The corridor of uncertainty: Open for business?

"Openness is in the eye of the beholder and new variations on the theme seem to pop up every week. The open component in a MOOC has become very flexible indeed, sometimes meaning something as restricted as being accessible only to those who register and log in. MOOCs are now commonly offered in layered versions with a plain vanilla view-only version available free of charge. The problem with open and free is how to build sustainability beyond grassroots volunteer work. Open education depends on enthusiasts and volunteers who earn money somewhere else and are willing to work extra for the sheer enjoyment of it. Is there a business model for openness and how can you reconcile that with the original concept? The field of open educational resources (OER) depends on educators sharing their openly licensed resources on public repositories, mostly without reward or career recognition. Is there a business opportunity even here? One answer to that question is a platform called panOpen where open textbooks and OER can be gathered and offered to students in a convenient package of services. Many of the resources are aggregated from other repositories but panOpen offers a convenient channel with attractive functions for educators such as LMS integration, data analysis, gradebook syncing, quizzes and note-taking functions. The twist to the concept is that they offer revenue sharing to educators who provide new content to the platform, no doubt attractive to those who commit months of work to write an open textbook. Teachers or schools can upload content, adapt existing resources (according to the Creative Commons license terms) and create customised repositories for their students. The platform guarantees quality by peer review of all resources and users are encouraged to add own reviews and comments to material. The business model for all this is to pay educators for their work and charge students for access. Students pay $25 per course for access and this income is hoped to sustain the teacher commitment to add new resources ..."