Sustainability Models
SPARC Europe Open Education Cafe
I’m looking forward to being a panel speaker at SPARC Europe’s Open Education Cafe on October 10, 2023 at 7am Pacific Time . This, the fifth in a series of open education cafe’s SPARC Europe has arranged around the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER), is focusing on the Recommendation’s fourth action area “nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER”.
There is a huge need for easy to understand and replicable OER sustainability models and I am super interested in this topic so I am thankful to be part of this panel. Special thanks to Paola Corti for organizing this Cafe and inviting me to speak.
UNESCO OER Recommendation
I had the good fortune to contribute to the writing of the sustainability text used in the UNESCO Recommendation which defines steps to take in creating a sustainability model including:
reviewing current provisions, procurement policies and regulations to expand and simplify the process of procuring quality goods and services to facilitate the creation, ownership, translation, adaptation, curation, sharing, archiving and preservation of OER, where appropriate, as well as to develop the capacity of all OER stakeholders to participate in these activities
catalyzing sustainability models, not only through traditional funding sources, but also through non-traditional reciprocity-based resource mobilization, through partnerships, networking, and revenue generation such as donations, memberships, pay what you want, and crowdfunding that may provide revenues and sustainability to OER provision while ensuring that costs for accessing essential materials for teaching and learning are not shifted to individual educators or students
promoting and raising awareness of other value-added models using OER across institutions and countries where the focus is on participation, co-creation, generating value collectively, community partnerships, spurring innovation, and bringing people together for a common cause
enacting regulatory frameworks that support the development of OER products and related services that align with national and international standards as well as the interest and values of the OER stakeholders
fostering the faithful linguistic translation of open licenses as defined in this Recommendation to ensure their proper implementation
providing mechanisms for the implementation and application of OER, as well as encouraging the feedback from stakeholders and constant improvement of OER; and
optimizing existing education and research budgets and funds efficiently to source, develop and - continuously improve OER models through inter-institutional, national, regional and international collaborations.
The Recommendation does a good job of identifying the scope of considerations that should factor into a sustainability model. But it does not provide actual examples. You must devise your own. For those wanting to ensure their OER has a sustainability model this can be a barrier.
OER Sustainability Models Literature
Fortunately there is a growing body of literature on this topic including:
Konkol, Markus, Jager-Ringoir, Katinka, & Zurita-Milla, Raúl. (2021). Open Educational Resources – Basic concepts, challenges, and business models (2.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4789124
This study puts forward the following models as relevant:
Selling course experience model
Governmental model
Institutional model
Online programme model
Substitution model
Community-based model
Donations model
Institutional subscriptions model
Sponsorship/advertising model
Membership model
Selling data model
Consultancy, training and support model
Author pays model
Tlili, A., Nascimbeni, F., Burgos, D., Zhang, X., Huang, R., & Chang, T. W. (2020). The evolution of sustainability models for Open Educational Resources: insights from the literature and experts. Interactive Learning Environments, 1-16. http://sli.bnu.edu.cn/uploads/soft/201124/2_2014185631.pdf
This study identies the following potential OER sustainability models that can be implemented in contemporary higher education systems:
Through public funding
Through internal funding
Through endowments/donations
By participating in an OER network
By offering services to learners
By relying on OER authors
Community-based model
By producing OER on demand
Through sponsorship/advertisement
By offering learning-related data to companies
Both studies emphasize that in practice OER initiatives use combinations of models.
Rob Farrow, as part of the European Network for Catalysing Open Resources in Education (ENCORE+) is doing some good work analysing all these models. See OER Sustainability Business Models and A Typology of OER Business Models.
I find it helpful to define models in this way, including the related details associated with each. But I also find it lacking.
Models Critique
OER are not just educational resources, they are “open” educational resources. Sustaining the open part of OER is essential but missing from these models. The practice of open must be embedded in any OER sustainability model.
A sustainability model is not the same as a financial model. Most of the example models focus on financial issues. While financial considerations are certainly part of a sustainability model they are not the whole thing. Furthermore the example models focus on revenue without considering costs. Many of the financial models are simple means of generating revenue lifts from traditional business models and do not map well to education and the way it is funded. These models do not fully take into account how the economics of open are different than non-open, and the way open changes not just the financial model for education but its very practice.
