The promise and the practical cost
Open education is often described to educators in terms of freedom: freedom to choose materials, to edit them and to share the results. That is a fair description of what open licenses permit. But permission is not the same as capacity. Between “you may adapt this” and “you have adapted this well” lies a lot of unpaid or poorly counted work.
This discussion sets out the main tensions educators describe, without arguing that open practice is good or bad. Experiences vary a great deal by subject, level, institution and support. Where research is mentioned in general terms, it is worth remembering that findings on teaching methods and workload are mixed.
Time to find, adapt and maintain
The first issue is educator workload. A prescribed textbook arrives complete, with sequence, exercises and often slides. Open alternatives may need assembling. The tasks typically include:
- Searching for suitable items and judging their quality.
- Checking licenses, so that adapting and sharing are allowed.
- Editing for local context, level and language.
- Fixing accessibility problems such as missing image descriptions.
- Keeping everything up to date as links break and subjects change.
Some of this is a one-off investment that pays back in later terms. Some of it recurs every year. Educators who teach many different courses or who have heavy marking loads may find little room for it. A good educator authoring guide can help with technique, but it cannot create time.
There is also a risk of overwork becoming invisible. If educators absorb the cost because they care about students, the institution may not notice the strain until someone leaves. The link between workload and teacher burnout is a reason to treat the issue seriously rather than assuming enthusiasm will cover it.
Recognition for sharing
A second tension concerns credit. Sharing a lesson sequence or a set of problems takes effort, and the outcome may be used by many people the author never meets. Whether that effort counts depends on local policy. In some places it is considered in reviews or promotion. In others, research output or student evaluations carry far more weight.
Questions educators reasonably ask include:
- Will my shared work be counted in my workload?
- Who owns what I create, and what does my contract say? This varies, so read the contract and ask your institution.
- Will I be credited when others adapt my work?
- Does sharing carry any risk, for example if it contains third-party material I did not have the right to publish?
Concerns over academic freedom sometimes appear here too, in both directions. Some educators value the freedom to choose and change materials. Others worry that an institution may use open materials to standardize courses or reduce the role of individual judgment.
Training and confidence
Many educators have never been trained in licensing, file formats, accessibility or digital publishing. Those skills are not part of most subject degrees. As a result, even willing educators can feel unsure whether they are doing things correctly.
Common training needs include:
- Understanding what different open licenses allow and require.
- Attribution practice.
- Basic accessibility checking.
- Choosing formats that work on different devices.
- Running a small evaluation of how well the materials worked.
Training works best when it is practical, short and linked to a real task, and when it is offered during working time. A one-off workshop with no follow-up rarely changes practice by itself. Peer support, such as a colleague who has already done it, is often valued more than formal instruction. This links to the wider idea of teacher development and to how teachers learn from one another.
Quality, control and responsibility
When an educator selects open materials, they take on more responsibility for their quality. If a resource contains an error, the educator who chose it is the person students will ask. Some find this empowering. Others find it stressful, particularly where they do not feel expert in every part of a course.
Control cuts both ways. An educator can fix a problem in an open text, which is not possible with a closed one. But time pressure may mean that problems are noticed and not fixed.
Isolation and the value of community
Working alone with open materials can be lonely and inefficient. Many educators duplicate work that colleagues have already done. Communities of practice, whether within a department or across institutions, reduce that waste by sharing lists, adapted files and lessons learned. They also provide encouragement. Building them takes organization, and it helps when someone has time assigned to it.
What would help
The issues above are not reasons to avoid open education. They suggest conditions that make it more workable:
- Time allocated in workload for adapting and maintaining materials.
- Clear policy on ownership, credit and the status of shared work in reviews.
- Short, practical training.
- Access to librarians, instructional designers or technical staff.
- A starting scope small enough to finish.
- Honest conversation about what is and is not working.
Administrators control many of these, which is why the issues faced by educators and by administrators are closely linked. An educator who raises these points is not resisting change; they are describing what the change would need to succeed.