We are being often warned about free online services turning us into products. Thoughtful people have long since pointed out how crowdsourcing can mask an exploitation of free labor. The net result of our internet age may just be the latest case of siphoning off from the many for the benefit of the very few; it’s just that technology is making us so much better at doing so. The technologists make by taking.

In higher ed circles it has not gone unnoticed that creating a MOOC, say, takes more uncompensated effort than a normal course. Participants shrug past this in part because the sunk costs put them at the forefront of something new and engaging, and in part because it is also being subsidized through grant programs riding this wave of interest. But that won’t last, and all faculty members might end up being as exploited as adjuncts. Chilling.

There’s a dynamic here it’s hard to deny, and I find myself complicit in it, even if it’s not clear that there’s a better alternative. My business is educational technology, after all. At a particular point I chose to stop trying to be an academic and became a practicing technologist, and there were a lot of power dynamics implicit in that choice; a lot of privilege I was opting for, even if I didn’t think of it in those terms.

The signature achievement of the LMS may simply prove to be the logistical support and productivity boost for conducting ever larger courses with fewer teaching resources: I’ve enabled that, and argued for new slices of the budget pie in order to do it better.

The expertise I have to consult and hire is better compensated than the vast majority of the teaching profession. I apologize for this without really apologizing, because I, too, care deeply about learning, you need talent to do this sort of work well, and I never have enough of it. But still.

And now I’m cultivating a small community of student developers to work on open source projects in these same areas. Of course it’s a great learning experience for them, and should ultimately prove to be a public good, but it is also motivated at least in part by the fact that we still don’t have the resource to do this work well at the going rate. So we hoover up more cheap talent and pack it into the technical superstructure that becomes our bread and butter.

Of course I’m framing all this in a fairly one-sided way to make a point, and there are other stories to tell, but it has to give me pause. I’m not sure I would trust an educational technologist who wasn’t conflicted.