As we look forward to the potential open educational resources (OER) have to positively shape distributed learning ecosystems (DLE), we must first consider the history of OER and acknowledge how technocentric thinking can negatively impact education systems. Our recent history of educational technologies is saturated with missteps, misfires, and unrealized utopian thinking (Watters, 2021), wherein educational technology research seems to follow a general trend of adopting technologies first and only later exploring matters of instructional effectiveness, pedagogical use, ethical considerations, and social effects (Boekweg et al., 2021). This technophilic or technocentric (Papert, 1990) view of educational technology treats technology as a catalyst or change agent upon education, wherein new technologies are expected to have an improving or even revolutionary effect on both individual learning and complex educational systems. The problem with this view is that it is both overly optimistic in its expectations of the positive effects that technology can have on education and simplistically assumes that technology is the change agent that acts upon social institutions, which are seen as passive recipients. In this view, technology is the chisel, and society is an amorphous block waiting to be shaped. In response, we, and others, have argued that the proper way to understand technology’s relationship to education, scholarship, and society is to view it as a coevolutionary artefact, wherein technologies and social institutions recursively shape one another, because emergent technologies “may just as validly be seen as a reflection of cultural trends as a cause of them” (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012b).

Applying this principle to OER and what the future holds for our DLE, we should first recognize that a cyclical relationship exists between OER and DLE. OER may technically enable us to do certain things, but even our understanding of OER is shaped by the values and norms present in our DLEs, as we then allow these values and norms to shape, empower, or negate what OER can be. The history of open-washing (Weller, 2013; Wiley, 2011) and the xMOOC (as opposed to the cMOOC; Ping, 2013; Xibin et al., 2013) are both prime examples of how OER may influence some changes in educational systems, but those same systems have the power to shape (and potentially warp) our understanding of what openness means, as open technologies and practices can be turned against themselves to promote futures that may be antithetical to the basic tenets of openness.

The problem with this recursion as it relates to OER is that tools and ideas that have the potential to help us fundamentally “rethink what learning is all about” (Papert, 1990) often end up being colonized or co-opted by existing systems to move forward business-as-usual. The reason for this is obvious: no system can be self-revolutionary. No system can be set up to allow for its own demise, and the pain, struggle, and inefficiency of a revolution only ever seem wise if we can be certain that the new system will be significantly superior to the old (cf. Kuhn [1996] and the precursors to scientific revolutions). As a result, revolutionary ideas and movements must often choose between (a) fighting a perpetual battle against a status quo that is mature and works more efficiently than the immature and untested revolutionary alternative or (b) reshaping themselves into docile or ineffective cogs in the machinery of the system. In our case, if we view the DLE as our system, it seems that the radical notions of openness that undergird OER must either seek to fundamentally change how DLE operate or risk becoming nothing more than a moral signal that appears to be responsive to the times without making any fundamental adjustments.

Or is there another possible future? We think there is, but to achieve it, we must start by taking a step back and reminding ourselves why we care about openness to begin with.

1 Openness as Means Versus End

Openness is not an unequivocal good. You would be rightly perturbed if your physician openly shared your medical history, if your romantic partner openly aired your relationship’s dirty laundry, or if your bank account were open for anyone to access. Openness, as with many of its synonyms like transparency and sharing, is good for achieving some particular ends, but the same idea that might be good in one setting (e.g., sharing our food with the needy) would be irresponsible or unethical in another (e.g., sharing COVID-19 with our students). Though we are quick to laud the utopian benefits of openness, we sometimes fail to equally articulate why openness is beneficial, why we want it, and in what contexts. We also often treat openness as an all-or-nothing proposition: either you promote open futures or you do not.

Most philosophical discussions of openness start from a place of altruism, access, equity, democratization, selflessness, or generosity. These ideals appeal to “fundamental ethical behaviours” and “moral requirements” to animate openness as a practice (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012a). Of these foundational ethics, we find “generosity” to be the most useful (cf., Wiley, 2010) because it is synonymous with some terms (e.g., “selflessness,” “altruism”) and is more foundational than others (e.g., “equity”). For instance, a lack of generosity (i.e., selfishness or self-centeredness) can breed inequity. In democratic societies, generosity comes in the form of public service as people freely give of their individual time, resources, and trust to share in governance and to promote the public good. When generosity is not present in democratic societies, the notion of public good is replaced by personal gain, and inequality flourishes. Similarly, without the lifeforce of generosity, OER run the risk of leading to futures wherein openness is mandated, co-opted, or manipulated in ways that promote greed, selfishness, inequity, and persistent ineffectiveness.

