I think, there is a fallacy in your argument.

At first you display a list of “Value Proposition to Members” and after the list you ask people to evaluate the list’s “value” to the “open education movement”. That is wrong.

I think the University OCWs and the OCWC are infrastructure projects. This does not mean that we should not ask questions related to value proposition or even to return of investment. However, with infrastructure we know that the return of investment may come later than what was expected and often it is something that is hard to measure in monetary terms: better health, wellbeing, knowledge.

I think in the case of OCWC the value proposition to the University members is pretty clear, and if it will anyhow (technical infrastructure, knowhow, examples, moral support) help the members to maintain their OCW projects it will have a huge impact to the open education movement globally.

At the moment OCWC and the Wikimedia Foundation are the only international organizations promoting open education globally.

Sorry, at present we don’t publish independently. The $5,000 above is a hypothetical that assumes staff and technology costs similar to those at universities that do publish. For a while, Utah State University hosted an OpenOCW site where individuals could post their own materials, but I think it became unsupported and was taken offline. I think the Consortium might revive it at some point, which would give you a place to post your own materials, though you’d have to do your own legwork to ensure you had permission to post all third-party materials.

Steve

According to your post, it costs the consortium $5000 to publish each course? Other than reviewing for licensing issues, I don’t really see why a budget is needed.

Take my course, please

As for the value of the Consortium to the movement, that is largely a question for the membership, funders and sponsors of the Consortium to judge, and again, it can and will be tested empirically. If the funding doesn’t show up in the future, we’ll know the value–or the perceived value–isn’t there. One measure, I suppose, is to take the current budget for the Consortium (actually $750,000 not $1 M–yes, $1 M was approved in the Strategic Plan, but ultimately we decided we could and should work at a lower budget to preserve funding) and to hypothetically apply it as you say to directly funding courses.

Say we could get courses produced at $5 K per course, that would fund about 150 courses each year. The question then becomes, does the support and advocacy of the Consortium’s work result in more or less than 150 total courses published each year that otherwise would not have been published? It’s a debatable question as well, and less testable, but even if the Consortium can claim a small fraction of the thousands of new courses each year would not have otherwise been published, then it would seem a pretty good bargain.

Here is a breakdown of total courses available from OCWC members by year (self reported):

2005 – 1,504
2006 – 3,470
2007 – 5,162
2008 – 8,226
2009 – 12,953

Over the course of those 5 years, the Consortium has received a total of about $1.75 M in support, or enough to publish 350 courses.

Anyway, as I’ve said above, I think these are important questions for the movement, and questions the Consortium will have to answer to the satisfaction of its members and funders in order to be successful.