{"id":1958,"date":"2015-07-20T14:52:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T21:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/?p=1958"},"modified":"2015-07-20T14:52:00","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T21:52:00","slug":"open-business-models-part-5-development-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/archives\/1958","title":{"rendered":"Open business models, part 5: development costs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Credit: Karen Fasimpaur; CC BY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the first post of this series<\/a>, I mentioned that most OER publishers rely on philanthropy to fund initial product development and that I had questions about how sustainable this model is. First, if more K-12 OER doesn’t achieve higher adoption and use rates, I wonder how long funders will continue to fund it. More importantly, as a movement, it’s not wise to be reliant on handouts. In addition, the categorization of development costs as a one-time cost is outmoded.<\/p>\n

So what are the options?<\/p>\n

One might be to tap into a broader pool of funding that might include government grants, social impact bonds, or partner participation as described in previous posts.<\/p>\n

Another is to think about this as a traditional business. Generate revenue streams as discussed earlier that fund not only sales and implementation costs, but also product development<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Now this sounds a lot like a traditional publishing stuff. Sales, costs, maybe even reinvestable proceeds (“profits”). And while the price under this scenario would be higher than under a model under which development is funded through philanthropy, I think it would still be less than commercial products.<\/p>\n

Another important distinction is that in this case the primary goal is social impact not profits.<\/p>\n

There are a number of other benefits as well.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The affordances of an open license not only make “free” product available, but also lead to other unanticipated benefits.<\/li>\n
  2. Teachers professionalism and student learning can increase.<\/li>\n
  3. There is a loop for continual product (and process) improvement.<\/li>\n
  4. Open collaboration across states and districts using common materials leads to more collaboration and richer learning for everyone.<\/li>\n
  5. (and perhaps) OER moves the system toward more openness.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Ultimately, learners benefit.<\/p>\n

    To me, these things are the foundation of what makes OER appealing.<\/p>\n

    (This is a part of a series on business models for OER K-12 core curriculum.)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In the first post of this series, I mentioned that most OER publishers rely on philanthropy to fund initial product development and that I had questions about how sustainable this model is. First, if more K-12 OER doesn’t achieve higher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[155,153],"class_list":["post-1958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-business-models","tag-k12oer2015"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6mlV-vA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.k12opened.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}