Sustainability models for OER initiatives

Coursera: Closer to the USU model. 150+ employees. Range of partnerships with universities and technology partners. Started with a seed funding and expanded to public listing. Hybrid of centralisation and decentralisation of both organisation and services. Work is distributed across some employed staff and a number of volunteers. Publish as many of the courses in the Coursera course catalogue as possible. Development and production environments run on free and open source software. Offer basic level courses to undergraduate and graduate degree level courses. Range of free to paid courses.

OpenLearn: Closer to the USU model. OpenLearn is a free learning platform, delivered by The Open University as part of its Royal Charter commitment to support the wellbeing of the community. Since its launch in 2006, OpenLearn has become an integrated part of The Open University, with the site attracting over 100 million visitors. Many of these visitors go on to make an enquiry about becoming a formal student, strengthening the journey between informal and formal learning.

The OpenLearn team plan, commission and develop content that unites faculty and University priorities with areas of topical and general interest. As well as serving the public, this supports their own student population in their academic, skills and career and personal development (CPD) endeavours, delivering quality assets openly available for teaching and learning.

MIT OpenCourseWare: Highly centralised. Tightly coordinated in terms of organisation and the provision of services. Rely almost exclusively on paid employees. Publish each and every course in the entire course university catalogue in a fixed period of time. Continually republish new versions of courses and archive older versions. Massive undertaking and so is the organisation that supports it. MIT OCW employs at least 29 people in service of the opencourseware project. MIT OCW also contracts with a number of vendors to gain access to additional services. For example, Sapient Corporation. Other vendor partners include Microsoft, Maxtor, Hewlett- Packard, Akamai, and NetRaker. Annual budgets from 2007 through 2011 average just over USD 4,300,000 per year. Average spend of USD 4,300,000 per year on an average of 540 courses produced per year makes for an average cost of just under USD 10,000 per course. Acquired foundation and private donor support (dozens of millions of US dollars over the life of the project). MIT has made an institutional commitment to sustain the project over the long term. Little chance that any other institution will be able to replicate the MIT model.

BCcampus Open Textbooks project: A mix of the MIT and USU models (or somehwre between the two). BCcampus Open Education began in 2012 as the B.C. Open Textbook Project with the goal of making post-secondary education in British Columbia more accessible by reducing student costs through the use of openly licensed textbooks and other OER. To achieve their goals and fulfill the mandate, they use a collaborative leadership model. They have a dedicated staff of at least 38  to oversee the BCcampus projects, with project-specific expertise brought in on an as-needed basis. They receive funding from Ministry of Advacned Education, Skills and Training for their core operations, with specific priorities and deliverables. To improve the learning opportunities for post-secondary students, they have created strategic partnerships with leading educational agencies and organizations within the realm of Open Education.

Sustainability models for OER initiatives © 2022 by  Mohammad Shoaib Haider is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0