[OCWC Sustainability Committee] And again

[Andy Lane]

As my attachemnet was too big I am now providing it in installemnts;

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Sustaining OERs: a brief and provocative road map
Andy Lane
Introduction
Open Educational Resources are championed as a public good, with those
supporting them believing that knowledge used for educational purposes should
be freely available to all at no or minimal cost. This is in contrast to the
use of knowledge and ideas to create products and services that are sold for
commercial gain and where there is some protection in law to generators of
those products and services about others using their knowledge and ideas
without due payment. I have argued elsewhere that the former is largely
operating in a social economy and the latter in a market economy, with both
being mediated by a public economy (Lane, 2008a). The social economy either
involves a social exchange rather than a monetary exchange where, most often,
it is people’s time and personal knowledge/experience that is brought to bear
on a common need or it involves an individual or organizational monetary
exchange (a gift or donation) to another organization that provides a social
exchange service on behalf of the donors, albeit by working with the market and
public economies. 
Gifts are not always wanted and not always useful to the intended recipient, so
if OERs are to be more than a grand vanity publishing exercise by some
organizations that makes the donor at least feel good, what is the higher goal
donors want to achieve?  My view is that it is to open up education and help
alleviate the disparities in access to educational provision not yet achieved
by the market, public policy and even current social programs. Much current
provision is closed or partly closed off due to the economics of scarcity and
the paucity of some public policy.
How can we make open education sustainable?
So, if we are talking about the opening up of education, with OERs as one
factor in this, this begs the question of what is being sustained, for whom and
by whom? 
Within organizations 
Currently most OERs are generated by Educational organizations using new or
existing grant funding to do so. Even where there are other types of
organizations publishing (or using) OERs it is important to determine whether
the activity is central or marginal to the existing mission of the organization
and whether it is there simply to maintain existing activity, albeit in a new
form, or to act as an incubator or test bed for a new activity that serves the
mission in previously unthought-of ways. In other words how do OERs fit both
with organizational strategy and with organizational practices?  
As outlined by Wiley (2006), the sustainability of organizational OER projects
will be achieved by making OERs part of the normal fabric of the organization’s
business, whether that is around teaching and learning, research and/or
business and community engagement activities. If the activity is seen as a
nice-to-have rather than a must-have then it will always be fighting for
attention and resources. But to be a must-have the activity has got to provide
benefits or value to customers/users/ members of the organization that in turn
provide benefits or value to the organization. Annex 1 briefly sets out the
benefits and value so far of OpenLearn to The Open University as an exemplar of
this point.
Similar issues are also discussed in the OECD report (OECD, 2007) and have been
reported on in more depth in a recent study looking at the sustainability of a
wider array of open academic resources (Guthrie et al, 2008; with part of the
executive summary reproduced as Annex 2).
Between organizations 
While all the above has focused on sustainability within the institution, we
also have to recognize that the success of OERs is also dependent on a thriving
and healthy OER movement (social or public market place) where there is full
and open sharing and collaboration between organizations and with individual
users of OERs.  OERs offer potential benefits to educational institutions,
individual teachers and both formal and non-formal learners. The size and scale
of these benefits are yet to be fully determined, but the size and scale of the
educational challenge worldwide is vast and will require much greater
efficiency and effectiveness in teaching and learning policies and practices in
the coming years and decades. Recent experiences in HE indicate that successful
change will require a mixture of both competition and collaboration (known as
coopetition; see [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition
]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition) in that individual institutions do
not have sufficient wherewithal to meet these needs alone but where some
competition for funding, students and staff forces institutions to closely
examine the programs they offer and the support services they provide.
To date most collaboration around OERs has been on a bilateral basis between
institutions not directly competing with each other. The open and free sharing
philosophy behind OERs directly creates an informal multilateral relationship
unless all but the first mover decide not to cooperate. Even if there are no
institutional relationships, some individuals will be tempted into sharing
materials as it is so much a part of academic culture, as is beginning to
happen with OpenLearn. But although individuals may dominate the transactions
or exchanges in the ‘common’ market place many will do so as a representative
or employee of an organization that may benefit from the exchange as much as
the individual.
Projects and programs that involve others will provide financial benefits if
they are able to reduce the cost of developing educational content which an
individual or organization employs in its courses and programs and also expand
the curriculum areas it covers to those for which there is not significant
demand, since currently large numbers of students are needed to help justify
the investment in them and recoup the costs of delivering them. However, there
is a high transaction cost associated with partnerships and/or other forms of
collaboration and managing partnerships is a capability that is required within
organizations as well as the capacity to act on agreed joint activities.
Two main paths are likely for organizational involvement (they are not mutually
exclusive). The first is that a sufficiently large ‘volunteer’ community of
professional or semi professional educators will continue to develop, refine
and add to a growing worldwide bank of OERs in an Open Source Software mode
because they individually benefit from this collective activity. Their
employers are happy for this to happen and activity to even take place in paid
time because the teaching and learning at their institution improves from these
high quality materials and support network. The second is that institutions,
supported by politicians, become the main developers and exchangers of OERs, in
order to provide public policy and social benefits for the country in which
they mainly operate.
Of course, it can be argued that with sufficient organizations contributing to
and taking from the educational commons, most of these transaction costs will
be greatly reduced, but this is only likely to be so IF content is the only
thing being exchanged and there are no other goals associated with the
collaboration such as reaching a particular excluded group or teaching a
particular topic; which brings us on to the eventual beneficiaries of OERs –
individual learners.
Communities and/or individuals 
A major issue here is whether most people, most of the time will interact with
OERs as self interested individuals or as part of a community of interest or
practice. And is that interaction a simple transactional one of seeking to
learn from or with the OER and related tools and services (a consumption
approach) or is it to engage in new ways with other learners and not just to
seek information (a contributory approach)? In part the approach adopted will
reflect the desires of the learner and whether they make seeking personal
benefits as a primary or a secondary consideration. If the former dominates
then there is likely to be much greater interest in paying for value added
services or access to more content than is available free. If the latter
dominates then they are being more virtuous and seeking to contribute to a
common good where they get value from contributing to the common project.
Successful communities basically need to be self organizing and sustaining
without continued third party involvement a la Wikipedia, Ebay and Flickr
(although most of these communities depend on simple one or two way exchanges
with minimal social interaction – unlike social networking sites which work on
social interaction first and other things second). That does not mean there is
not some type of organizing body but it is one that manages the environment in
which the many communities can collaborate. Communities for open education
could be, for example, groups of individuals, groups of institutions and
voluntary groups. A successful community will most likely be a community of
interest around a topic, a discipline or an issue but some may be construed as
communities of practice where it involved professional or semi professional
practitioners. The latter is needed to get open education started but it should
be the communities of interest that dominate in the long term. However in all
cases a large enough community of users is needed.
Another point to make is that most of the exchanges in this ‘common’ market
place for education will show very asymmetric relationships. Most teachers are
learners but many learners do not want to act as teachers even if given the
opportunity. Indeed most participants will act as learners and a minority act
as teachers. Few learners will produce significant de novo (even remixed)
teaching material (in the sense of being a creator of a sense making narrative)
as opposed to augmenting existing materials with comments, essays, questions
etc (as a co-learner). 
Making money out of free stuff
Of course, there is more complexity to people’s motivations and actions than I
have portrayed above. But services or products that are free at the point of
use still have to be paid for through somebody’s efforts, paid or unpaid. 

