Following the Money Trail

This week’s readings (here and here) from Dr. Wiley unpacked OER a bit more. I continue to agree with Dr. Wiley’s viewpoint about education being shared knowledge and that sharing knowledge should be done freely. However, there were a few "aha moments" in these passages. Before reading this, I didn’t realize how little of the profits of a textbook sale actually go to the author and how disproportionately more go to the publisher (see my graph illustrating this here). Dr. Wiley stated that often the peer-review of expensive textbooks is done on a volunteer basis by experts. This was news to me. I assumed those that checked validity of the textbook were paid to do so. Previously, one of my hang-ups about using OER has been the potential lack of accountability for those educators reusing/remixing/rewriting the OER textbooks. Now I wonder: if experts already volunteer to oversee/peer-review validity for textbooks, why couldn’t they offer the same with OER?

One other point that Dr. Wiley brought up was that taxpayers have already paid for these textbooks (and their education) when they pay their taxes. So, why are they asked to pay a second time when they sign up for a class? That’s an interesting question and (one that parents who send their kids to private schools often ask). I think most people are aware that their taxpayer dollars pay for public K-12 schools, but how many of us connected the dots from our tax dollars to government grants that we once again pay to be a part of using in a college setting? Dr. Wiley posits, “Every taxpayer has a reasonable expectation of access to educational materials and research products whose creation tax dollars supported.” My questions for Dr. Wiley are:

1. Do you believe we should pay for an education (see quote above), not pay for an education ("education is sharing"), or somewhere in between (pay the educator a living wage but use and share educational resources freely)?

2. If “education is sharing” and it is done freely, then where does money fit into the conversation? Should it have a place in the conversation?

3. Is the cost of an education creating a vicious cycle of “paying to get an education”—"incurring educational debt”—“must charge high prices to pay for educational debt”?