Tagged for OEG Connect: A National Priority for Open Education: Building a National Courseware Ecosystem | by Delmar Larsen | Sep, 2026 | Medium

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What’s of interest? A National Priority for Open Education: Building a National Courseware Ecosystem | by Delmar Larsen | Sep, 2026 | Medium

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The Open Education movement has successfully created a large body of freely available educational content, but it has yet to develop a comprehensive alternative to the commercial courseware ecosystem. Below, I argue that a national priority for Open Education should be to increase equitable access to education by replacing costly and restrictive proprietary courseware with low-cost or no-cost open alternatives. Achieving this requires moving beyond Open Education Resource (OER) production to build a sustainable, nonprofit National Open Courseware Ecosystem that integrates open content with assessment, learning technologies, authoring, accessibility, analytics, AI, and other essential services. Many of these components already exist across the Open community; the opportunity is to connect, coordinate, and scale these efforts into a coherent alternative capable of competing with commercial courseware.

The flavor of Open that most directly calls to me, as a faculty member, is Open Education, where this broader principle can be translated into a more tangible objective and mechanism:

Our goal is to increase equitable access to education, educational resources, and information by replacing costly and restrictive proprietary alternatives with low-cost or no-cost open alternatives including OER, open-source technologies, and open pedagogies.

This frames Open Education not as the goal itself, but as a means to achieve a larger objective: ensuring that educational infrastructure, resources, and practices serve students and educators rather than extracting value from them.

Where is it?: https://medium.com/@delmarlarsen/a-national-priority-for-open-education-building-a-national-courseware-ecosystem-2239a13e19b6

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This is a comprehensive and bold statement posted by @DelmarLarsen also seen shared recently in the CCCOER mailing list, aligned with the Open Education Association’s call for participating in its National Priorities for Open Education program.

There’s a lot to take in, as well as consideration for what this means in other regions and a global scale. Delmar outlines the goals of “the Opens” – Open Education, Open Science, Open Source, Open Pedagogy, and Open Data having a “common philosophy that knowledge and the tools for creating and using it should not be unnecessarily restricted.” But he also suggests they do not quite have actionable direction.

What do you think of Delmar’s calls for a National Open Repository and a National Open Courseware Ecosystem (or international)??

This is big, take some time to read closely Delmar’s post.

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I believe this is an excellent opportunity to treat a “national” topic as a “global” one. After all, this is a global community. Therefore, I think it makes a lot of sense to consider a multilingual “Global Courseware Ecosystem.”

Furthermore, in these new times, we can no longer think only of static textbooks. We have to think of AI resource repositories, such as skills, MCPs, and educational agents.

I work in Brazil and have dedicated a good amount of time to this, building open platform concepts that natively incorporate AI. The path forward is the development of an educational “harness” that can connect to open models, with decentralized deployment.

In other words, the harness is the same for everyone, developed through an open-source effort. But the resource created from this harness must be hosted in decentralized repositories, but following a common standard.

In addition to the cases mentioned (OER Commons, MERLOT, Runestone, Open Textbook Library, Connexions, LibreTexts), it would also be important to bring in 1EdTech (formerly IMS), which defines important standards such as SCORM and LTI.

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This is not even close to a global ecosystem because it ignores anyone without a reliable internet connection and reliable electrical power. A “global” claim can’t rest on infrastructure that only exists in a fraction of the world. Large parts of the population, across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and rural regions everywhere, face intermittent electricity, expensive or nonexistent broadband, and devices shared across entire households or communities. Designing as though these constraints are edge cases to patch in later isn’t a technical oversight; it’s a framing problem. It builds a system for the connected world and then labels it “global” after the fact.

In order to be considered a global open ecosystem, those without the internet need to be served first, not last. Sequencing matters here. Doing it at the same time is not going to work, because the design decisions that serve well-connected users (cloud-dependence, streaming-heavy content, real-time collaboration, assumption of always-on access) actively work against the needs of low-connectivity users. You can’t optimize for both simultaneously without one set of constraints quietly winning by default, and history suggests it’s usually the well-resourced context that wins, with the rest treated as a later “accessibility” add-on. Solving first for those without the internet will “open” attitudes and approaches, because it forces the design team to confront offline-first architecture, low-bandwidth content, asynchronous collaboration, and device-sharing models from day one. Constraints that, if solved well, tend to produce a more robust and flexible system for everyone, not a compromised one.

A global ecosystem also needs a primary focus on building the skills and capacities of those who will be using the system, not as a maybe nice-to-have, but as a core design requirement on par with the technology itself. A platform without digital literacy support, teacher training, and ongoing capacity development isn’t neutral infrastructure waiting to be adopted; it’s a tool that will only be usable by those who already have the skills to use it, reinforcing the divide it claims to close. Capacity-building needs to be budgeted, staffed, and sequenced with the same seriousness as the technical roadmap, not tacked on as training material after launch.

The proposal is also heavily slanted toward North American higher ed and needs to instead be focused on K-12. Higher ed learners in North America are disproportionately connected, resourced, and already embedded in digital learning norms. They are close to the least representative population for a genuinely global system. K-12, by contrast, is where foundational access and skill-building actually happen, where the largest global population of learners sits, and where the stakes of getting this wrong (or right) compound over an entire lifetime of education. If the goal is genuine global reach and equity, the center of gravity needs to shift there.