A few examples here might be instructive. In software development, openness has a relatively long history via the interconnected “free software” and “open-source software” movements and their complicated relationships with one another (Stallman, 2021). Though an in-depth exploration of these movements is beyond the scope of this chapter, the resulting software ecosystem we find ourselves in today has been shaped markedly by openness in many ways with some exciting and some troubling effects.

One problematic result of openness in our current software ecosystem is inequity based on the type or degree of resources certain companies offer. For example, recognizing that free and open can be effective hooks for attracting new users, freemium models of apps are now commonplace, wherein companies create tiered experiences and provide only the best experiences for premier, paying users. Applied to OER and education, this same mindset exists with the creation of tiered learning experiences. In these instances, some learners are given more robust educational opportunities than others in the form of inequitable access to supplements, supports, or full course materials based on their ability to pay, geographic location, or other considerations (Polonetsky & Tene, 2014). Some of these strategies have even been used in educational technology as advertising funnels or bait-and-switch scams (Hempel, 2010; Newton, 2018).

Similarly, some companies have used openness to exploit user data. As companies have recognized the benefits of data interoperability and sharing between various systems via application programming interfaces (APIs) and data repositories, they have found that providing users with inexpensive access to software allows for quick collection of valuable user data, which then can be monetized in a variety of ways. Educational technology companies are not oblivious to this, and many lucrative business models have arisen that leverage student data for profit (cf. the “Instructure Wars” [Crosslin, 2019] and proctoring software [Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2021; Morris & Stommel, 2017]). Without its ethical centre of generosity and relying instead on motivators of selfishness, greed, and control, open practices run the risk of providing even greater power to corporations, governments, institutions, and even researchers like ourselves to manipulate, control, and harvest the efforts of learners, thereby showing that openness without generosity is no virtue.

Beyond its ethical core, openness also potentially provides a way forward for our DLE that is simply better for learners in a practical sense by providing ongoing improvement of learning materials and experiences. Since they are generally digitized, OER can be easily updated and distributed to learners in a variety of formats, potentially improving accessibility, up-to-dateness, and flexibility in comparison to print-only and proprietary media. Because they can be provided without paywalls, OER can be more seamlessly embedded into learning experiences, such as by dropping content directly into learning management systems or using the internet itself as a learning platform for interconnecting diverse content and people. Because they are openly licensed, OER can be remixed for many purposes, which is immensely beneficial from a learning perspective to adapt and differentiate resources to local contexts, diverse language requirements, and other developmental or personal needs. And because authors can collect data on resource usage and adjust them with little effort, OER provide unparalleled opportunities for educators to continually improve the materials they use to meet the emergent and ongoing needs of learners. These potential benefits to teaching and learning practice have been described collectively by different names, including open educational practices (OEP; Cronin, 2017; Cronin & MacLaren, 2018; Ehlers, 2011), open pedagogy (Nascimbeni & Ehlers, 2020; Peters et al., 2012), and OER-enabled pedagogy (Wiley & Hilton, 2018). Though OER may not categorically lead to such open practices (Mason & Kimmons, 2018), they are nonetheless necessary to engage in them. As educators, we can use the benefits of OER to shape students’ DLE in ways that extend beyond the classroom.

From these roots, we contend that future directions in OER design, use, and research should not focus on openness itself but on creating futures that (a) are more generous and (b) better allow for ongoing improvement (both in sustainable ways). Openness may merely be a means to achieving these aims. If we could wave a magic wand and make our DLE more open but then realized this future made learning less generous, made us less effective, or was unsustainable, then we would find ourselves in a dystopian world. Openness and OER are merely suggested vehicles for achieving these goals, and if we cannot achieve them through openness (or if there is another method that allows us to better achieve them), then openness and OER are not worth our time or effort.

For these reasons, we believe that approaching a discussion of the future of OER design, use, and research should rest on our two primary aims of openness: (a) sustainable generosity and (b) sustainable improvement. Doing so will provide us with better focus to solve the problems associated with OER and will also help to ensure that we are using these valuable technologies to shape society and educational systems in positive, rather than dystopian, ways. In the remainder of this chapter, we will limit our exploration to this first issue of sustainable generosity, but we also encourage others to help further articulate how sustainable improvement must be key to OER-connected futures (e.g., Wiley et al., 2020).

