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". Gary Lopez, Executive Director at the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), and his team think there's a promising middle ground between crowd-sourced Wikipedia-like free instructional resources and traditional publisher-centric product development and distribution. They've just finished developing an interesting example of this new-age product, an Algebra I package offered on a part free, part paid business model that they see as the future of educational publishing"

"For four years, students in John Sterman's [2] business management courses have gone toe to toe in simulated business arenas, with the latest being a concocted world of video game companies looking for an edge in marketing and selling their game consoles and software. The university announced Nov. 30 that the simulation, known as "Platform Wars," [3] would be freely available on the MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) website, following the lead of MIT's OpenCoursWare program [4], a seminal experiment in higher education's sharing of open source material."

"Gary Lopez, MITE's Executive Director, whose educational publishing career spans commercial as well as OER experience, has an interesting perspective. He positions foundation-supplied capital as the seed for the heavy lifting required for creating rigorous OER instructional packages, sustained by institutional membership fees for a bundle of enterprise-level services. What we used to call a free trial, and what the digital world now speaks of as freemium, is morphing into a series of business strategies that give customers a free taste and then offer fee-based elements that enhance the value proposition. Let's look at some from the education arena. "

"Lumen Learning, a new company that will offer guidance and support to institutions looking to use those resources. One of the company's goals is to collaborate with colleges to develop an associate degree in business administration that can be completed entirely with free open-education materials."

"It's the new business models for providing learning opportunities that concerned me in a previous post: Why Open Education is Dangerous. Are the ideals of open education a trojan horse for commercial interests to undermine publicly funded institutions? What is driving the interest, is it on the inside or the outside of "education"? Am I a reactionary for wanting to preserve some of the strengths of a public education system? In other words, I see there are opportunities, but what are the threats? Is education on the edge of the abyss, or the edge of a reformation? If the castle of "education as we know it" is under seige, is "openness" in education the dragon or the knight in shining armour?"

"OAPEN is pleased to announce a new service for Open Access monographs: the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). DOAB will provide a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher's website or repository."

"OER is a very complicated issue. But it is one worth trying to solve. Lowering costs for students is fundamental to providing fair access to higher education for those who seek it. We need smart, sustainable business models for OER that don't simply shift costs from one place to another, or reduce the overall quality of the materials we offer students. We need the highest quality instructional material at the lowest possible price."

"Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education. Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea?"

"Open-source textbooks, free for students to use and for professors to modify, are being developed by more companies and adopted in more classrooms. They may work hand-in-hand with the rise in free online courses to revolutionize the way we view-and pay for-higher education."

from a business perspective

"MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) is a collection of teaching materials, including case studies, industry notes, and management simulations, that MIT Sloan provides as a free teaching resource open and available to the world. Similar to the course syllabi and materials found on MIT's OpenCourseWare site, these materials carry a creative commons license allowing them to be downloaded, copied, and distributed. "