Share some Gratitude for the OER Foundation, For it is No More

OEGlobal Plaza
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The links for this news have ricocheted to me through several channels, but if you have not heard, a remarkable era and inspiration is ending with this notice of the end of the road for the OER Foundation.

To me this is an appropriate time for the concept of small acts of open recognition I have tried to instigate as “Hat Tips” via the Open Thinkery Remixer Machine. Here is a small gesture of appreciation to @Mackiwg @lightweight and the many participants over 16 years who have benefitted or been inspired by the OERu and WikiEducator

Cartoon style hand holding a fancy Trilby style hat, as a Hat Tip with message Ngā mihi OER Foundation for 16 years of maximum openness at all levels via OERu, WikiEducator, and more.

Everything created and produced by the OER Foundation has been built open open source tools as recognized with a 2021 OE Award for Open Infrastructure. But its more than that, open was lived out at every level of the work of the foundation. The courses shared through OERu are built on the web first approaches of collaborative authoring via a wiki and a dynamic distribution system based on open protocols.

This is a credit to the vision and commitment of Wayne Mackintosh over 16 years (hence his earning his own 2020 OEAward for Leadership). And so much was built and share in not only the tools, but the methods, but technologist Dave Lane, who always shared his expertise with me for years and years.

So if you have any experiences with the works of the OER Foundation, Wayne, or Dave, we invite you to share your appreciation in a reply below. Or we would be delighted to see a few more remixes of my Hat Tip where you can create and customize your own message.

According to the announcement post after December 19, 2025, the continuation of support for the web sites developed by the OER Foundation are in the hands of Otago Polytechnic with no guarantee of future availability.

This would surely be a terrible lost if this body of open education resources are lost from the web.

But mostly, we ask that all here who have had some interaction with the OER Foundation to reply with a little gift of gratitude.

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I’ve always been grateful for Wayne’s and Dave’s leadership in the OER community, and that of Jim Tittsler. I do hope that Otago Polytechnic will at least see fit to relinquish the domain names so that the services provided under them may continue with community support.

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Big mahalos to Wayne and Dave for years of keeping open at the center.

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Thanks to Wayne @Mackiwg and Dave @lightweight for your leadership and advocacy for open. Wayne was a source of advice and inspiration to me as I developed my own open online educational initiatives. Devastated to hear of the closure of the OER Foundation.

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I am hearing about the OER Foundation for the first time through this post. While I haven’t personally used its services, it’s evident from the community responses how meaningful its contribution to open education has been. Thank you to everyone who built and sustained this work.

Wisal Alim

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Wayne @Mackiwg has long been an inspiration and role model for me. WikiEducator and OERu exemplify the many ways Wayne and Daves @lightweight big open ideas have benefitted so many. It takes perseverance and personal engagement to bring such ideas to life and Wayne and Daves commitment to radical openness as the way to do so has been outstanding. They made me see that open isn’t just content or technology it is a way of being and organizations involved in open work can and should adopt and embody an open culture. It’s disheartening to see exemplary open work be shuttered. But I expect Wayne and Dave will find other ways to make their passion for open manifest. Welcome being part of making it so and finding new ways forward. Much gratitude. Paul

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From my archives of photos shared in flickr, I found a memory of meeting Wayne for the first time September 2010 at a meeting in Wellington, New Zealand.

A young man in goatee staring intently to another person to the right, hand held out as part of his expressing a big idea
Wayne Mackintosh flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

This meeting was organized by New Media Consortium (no longer around) as part of the process that led to forecasting publication of the 2010 Horizon Report Australia / New Zealand Edition (PDF available from EDUCAUSE).

Let’s see what was forecasted (the Horizon report was not meant to be predictive) to be regionally significant in Australia/New Zealand for technology from 2010 (with great benefit of hindsight)

  • One Year or Less horizon: Electronic Books and Mobile Tech
  • Two to Three Year horizon: Augmented Reality and… Open Content (!)
  • Four to Five Year horizon: Gesture-Based Computing and Visual Data Analysis

Again it night be easy to dismiss or pick apart looking back, but it many ways, to me, this was a bad forecast. From page 20 the intro to the Open Content topic opens:

The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it. Open content embraces not only the sharing of information, but the sharing of instructional practice and experiences as well. Part of the appeal of open content is that it is also a response to both the rising costs of traditionally published resources and the lack of educational resources in some regions, and a cost-effective alternative to textbooks and other materials. As customizable educational content — and insights about how to teach and learn with it — is increasingly made available for free over the Internet, students are learning not only the material, but also skills related to finding, evaluating, interpreting, and repurposing the resources they are studying in partnership with their teachers.

If you have an interest in open education history, this is quite a snapshot, see starting at page 19 in the 2010 Horizon Report Australia / New Zealand Edition

Great memories all around of meeting all these colleagues, especially the person in the photo!

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Hang on, there’s more to this story, thanks to a reference from @Downes in hos OLDaily post today from Paul Bacsich’s matic media site:

This includes a very long report/analysis created via a process of intensive conversation with ChatGPT and a reprocessing via another LLM called Manus, then human edited into the PDF version. Reflections on the closure of the OER Foundation and the implications for OER policies: A conversation with ChatGPT

We have a small bit of pride, as this OEG Connect post is the first footnote!

Screenshot 578
Screenshot 5781536×560 141 KB

So it will take good amount of time to read, and it does not only summarize what the authors suggest as the regional factors leading to the end of the OERu but also many other broader questions about OER, the implications of micro-credentials a limiting factor, the success of OER efforts in British Columbia, Ontario, and Germany.

Now it feels a bit more than a glib chat like summary, there are some strong statements in the closing:

OER fails when it is treated as an educational movement; it survives when treated
as public infrastructure.

and regarding the impact of AI on OER, take this in:

AI collapses discovery, synthesis, and explanation into one interaction

The Commons is no longer directly visited; it is intermediated

I am again just skimming after finding, I am keen to hear from others who take the time to read what the authors describe

Although it seems a distractor from our work on reconstructing assignments in an AI-heavy world, the report is at 8,000 words, about the length of a shortish undergraduate dissertation, and its complex structure in Word, with footnotes and endnotes, makes it ideal as a testbed for programmatic creation and editing via LLMs and thus part of our tring agenda too. More on that soon, ready for the next semester.

and see also Stephen’s summary and yes, opinion https://www.downes.ca/post/78619

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I’m really sad to hear about this. When I was a bit frantically looking for a Mastodon server, the folks at social.fossdle took me in. It’s been a little corner where I could stay in touch with Open Education, Open Source and all the interesting people doing activities related to them. Though I don’t participate much, it’s really been a nice corner to go curl up with. Reading the announcement, it seems like the Mastodon server was just a tiny piece of all the work they have done. I am so sorry and I want to thank them so very much!

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