These models do not address the full life cycle of OER - from creation, to use, to storage and distribution, to maintenance and enhancement. A sustainability model must factor in the full life cycle and the stewarding required for persistence and longevity. OER are like living things requiring ongoing care and sustenance. These existing models say little about the means by which this will be done. A sustainability model ought to make explicit the way OER involves collaborating with others to generate, maintain and steward something of mutual value.
And finally these models miss the larger context of value. Access, inclusion, adaptability, and quality are but a few of the ways OER improve the value proposition of education. The models are silent on value or assume parity of value between OER and more traditional closed education resources. An OER sustainability model ought to take into account the value OER generates in uniquely making it possible to fulfill visions, goals and diverse purposes of education.
In this blog post, and for the SPARC Europe Open Education Cafe, I’m going to bring forward these and other missing considerations. I aim to establish them as essential foundational building blocks. And I’ll share a few example OER sustainability models of my own that start from that foundation.
Devising A Sustainability Formula
Over a two year period from 2015 to 2017 I co-authored with Sarah Hinchliff Pearson a Kickstarter funded book called Made With Creative Commons.
This book describes how open makes sense as a model for organizations. It analyzes open business models and provides profiles of twenty four organizations, across all sectors, who have devised sustainable models.
In the years since that book came out many have expressed interest in adopting an open model but have asked me for guidance on just how to do so. In some ways the twenty four case studies in the book are all unique. There is no one size fits all model. Nonetheless I felt compelled to distill out of everything in Made With Creative Commons some core pithy advice that would apply to everyone no matter what sector you are in or the specifics of the model you are pursuing. In the end I came up with a simple formula:
Sustainability = high value open resources + public social good + large community of users, partners, collaborators
Lets look at each variable in the formula.
For you to have a sustainable open model you must produce high value open resources. If you are simply sharing some low value thing openly the likelihood of creating a sustainable model is low. The higher the value proposition of the open resource the higher the likelihood of a sustainable model. An essential element of that value must be some kind of public social good the resources generate. It helps if your organization has a social mission not just ambitions for profit, investor returns, and unlimited growth. If you have a high value open resource that generates some kind of public social good others will use it and join you in enhancing it. Building a large community of users, collaborators, and partners is essential. If you have all three of those things then you have the foundation for a sustainable open model.
This simple formula asserts that sustainability involves combining resources that generate social good with human connection. Organizations that pursue this strategy aim to provide value and build relationship up front. Once those are in place there can be reciprocal value creation between all involved out of which a sustainable model emerges.
This formula for me is a test for sustainable models. I ask myself are there high value open resources being shared? Do those resources generate significant public social good? Is there a large community of users, collaborators and partners working with the resources? If the answer is yes to all three then things are looking good for creating a sustainability model. If the answer is no to one or more of these variables then work needs to be done to convert the no’s into yes’s before a sustainability model can be devised.
When you apply this test to the models described in the literature the models appear even more inadequate.
National OER Framework Sustainability Model
By now you’re probably saying OK show me an example. So let me share an OER sustainability model I presented at a workshop I gave at the National Center for e-Learning Ministry of Education, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia back in October-2014. At the time I was part of an initiative called the Open Book project which Hillary Clinton started when she was US Secretary of State. The goals of the Open Book project were to:
Deliver the benefits of open education to the Arab world
Expand access to free, high-quality, open education materials in Arabic, with a focus on science and technology
Implement open licensing in the MENA region that enables anyone to use, adapt, and share these education materials
Build partnerships between the US and MENA region to make more learning materials open, free, and connected to Arab educators, students, and classrooms
Lower geographic, economic, and even gender-based barriers to learning
Create open education resources that anyone with access to the Internet can read, download, and print for free or adapt a copy that meets the local needs of their classrooms or education systems.
Put a full year of high-quality college-level science textbooks – biology, chemistry, physics, and calculus – online, for free, in Arabic
Help Arab professors and intellectuals create their own open courses
Explore the benefits of OER for governments, institutions, faculty, students and the public, specifically examining how OER affects teaching and learning practices including the inter-relationships and synergy of OER with open access, open data, open policy, open science
Evaluate the impact of OER
The Open Education Consortium, Creative Commons and World Learning were asked to organize and run the initiative. Participants from across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region took part in a kind of fellowship, mentoring learning exchange including time onsite with a range of OER initiatives across the USA. On their return home they were tasked with starting their own OER initiatives.