2 Sustainable Generosity.

“The only legitimate role for new media and technology in education is to increase our capacity to be generous with one another. The more open we are, the better education will be.” — David Wiley

An estimated half of all agricultural produce grown in the United States each year is thrown away, making food the biggest occupant of landfills (Chandler, 2016). Yet roughly 10% of people in the United States experience food insecurity (USDOA, 2020), and 9% of people globally are undernourished (United Nations, n.d.). Why are millions of people starving while roughly one-third of U.S. foodstuffs are wasted (Chandler, 2016)? It is doubtful that U.S. farmers or supermarkets would object to their discarded produce being used to feed the hungry, so it does not seem like this problem simply stems from a moral deficiency on their part but from inefficiencies and impracticalities associated with redistribution of the unwanted produce. Though there would be no additional cost to farmers or supermarkets for the hungry to benefit from their unwanted items, the cost and logistics necessary to enable sharing of these resources is significant and might make the effective and sustainable sharing of perishable resources impossible for even the most altruistic producer.

A similar situation seems to exist in education wherein many people have valuable learning resources—such as content, expertise, and time—that they could provide to a world hungry for them, but there seems to be a disconnect between those who would give of themselves and those who could benefit from such giving. A professor who creates course materials for their students could share those materials with others outside of their class, allowing others to build upon the professor’s expertise. A K-12 teacher could provide copies of lesson plans and activities to other teachers, preventing others from having to recreate the wheel in their classes. Or an adult educator could allow students from all over the world to audit their class via synchronous video. Yet, as with the farmers and supermarkets, this sharing often fails to occur simply because educators are unaware of needs, do not understand how they can help, or lack the time, skills, or resources needed to effectively share with potential students or other educators in need. Effective sharing, it turns out, can be hard work. As a result, many of us find our generous impulses and opportunities to share stymied by the cost and logistics of providing our educational sustenance to those who need it.

Generosity might mean different things to different people, but a simple definition would be that it means to willingly give of the self to benefit the other, making it antonymous to selfishness or greed. Educators as a group are likely more generous than the average person, since a desire to give, lift, and help often draws people to the profession. In K-12, for instance, 53% of teachers in the United States report using their own money to purchase food for hungry children in their classrooms (Share Our Strength, 2012), and positions at all levels within our educational systems are staffed with highly skilled professionals who have often decided to forego more lucrative careers elsewhere to give back to society or to make an impact on learners. Yet OER are a fitting example of how our generous impulses typically do not match with actual outcomes. Though the vast majority of higher education faculty believe that OER, and open textbooks specifically, are a good idea, only about 7% use textbooks that are openly licensed and only 13% use any OER at all (Seaman & Seaman, 2018). Reasons for this are manifold, including lack of time, lack of skill, lack of awareness, misalignment with performance indicators, and financial opportunity costs (Kimmons, 2016; Martin & Kimmons, 2020), but it seems that all these issues may be summarized as a failure to build systems that allow educators to be generous in a sustainable and impactful way.

We need systems in place that honour, support, and (maybe even) reward generosity. We do not need our farmers to produce more food; we need systems that make it easy for farmers to get surplus food to those who need it. Similarly, it does not seem that we need more expertise in education. Rather, we need to create systems, processes, and cultures within our educational institutions that support educators in more effectively collaborating with others, codifying their expertise into non-rivalrous learning materials, and reaching more learners. So, when it comes to future directions of OER use, design, and research, our first proposal is that educators and researchers need to be involved in creating and supporting systems and in conducting research to make generosity more sustainable within their institutions. This important work may take many forms, but we will only briefly mention three: (a) shining light on false narratives and immoral systems; (b) legitimizing, valuing, and protecting givers; and (c) exercising gratitude.

