IPT692R: Sustainability of open education projects

The international community is moving towards an understanding of the Open Education and OER's. This is demonstrated by some indicators:

• The Creative Commons (CC) Licensing scheme has already started to have significant impact on eliminating some of the barriers around ownership, attribution and re-use.
• The rise of social networking tools, such as flickr, Facebook and blogs has caused a revolution in approach for both individuals and institutions as they have begun to embrace a more open approach to sharing information, practice and resources.
• There is increasing recognition that the context in which content is developed for teaching and learning is crucial.
• The growing development of MUVE's like Second Life where the philosophy of most users is to share resources.
• The concept of the Semantic Web will facilitate the localization of OER's.

Although not all the parts involved are aware of the movement and the benefits of utilización of OER's, these benefits are clear:

• Global community
• National community
• Educational institutions
• Those supporting/facilitating learning
• sharing for learners

And applicable to various levels:

• Open sharing
• Sharing through a Community of Practice (CoP subject-based sharing
• Institutional sharing
• National sharing
• Informal sharing

However, Wiley says a significant fact: When the re-usability goes up, the contextualisation goes down, and vice-versa. This is a sensitive issue because the sustainability of the movement depends largely on the reutilization, although also beginning to be encouraged by the competitiveness generated by the implementation of OCW.

Depending on the context of replication, there are three big models of development:

• Financial model
• Service model
• Supplier/customer model

But, in any of the three models, it requires the active participation of government and large companies that opt for the project.

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Resources:

• Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational Resources (Koohang and Harman)
• On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education) (Wiley, )
• Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources (Downes)
• JISC Good Intentions Final Report (JISC)
• JISC Good Intentions Business Cases (JISC)