{"id":19722,"date":"2017-03-22T14:25:25","date_gmt":"2017-03-22T18:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carleton.ca\/edc\/?p=19722"},"modified":"2026-05-06T13:27:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T17:27:59","slug":"blog-cost-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/2017\/blog-cost-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: The cost of free"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<section class=\"w-screen px-6 cu-section cu-section--white ml-offset-center md:px-8 lg:px-14\">\n    <div class=\"space-y-6 cu-max-w-child-5xl  md:space-y-10 cu-prose-first-last\">\n\n            <div class=\"cu-textmedia flex flex-col lg:flex-row mx-auto gap-6 md:gap-10 my-6 md:my-12 first:mt-0 max-w-5xl\">\n        <div class=\"justify-start cu-textmedia-content cu-prose-first-last\" style=\"flex: 0 0 100%;\">\n            <header class=\"font-light prose-xl cu-pageheader md:prose-2xl cu-component-updated cu-prose-first-last\">\n                                    <h1 class=\"cu-prose-first-last font-semibold !mt-2 mb-4 md:mb-6 relative after:absolute after:h-px after:bottom-0 after:bg-cu-red after:left-px text-3xl md:text-4xl lg:text-5xl lg:leading-[3.5rem] pb-5 after:w-10 text-cu-black-700 not-prose\">\n                        Blog: The cost of free\n                    <\/h1>\n                \n                                \n                            <\/header>\n\n                    <\/div>\n\n            <\/div>\n\n    <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n<p><em>\u2028By Kevin Cheung, Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Recently, UC Berkeley started <a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2017\/03\/06\/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">removing roughly 20,000 free videos from public access<\/a>.&nbsp;One reason given for the action was the prohibitive cost of retroactively making the videos comply with accessibility laws in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The action by Berkeley ignited a firestorm of responses of various kinds.&nbsp;However, I will not get into the debate in this blog post.&nbsp;Rather, I would like to take a quick look into the cost of free education content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the record, I am an eager supporter of free as well as open education content. In fact, I have created such content myself.&nbsp;But as the saying goes, \u201cThere ain\u2019t no such thing as a free lunch.\u201d&nbsp;Restating the obvious: somebody has to pay for their development and delivery, either directly or indirectly.&nbsp;What is not so obvious is how much they actually cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The production and hosting costs of the millions of free YouTube education videos are difficulty to tally.&nbsp;One can imagine that the expenses associated with hosting such videos for worldwide access 24\/7 must be huge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The free resources provided by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.khanacademy.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Khan Academy<\/a> do not come cheap. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Khan_Academy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">According to Wikipedia<\/a>, in 2014, Khan Academy had over $19 million USD in expenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As for massive open online courses (MOOCs), the cost of developing and delivering one can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.irrodl.org\/index.php\/irrodl\/article\/view\/1901\/3069\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of US dollars<\/a>.&nbsp;In Ontario, eCampusOntario recently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecampusontario.ca\/Content\/open-content-funding\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">awarded over $2 million in funding<\/a> to two dozen proposals for creating open education content for higher education.&nbsp;From these numbers, it can be seen that free education content can come with a hefty price tag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In short, free education content is far from being free. The question is, will money spent on creating and delivering free education content lead to a good return on investment for the investors? And if so, what kind?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2028By Kevin Cheung, Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics Recently, UC Berkeley started removing roughly 20,000 free videos from public access.&nbsp;One reason given for the action was the prohibitive cost of retroactively making the videos comply with accessibility laws in the U.S. The action by Berkeley ignited a firestorm of responses of various kinds.&nbsp;However, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40197,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19722\/revisions\/40197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}