3 ms·
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 th
by cinntaile 4y ago
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.
- kragen 4y agoI 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-solutions/open-educational-resources 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.
- drieddust 4y ago[flagged]