Many people make lots of money in education-related businesses. But if your focus is on making money, you are not going to create something that is available to all students.
I have a conviction that a quality education should be available to everyone. To that end, it really seems that most education resources should be free and open.
That said, developers deserve to be paid well for their time. I think the ed-tech world should focus on paying good developers a respectable rate for creating high quality, free and open resources.
The nice thing about education: it only takes one to deliver to many. If we could have one person make an open Algebra Textbook millions can benefit from it.
We just need a systematic method to pay for this material to be produced.
One approach which I think has a future, would be for educators to produce printed textbooks (i know... i know... very retro;) and make a reasonable profit from each sale.
This is essentially a streamlining of the traditional textbook publishing model, focussed towards authors' interests (66% margins is the kind of incentives to make knowledgeable person want to sit down and write a book). It is a pretty good value for the student too (1/3 of cost of book offered by traditional publisher).
Specifically for textbooks, students appreciateª the value/portability of the printed book and are willing to pay for it. If the cost of the perfect bound book (delivered to your door) is lower than what it would cost to print out and bind a pirated PDF, then the business will work.
Honestly, I think that print-on-demand and the above author-centered publishing model have the potential to bring about an intellectual revolution on the scale and importance similar to when the Gutenberg press was invented.
Open textbooks don't always work. The reason for this is that courses differ slightly from university to university. Using an open textbook then becomes and exercise in identifying the parts that you don't require at this stage, which in itself is a bit of pain and a huge waste of time.
I have a conviction that a quality education should be available to everyone. To that end, it really seems that most education resources should be free and open.
That said, developers deserve to be paid well for their time. I think the ed-tech world should focus on paying good developers a respectable rate for creating high quality, free and open resources.