I was really thinking that you will talk or include youtube in your article but i was surprised it was not even mentioned. Maybe i was thinking something else when you talk about the music industry as to how artist can produce their own or market their own using social sites such as youtube or facebook. I have no idea about OER or MIT, but i was really concerned about the power of social sites like the ones i mentioned. Producers are not doing it free will the consumers are watching and listening things for free. I already saw an essay about “piracy on social networking sites” and there was even a case where the kid was dancing with a popular music owned by a big music company. Open source, free, public, community, friends and social words are now a harmful things to the industry.

Mechan .. youtube user

I agree there's big OER as illustrate by MIT OpenCourseWare and little oer, like the Twitter Love Song or the Pedagogy of Abundance slideshow. I also agree that it's likely the high cost per course at MIT at the moment is due to rights clearance and preparing pre-existing content for the format; that cost should go down as people format the content appropriately from the start and use rights-cleared or freely licensed content in their material.

However, the bigger issue hiding in here isn't actually the cost, although an awareness that there is a cost is a good thing to have. Big OER has a huge advantage over little OER in two areas: findability and reputation. In the talk's backchannel and in my blog post, we talked about information filtering and crap detection. An abundance of OER content means there's a need for finding appropriate content to use. MIT, The Open University, and other such initiatives are well-known with respected images. Their reputation plus large repositories in a single location means that people can easily find content and will be more willing to trust it authority or accuracy on the basis of the repository's existing reputation. MIT and The Open University can become de facto information filters. Little oer has a much harder row to hoe in that respect.

I can't help but wonder if that means that means, in the world of a pedagogy of abundance, we'll see a similar pattern as to what happened with ISPs? At first ISPs proliferated. There were many, many to choose from. Eventually, over time, it collapsed down into a few major companies along with a few hardy independents in a given area. Will OER mature the same way, simply because of the reputation and findability issues?