Sustainability

As many of you know, my empirical work at BYU has focused largely on issues of sustainability. I’ve blogged some of it before, but to wrap it up in one spot, here is a recap of what we’ve been up to. Justin Johansen and I did some interesting work on OCW sustainability, examining what happens when opportunities to enroll in for-credit courses are integrated into OCW. The results - over 2.5% of OCW visitors became paying for-credit customers of BYU Independent Study, generating enough revenue to more than pay for the cost of opening access to the courses. An article version of the dissertation, with a few months more data, is forthcoming in Educational Technology Research and Development. ...

Dr. John Hilton, who until just recently was a doctoral student of mine, has written a great dissertation on the impact giving away free ebooks has on sales of printed books. The findings may surprise you. Here’s a repost of the description from his blog: I’ve posted on my dissertation before. The full version is now available here. Here’s a little summary of what the dissertation is all about. What Deseret Book placed eight books online for free download. All of these were “backlist” titles. This study tracked what happened as a result of those books being available. ...

In response to yesterday’s post, OCWC President Steve Carson left a link in the comment section to the organization’s 2010-2011 strategic plan. Reading through the plan provided a number of insights, but let me focus on two here and you can read the rest of the document for yourself. First, the OCWC budget for 2010 is $1,000,000. Second, the document includes a section called “Value Proposition to Members,” which includes the following explanation: ...

Newly minted Dr. Justin Johansen’s dissertation study, The Impact Of Opencourseware On Paid Enrollment In Distance Learning Courses, is now available from BYU’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) archive. This dissertation is the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing opencourseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it. In other words, Justin’s study not only demonstrates that it is possible to publish opencourseware without requesting donations from users or foundations, it goes further and demonstrates that it is possible to make money publishing opencourseware. And if you can make money publishing opencourseware, you can continue publishing opencourseware for a very long time. This capacity is also known as sustainability. ...

Sometimes I’m wrong, and I don’t mind admitting when I am. The numbers in Ryan’s article in The Tech yesterday were not terribly representative of the way money has been working at MIT OCW recently. Consequently, the numbers I ran in yesterday’s post weren’t terribly reflective of the current reality, either. (In other words, yesterday’s numbers were wrong.) In that post I invited people to send me more current information if they had it. Both Ryan and Steve Carson of MIT OCW accepted the invitation and provided more updated financial data. (In his reply, Steve good-heartedly suggested that I’m poor at math. My math was correct based on the numbers in Ryan’s article; I think Steve meant that I should redo my calculations based on more recent numbers.) So here we go. ...

In an opinion piece for The Tech titled OpenCourseWare and the Future of Education, Ryan Normandin lays out MIT OCW’s funding breakdown. It’s the first time I’ve seen the numbers shared publicly. He begins by stating that MIT OCW’s budget is $4.1 million per year (though he notes that OCW cut $500,000 in costs for 2009), and then analyzes revenue by source: Since its creation, 22 percent of OCW’s expenditures have been covered by the Institute, 72 percent has been paid for through grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and 6 percent has been covered by donations, revenue, and other sources. ...

The Chronicle of Higher Education describes the “mothballing” of USU OCW in today’s story, Utah State U.’s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes. I don’t know if the added attention will help Marion advance their cause on campus, but we can hope.

George has responded to my response to his earlier post as a comment on my recent post. It’s a great bit of thinking and writing worthy of being its own post! I respond below: My point is that openness is the virtue to be pursued (I feel silly making this statement to you – you’ve done more for this “movement” than almost anyone else has). Not sorta-openness. Or sorta-affordable openness. Full openness to download, edit, reuse, add media, etc. is the target. Settling for affordable quasi-openness may sell cheaper textbooks and may delay more foundational change. ...

With two months of data in the door, the numbers keep getting better and better for our pilot at BYU Independent Study OCW. To date 7559 people have visited BYU IS OCW, and 232 of those people have enrolled in at least one course (they may have enrolled in more than one course, but we don’t have that data yet). That’s a conversion rate of just over 3%! Things continue to look very sustainable…

Richard Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. An article published in the Journal of Legal Studies identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of all time, and the New York Times called him one of the most respected judges in the United States. In a blog post titled The Future of Newspapers, Posner opines that the best solution to the newspaper industry’s problem may be expanding the scope of copyright law: ...