OECD Paper on Sustainability

I recently finished a report on the sustainability of OER projects in higher education for the OECD. The report draws on papers written by Downes and Dholakai earlier this year (2006) for the February OECD meeting in Malmo.

I wish I could claim that the report contains an earth-shattering revelation about how to make what we do “sustainable in the eyes of our home institutions.” This phrase, “sustainable in the eyes of our home institutions,” translates roughly into “our home institutions kindly allow us to continue working on our projects so long as funding for the project comes from an outside source.” Thinking we can find an infinite source of outside funding is silly, and so we have only one other choice, really – make the OER projects we do so central and critical to our institutions that they have no choice but to continue them once the outside funding goes away…

Can you imagine being asked to calculate the ROI of a university website? Can you imagine what your perception of a university that didn’t have a website would be? OER projects like OCWs have to rise to the status of “website” – they have to become absolutely core, I-can’t-imagine-a-university-without-one, features of our institutions, that we simply find internal money to indefinitely fund – like the rest of our websites.