A Possible Game-Changer for Open Educational Resources? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Earlier this month, an EdWeek Market Brief reported that Amazon is preparing to beta-test a platform for open educational resources (OER) — textbooks and other classroom instructional materials that are provided online at no charge to users. Reportedly the platform will be called Amazon Inspire and is tentatively scheduled for public roll-out within the next two months. What will it look like? Initial reports indicate that Amazon Inspire will be designed largely to mimic the experience of shopping on Amazon: site users will be able to search for OER by category/subject/format, to filter their search results by faceting, to add ratings and reviews, and to get recommendations based on their demonstrated interests. Furthermore, educators will be able to use Amazon Inspire for self-publishing and as a curation platform for their institutions’ own open digital products. At this point, all indications are that Amazon plans to start by offering this service to the K-12 market. And my suspicion is that this fact, in itself, is what makes the initiative likely to have an impact on the textbook market in higher education. Why? Two reasons, one less important and one more so: Less important: the more students get used to having free online access to textbooks and other classroom materials at the primary and secondary levels, the less they will understand why they suddenly have to start shelling out thousands of dollars for textbooks in college ... 2. More important: college instructors have no structural incentive whatsoever to adopt OER, but K-12 administrators do—and the incentive is powerful. In K-12 systems, it is the educational administrators themselves who feel the pinch when buying textbooks for their students. (Not because they pay for them out of their own pockets, of course, but because they pay for them out of their budgets.) The same is not true for college instructors, who assign texts to their students without having to deal with any of the economic consequences of their choices ..."