So I feel like I am coming to this quite late and I have a hard time catching up with the twitter stream that followed your post, Maha. I see the point in focussing on the writing first, going for the free wordpress.com approach. Immediately, there are two thoughts on this, one is a barrier, the other one is a bit more self-inflicted. As subversive as I would like to be, there is one thing I like about the German system and sensitivity with regards to data protection and privacy: I am not allowed to “force” our students on any kind of service that is hosted outside of the EU (some would even say Germany). I know you picked up on this kind of sensitivity in an earlier post, comparing it to what other folks go through in terms of surveillance, humiliation, privacy-infringement (paraphrasing here, I know there are more layers to your thoughts than a blunt comparison) but I for one do not want to be the guy who proposes to break those rules at my university.

The other thought is something that was noted here in the comments before by Alan and you, especially: For me, DoOO is also about culture. I want to contribute to a change in teaching culture at my university. That is part of my job description and it is what makes me get up in the morning. One huge lever to change behavior, and with it perhaps culture, is funding. Funding, especially for good teaching, is rare here. If DoOO got funded, I would be able to support educators, others would see and follow, we would be able to lay some groundwork for others. Hosting on wordpress.com for free feels subversive on the one hand, but also like an acknowledgement of a lost battle, somehow. Might have to think about this longer, there’s another post in here somewhere. I just got in a twitter argument with someone yesterday who folllows a techno-solutionist approach of predictive analytics to deal with drop-outs (I would even argue that drop outs are not a big issue in Germany). He got pretty defensive about his approach and started to be a bit more aggressive, in a twitter-kind-of-way. Part of that aggression was that he dismissed anything “open” in teaching as nice to have, but “in the real world, we develop serious tech for real-world problems”. Receiving funding is about that cultural change as well. This is another dimension of DoOO, I think – it might not have anything to do with the teaching itself but I think it’s important. Does that make sense?