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The Battle for OER

If we return to the theme of the book, that openness now faces a battle as to its future direction, then what might be the focus of that battle for OER? One such area might be competition from commercial interests in the OER space. OER has largely been a movement driven from within education, but there are commercial aspects too. The motivation for many universities is not purely altruistic; brand awareness, marketing and student recruitment are also part of the justification for an OER policy. In addition to OERs that are generated by educational institutions, a number of companies use them either as supplementary material to their core product or as their primary offering, and in other cases there is a blurred boundary between commercial and open interests. For example, the Virtual School creates OERs for teachers (in collaboration with the teachers themselves), and releases them under a CC license. It is created and funded by the corporate elearning company Fusion Universal and set up as a social enterprise. The Khan Academy is a ­not-­​­for-​­profit organisation that creates and openly shares educational resources in the form of instructional videos. The founder, Salman Khan, was reckoned to be ‘the most influential person in educational technology’ by Forbes (High 2014). The Khan Academy has a reported 6 million visitors a month (Khan Academy 2013), and their approach was very influential on many of the MOOC founders, such as Sebastian Thrun (High 2013), so maybe this claim isn’t too exaggerated, at least in terms of media coverage.

A different take on OERs is provided by OpenEd, which is a catalogue of resources, including games and assessment for K–12, many aligned to the US Common Core standard. These are from other creators, such as the Khan Academy, but the