QUESTIONS: How can you build a sustainable business around giving away educational materials? How can you build a sustainable business model around giving away credentialed degrees? Should governments fund open education? (Do they already?)
I’m going to take a different approach to the questions for this week, which is basically not to answer them. :) The various ways that sustainable OER models can be built are well outlined in the readings for this week. Rather than summarizing them, which will be of limited value to me or to other readers, I am going to spend my time on this assignment in reading and responding to others’ posts this week and in posing some additional questions for everyone’s consideration. This approach is in part in response to the dialog we’ve had this week about the dynamics of this course.
So…some things this week that made me think and a few questions for your consideration:
1. In Wiley’s On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education, he defines sustainability in terms of a project’s ongoing ability to meet its goals (broken down into production, sharing, use, and reuse). He also points out that while many (most in higher ed?) projects are intended to be a resource for teachers, many (most?) are actually used primarily by learners. My question: Shouldn’t the goal of every OER project to be to facilitate learning by a maximum number of learners?
Many projects seem not to be not primarily focused on learners or maximizing learning.
2. In Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources, Downes says “Rather than think of each of these five steps [discovery and research, designing the learning experience, teaching, learning, feedback/assessment/evaluation] as something that is done for learners, and supported through some sort of sustainable (or commercial) program, we need to think of each of these five steps as something that learners do for themselves, and indeed, that any act of learning consists in exactly these steps.” How does this perspective relate to OER (especially in the context of OERs used by informal lifelong learners) and sustainability?
3. In Koohang and Harman’s Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational Resources, the authors ask “Does a constructivist paradigm make design a function of serendipity rather than an issue of value or perceived value?”
Thank you for your support. I know you are a teacher with lots of teaching experience. From this new learning environment, we do learn a lot more than only about the class’s content. I am so impressed there are so many talented students in our class. I feel pressure and pushing during this class because of the huge difference from my traditional education background and i’ve changed my major. Some of you guys are great, and I can always set you guys as examples and move further in this class and later on.
This is a good question to me!
Furthermore, I find that the papers chosen talk too much about higher education (we call it in Italy University education), and aren’t focussed so much on k-12 education, for example.
Another topic that we met and we are missing in the last weeks is the problem of portability: how can we use OER which are digitl in non-digitalised environments?