The moment I realised I was an Open Education pragmatist

"I wondered if I would feel like an interloper at the first conference I’ve ever attended on Open Educational Resources (OERs). It wasn’t a dress code issue (though in hindsight I should have worn trainers) but that most of the attendees at #OER18 were from universities, while only a few of us there worked for education businesses. But I was determined to go. As the director of the platform that still appears to be the world’s most popular place for the free sharing of lesson plans and educational materials by school teachers it would have been weird not to be there. Plus I’d announced in my first month in my new job that I was going to make our support for OERs “overt”.

However, I still understood that some attendees at the event in Bristol might be wary. I work for a commercial company, one that makes money from advertising and recruitment services, plus — even more controversially in this context — by letting teachers sell resources to each other, and taking a percentage on transactions. The scale of free OER sharing that goes on each week on Tes is staggering and seems to dwarf any other project I’ve seen on the OER world map. And I would argue that the free resources on Tes are often more pure examples of Open Education than the materials you’ll find on many supposedly “Open” MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) because our free materials have Creative Commons licences and are usually designed to be remixed and adapted. But even I would not attempt to argue that our website offers pure Open Education, as paid content sits alongside the free. So I wondered if I’d be cold-shouldered by the purists. As it turned out the other participants at #OER18, and the event’s organisers, the Association for Learning Technology, were incredibly welcoming — and the debates were more open than I’d expected on how commercial organisations could play a part, especially in regards to reach and sustainability...."