These past few weeks, we have been going down the rabbit hole of open education and it has really changed my outlook on how and ways in which educational materials and teaching resources can be shared with the larger learning community. The idea that lessons, activities, and supplemental materials should be free to access across a greater global learning community seems so intuitive, yet so counteractive to how educator online spaces have been operated and designed for the last decade.

Open education comes in direct conflict with the teacher culture of online resource stores for profit like Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) and free resource libraries locked behind account sign up systems like Twinkl. Through these online platforms, it bred a culture that quality lessons are worthy of sharing, but only behind a paywall or surrendering your personal information to a repository. Teachers see their lessons as ways to profit from fellow teachers, rather than contributing to the greater good of sharing what works with their students. In this sense, these pay-to-teach lesson database stores are the epitome of closed education. Each lesson purchased or downloaded from these websites come with a blurb about the extent of the license (can a teacher edit or remix the lesson), but couldn’t that same thing be achieved with a creative commons license? The only change to the system is that creators and their website hosts would no longer monetarily profit from the creation. Therein lies a huge problem of greed over shared knowledge around teaching.

Even outside of the digital world, the culture of education and resource sharing has often perpetuated the idea that you can share your lessons, but keep the best ones to yourself. In too many schools I’ve worked in, I’ve seen lessons, resources, and projects I would have loved to try, but when I ask a teacher to share, I would often be left disappointed with answers like “This is my thing,” “The students look forward to being in my class because of this project. I can’t have someone else doing it too,” or “you can find your own version of it somewhere else.” As a new teacher at the time, it frustrated me that many colleagues guarded their libraries like industry secrets. As an act of rebellion, I used to make digital copies of all of the lessons left for me to distribute as a TTOC, and I built up my own digital library which I would later share to any and all teachers who asked. Only in the recent years, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, has the idea of sharing lessons and content become more accepted in the community.

Even in my current school context, no one is gatekeeping their materials but TPT is still the gold standard for when teachers need a quick lesson no one else has. It is upsetting to see how much money teachers are spending for the sake of quality and convenience when the materials online should be open.

So what can we do as a greater learning community to encourage open education and disrupt the foundations of sites like TPT and Twinkl? Shifting the collective thinking around how one accesses and keeps materials will shift to a more communal mentality as file sharing and ease of access progresses. At the school and district level, adopting a more open mindset encouraging open education can be the first steps. At the larger scale, maybe the issue lies with not having an appealing global open education hub for teachers to easily search, download, and review each other’s lessons. It needs to look appealing and be intuitive enough that teachers of all technological abilities can navigate through the interface intuitively. We have spaces like the BCTF Classroom Resources website, but few members actually know about it, or contribute to it. Open education needs to be an active priority if we are to help equip teachers with materials and resources that are both high quality and available easily.