That’s what’s so depressing about the Soton situation, that after so many years of the worldwide OER movement, after it being pushed bigtime in UKHE by Jisc and other funding bodies, after it being backed by major UKHE institutions, after the effective death of content copyright (for all that institutions are paranoid about IPR), academics still want to assert control over their content.

When I was at Nottingham Uni, one of the few UKHE institutions that went for OER bigtime, the top dogs from the VC down actively supported and funded the ‘OER agenda’, and that pushed academics and teachers into both producing and using OERs. Their scepticism of OER and anal-retentive tendencies were overruled by institutional policy, and many of my colleagues came to actively support both the principle and practice of OER. I’d hoped that other institutions would take on this approach.

OER was the big wave of the last few years, but it looks like it’s crashed and dissipated and we’re back in the sad old world of proprietised content.

There is of course nothing to stop academics from developing MOOCs using OERs, and sites like Utubersity are heading in this direction: http://utubersity.com/

As for the political dimension of MOOCs, well you’re absolutely right. The revolution has already been commercialised. The only hope is for the proletariat to rise up and utterly reject the epistomological hegemony of academe!

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This is depressing, and very disappointing given the OU’s exemplary role in the OER movement and their making their course content available under the excellent Openlearng platform. I can’t believe that the OU would have agreed to such proprietorial anally-retentive conditions without severe pressure from the other members of the FutureLearn consortium.

I’m rather glad now that I was rejected for the FL post, though I did give a deliberately provocative presentation which was designed to bring out the background ideology and philosophy of FL, and which definitely wound up the Suit on the panel.

Perhaps MOOCs will spell the death knell of OER? As a passionate believer in the principles of OER I would very much hope not, yet there’s a flip of a lot of corporate and State moolah behind MOOCs which is building a behemoth, a juggernaut that could crush all in its path.

Of course, some non-corporate MOOCs could be consistent with OER principles. What’s become very clear to me is that there are underlying socio-political ideologies behind MOOCs, from Left socialist through liberal to Right corporate. That much discussion of MOOCs is concentrating on “business models” is a worrying development to me, as a free education leftie idealist, as is the prominence of neo-corporatist collectivism as a MOOC knowledge paradigm. I think that this subsurface political agenda is something that has just not been discussed in the open, and I really think it ought to be before the right corporatist model becomes the accepted paradigm.