A Conference on Open Education Invited For-Profit Publishers to a Keynote. Then the Objections Began.

Less than two weeks before its 16th annual meeting, the Open Education Conference has canceled one of its keynote panels — “The Future of Learning Materials” — after facing a backlash on social media.

The panel, which had been scheduled for November 1, was slated to include representatives from Cengage, McGraw-Hill, Lumen Learning, and Macmillan, all for-profit publishing companies, as well as the managing director of OpenStax, a nonprofit. It was supposed to explore the potential role of traditional commercial entities in the future of open education resources.

“That role could be anything from ‘no role’ to ‘deeply committed participant,’” David Wiley, a member of the program committee and a co-founder of Lumen Learning, said in an email. Of the more than two dozen speakers and panels nominated for keynotes, the future panel was one of the top vote-getters on the program committee, he added.

But the reaction to the panel highlighted the often contentious relationship between advocates for open education resources and commercial publishers, as open resources expand in the learning-materials market. The outcry also raised broader questions about the politics of providing platforms to those with opposing views and social media’s tendency to amplify outrage. Many open-ed advocates pushed back against the framing of the panel and objected to elevating profit-seeking entities with a keynote and prescreening questions audience members could ask.

The conference’s program committee, comprising Wiley and 11 others involved in open education, said the decision to cancel had stemmed from “toxic behavior” on Twitter, adding that committee members had received “abusive and harassing” direct messages. Two panelists withdrew, according to a statement, and potential replacements declined to participate because of the tone of the discussion on Twitter. But some in the open-education community, both those who had pushed back against the panel and those who had stayed out of the discussion, said they did not see anything particularly troubling in the public posts.

Wiley declined to share copies of the direct messages that committee members had received, or to comment on their nature. Several committee members and panelists did not respond to requests for comment.

A Pattern of ‘Platforming’

The cancellation followed a pattern of “platforming” and “no-platforming” seen at other conferences and on campuses. Characterized by its critics as antithetical to educational discourse, no-platforming seeks to prevent speakers who are seen as belonging to historically or systematically destructive groups from taking advantage of opportunities to share their views.

Nathan Smith, coordinator of open educational resources at Houston Community College, watched the dispute unfold on Twitter. He noted that the open-education movement is rooted in social justice and driven by ideological principles, so it’s not surprising to see its members raise concerns about platforming.

“The criticisms around platforming are legitimate. They are not made just because some people disagree,” Smith said in an email. “I think it’s unfortunate that sometimes these criticisms are misunderstood and sometimes the people criticized see themselves or their reputations in harm’s way because of that criticism.”

In the case of the Open Education Conference, many pointed out that for-profit organizations represented on the panel had historically inflated the price of learning materials or limited access to them. A week before the cancellation, Rajiv Jhangiani, associate vice provost for open education at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in British Columbia, published a blog post outlining how he thought commercial entities had engaged with open education maliciously in the past, and how many of them were trying to improve how they work with the field.

“While this may seem like a tricky balance, I see it as quite straightforward to criticize openwashing” — marketing as open education without offering a fully open product — “by a commercial player while also recognizing positive developments from the same actor,” Jhangiani wrote. “You see,” he wrote later in the post, “I do want to have these discussions with commercial players. I am interested in a diverse and healthy commons, and I take no joy in skewering for-profit actors publicly when they perpetrate harm and lie to advance their bottom line.”

In an interview with The Chronicle, Jhangiani said that after publishing his post, members of the panel and the programming committee reached out to say he had raised fair criticisms. He also said that, at least on the tweets with the conference hashtag, #OpenEd19, he had not seen any particularly abusive messages. “But of course it said they got direct messages, which is troubling,” Jhangiani added.

56 Questions

In conjunction with the statement announcing the panel’s cancellation, the programming committee also released all of the questions that had been submitted to the panel. Of the 56 questions submitted, many were directed only toward the for-profit panelists and could be quite pointed. “Why should open-education advocates and OER publishers listen to the opinions of the commercial publishers, whose greed has directly caused the current textbook-cost crisis?” said one question. Others asked about the companies’ use of student data, their practice of openwashing, and their compliance with federal and state laws.

After the cancellation, one panelist, Daniel Williamson, managing director of OpenStax, which publishes free, openly licensed online textbooks, took to Twitter to answer some of the questions that had been submitted. In response to the question about the publishers’ “greed,” Williamson said, “I was taught to hate the sin, not the sinner. And the reality is the publishers have done some bad things.”

Williamson went on to talk about his own student-loan debt, which existed in part because of textbook prices, but he acknowledged that the commercial publishers had also created “high-quality content” and that it is worth paying attention to them in order to understand future strategies.

He attributed some of the disagreements about the panel to the growing pains of the open-education movement. He remembered when he was just one of 150 or so open-education advocates 12 years ago, but said the movement has now grown to include thousands.

“It’s a big community now, and I think a lot of people are concerned about representation and understanding how you can be one of the voices on the stage and understanding how the voices on the stage are selected,” Williamson said in an interview with The Chronicle. “And I think every organization, every movement struggles at some point to think: How do we grow up?”

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.