Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources

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Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources

Stephen Downes

Abstract

This paper depicts the sustainability of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in terms of the three models: funding, technical, and content. Discussion and recommendations are focused on the sustainability of OERs and the requirement that we think of OERs as only part of a larger picture– one that includes volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management and control.

Keywords

Learning, Educational resources, Open access, OER

Annotation

This paper cover the three different models that are necessary for the sustainability of Open Educational Resources (OER’s). These three models include: funding, technical and content. The recommendations described in this article are focused on the sustainability of the OER’s and based on the fact that OER’s are only part of the larger picture. This larger picture includes volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management, and control. problems about the fostering of OER’s are noted in the article. The article digs deeper into the sustainability of OER’s by describing what they are, who creates them, how they will pay for this, how they will distribute them and how they will work with them. The answers to these contribute to how OER’s can be sustained. The article includes multiple funding, technical, content, and staffing models. One of the primary arguments on the improvement of sustainability is based on value and usability. For example, the article stated that UNESCO discussion of OERs participants suggested to establish a global index system that will help potential users to find courseware and then make it easily accessible. They also stated “Open content + community = Open course”

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