The Soul of Open is In Danger – McToonish

"During the 2024-25 academic year, the University of Saskatchewan will celebrate an important milestone. At least, I think it’s important. Ten years ago, an instructor in our College of Agriculture and Bioresources adopted the OpenStax Economics textbook. It was the first adoption of an OER in a large class at USask. That year, students saved about $30,000.

This year, students at USask will save about $1.95 million. While our provincial government, administration, and students focus mostly on student savings (it helps when tuition and housing costs continue to rise), open isn’t just about cost savings or even access....

Yes, all of this work helps to save students money (more than $9 million overall at USask), but it also increases their engagement through experiential learning and by making strides to improve students’ sense of belonging....

Everything I’ve learned about open, everything I’ve ever believed about what the OER movement stands for is the antithesis of what GenAI is and does.

Open is about improving access to education and the lives of learners worldwide, not just for those in privileged countries or communities. GenAI is used to create papers and images for the privileged, harming many of the very people we’ve said open is trying to benefit.

While open aligns with several of the SDGs, GenAI is an environmental nightmare, from the energy needed to run the growing number of servers to the immense amount of freshwater needed to cool them (by the way, the same is true for cryptocurrency).

While open is being used to integrate EDI and Indigenization into curriculum, GenAI, programmed by those of dominant groups, often fails to represent or misrepresents members of marginalized communities. Maha Bali noted in her recent keynote at The Digital Pedagogy Institute that she had asked several GenAI tools to give her examples of terrorist attacks. Almost every single example gave Muslims as the perpetrators...."