In the Week 4 readings for the Open Ed course, there was much discussion of sustainability and business models. Each report discussed these issues and concluded that they are “tricky.” :) These are critical points though, particularly as many of the efforts in OER to date have been funded by foundations. Grants are a big double-edge sword, in part because they do not provide a source of on-going funding.
The OECD report summarized the issues nicely, elaborating on a continuum with co-production model (mass collaboration) and a producer-consumer structure at the two extremes. Most of the current higher ed resources have been developed with under a producer-consumer model. This has the advantage of having built-in quality control, but the potential disadvantages of not being economically sustainable and not being driven from the bottom up by learning community needs.
The mass collaboration model, while being inordinately successful at Wikipedia and in Open Source software development, but has not had much success in education, though it is certainly too early to say that it couldn’t be successful in the future. Two attempts at this have been Wikibooks and Curriki. To date, Wikibooks has experienced low participation on both the creation and the use end. (If you haven’t been there, check it out! It’s a great resource, and the more people who participate, the better it will be.) Curriki is very new, but so far, it seems to suffer from a lack of quality control. It appears to have a substantial quantity of content, but a large percentage of it of insufficient quality (e.g. not actually open licensed, mere web links, etc.).
I think that the mass collaboration model has great potential, particularly in primary and secondary education, in which most teachers have a lot of materials and are willing to share. Clearly, though, there is a long way to go.
Another model that has been suggested is a semi-commercial model (commercial partnerships, conversion models, etc.). Despite (or perhaps because of) over 20 years of experience in commercial for-profit educational ventures, I am skeptical of this model.
Thinking about this, I am not sure that anyone has yet shown the real economic benefits that OER offers.
In the US alone, over $4 billion is spent on K-12 textbooks (1). (That doesn’t include supplemental materials, educational software, or any post-secondary materials.) Much of this expenditure is duplicative with different editions being produced for different states and many versions of the essentially the same content being published by different publishers. There is a whole industrial complex built around the procurement of expensive textbooks that many schools don’t even use because they are not suitable to their students’ diverse needs. (One of the schools I work with reported that after they spent thousands of dollars on new textbooks, most teachers didn’t use them at all “except to look at the pictures” at the beginning of each unit, because the materials were not accessible to their students. This is not uncommon.)
OER could not only reduce this expense, but could greatly improve learning by expanding opportunities to differentiate instruction. In my opinion, differentiated learning is a key to turning around the current state of failure in much of K-12 education in the US. This sounds obvious, yet it is not being done, in part because of the current unsuitability of textbooks. (There are many other reasons as well.)
So this sounds like a no brainer — what is needed to make it happen? Advocacy, so that educators and more importantly, decision makers, can see the advantages of OER. Getting decision makers to share this view is probably the hardest part to accomplish. The textbook industry is very entrenched and very politically influential. And while I appreciate the perspective of those who suggest skirting the establishment and doing this through back channels, government-funded core instructional materials purchasing decisions drive mainstream education.
A more optimistic view can be had by looking at the situation in the developing world. For the most part, these countries have no established publishing industry or really even any textbooks to speak of. As in other areas, like technology infrastructure building, they can leapfrog over the legacy problems we have here. For them, OER offers what may be the only cost effective way to build the capacity they need to achieve universal education.
(1) AAP http://www.aapschool.org/vp_funding.html, and EMR Research http://www.ed-market.com/r_c_archives/display_article.php?article_id=101.