Stephen Downes

We haven't mentioned Flatworld for a while. They started as an open educational resources (OER) platform but then shifted to a commercial model, prompting co-founder David Wiley to leave and start an alternative, Lumen Learning. This page, published by Flatworld, compares its offering with commercial textbooks and with alternative OER platforms, including Lumen, OpenStax, LibreTexts, Top Hat, and vanilla OER resources (these would be found in places like OERCommons, OASIS, MERLOT, OEGlobal, OpenLearn, SkillsCommons and many more (none of these is mentioned by Flatworld)). The commercial textbooks are much more expensive and lock you into a platform. The OER platforms, writes Flatworld, offer content for free but usually sell access to a course or homework platform. It's still cheaper than Flatworld's bundled courses, but, they say, "OER best fits faculty with the time and institutional support to assemble and maintain a course." Via Delmar Larsen, who says "their numbers are screwy and incorrect." Obviously the presentation favours Flatworld, but as a while it offers a glimpse at a particular competitive landscape.