Delmar Larsen followed up on his argument for a national courseware ecosystem. I responded to Delmar's proposal in my last post. In his follow-up, Delmar says that FlatWorld, a commercial publisher, understands the publishing game because its platform connects textbooks to a homework system and to the instructor's actual workflow. His point is that the textbook is only one part of the ecosystem, that if open textbooks leave homework, assessment, analytics, adaptive learning, instructor tools, and LMS integration to commercial providers, they have solved only part of the problem.
I agree with that, and I want to add to it. (A note on terms: I use "institution" here for any body that adopts and supports these tools, whether that's a school, a district, a university, or a ministry of education.)
As I said in my previous post, open content has not displaced the infrastructure beneath it, and Delmar's framing of the future as "an open infrastructure for teaching and learning" rather than a bigger repository is the right one. However, two important pieces are missing: infrastructure must include the people with expertise to make it work, and institutions that depend on it must be able to run it themselves, offline if necessary, or by choice.
FlatWorld is a for-profit textbook publisher, and it publishes comparison pages that set itself against open and commercial providers. Flatworld’s central claim is that a free textbook is not a working course: the $0 price covers the text, while homework, support, and accessibility checks sit outside it. Flatworld also claims faculty report spending more time preparing with open materials than with commercial ones. Its page on LibreTexts argues that the instructor sets up ADAPT homework, connects the learning management system, and checks each remixed title for accessibility, with support from community office hours and forums rather than a named contact.
FlatWorld's conclusion is that you should pay a vendor to do this work for you. I disagree. When training and support are bought from a proprietary vendor, the expertise stays locked inside the vendor's product and staff. If an institution's contract ends, or the company changes its pricing or its product, the know-how leaves with it.
Open projects can avoid that, but only if openness extends beyond the content. Delmar proposes a centralized ecosystem, and centralization has real advantages, but a centralized system must enable the institutions that depend on it to run it, repair it, and change it, including when they're offline?
LibreTexts' construction guide describes ADAPT as a centralized system, delivered through LibreTexts' own site and integrated with learning management systems such as Canvas and Blackboard. But, it can't be self-hosted, and it can't be run on an offline server such as a MoodleBox, a self-contained Moodle server that works in a classroom with no internet. Components like WebWork and IMathAS depend on server-side infrastructure.
Teachers can learn to build assignments and connect ADAPT to their LMS, but the ability to run, repair, and change the platform stays with LibreTexts. An institution can build some proficiencies, but not ownership. An offline classroom has no way to use it at all. A system can have openly licensed content and still be an infrastructure that institutions can only rent or borrow.
FlatWorld's OER page acknowledges that community support has real strengths because expertise is spread across many practitioners. Peers who have solved a problem can help the next person, and it institutions save money. OpenStax runs a hub, LibreTexts runs office hours and forums, and informal listservs and faculty networks fill in around them. FlatWorld presents this as a limitation. I see it differently. A community is as strong as the shared expertise it builds, and that expertise grows when people work on problems together rather than alone. A teacher who fixes a broken LMS connection, adapts a lesson for English learners, or checks a remix for accessibility has learned something the whole community can use. If that experience is documented, discussed, and folded back into the shared materials, it benefits every institution that adopts those materials.
The words we use for our higher ed institutions point the same way. "College" comes from the Latin collegium, an association of colleagues joined in a common purpose. "University" comes from universitas, which in the Middle Ages meant a corporation or guild: a body of teachers and students who organized themselves to learn together and governed their own work. Those early universities were not open in the way we use the word today. But they started from the premise that knowledge is made and passed on by a community working in common, not owned by a single provider and delivered to customers. Too much of today's professional development relies on proprietary, for-profit vendors to supply training and support. Funded collaboration and open licensing return us to our roots.
In K-12, where most of the institutions are public schools and districts, building capacity is even more important. Most K-12 is publicly funded and publicly governed, a community working in common on the public's behalf. When a district spends its professional development budget on a proprietary vendor, public money buys training the district can't adapt, reuse, or share, and the know-how leaves when the contract does. In my last post I argued that K-12 is the real test of open infrastructure, because it is where teacher capacity matters most and where the largest and most varied population of learners is found. The same holds for professional learning. A teacher in a small rural district, an under-resourced urban school, and a classroom in the Northern Region of Ghana all need training that fits their context and that the people using it can improve. Openly licensed professional development, built and supported collaboratively, lets the institution keep what it learns, adapt it for its own students, and pass it to the next school instead of paying again for each cohort of teachers. It also means that money spent on teachers' growth builds a shared public resource rather than renting access to a private one..
This also creates reliability without giving up openness. Support becomes predictable when it is shared work. Our institutions need funded facilitators backed by a growing body of openly licensed, documented practice that anyone can use. A vendor can promise a response because it owns the product. An open community can promise a response because it has built the capacity to deliver it, and everyone who contributes makes the next person's problem easier to solve.
Someone has to fund this, and the funding model is important. Pooled institutional membership is one route, public money is another. FlatWorld's page says California state funding supported ADAPT's development, which is why students there don't pay for it. Consortium dues favor institutions that can afford to join. Public funds follow their own geography, the trap my last post warned about. Paying for training on a platform an institution can't host doesn't build capacity; it builds dependence on someone else's infrastructure.
So the funding should carry conditions. Money for training and support should go to platforms and materials that institutions can run, maintain, and modify independently, including offline, so an institution's investment doesn't disappear when a private equity company changes course. And it should reach the institutions with the fewest resources, first.
Delmar says he'll be writing more about this in the coming months. Alongside homework, assessment, and analytics I hope the conversation includes funded training and facilitation as part of the infrastructure, platforms that institutions can host themselves, and designs that work offline.
The measure of an open system is whether it gets stronger as more people use it. A vendor's support model scales by adding customers and staff on the vendor's terms. An open one can scale by turning users into contributors, so each trained teacher adds to what the next one can build on. That’s the difference between merely being a consumer of professional development and taking part in building it. No price cut, however welcome, can supply that.
Sources: Delmar Larsen, https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7512339710636154880/ ; Delmar Larsen, A National Priority for Open Education; FlatWorld, LibreTexts vs. FlatWorld and OER vs. FlatWorld, both updated September 16, 2026; LibreTexts, Construction Guide 3e, 1.2: ADAPT. FlatWorld is a commercial publisher and its analysis is its own; pricing and policy details should be confirmed with LibreTexts directly.
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