3 Shining Light on False Narratives and Immoral Systems

There are many false narratives permeating our educational systems that dissuade people from being generous, but one of the most pernicious is the gilded bogeyman of intellectual property opportunity cost. The narrative goes like this: Our knowledge and expertise are valuable; so, we should not give them away. Rather, we should keep them to ourselves until we can monetize them and make a fortune. Though the premise to this argument is true—our knowledge and expertise are valuable—the erroneous conclusion is drawn from a misunderstanding of how wealth flows in education. Of course, there are plenty of people who make an absolute financial killing in the education marketplace, such as the author of a core subject area textbook that is adopted across multiple countries or states, but this type of wealth only comes about when resources are adopted on a large scale. In contrast, much of the knowledge and expertise held by educators at all levels tends to be less scalable, such as contextual expertise of how to teach a particular subject to a particular group of students or niche expertise in an advanced, highly specialized area. Though it is still possible to monetize such expertise through the creation of educational content, doing so is much more difficult than in other creative spaces and provides less financial incentive. Royalties of nonfiction books, for instance, tend to only be 15–25%, and if the subject matter for the book is too specialized or is so generalist that it could be replaced by a variety of free sources, then the incentive for producing such content rarely outweighs the time and effort needed to do so. The result is that educators have valuable knowledge and expertise to contribute to the world that they often never get around to sharing.

Furthermore, this fixation on the financial value of knowledge and expertise also leads to a variety of morally questionable behaviours that some educators engage in. If a university professor, for example, takes the time to write a book for the market, they will often use their positions of power to influence its adoption. If they teach a class, they will require students to purchase their book and encourage their departments, libraries, bookstores, and colleagues to do the same, mandating the text for as many students as possible. This creates a situation in which student tuition and taxes fund professors to create content, and the professors then require those same students to pay again or risk failing coursework. Understandably, if a professor takes the time to write a book, then they would want it used in their class, as it would likely align best with their subject matter and teaching approach, but the moral problem here is that educators can use their positions to create pressures on financially vulnerable students, to essentially charge whatever they like for course materials, and to make a double profit from their students via tuition and materials. The advent of digital publishing has not solved this problem and may have even exacerbated it by reducing barriers to publication, removing quality assurance mechanisms, and giving professors more control via self-publication. In many higher education institutions, it is currently possible for a professor to self-publish an unvetted, low-quality book and require it in their coursework, charging whatever they like for a fee and keeping a higher percentage of profits than they would from a traditional publisher. Because professors can both publish materials in which they have a financial interest and dictate what students must purchase to pass courses, this creates a scenario ripe for exploitation, and it is no wonder that textbook prices have risen at triple the rate of inflation over the past 20 years (Perry, 2016).

Another false narrative is the belief that the cost of an educational resource is indicative of its quality. The saying “you get what you pay for” is often applied to textbooks and other materials, leading educators and curricular decision-makers to sometimes treat free resources as being of poorer educational quality than commercial products. Research on this topic has shown repeatedly that open resources yield similar, and sometimes better, educational results when compared to commercial alternatives (Hilton, 2016, 2019) and that open resources can be just as accurate and high-quality as their commercial counterparts (Giles, 2005; Greenstein & Zhu, 2018; Kimmons, 2015). And yet, the myth persists primarily because perceptions of educational resource quality in a consumer-driven society are heavily shaped by a variety of factors that may have nothing to do with a resource’s impact on learning, such as its aesthetics. As an example, the most brilliant computer scientist in the world could write a comprehensive book and publish it openly on the internet, but unless they also hire a graphic designer to give it a flashy cover and a copy editor to proof the language for errors, the book may be perceived as being of lower quality than a competing book produced by a novice in the content area. Indeed, students—along with seasoned educators, designers, and researchers—“judge books by their covers.” This behaviour perpetuates the false narrative that the educational quality of a resource resides in marketing appeal and leads educators to adopt form over substance: paying for publisher polish even when generous content expertise is freely available.

To combat these false narratives and the immoral systems they create, future research should explore what the actual opportunity cost is to educators for sharing knowledge to provide more transparency in their decision-making processes. Furthermore, those involved in the use and design of OER also need to be aware of these realities and recognize that creating a resource that will be perceived as being high quality by educators and students may require a diverse set of expertise and skills, such as graphic design, copy editing, search engine optimization, etc. The false narratives that prevent OER from shaping our DLE in positive ways may have come about as unintentional consequences of a historically market-driven system, but that does not mean that we are doomed to operate under these narratives. Good research and good practice can help us see that these narratives, rather than being inherently true or inevitable, may be nothing more than temporary obstacles between us and the more generous world we seek to create.

