Open Educational Resources

The promise was of a future where Open Educational Resources would sweep the globe and those pesky publishers would be washed away by a tsunami of high quality, free stuff. It happened to a degree with Wikipedia, Khan, YouTube, MOOCs and Duolingo but almost in spite of the OER movement. In fact, there seems to have been a bifurcation in OER between lots of publically funded projects, that tended to atrophy even die, and a successful crop of global successes. I’d argue that this was due to several strains of scepticism, institutional attitudes and a lack of awareness around marketing and sustainability in the educational community. The successes have been those that weren't held back by these barriers.