As the Creative Commons lead on this project I took part in site visits across the MENA region to see how progress on OER was going, providing assistance with planning and implementation, and making recommendations in support of enhancing progress and impact. In Riyadh I was asked to present a national OER framework for planning and implementing OER. Here is the one pager I generated which I share as an example of a national OER sustainability model:
When it comes to OER I usually get a lot of questions related to technology. However, in this diagram I try and show that there are many components to an OER initiative that have nothing to do with technology and come well before technology decisions need to be made.
I start with Strategy. Large-scale OER initiatives should be strategic and purposeful. Doing OER without a real purpose is not a recipe for success. The US Department of Labor TAACCCT program is a great example of a national OER initiative with a clear purpose – move displaced and unemployed workers into jobs in high growth industry sectors by funding community colleges to create stacked and latticed credentials in partnership with industry. All the curricula these community colleges create must be licensed with a Creative Commons CC BY license making them OER.
In addition to strategy a large OER initiative needs incentives which could be monetary or could be other things related to innovation or transformation of teaching and learning.
A national OER framework should include a research component. It is essential to test out the strategy and purpose of any OER initiative and evaluate practices and outcomes on an ongoing basis. Research informs success. I point to a current source of OER research – the OER Research Hub (and in subsequent versions of the diagram have included the OER Knowledge Cloud).
To enable large scale success OER require policy. There are a number of guidelines available for generating policy including:
Atenas, Javiera; Havemann, Leo; Neumann, Jan; Stefanelli, Cristina (2020). Open Education Policies: Guidelines for co-creation.
Miao, Fengchun, Mishra, Sanjaya, Orr, Dominic, Janssen (2019). Guidelines on the development of open educational resources policies
Strategic purpose, incentives, research, and policy all impact the activities of institutions. A national OER initiative involves many institutions. Two institutional practices I’ve come to see as critical to success are:
Forming inter-disciplinary OER teams within an institution made up of faculty, instructional designers, media producers, librarians, and educational technologists. For OER to succeed a team effort is needed and each of these roles has crucial skills and knowledge to contribute. Faculty have the subject matter expertise, instructional designers the ability to design effective teaching and learning structures and activities, media producers can produce rich multimedia, librarians are superb at finding and curating collections, and educational technologists bring essential skills about how best to develop and deliver OER with technology.
Forming communities of practice across all the institutions involved in a national OER initiative that bring together people across institutions by domain (such as arts, science, engineering, etc.) and by role (such as faculty, instructional designers, librarians, etc.) All distinct fields of study and members of OER teams like to talk to their peers at other institutions. The challenges tend to be the same and they frequently learn about great resources their peers have found or new practices that are working well.
For actual OER content I advocate implementation pursue four distinct efforts. First review existing curricula already developed and in use that could simply be openly licensed and made in to OER. Second identify educational content that is desired and search existing OER to see if anything is available. If it is simply adopt it. Sometimes OER is found but is not a perfect fit. If that is the case why not adapt it – translate, localize, customize, update or improve the educational materials so that the fit works. Thats one of the benefits of OER – you can modify it. Finally, as a last measure, having exhausted the previous three efforts if OER is needed where none exists then go ahead and author it.
OER is transforming education by making educational materials visible and available to all. Success is contingent on high quality resources. In higher education research is quality assured through peer review. I believe the same practice is a success factor for OER too. OER should be vetted through a quality review process and peer review.
I place technology next well after all those other key success factors have been dealt with. I highlight a few of the key technology components in the diagram – authoring tools, open file formats (so others can modify the resource downstream), creating portable interoperable content that can be exported out of one Learning Management System and uploaded to another, classification schema for OER, and repositories or referatories where OER can be found, previewed, and downloaded.
Finally we come to usage. OER are multi-use. They can be used in on campus courses, mixed or blended courses, fully online courses, and MOOCs. OER don’t just have teaching and learning value they are useful as a means of marketing to students (try before you buy), they provide a rich source of supplemental resources for students to use when they are studying, they can help industry meet the professional development needs of their employees, they help working adults pursue career pathways, and they attract national and international interest in your institution.
In subsequent versions of this diagram I’ve added accessibility (ensuring OER meet the needs of those less abled) and pedagogy (factoring pedagogical approaches into the design of OER and innovating new open pedagogies based on the unique attributes OER have).
