Currently, I am participating in an online forum discussing issues related to OER, hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and there is lots of discussion about institutional sharing of OER. Stephen Downes recently raised the following point,

These forums have a habit of becoming discussions of how these resources can be produced by institutions and used by teachers in the classroom. Inevitably, the issues then become (a) the cost of institutions producing them, and (b) how to get teachers to actually use them. But it would be a more fruitful, and more accurate, discussion to consider OERs, first, in the much wider context of community production, and second, in the much wider context of use (and reuse) outside the institutional educational context.

This ties somewhat to my questioning of late of whether or not OER's vision of institutional repositories of open content is the best means for creating a sustainable education commons. After all, the original UNESCO Forum discussions (initiated because of MIT's OpenCourseWare) that led to the coining of the term "open educational resources" defined it as “the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes” (“Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries: Final Report” 24). Thus, universal institutional sharing of open content is one means to achieve this, but not the only one, and perhaps not the most effective for stimulating the initial growth of the commons.

Moreover, I try to imagine the immense cost to education of a significant number of institutions creating online repositories and wonder what the opportunity cost is in terms of other approaches to developing the commons. After all, MIT received millions in grants. Then I try to imagine how teachers and learners would choose from all the content available to them. Finally, I wonder at the difficulty of one/a few OER advocates trying to institute such wide scale change at an institution, given the many different concerns of faculty and administrators.

What if instead, the open education community focused more on a bottom up strategy of gathering/creating/sharing resources within disciplinary communities either at the local, regional, national, or global level? Either initiatives begun within disciplinary professional organizations, such as NCTE. Or, independently constructed disciplinary community projects, like Writing Spaces and Smarthistory, which self-organize to grow communities of their own from within a specific discipline. The disciplines would also function as quality control filters as "publishers" of OER content. OER advocates in higher education would also need to construct discipline-specific arguments and publish in in the journals of their discipline to promote OER creation and the value of it as the work of the discipline. Once enough momentum is created in the academic disciplines, then the disciplines would become change advocates for education as a whole that would have much greater influence on educational institutions, government, and other communities.

I'm not proposing this as an all or nothing alternative. But I do believe it is likely as viable a method for creating a sustainable commons. And it might just get us there quicker.