Originally posted by Brian Leavitt on November 13, 2019
Amazon has been piloting an OER sharing website, called ‘Amazon Inspire’ for a little while now. I believe it is US only at the moment, but it can be found here:
It is described by Amazon as “an open collaboration service that helps teachers to easily discover, gather, and share free and open educational resources with their community.”
Amazon has now also started an OER marketplace for teachers, which seems very similar to Teachers Pay Teachers. The benefit of Amazon over other marketplaces will likely be their greater reach, as well as their searching, indexing, and recommendation technology. The downside is that Amazon is of course in it to make money, and they have tended to ‘disrupt’ industries that they join. If Amazon is successful, it may end up being the only OER marketplace.
The Amazon OER marketplace is called ‘Amazon Ignite’, and again I believe it is only US at the moment.
“Amazon Ignite connects educational content creators with Amazon customers. Sell your original teaching resources—like printables, lesson plans, and classroom games—as digital downloads. It’s free to join.”
Here is an article about Amazon Ignite: https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/12/amazon-ignite-educational-materials-store/
Noting that this resource was initially published roughly two years ago, I took a browse through Amazon’s current educational offerings and found some significant changes. The Amazon Ignite link is still live – though it requires an invitation to join; I assume the system only allows users with educational institution email addresses or some similar barrier, similar to the verification process for a Prime Student account. Amazon Inspire on the other hand, the OER option, seems to be completely disbanded. The link posted above now redirects to a general Amazon Education landing page (https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?&docId=1000412651). The free content within Amazon’s current educational offerings is now called “aws educate” and instead of focusing on the K-12 teaching sector, it now appears to provide general career upskilling resources – more similar to a platform such as LinkedIn Learning.
This is an interesting conversation as the use of the terms “OER” and “marketplace” in the same sentence or even in the same contest is particularly jarring! This reminds me of the conceptions of the cathedral and the bazaar presented in Rob Farrow’s article on Open Education and Critical Pedagogy. I don’t want to add a binary, deterministic perspective to this idea that OER and marketplaces can’t co-exist. They can, and do! But marketplaces tend to dominate and detract from the idea that we can decide to share openly – as a global cultural ‘virtue’ rather than engage in marketplace economies like Amazon Inspire OR TPT!. Here’s a link to Cable Green’s quick explanation of what CC and OER are all about [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLcVycFkmtM&feature=youtu.be].
Reference
Farrow, R. (2015). Open education and critical pedagogy. Learning, Media & Technology, 42(2), 130–146. https://doi.org/http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2016.11139 91.
Amazon’s attempt to capitalize on a market created Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) can’t compete. In relation to TPT, Amazon’s search/browsing is limited, especially on the free OER site (Inspire), with paid resources (Ignite) being slightly more searchable and browsable. Inspire and Ignite’s user interactions/ratings with products is a mere fraction of interactions/ratings on TPT. The highest rated product on Inspire has 7 ratings – the highest rated free product in Teachers Pay Teachers has 16,000.
Thinking of selling your resources and materials on either platform? Amazon pays 70% plus a transaction fee of 30 cents for items under $2.99, and TPT rates for free memberships pay 55% with a 30 cent fee for each resource in a transaction, and for an annual fee of $59.95 USD teachers earn 80% with 15 cent fee per resource (only on orders totaling less than $3). TPT sellers also incur a PayPal payment fee as TPT uses PayPal to pay teachers.