If all OER development is largely unpaid, then the sharing of effort only makes
sense at economies of scale and so I confidently predict that if this were the
case and if it takes off there will quickly become one dominant outlet for
community authored educational materials at HE level with all others being
distant also-rans just like one online encyclopedia (albeit in different
languages) dominates. However I still doubt whether it will succeed because of
the difficulties of creating an acceptable common curriculum at this level. At
school level a different barrier exists in the greater state involvement in
defining curricular as opposed to the relative freedom there is at University
level.

If efforts are paid for directly or indirectly, then there are no new sources
on money for OERs as compared to closed educational resources, just possibly
new ways to get at the sources of money depending on whether it a not for
profit or profit seeking organization. The sources remain:

  · Public grant (recurrent or project based funding from taxes);
  · Individual donations (the goodwill of users and non users);
    · Organizational donations (philanthropy  ·  by individuals and
    organizations);
Advertising (selling space for messages);
Fees for products or services (i.e. sales or subscriptions).

In looking at the many ways to make money on the back of free stuff then the
article by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine (Anderson, 2008) sets out in detail
the wider possibilities of revenue generation for profit making organizations
(as opposed to recurrent or project grants) and that this approach has a long
history and works across more than just the internet (this also makes an
interesting contrast with the Ithaka report). But even here the clear message
from Chris Anderson is know what it is you are trying to do, make that central
to your way of working or business model, understand your users as fully as
possible, and look at more than one source of funding to sustain the activity.
Whether for profit or not-for profit, the mantra is: ‘It’s the (market, public
and/or social) economy, stupid!’
References
Anderson, C (2008) Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Available online
at [ http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
]http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free. 
Guthrie, K., Griffiths, R. and Maron, N. (2008) Sustainability and Revenue
Models for Online Academic Resources. 66pp. An Ithaka Report available online
at
http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/2008/06/03/download-final-ithaka-report-on-sustainability/
Lane, A.B. (2008, in press) Widening Participation in Education through Open
Educational Resources. In Eds Ilyoshi, T. and Vijay Kumar, M.S., Opening Up
Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology,
Open Content, and Open Knowledge. MIT Press. 2008. ISBN 0-262-03371-2.
OECD (2007) Giving Knowledge for Free. The Emergence of Open Educational
Resources. Paris. Available online at [
http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9607041E.PDF
]http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9607041E.PDF. 
Wiley, D. (2006) On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives
in Higher Education. 9pp. Available online at: [ http://www.oecd.org/edu/oer
]www.oecd.org/edu/oer. 

Andy

Professor A.B.Lane, 
Director, OpenLearn
Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA  UK, 
Tel: 01908 332233  
www.open.ac.uk/openlearn 




The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt
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