Dutch disease and the failure of OER initiatives

I may have been skiving on my MOOCs over the past week, but I have been keeping up with my economics homework. I've just finished Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid, and I was particularly interested in her description of Dutch disease with respect to African aid.

Dutch disease is where foreign currency floods a market, overpricing local commodities, forcing down the value of labour and ultimately cutting off the isolated economy from wider trade. Which is, when you think about it, pretty much the effect the huge influx of OER money has had on the academic economy. With no real demand for OERs, staff who have been teaching for years find the value of their labour is decreased or destroyed unless they secure huge grants (rise of the MOOCs). Disenfranchised by their institutions, they are powerless to compete freely since there is no open education market. Whatdya know, Marx (and Richard Hall) were right.

Moyo's answer to the problem of dead aid is a pretty Marxist solution too - a free market where the majority of revenues are spent on public goods. To translate this into the OER context means that we need to value OERs and the labour of those who produce them. OERs are pretty close to the definition of public goods, but at the present time, their production is financed by the economically damaging awarding of aid (grants) by external "benefactors" such as JISC. If you want to know all the reasons why that is a very bad idea, read Moyo:

"Just as throwing aid money at poor countries does not work, simply boosting investment is not the key to economic growth either. Only when capital is allocated to its most productive uses will an economy benefit, and this can only happen when governments are given incentives to respect and support those industries that can contribute to a country?s longer-term potential. The ceremony to cut the red ribbon to launch the newest road, bridge or port is easy. The hard part is ensuring the longevity of infrastructure, which can only be achieved if the economy is growing"

If we are serious about OERs, we need to reverse the failed strategy of throwing money at the problem and start building a genuine open economy of OER production and use.

A.J. Cann