Ken asks why it would matter if others were making money from open content Learning Designs, so long as the wider educational benefits of their adoption was the outcome?
I won't try to answer this for myself, as I am yet to resolve my own conflicting ideas on this, but let me try to comment generally on behalf of the educators with whom I've discussed this topic - I think there are two points:
(a)The spirit of sharing resources for non-commercial use runs strong in the education community - the idea certainly predates its codification in Creative Commons licenses, and I believe it is decades if not centuries old. But saying this does not mean commercial use is somehow the polar opposite, rather that commercial use tends to foster a much more mixed reaction among educators, and a tendency to debate pros and cons (sometimes vociferously). My sense is that the idea of non-commercial sharing *in and of itself* is widely accepted. So I think the choice of NC licenses should not be assumed to be an “anti-commercial” decision - rather, for many educators it is a statement of what is unproblematic as an up-front grant of rights (as compared to a different set of up-front rights that tends to provoke more mixed reactions).
This spirit of sharing among educators may change over time as the arguments for a combined noncommercial and commercial grant of up-front rights are made (as it has been made successfully for free/open source software - although it's worth noting that Linus Torvalds' initial Linux license had a condition against distributing it for money, and he only later changed to the GPL). For now, I think the deep bedrock of instinctive educator behaviour is to be comfortable with non-commercial sharing, but uncertain what to make of commercial use. And I would add that even if there are some fuzzy boundaries to the limits of non-commercial use, in my experience this does not tend to change the broader spirit of how educators feel about this issue.
(b)I think the concerns about commercial interests making money from an educator's Learning Design (or any other educational resource) is more about a fear that money is being extracted from users for what would otherwise would be a no-cost resource, and then those revenues could be going to things *other* than the further creation and dissemination of Learning Designs to benefit education (eg, offsetting losses on past failed commercial e-learning initiatives).
My sense is that where there is a virtuous circle between commercial dissemination of educational resources that leads to further funding for creation and dissemination of new resources, then many educators would be (more) comfortable with this situation. But if this is not the case (or even if it is just perceived to be not the case - there is much trust to be rebuilt between educators and commercial interests), I think there is a natural reluctance among educators to trust commercial parties *up-front* to use their content to make money in unknown ways.
Having said the above, I think there is quite a lot of unrealistic thinking about the potential monetary benefits to educators of having their work used commercially. In practice, most publishers I have dealt with tend to only work with quite large “units” of educational content, such as a whole textbook (as the cost of acquisition for smaller units, like individual learning objects, makes them uneconomical). So I don't see a viable market for individual Learning Designs, at least not for a long time.
However, if you are an expert author of Learning Designs with many existing shared items that are highly regarded, then I think the chances of you being approached by a commercial publisher to create a set of *new* resources for a fee is a more likely commercial opportunity for the short-medium term. In other words, for educators who might like to benefit commercially from the work they share, what matters more is the reputation they achieve from past sharing of good quality work as a basis for new paid work in the future; rather than the idea that an educator would see any significant commercial income straight off the back of existing sharing.
I may be wrong on this, as we really don't have much practice of any kind to observe yet, but this is my sense of how the relationships between Learning Design authors and commercial interests are likely to pan out in the next few years. I'd welcome feedback and alternative views on this.
I should note that I've made many claims above on behalf of “(most) educators” - and although this is based on the many conversations I've had on this topic over several years all around the world, I could well be wrong on some or all of the “spirit” that I attempt to articulate above. Even if my characterisations are somewhat accurate, there will be many educators who don't share these views, so I accept that I am not speaking for them, and I don't mean to offend anyone who has different views to those I'm attempting to describe.
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