Paper: Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability

Here’s a draft of a paper I just completed on OERs and sustainability. Drawing a number of lessons from an informal survey of educational resource projects, both past and present, it warns: “OER projects suffer from the same incompatibilities with existing institutional cultures and priorities that have dogged learning object initiatives, and face the concomitant challenge of gaining access to the operational funding support that …is necessary for their survival.” But the paper also looks to the “original” and long-lived OER project –the MIT Open Courseware Initiative—as an example of how to address this challenge: Namely by linking the laudable (but lofty) humanitarian goals of the OER movement with tangible, short-term institutional gains.