Brandon Muramatsu and David Wiley While critical discourses are proliferating in the open education community, there are a number of critically important issues related to OER that, as a field, we aren’t talking openly about. Perhaps the most important of these taboo topics is “sustainability”. Ideas like business models, funding lifecycles, ecosystems, markets, and revenue shouldn’t be anathema in our community. Real dollars and real time continue to be spent to make OER “free” (or low cost). While grant funding might be a great way to fund the startup of a project or program, continuing to live from grant to grant will not likely be a successful strategy over the long term, as funder priorities change and funding sources dry up.

1. An Elephant in the OER Room:
One Topic We Aren’t Talking About
Brandon Muramatsu, mura@mit.edu
David Wiley, david.wiley@gmail.com
Photo by Nam Anh on Unsplash
Hi, my name is George,
Ellen had another
session to attend
Copyright 2019, Brandon Muramatsu and David Wiley. Unless otherwise stated this
presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2. “Sustainability can be defined as a
project’s ongoing ability
to meet its goals.”

3. Sustainability involves resources of
various types to meet many needs:
• Creating new content (static)
• course materials, assessments
• Creating new content
(dynamic)
• assessments, simulations,
interactives
• Platform
• Hosting, security
• Community
• development / facilitation,
coordination
• Maintaining existing content
• recency, relevance
• Improving existing content
• data-informed continuous
improvement
• Platform improvements
• new features, bug fixes, security
updates
• Wholesale platform changes

4. Will every person associated with your open
ed initiative work for free as a volunteer?
If yes, where does the funding to coordinate
their work come from?
If not, where does the funding to support
their work come from?

5. Is hoping that a small number of
major foundation programs
will continue to fund OER indefinitely
a reasonable and viable long term plan?

6. Is hoping that one time funding will
continue to be provided
(by colleges, state legislatures, etc.)
a reasonable and viable long term plan?
If not, where does the
funding come from?

7. Is there a role for revenue?
E.g., fee for services models, including:
Professional societies
Membership networks
Internal (course fees)
External (value added service providers)

8. Frameworks Matter
Are OER common pool
resources?
If yes, we should fund and
manage them as a commons
Are OER public goods?
If yes, we should fund
and manage them as
public infrastructure