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Cable Green, director of global learning at Creative Commons, says that spending public money on higher education resources that cannot be shared openly borders on being ¡°immoral and unethical¡± (¡°Failing to share publicly funded HE resources ¡®immoral¡¯¡±, 15 April).

However, now that students are picking up most of the tab for their degree courses, how does this affect the argument? Do students want to pay for a course only to find that the materials later become freely available to all? I suppose they would have to balance that against the suggestion that the quality of their own course would be enhanced if these materials were generally available.

I suspect the reason that most academics don¡¯t want to share their course materials is because they are worried that what they have produced won¡¯t match up to what else is out there, and they don¡¯t particularly want to open themselves up to unnecessary scrutiny or put in the often huge amount of work necessary to polish something for public consumption. Most lecturers simply can¡¯t compare to those you can watch on edX.

Michael Hughes
Via timeshighereducation.co.uk