[Oer-community] Introduction to the discussion

Tue Oct 5 12:20:36 MDT 2010

That is a great point Jacques!  Once the social justice work of bringing
free online learning involves compensation or requires special funding, it
is subject to implosion.  I learned from your post- Thank you.  I run, as
a volunteer, an online English course for teachers in rural Guatemala, and
my collaborators are also volunteer course writers and teachers.  The only
requirement to maintain this project is personal commitment and to grow it,
the same.

Best- Doug

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 5:17 AM, Jacques du Plessis <jacques at uwm.edu> wrote:

>  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
>
> -------
>
> 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*<http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=1300>
>
> 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
>
>
>
> --
> The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt
> charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
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-- 
Dr. Douglas Tedford
ELT Author - Editor - Teacher Trainer
Researcher - Online English for Rural Guatemala
Mexico City, Mexico
celular: (011 52 1) 55 1724 3738
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