4 Legitimizing, Valuing, and Protecting Givers

The second area we must focus our efforts on in order to make generosity more sustainable is pushing our institutions to legitimize and value giving, while at the same time protecting those who are doing it. Research on OER creation among university faculty and K-12 teachers alike has shown that the primary barrier is time: educators simply do not feel that they have enough time to find, vet, or create open resources (Kimmons, 2015; Martin & Kimmons, 2020). To understand this barrier, we must recognize that educators, like other professionals, operate in institutions where their performance is evaluated, and they must devote their time to doing what their institutions signal to them is necessary for job security, promotion, etc. In the case of classroom teachers, this primarily means teaching and grading. In the case of university professors, this means a combination of research, teaching, and citizenship, though the weighting and interpretation of these categories varies by institution. Tenure-track faculty at large research universities are typically evaluated primarily on their research productivity, while those at teaching universities might need to give more attention to teaching evaluations. In every case, though, there do not seem to be institutionalized ways of valuing OER-related work. Is creating an open textbook, for instance, scholarship, teaching, or citizenship? And how would a tenure and promotion committee view such an activity? Currently, because such activities are not valued as core elements of educators’ job descriptions, they are typically seen as positive supplements to one’s career but are not essential for career advancement. Since expectations are so high for educators in other areas, the result is that educators simply do not feel like they have the time to engage in activities that would at best be considered a brief footnote to their overall job performance.

In response, researchers need to validate the social and teaching impacts of OER and show how such efforts stack up to more traditional approaches to scholarship, teaching, and citizenship. As an example, the Iowa Open Education Action Team recently created an information packet to help guide faculty and staff in advocating for OER-related activities “in the promotion, tenure, and faculty evaluation practices at their institutions” (Elder et al., 2021). This packet provides ideas for how different OER-related activities might be couched within the three categories valued by institutions. However, for such efforts to become fully ingrained in our institutions, we will likely need to revisit some basic assumptions that we make about scholarly impact and quality.

For example, metrics such as impact factors and acceptance rates that are traditionally used for determining scholarly merit may be less useful in a world that is increasingly digital and open. As proxies for impact and rigor, these metrics were developed with certain assumptions about the dissemination of information that may be antiquated now. For instance, journals are no longer limited in the number of articles they can publish due to paper printing and mail delivery fees, which means that a digital journal could feasibly publish every article that was submitted if each met the journal’s requirements for scholarly rigor, thereby calling into question the value of acceptance rates. Digitization of scholarship has also led to growth in predatory and pay-to-publish models of dissemination, which also calls into question the relationship between article acceptance and institutional wealth or researchers’ willingness to pay. Furthermore, since impact factors rely upon citation counts, those factors can be artificially inflated by some activities that may not reveal impact at all (e.g., self-citations) while simultaneously ignoring others more indicative of social impact (e.g., reading and sharing behaviours), learning (e.g., reader performance on learning checks), or quality (e.g., reader ratings of content quality). As a result, we suggest that advocacy for inclusion of OER-related activities into institutional evaluation practices should also be informed by ongoing research and conceptual work to unpack what our purported institutional values—such as impact, rigor, and quality—actually mean, as well as the exploration of how new methods of data collection and analysis might provide better proxies than pre-digital norms (e.g., West & Rich, 2012).

As we move in these directions, however, we also need to be careful to protect those engaged in the act of giving. Though digital OER are non-rivalrous by nature (i.e., they can be given without being given away or shared without precluding others from using them), their creation and ongoing development require the expenditure of professional time, which is a rivalrous resource. Any time that a professional devotes to OER is time taken away from other activities, and as educators and scholars exercise generosity via OER, there is a risk that their efforts may be exploited and drained dry. In higher education broadly, for instance, female and racially minoritized faculty may often find themselves shouldering a greater burden of mentoring, service, and committee work than their male and white peers, often being asked to sacrifice more and experiencing lower job satisfaction as a result (Allen et al., 2000; Olsen et al., 1995; Tack & Patitu, 1992). Even in cases where there is observed parity in terms of devoted time, it may be that female and racially minoritized faculty “have learned that demands for service outweigh rewards (particularly in a research institution) and self-consciously limit the time they spend on such activities—nevertheless feeling the press of extensive requests” and desire to participate (Olsen et al., 1995, p. 283). The corollary here with OER is that if OER-related work is treated simply as a worthwhile (but extra) thing to do, then those who engage in this work will potentially open themselves up to unique risks and demands, which may create a tension between the progression of OER-related work and individual career advancement.

