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There is more than one way to get a school to start looking at online learning as a way to reach students. As an international educator, I have found no greater motivation to get the conversation started around online learning than planning for the worst…

I have found that providing students with progress reports via audio files is a very motivating alternative to providing written feedback on their progress. Generally, I do both. I am required to enter written feedback in the online records kept for my students. However, there are several things that don't overly excite me about this: I sometimes find them to be overly formal and (on occasion) stilted. They occur too infrequently - usually mid- and end-of-semester - to provide students with useful information. They can (on occasion) fall prey to ticking-the-boxes syndrome and thus can (on occasion) not be so overly heartfelt.

I frequently hear people attempt to equate the open education movement with socialism. After all, the logic goes, what could possibly be more socialist than freely sharing things with everyone? The attempt to characterize the entire movement in a single assertion assumes a uniformity within the movement that anyone working in OER knows does not exist. I will neither agree or disagree with broad, general assertion in this post. Instead, I want to disagree with the statement in a very specific context, and carve out a specific and concrete space in the discourse about the motivations that underlie OER.