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Comment by sputknick | Hacker News Reader

I'm a homeschool parent, I used https://openstax.org/ high school physics book with my son last year. Really great resource, its essentially Newtonian physics for the first 3/4ths, so hasn't really changed in 300 years, no need to publish a new textbook every year. Also they embed Khan Academy videos, embedded Flash based "games", and they have really well done end of chapter questions with answer key (need to show proof of homeschooling to get them to email you the answer key). Highly recommend it!

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And, unlike the OER project Gates is funding, the resources from OpenStax and Khan Academy are under Creative Commons licenses that guarantees they'll stay free. The OER resources here are "open" only in the sense that, for the time being, they don't charge you to access them. Gates carefully avoids any mention of licensing throughout his entire article.

So I'm comfortable labeling OER as "openwashing", given the current draconian copyright environment.

In addition to OpenStax and Khan Academy, I can recommend MIT OCW and, if it's legal in your country, downloading textbooks from Library Genesis.

However, surely Gates is correct when he says, "Courses should be created by educators and subject-matter experts, supplemented with professional development, and regularly improved with feedback from the teachers who use them."

There's also LibreTexts, which are designed to be remix-able. I think they pull in most/all of the OpenStax content into their platform as well as generating their own.

Thanks! I didn't know about LibreTexts!

It's probably also worth mentioning Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, although you probably won't find an up-to-date textbook for a class in them unless you're studying Classical Greek or something. And no lesson plans.

Another one that is elementary and high school oriented, and CC licenced, is the Utah's Open Textbook Projects, https://www.uen.org/oer/.

It's probably also worth mentioning https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/, https://hefferon.net/computation/index.html, and https://hefferon.net/proofs/index.html, all by one Jim Hefferon.

Looks like this is CK12-sourced content, at least in part. Is it different in any way from just getting it straight from CK12?

I should have said "labeling this OER project as 'openwashing'", since "OER" is a broader term that is not owned by this one organization.

It sounds like you are trying to insinuate that he's pushing the OER project to make a profit at a later time. The Gates Foundation has funded KhanAcademy in the past.

I don't know all of his motivations, but if someone is making a profit out of this at a later time, it'll probably be oer-prj.com, not Gates or his Foundation.

But there's nothing wrong with profits. Profits are great! My concern is teachers and students potentially being put into a very unprofitable situation where they become dependent on oer-prj.com, perhaps when their angel funding runs out. Under current copyright law they wouldn't have the right to keep making copies of the PDFs they can download today, unless those materials are explicitly licensed to protect them from such rugpulls; they'd have to either pay whatever price oer-prj.com decides to charge, or switch lesson plans and textbooks with, potentially, no warning. Possibly no price will be sufficient if the rugpull is part of a US sanctions package against their country.

Legal protection from such scams is central to the usual definition of "Open Educational Resources", as articulated for example by UNESCO: "Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others." https://www.unesco.org/en/communication-information/open-sol...

The so-called "OER project" Gates is funding fails to meet that bar.

And that's slimy.

It does appear that https://www.youtube.com/c/OERProject/videos are CC-BY-3.0, though none of the other material seems to be. Naive searching doesn't turn up any of the videos or material extracted from them on Wikimedia Commons or archive.org but maybe that'd be a useful project.

Added: the Gates Foundation did (and may still for all I know) provide funding to some OER projects 10+ years ago, also to Creative Commons on the idea that organization was infrastructure for OER or something like that. I'm not really suprised if they've focused on getting schools to adopt whatever they are funding, really open or not, since then; it sounds like they've had some success. If there's a trove of under-exploited openly licensed educational videos linked above based on that engagement, and/or based on YouTube adding the ability to opt into CC-BY-3.0 licensing sometime before then, I'm mildly satisifed.

Thanks for adding that context, Mike!

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