Another popular Teachers Pay Teachers seller, David Rickert, creates hand-illustrated poetry worksheets as a labor of love.* He chooses not to us one of his most popular products, a comic to accompany the text of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” in his classroom. Instead, he prefers to keep the materials he sells and the ones he uses for his own students separate. That is not to say that his materials aren’t classroom ready—he, like Orman and many Teachers Pay Teachers sellers, writes a blog that is full of ideas about best practices for using his resources. Unlike Orman, though, he is enthusiastic about the prospect of the DOE’s #GoOpen campaign. He said he would be interested in creating additional comics if his district were to join the #GoOpen initiative because he’s always looking for new ways to reach more kids. He initially joined Teachers Pay Teachers not for the money, but simply because it is “a great way to get [my] stuff into classrooms, and I wouldn't want to shut that off.”

Although it is unclear how districts and schools looking to adopt an open curriculum will look upon teachers who are already selling their resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, if the #GoOpen campaign is to succeed, it will need a centralized platform where teachers can seek out each other’s work and find community. The Learning Registry is one DOE-endorsed tool that aggregates free education resources. Marcinek, who worked closely with the Learning Registry and the platforms it serves, looks to the music industry for design inspiration, citing playlists as an ideal element to help teachers curate and share quality lessons.

Amazon, currently testing its new education platform, Amazon Inspire, is another company poised to step into this role. The company’s resource-sharing resembles Teachers Pay Teachers and is comprised only of free and openly licensed materials. Rohit Agarwal, Amazon’s director of education, estimates that teachers spend an average of 12 hours a week searching for resources, and he hopes that Amazon Inspire will help to streamline this process. This great goal may be helpful to teachers in the role of consumer, but Amazon has had more difficulty assessing the needs of teachers who create materials. The company has not always recognized that well-honed and polished resources are not just something teachers have lying around ready to share. Amazon Inspire’s rollout showed little regard for the work of educators when it used teacher-generated resources taken from Teachers Pay Teachers without permission. To foster an intellectual community, it is important to respect the creative output of teachers as intellectual property.

There is no right answer to whether teachers should be paid for their materials. The types of work represented on Teachers Pay Teachers span such different uses: There are the rigorous lesson plans on American literature that could make our country a better democracy, the customizable classroom name tags that could improve one second-grader’s day, and the grading rubrics that could give a teacher back an hour of his weekend. The fact is, teachers’ work is already bestowed on the American public whether or not it is polished for sale or uploaded to an OER platform. But whether a teacher decides to share on a micro or a macro level, the choice should be open and judgement free.

* This article originally misspelled David Rickert's last name as Rickets. We regret the error.