 This summer, I surveyed independent content creators who create educational resources. I interviewed 15 K-12 teachers and 15 post-secondary instructors. I was trying hard to understand the dynamics between the independent content creators and their content adopters. But the data I collected was not conforming to one simple story. If the data can tell me a story, it's plausible that it contains more than one story. I noticed cultural differences across the different education levels. The most distinct and profound being between K-12 and post-secondary. This cultural difference felt like a chasm or canyon. We can have to explain why I found it hard to think about content creators in the education space as one homogeneous group. I wanted to understand what drives these cultural differences. I identified some drivers and they fell into these three categories. Students' age, teachers' role, and the system. The students' age naturally is the main driver of the cultural differences. The goal of the K-12 education is to develop kids into independent learners. The key is for them to develop many basic skills through road practice. However, engaging kids in road practice can be a big challenge. Think of K-12 teachers as boredom combating ninjas. They use multimodal, visually attractive content with meaningful, accessible themes. On this slide, we have an example for grade one to practice addition. Conjuring and creating such engaging exercises takes time, creativity, and artistic skill. Consider that the K-12 teachers, unlike their post-secondary counterparts, need to spend a large portion of their time on continuous assessments, and many of which do not have advanced artistic or technical skills. Then how do teachers manage to engage their students? Well, they heavily rely on their network. Every K-12 teacher I interviewed told me that they have developed a small trusted network of teachers. They continuously share with this network content and, more importantly, the assessment of the content. They share their own content, but primarily reshare content they find on their web and social media. K-12 teachers in the United States are three times more likely to have a Pinterest account than a person in the general population. Pinterest is a perfect example of what a K-12 teacher is chasing. Inspiration, ideas, and time to reflect. Social media in K-12 education is the elephant in the room. All K-12 teachers use YouTube in the classroom. However, the barrier to creating K-12 videos is higher than at the post-secondary education level. Targeting younger audiences requires specialized artistic and technical skills. For this reason, K-12 teachers rely on social media to create content that requires specialized artistic and technical skills. Teachers' role also has an impact on the cultural differences. At the K-12 level, the majority of teachers are generalists and they are expected to teach all subjects. In contrast, the post-secondary instructors teach in their own field. At the K-12 level, the teachers spend more time with the students and continuously update their teaching plan. The plan is modified based on the class assessments but also on the student's engagement with the theme. In contrast, the post-secondary instructors have few predetermined assessments and spend minimal time with the students. For this reason, K-12 teachers heavily rely on their network, including social media, to support them throughout the school year. They use social media and their network to acquire multi-discipline content and troubleshoot and course-correct their teaching plan. The K-12 teachers work at organizations that are drastically different from post-secondary institutions. Historically, the K-12 school boards purchase content for the student. The school board negotiated with select educational publishers. Individual teachers were not included in these negotiations. In contrast, in post-secondary institutions, the instructor ultimately retains academic freedom to decide what books are used in their course and the cost is offloaded to the student. Social media empowered the K-12 teacher by providing them direct access to content, changing the dynamics of publisher and school board negotiations. Another reason why K-12 teachers embrace social media. Moreover, K-12 teachers don't get funding to go to conferences. In contrast, post-secondary instructors attend conferences and use this venue to promote their contributions, including their own OER, open education resources. They develop a network that provides feedback to further their OER work. K-12 teachers who develop OER do not have this opportunity. Once again, they must rely on social media. We identified drivers for the K-12 post-secondary culture difference in educational content. We classified these drivers into three categories. For each driver category, we discussed the role of social media plays. Let's take a step back and summarize the cultural differences in another way. The teacher's behavior changes depend on the age of the students in their classroom. Teachers of younger students download and stream more content and that content spends a large number of unique content creators. They use more content and cycle through higher volume. They use social media to post teacher-to-teacher content, content that targets teachers but is not directly usable in class. They share educational content with the teachers they already know using email and cloud storage. In contrast, teachers of older students are more likely to upload educational content on social media. They use less content sources and use content more. They rely on students to find supplementary content. Teachers that publish content, network at live events such as professional development workshops for K-12 or conferences for post-secondary instructors. Teachers of younger students have different relationships with the content creators. They rarely make contact with them and they share that content with a small private network. In contrast, teachers of older students rely on smaller network of content creators. They are more likely to have interacted with the content creators from whom they adopt content from and more likely to share their content publicly. Social media is critical for K-12 but does it have any negative side effects or impact on OER? None of the K-12 teachers I interviewed were familiar with OER. One mentioned the creative comments license. Most did not feel comfortable talking about licenses. However, all to some degree discussed the importance of what essentially are the five Rs of OER which means that for them free always means OER. OER in their world is disguised as free. Most K-12 teachers hesitate to share their content on social media. Mainly they already share it with their physical network. Sometimes though, it's because they feel it's work in progress and they are embarrassed and afraid to be judged. And yet sometimes it's because they don't feel they will get the credit or valuable feedback. Social media seems to have created a license free culture that supports only one mode of sharing, all or none with poor feedback mechanism that feels either like a black hole, no feedback or fire holes, too much feedback. For this reason teachers prefer to share their work at professional development workshops organized internally at their own school with teachers they already know. On the flip side, there are few takeaways K-12 OER content creators can take from K-12 social media content creators. OER for K-12, number one should use social media to promote itself to the K-12 teachers. Number two should be tagged using the assessment type terminology. Number three should build collaborations that mix artistic and technical skills. Number four should provide swappable themes. Number five should provide assessment variations. The last two points are crucial for K-12 so that the lesson can be adopted to different classrooms using different cultural contexts in grade level but also that it can be repeated in the same classroom at a different time. Bilateral content synergy means that the content creator receives feedback and notification from the content adopter. The feedback and notification is a form of content as such, it's a bilateral exchange. The content adopter is someone who has used the content in their classroom or is able to provide further value through their artistic or technical skill. As educational content is moving towards virtual reality, gaming and interactive platforms, a better way to manage bilateral content exchanges will enable skill mixing and that's more sophisticated collaborations to create the next generation of OER. I'm going to end the talk with a concrete example of bilateral content sharing. Elementary is a platform that enables elementary level students to write interactive books. Kids can create visual engaging stories using the professionally developed illustrations and music. This library was built with content that was donated by a group of independent professionals. In return, the content creators receive feedback and the usage data that guides their creativity and deepens their ability to create more engaging content. We need more bilateral content sharing and empowering our content creators. I think we are at the cusp where we need to rebalance the dynamics in educational content sharing if we want to include diverse skill sets in OER content creation. That is especially crucial for the K-12 education level.