Further content from my Masters degree, this time an open education project.
I created a website for commercial education managers who are sceptical about the growing academic movement to Open Education.
The ideal of knowledge and resource sharing in academia, from birth to Higher Education, is an admirable and well supported goal funded by government education budgets, grants, foundations and alumni donations. But outside this limited world, how can every-day professional and lifelong education be provided openly? How can freely available, open-to-all education be commercially sustainable?
Using the example Joe Wicks “The Body Coach”, the website demonstrates the innovations and technological advances that make it possible for him to successfully operate as a commercial Open Education Practitioner (OEP), and invites commercial education managers and companies to consider how they might follow a similar model.
I presented a summary of the project at The Open University H818 Networked Practitioner Conference in February 2021. A recording of my presentation is shown below, and associated downloads and a written record of the Q&A section can be found here.
Sarah Alcock 
This is such an important conversation! It’s always a question how much content should we give away as free since most people like free stuff but only a portion of the people who benefit from our content will ever pay for anything else we offer. It’s said that free stuff function as advert for the content creator but the amount of work going into creating them often puts that revenue/effort balance into question. With education the problem lies in the social aspect of learning. If education is put behind a paywall many simply won’t be able to afford it. (As it’s often the case with higher education.) However society needs well educated people. On the other hand educators need to be able to earn enough to make ends meet, it cannot all just be non-profit. The need for this debate to happen is even more urgent now after the pandemic since the need for online learning technologies resulted in people expecting even more information to become freely available as a form of help/charity/non-profit.
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