[Open-education] Openness and piracy in commercial publishing & a new group-based MOOC from edX at McGill

[alannah fitzgerald]

Dear All,

If any of you have any experience in working with commercial publishers or
with growing open business models and improving corporate or institutional
branding through openness, would you please consider contributing to a blogpost
discussion
<http://eltjam.com/rebalancing-english-language-education-access-materials-writing-and-copyright/#comment-269911>
I have started at ELTjam? I’m trying to focus this discussion on key issues
in ELT publishing, namely: access, copyright and piracy by bringing this
discussion to the mainstream English language education community via one
of their well-known blogs.

In short, the issue of piracy with ELT course book resources is a hot and
highly moralised topic as these resources tend to live a second life as
.pdf versions via pirate websites (some free and many for payment) as
befits the culture of the digital commons. I’m asking the big brand ELT
commercial publishers who make a mint out of the ELT industry to look at
ways to acknowledge the greater need behind the piracy issue as one of
access. I’ve had the predictable response from ELT publishers of why should
we care about providing accessible resources to those informal online
learners if this is not affecting our current closed business model for
those formal learners who can afford our resources, in addition to
side-stepping issues I’ve raised about corporate social responsibility and
the success of other open business models e.g. the Open Access movement
with research publications. Anyway, it’s good to have them enter the
discussion but I’d like for this discussion to not only be a one-sided
response from me representing the open movement, so it would be great if
any of you could add to the discussion.

I’m also inviting anyone here, in addition to those I’ve invited from the
ELT community, to the first group-based MOOC with edX which I’m involved in
facilitating at McGill Uni on Social Learning for Social Impact
<https://www.edx.org/course/social-learning-social-impact-mcgillx-groocx>
to bring forward social justice initiatives including access to education.
If you’re interested in exploring this group-based MOOC model – we’re
aiming for as connectivist a MOOC as possible within the edX platform -
we’ll be accepting registrations until October 16th. Hope to see you there.

Many thanks for reading!

With all good wishes,

Alannah


Alannah Fitzgerald

FLAX Language Project (flax.nzdl.org) Open Education Research

PhD Candidate in Educational Technology at Concordia University, Canada
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alannahfitzgerald / alannahfitzgerald.org /
@AlannahFitz <https://twitter.com/AlannahFitz> /
http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd
a_fitzg at education.concordia.ca / alannahfitzgerald at gmail.com /
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+alannahfitzgerald
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