It is the same with Teachers Pay Teachers. You can choose to ‘buy your table’ and give 15% of your sales or not and give 40% of your sales If so, it is not an open educational resource. Downes’ definition of a OER “ are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone” (2011) Open Educational Resources: A Definition
But is that all bad? The website is well organised. You can easily find what you are looking for. Each item is sorted by subject and grade and the author and material is rated by past users. So finding quality is easy. This would solve one of my issues in a previous blog of ‘adding to the garbage dump’ of materials online. All the items that are best would be one top of the heap. You are not given permission to take items and remix them, but some items were free. I downloaded one and plan to use it with a few improvements. I don’t feel comfortable re posting something that I wasn't given direct permission to upload.
What if a website was available, like Teachers Pay Teachers, to share OER with everyone? Have teachers post materials which are copyleft like creative commons. This would also solve the copyright issue that I have too. I would call it “Creative Commons for Teachers.” Now all I need to know is would anyone use this?