[Oer-community] Introduction to the discussion

Tue Oct 5 04:17:23 MDT 2010

Hi Paul, I liked your email to Susan regarding the zero-sum issue for sustainability of OER projects. This concept of sustainability is something many are intrigued by, yet it is not achieved with ease. 

My example is the openlanguages.net initiative. It has been growing since 2004 to offer less commonly taught languages online. The financial grounding of this site is not a big problem since housing a web site is cheap these days. The financial sustainability is in the development of derivative products and in nominal fees to supplemental tools and resources when the course is formally implemented. The core of the course is open to the public, but certain recordkeeping tools, personal progression tracking tools, etc are offered to a specific program using the site. So, these services on the side offer adequate support to keep the venture going. It is a modest approach, but I find it more grounded than the grant-seeing approach, aimed at growing it big, which is like adding a raising agent (the big plan) to the dough and the grant being the heat. The moment the grant is over, the poofed dough implodes. I want to avoid financial support that brings 'magic' to a project, and then the money goes away, and there is not the means to maintain the 'magic' or bigness of the venture. That is the dance I do not want to dance :-) 

It is vital to think bold and beautiful and even quick, but to do nothing if there is not the long-term logic factored in. 

Kind regards, 
Jacques 
====================== 
Dr. Jacques du Plessis, School of Information Studies 
University of Wisconsin (UWM) 
Bolton 510, 3210N Maryland Ave 
Milwaukee, WI, 53211 

Tel 414.229.2856 
www.afrikaans.us and www.openlanguages.net 
www.sois.uwm.edu/jacques 

"Fluidity is the way to life. Fixation is the way to death. This is something that should be well understood." 
-Miyamoto Musashi, the Book of Five Rings 

From: "Paul Lefrere" <p.lefrere at open.ac.uk> 
To: susandantoni at gmail.com 
Cc: oer-community at athabascau.ca 
Sent: Tuesday, October 5, 2010 4:37:58 AM 
Subject: Re: [Oer-community] Introduction to the discussion 

Note: Although I'm using my university email address, my comments below are personal and do not necessarily represent university policy. For the record, my personal email address is lefrere at mac.com 

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Dear Susan, all 

It's great to see this discussion starting. Thank you for circulating the briefing document (10 10 OER Community-OCWC.doc), which mention three sub-themes: 

1. Building OpenCourseWare 
2. Using OpenCourseWare 
3. Sustaining OpenCourseWare 

Sub-theme 3 states the importance of strategies for long-term sustainability of OCW/OER projects. It says "...think of sustainability not in terms of money, but rather in terms of impact." Fine. Then I begin to worry, because it says "...investments will come IN THE PLACE OF other current expenditures." (my emphasis). "In the place of" sounds like diverting funding from one area to another area. To me, that seems like a zero-sum game. In my view we don't need to make the assumption that our options are limited to what we can do within overall institutional budgets, and we don't have to decide on what to allocate to OCW/OER at the expense of other activities. Diverting funding is potentially very divisive: imagine for example that the "current expenditures" at risk of being diverted to OCW/OER are for social justice programs that have lower impact than OCW/OER on impact measure A, but higher impact than OCW/OER on impact measure B, and that we pay attention only to measure A and use that to justify shifting funds. Sounds fine? Not for me. I'd want to know how to protect people affected by the cuts. They might include people who are surely important to any caring institution, such as the disabled, minority groups, and historically-disadvantaged groups such as women. 

There is a better way, in my view: create wealth in socially-desirable ways (= benefits to society as a whole, rather than the few), using OCW/OER where appropriate, and direct a proportion of the new wealth to augment the total budget available for social justice interventions including OCW/OER. 

This is not fanciful. It requires liaison with people in other communities, likely to be well-disposed to OCW/OER. An example is the Open Science community, see eg an open-access book from the National Academies Press, "Managing University Intellectual Property in the Public Interest" [acronym: MUIPPI], http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13001 

The MUIPPI book is representative of a body of well-informed work on how society as a whole, as well as individual public institutions, can benefit from a systemic (and systematic) approach to sharing and using innovations. I shall be contributing to that process in various multi-partner international projects, one of which has just begun. Our commitment to our funders (public bodies) includes interoperability with other programs, eg OCW/OER, and sharing our findings, insights, contacts etc in open ways that have the potential to create societal wealth at a significant level without harming weak groups in society, and, as part of that, can help individual learners and their communities to get lasting benefits, valued by them, from the knowledge created and shared in joint work such as OCW/OER. 

My conclusion: I would be delighted to collaborate with anyone who wants to explore projects that implicitly assume a subtext to sub-theme 3 in the following direction: 

Think of sustainability not in terms of money, but rather in terms of impact that is wholly positive (eg, new forms of wealth creation, compatible with the public-interest). Take action in an integrated way: link OER and OCW to forms of Open Innovation and Open Knowledge Sharing that benefit society as a whole (eg, socially-focused exploitation of publicly-funded intellectual property, to create new sources of wealth for the world) and that can lead to socially-desirable outcomes (eg, creating new types of job, and making students more employable by helping them to apply what they learn via OER and OCW, to bridge the "knowledge-action gap"). 

Best wishes 

Paul 

-- 
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