Fig.1 Stephen Downes 2009 presentation "The Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning", VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e–Learning.
"Open Courses will definitively shift the power from content to community in Higher Learning. The second coming of knowledge is firmly associated with free connections, inquiry and conversations, something that textbooks implicitly discourage. Textbooks, for all they stand for, are the industrial age contraptions that dominated learning for most of last fifty years; Open courses bring a much needed, paradigm shifting update.
In summary, then, Open Courses are eating the publishers' lunch, and that's where the resentment comes from. These masters of the learning universe already had enough trouble with the culture of Internet, and Open Courses represent everything they feared: the communities, the conversations and the knowledge commons. This isn't a battle which is over yet, but we may just be witnessing a passing of an age."
(Supriyo Chaudhuri, 05 November 2012)