{"id":19722,"date":"2017-03-22T14:25:25","date_gmt":"2017-03-22T18:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carleton.ca\/edc\/?p=19722"},"modified":"2021-08-13T10:10:47","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T14:10:47","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":"

\u2028By Kevin Cheung, Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics<\/em><\/p>\n

Recently, UC Berkeley started removing roughly 20,000 free videos from public access<\/a>.\u00a0One reason given for the action was the prohibitive cost of retroactively making the videos comply with accessibility laws in the U.S.<\/p>\n

The action by Berkeley ignited a firestorm of responses of various kinds.\u00a0However, I will not get into the debate in this blog post.\u00a0Rather, I would like to take a quick look into the cost of free education content.<\/p>\n

For the record, I am an eager supporter of free as well as open education content. In fact, I have created such content myself.\u00a0But as the saying goes, \u201cThere ain\u2019t no such thing as a free lunch.\u201d\u00a0Restating the obvious: somebody has to pay for their development and delivery, either directly or indirectly.\u00a0What is not so obvious is how much they actually cost.<\/p>\n

The production and hosting costs of the millions of free YouTube education videos are difficulty to tally.\u00a0One can imagine that the expenses associated with hosting such videos for worldwide access 24\/7 must be huge.<\/p>\n

The free resources provided by Khan Academy<\/a> do not come cheap. According to Wikipedia<\/a>, in 2014, Khan Academy had over $19 million USD in expenses.<\/p>\n

As for massive open online courses (MOOCs), the cost of developing and delivering one can range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of US dollars<\/a>.\u00a0In Ontario, eCampusOntario recently awarded over $2 million in funding<\/a> to two dozen proposals for creating open education content for higher education.\u00a0From these numbers, it can be seen that free education content can come with a hefty price tag.<\/p>\n

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":"

\u2028By Kevin Cheung, Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics Recently, UC Berkeley started removing roughly 20,000 free videos from public access.\u00a0One 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.\u00a0However, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nBlog: The cost of free - 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