This National OER Framework sustainability model emphasizes a system wide collaboration effort, development of educational resources that have collective value, and the unique ways open practices can enhance education. It fulfills all three variables in my sustainability formula.
Open Operating System Sustainability Model
Another lesson I learned from writing all the case studies in Made With Creative Commons is the importance of considering all aspects of an organizations operations through an open lens. Let me give an example based on one of the case studies in Made With Creative Commons. While not an education initiative this case study illustrates the process of centering open as key to your operations. Let me briefly describe it and then come back to show how the process they used could be applied to education and create an open sustainability model.
Opendesk is an online marketplace that hosts independently designed furniture and connects its customers to local makers around the world. Rather than mass manufacturing and shipping worldwide, they’re building a distributed and ethical supply chain through a global maker network.
The typical business activities associated with manufacturing furniture look something like this:
Opendesk looked at each of these activities through an open lens. In doing so they totally changed the business model associated with furniture. Here’s how their model looks mapped to each of these business activities:
Instead of having their own internal team doing research and development associated with designing and manufacturing furniture they invited furniture designers from around the world to provide them with designs. This allows them to source and curate designs that go well beyond what they might have come up with internally. Designers are asked to openly license their designs by choosing from the full suite of Creative Commons licenses, deciding for themselves how open or closed they want to be. Most chose the Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC). Anyone can download a design and make it themselves. But most people don’t have the knowledge or equipment to do so and instead of making the furniture themselves they buy it from Opendesk who connects them to a registered maker in Opendesk’s network, for on-demand personal fabrication in close proximity to where the customer lives.
Instead of having their own factory for manufacturing and assembling the furniture Opendesk uses a network of makers around the world who do digital fabrication based on the designs using a computer-controlled CNC (Computer Numeric Control) machining device. This tool cuts shapes out of wooden sheets according to the specifications in the design file.
For sales, marketing, and business development Opendesk created a web platform matching customers to designs and local makers. With manufacturing done by local makers there is no need to store furniture in a warehouse or provide shipping and delivery. Customer service and support is done as a partnership between Opendesk and local makers.
The Opendesk financial model ensures that designers, makers and Opendesk itself get a fair share of the sale. For more details on how finances are done I encourage you to read the case study in Made With Creative Commons.
Opendesk describes what they do as “open making”. Designers get a global distribution channel. Makers get profitable jobs and new customers. Customers get designer products without the designer price tag, a more social, eco-friendly alternative to mass-production and an affordable way to buy custom-made products.
The Opendesk case study is an example of how adopting open as an operating system and examining all facets of the business through that lens can lead to a new way of doing things and a sustainability model different from current practice.
Applying the open operating system model to OER entails examining all education operational processes through the lens of open. Doing so will lead to new OER sustainability models.
Currently most OER initiatives are done as projects with one time funding and fixed start and end dates. Done this way OER is an incremental add-on to existing operational processes. While some of the benefits of open can be attained in this way, it is slow, limits the full value proposition of open, and curtails innovation as the new open practices are forced to meld with existing operational systems and practices that are often not aligned with open. When OER are short term projects, done on the side, without affecting existing operations there is no long term sustainability model. A sustainability model requires positioning open to be core to institution operations.
Devising a sustainable model just around OER fails to take into account the broader context of open. Open practices in education extend well beyond OER to include Open Access, Open Science, Open Data, and open source. Strategically bringing these various forms of open together acknowledges and strengthens their shared purpose and practice. The aggregate whole of all these forms of open is greater than the sum of their parts. A comprehensive open operating system approach that includes all these forms of open generates a stronger more synergistic sustainability model rather than one limited only to OER.
Consolidating the various forms of open increases all the variables in my sustainability formula. Collectively there is a larger value proposition, the social good being generated is larger, and the total number of users, participants, partners, and collaborators increases.
Situating open as an operating system involves positioning open as central to operations and showing how all these forms of open align with, and strengthen, the mission, strategy, policy and success metrics of the organization.
Operationalizing open as an operating system involves using open as a lens to evaluate all other operational processes. Education operational processes differ from the manufacturing processes associated with the Opendesk example. Instead of R&D, manufacturing, marketing and sales, distribution and delivery, and customer support education has teaching, learning, research, academic program of studies planning and development, student services, enrolment, procurement, finance and administration, alumni relations, marketing and communications, information technology and so on. To develop a fully robust sustainability model requires examining how open changes these operations.
