Sustainability

Just a quick update on the BYU Independent Study OCW. A few weeks ago I gave the following initial status report: So far the results are very positive – 85 of the 3500 people who visited the OCW site last month registered for for-credit courses. In other words, 2.4% of people who visited the OCW site during its first month became paying customers of BYU IS. The latest data say that we have now had 5529 visitors to BYU IS OCW and that 136 of those visitors have enrolled in credit-bearing courses. In other words, 2.5% of the people who have visited the OCW site have become paying customers. Remarkably stable, eh? ...

Seth Godin expands on Kevin Kelley’s Better than Free. Seth’s takeaway: “when there are infinite copies of something, charging for one is almost impossible.” Or in Kevin’s words, When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. They both hit the nail right on the head. People trying to figure out how to make open education sustainable would do well to read these articles. If a day or two passes and someone hasn’t translated Kevin’s eight points into education speak I’ll go ahead and do it. But read these pieces NOW.

No, this isn’t another tired post complaining that we should think of all “consumers” as also being “producers.” Of course we should. This is a post about a much more subtle problem with the way we’re thinking, that I am increasingly convinced is putting the field of open educational resources (OER) at risk. ...

I am extremely pleased to announce that the Utah Legislature has provided $200,000 to Utah State University for OpenCourseWare-related activities in the 2007-2008 budget year. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first state or federal funding to be set aside anywhere in the US for opencourseware-like initiatives, and only the second governmental funding so allocated world-wide. The Dutch government provides partial funding for the Dutch Open University’s openER program (which also happens to use eduCommons). The Hewlett Foundation provides the rest of the funding for openER. ...

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… ...

Several interesting thoughts about sustainability are making the rounds after our recent conference. I thought Kerry struck a particularly alarming chord: Eisenhower National Clearinghouse is a good example - once enc.org, home to a plethora of math-based lesson plans, tutorials, java applets, etc. - now a paid subscription site due to the end of NSF funding. Is this really the eventual end of opencourseware and other open education projects once Hewlett funding and other sources dry up? Do the resources disappear from those who can’t afford them (trans. those who need them most)? Saying things like “oh, the Internet Archive will still have them” is only helpful as long as people keep funding the archive. ...

So I’m sitting here in the annual Hewlett Foundation Open Education Grantees meeting thinking… what is the future of open education? Where is it going? I think there is only one answer: localization. ...