As an anecdote, I (the first author) recently collaborated with a newly hooded PhD colleague who was seeking a faculty position. The former student expressed a desire to be involved in an open textbook project that I was working on, but though her involvement would have provided amazing benefit, I encouraged her to limit her efforts with OER for the time being and to focus her attention elsewhere (namely traditional publishing) to better safeguard her own marketability and future in academia. This advice came in response to my own experiences with OER work, which I have found to be much more feasible from positions of power (e.g., post-hire and post-tenure). The sad reality illustrated by this example is that many who have important contributions to make to the professional community via OER must often choose between doing what is generous and doing what is necessary to survive in their professional setting. If we are truly seeking to move to a future that is more open, then we need to be sure that we also are engaging in research and practices that help safeguard those who are being generous with their time and resources rather than simply expecting professionals to sacrifice their careers in the name of openness.

5 Exercising Gratitude.

“Generosity and gratitude are inseparably linked.” — Judith Martin

As a final thought, we submit that because our capacity and willingness to be generous is in many ways dependent upon our perceptions of our own abilities, resources, expertise, and opportunities, it is necessary for us to reflect upon and realistically come to understand what those opportunities are. Positioning this through a more critical lens, all professionals must recognize the various privileges they enjoy by virtue of their educational attainment, institutional affiliations, expertise, skills, time, abilities, comforts, health, connections, and other benefits and opportunities available to them, or in a more colloquial or traditional sense, we simply need to recognize and be grateful for the blessings and opportunities we enjoy. Otherwise, we will quickly rationalize our way out of being generous and out of understanding the need for generosity.

There are a host of problems facing education professionals, many of whom are overworked, underappreciated, and underpaid. The persistent adjunctification of higher education (Cawley, 2020; Ovetz, 2017) and deprofessionalization of K-12 education (Milner, 2013; Wronowski & Urick, 2021) delegitimize the professional status of educators and scholars at all levels, and we see stark inequities in how professionals are valued across disciplines and institutions (Higher Ed Jobs, 2020; Lincoln & Stanley, 2021; Pyke, 2011). These are serious, systemic problems that need to be solved. However, because it is human nature to interpret our own opportunities and deprivations in relative (rather than absolute) terms, professionals may often make determinations about their capacity to be generous based upon their relative positionality to others who are more privileged than themselves rather than from an objective realization of what they have to offer the world. The result is that many of us perhaps are not as generous as we should be and do not have the impact on the world that we could, simply because we justify withholding our generosity on the basis that such efforts are the exclusive requirement of others who are more privileged than ourselves.

Privileges and opportunities are inequitably distributed. There is no doubt about that. However, we would wager that the typical person reading this book has far more privilege, opportunity, and resources available to them than their average student (and the average citizen of the world). For instance, as a first-generation college graduate (first author) and a first-generation college student (second author), we recognize that the knowledge and skills at our disposal simply by virtue of our educational attainment provide us with unique opportunities to help others that far exceed those of our ancestors and many of the members of the communities we grew up in. Couple those privileges with technical skills, food security, professional connections, and a host of other blessings, and it becomes clear that the opportunities we enjoy—ones that most professionals commonly share—give us the potential for doing substantial amounts of good.

As stated in the previous section, we do not suggest that professionals should be generous to the point of jeopardizing their careers or opportunities for growth and advancement, but it does seem that if we want to work toward a world that is more generous via OER, then each of us must start by seriously considering how generous we should be with our time, talents, and opportunities. There is perhaps no simple principle here to follow, and how generous each of us should be will likely vary from situation to situation, but it seems safe to conclude that most of us should perhaps be more generous with these privileges than our institutions and fields encourage us to be. In talking about religiously motivated generosity, C. S. Lewis (2015) concluded the following: “I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.” We concur with this sentiment and suggest that if we all seek to use OER to build educational futures that are more equitable and generous, then our generosity should hurt at least a little.

6 Conclusion

The future of OER design, use, and research rests in our ability to both recognize the detriments of technocentric and consumeristic approaches to educational technology and shift course toward more generous, sustainable, and realistic views of OER. Traditionally, support for OER has lauded openness without understanding how to create a sustainable future or how to honour and protect those who give. Such oversights have caused openness to be misrepresented and misused, delaying our generous futures from coming about. If, instead, we view OER through the lens of seeking sustainable generosity and improvement, we can then retrain our understanding and reshape the future of OER within our DLE. To do so, we must interrogate our market-driven assumptions in education, legitimize giving, and practice gratitude in ways that motivate generosity. We hope that these steps can lead to lasting, impactful improvements in education as openness is no longer seen merely as a fashionable oddity or moralistic token but as a pathway that leads to the generous and more equitable futures that we desire.