A presentation for a lecture, a worksheet for a seminar, a self-created illustration, or an explanatory video: For me, it’s hard to imagine everyday college life without teaching materials. Often, however, we don’t realize what goes into them.
After all, teaching materials come at a cost. Creating them takes time and effort. Creating teaching materials involves researching content, writing texts, creating illustrations, developing assignments, and updating materials as needed. Depending on the type of material, educators also need technical infrastructure, software, and a platform where they can make their materials available in the long term.
As we discuss the costs of knowledge during this year’s Open Access Week under the theme “The Cost of Knowledge,” it is worth taking a look at Open Educational Resources (OER). During last year’s Open Access Week, we explored OER primarily from the perspective of sharing and collaboratively developing knowledge: Who can use, modify, and share knowledge? And how can open licenses help ensure that knowledge is not only accessible but also shared?
This year, we’d like to shift our perspective a bit and ask: What do open educational resources actually cost, and what happens to the time and effort we invest in creating them?
“Open” does not mean “free”
OER are educational materials published under an open license. Depending on the specific license (see also “Creative Commons Licenses at a Glance”), this allows others not only to read or download them, but also, for example, to share, edit, and adapt them for their own teaching.
However, creating open educational resources still requires time and effort.
OER don’t just happen by chance, either. A resource often starts with an idea or a specific situation: a question from a class, a topic that existing materials fail to explain clearly, a gap in one’s own understanding, or simply a flash of inspiration about how to communicate something more effectively.
Turning that initial idea into educational materials requires researching and adapting content for teaching, writing texts, developing exercises, creating illustrations, and producing videos. Educators then review, describe, and publish the materials and, ideally, maintain and update them over time.
All of this takes time, attention, creativity, and effort. Openness also means letting go to some extent: rather than keeping a resource locked away in your own drawer or within the protected space of a course, you make it visible and share it with others. This allows others to access your work, comment on it, and, with the appropriate open license, adapt it.
Transparency does not, therefore, make the effort behind a resource disappear. Those who prepare resources in such a way that they are understandable, discoverable, and reusable even outside their original educational context may even have to invest additional work. At the same time, however, this also creates something new: others can build upon this work.
The interesting question, therefore, is a different one: What happens to this investment afterward?
When one material can become many
Educational material used exclusively in a single course can be very valuable in that context. However, its use is initially limited to that course. Open-licensed material, on the other hand, can travel far and wide. Where it will end up cannot be predicted at the time it is created.
Situations like this come up quite often in practice. For example, students have asked me if they can use materials from a course later on for their own tutorials. The question of whether materials presented during classroom observations – such as those conducted as part of the Erasmus program – can be reused afterward has also come up.
I’m happy to receive such questions, and at the same time I can point to the CC license for the content: that’s exactly what it’s for. You can reuse, share, and modify the materials as long as you follow the respective license terms. You do not need my additional permission.
In fact, situations like these show the impact an open license can have: Materials originally created for a specific course can find new uses beyond their original context. Others can use them in tutorials, adapt them for courses at another university, or further develop them for use in school classrooms.
When I’m creating something, I don’t yet know who might use that resource in the future. But thanks to the open license, I can make that possible right from the start.
The work that went into creating the resource isn’t diminished by this. But it can continue to have an impact.
Openness Requires Certain Conditions
At the same time, reuse does not happen automatically just because a piece of material is licensed under an open license.
To make OER easy to find, understand, use, and further develop, we need suitable platforms and infrastructure, clear licensing information, good descriptions, and people who create and maintain the materials. This also includes advice and support regarding open licenses and publishing options.
At tub.torials, for example, we therefore try to ensure that openness doesn’t end with the license. We also make posts and materials available in reusable formats, such as Markdown files in a GitLab repository. After all, whether a material may be reused and how easy it is to do so in practice are two different questions.
This form of content provision doesn’t happen on its own either. Content must be properly prepared, stored, and kept up to date. This example illustrates once again that reusability requires not only an open license, but also time, appropriate formats, and infrastructure.
Open knowledge is therefore not simply knowledge “at no cost.”
Perhaps we should instead ask ourselves how we want to use our resources and what long-term benefits they should enable.
In the context of OER, this means: We continue to invest time, effort, and infrastructure in helpful teaching materials. However, by using open licenses and making these materials as reusable as possible, we ensure that this investment has an impact beyond the context for which we originally created them.
What is open education worth to us?
This brings us full circle to the theme of this year’s Open Access Week.
The “cost of knowledge” isn’t just about bills and publication fees. Knowledge also costs time, effort, attention, and infrastructure. And these costs begin long before we have a finished teaching resource in front of us: with an idea, a question, or a specific occasion, and with the consideration of how to effectively convey the content. After all, an idea must first be turned into a resource. Preparing, publishing, and maintaining that resource also require resources.
With open educational resources, it therefore becomes particularly clear that the crucial question is not simply: How much does it cost to make knowledge openly accessible? But also: How can we make the most of the work behind existing knowledge?
Open Educational Resources offer one possible answer: sharing knowledge in a way that allows others to build upon it.