Here is a diagram depicting the Open Operating System Sustainability Model.
Global Commons Sustainability Model
OER by their very nature are global public goods. Yet current sustainability models do not consider their global nature. A global commons sustainability model works toward fulfilling education as a basic human right and brings together all education providers in a collective effort to make education available as a global public commons.
Such a model may seem a pipe dream but the Gateways to Public Digital Learning global initiative led by UNESCO and UNICEF comes pretty close. Here is how this initiative is described:
“The aim is to help countries recognize and act on national, regional, and global possibilities to advance education through digital cooperation and solidarity. The internet allows unprecedented possibilities for sharing, cooperation, and the pooling of resources that can benefit learners, teachers, and families within countries and across them. This initiative seeks to maximize these collaborative actions.”
The Gateways initiative focuses on digital learning content noting; “During the COVID-19 pandemic and to this day, many people who have good connectivity and strong digital skills cannot find free, well-organized and high-quality digital learning content aligned with the curriculum. This content helps strengthen the other keys to digital learning: easily accessible digital learning content bolsters demand for connectivity and helps people develop and improve digital capacities.”
In addition to content, the initiative aims to work with countries to establish and enrich public platforms for education on the internet. The aim is to ensure learners, teachers, and families can access a wide range of learning resources from digital platforms that are public, open, and well-maintained.
Current efforts are focused on two important commitments that emerged during the recent Transforming Education Summit:
Establish and iteratively improve national digital learning platforms with high quality, curriculum-aligned education resources, ensuring they are free, open and accessible for all, in line with UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, and respect the diversity of languages and learning approaches, while also ensuring the privacy and data security of users.
Ensure these platforms empower teachers, learners, and families, support accessibility and sharing of content, and meet the diverse needs of users including learners with disabilities, girls and women, and people on the move.
It’s great to see incorporation of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources in this effort.
An effort to collaborate on generating a global collection of OER aligned to curriculum, in different languages, supporting accessibility and inclusiveness, with different learning approaches is a pretty big value proposition with a large public social good. The extent to which different countries can rally their schools and institutions to participate is the sustainability variable that will require most attention as it is essential to create a large number of users, partners and collaborators.
Toward that end countries are invited to join the initiative by becoming a "Gateways Country” forming a networked community of practice around this effort.
Here is a diagram depicting the Gateways to Public Digital Learning as a global commons sustainability model:
I’m not sure if the Gateways to Public Digital Learning initiative sees itself as a global commons or as having a sustainability model. But I do.
Design Your Own Model
I have presented three sustainability models:
National OER Framework
Open Operating System
Global Commons
In designing these models I gave consideration to the following that you might find useful in your own model design efforts:
Each model implements UNESCO OER Recommendation steps for creating a sustainability model, but in different ways. Many sustainability models are possible. These are but three examples. I can also imagine ways in which these three models are used in combination.
These are OER Sustainability Models so the practice of open is embedded right into the model. Open is not an add-on but an integral function of the model.
Each model focuses on high value proposition, social good, and large numbers of users / collaborators / partners. These three variables act as the foundation on which open sustainability models are built.
All three models are based on collaboration not competition. Sustainability entails collaborating with each other over time to generate, maintain and steward something of mutual value.
These sustainability models focus on value not finances. OER generate a multidude of value including increased education access, inclusion, adaptability, and quality. Knowing the purpose and value OER are intended to produce ensures sustainability models are built around the unique educational value OER creates.
The operational processes associated with these OER sustainability models are new and different than existing practices. The financial part of any OER sustainability model should be derived after the model is designed, based on these new processes.
More to Come
There is a huge need for easy to understand and replicable OER sustainability models. I hope these three examples prove useful and stimulate the creation of others. I think there is lots more to come around how to do this well. I look forward to sharing these ideas in SPARC Europe’s upcoming Open Education Cafe on this issue.
I expect many of you have thoughts and ideas on this topic too so I've created a Sustainability Models discussion forum in OEGlobal's Connect space. Welcome discussion and suggestions there.
Thanks to OEGlobal, and in particular @cogdog for providing this forum for discussion.
