Transcript

PRESENTER:

So I’m just going to finish up with my ideas of views about business models and sustainability. How do you sustain things? How do you make them viable? Now, the general model which The Open University has taken is to mainstream [INAUDIBLE] within existing business model, practices and processes. What I mean is, I said earlier that we don’t have an OER policy.

We have a learning and teaching strategy in which openness and open media are talked about. But it’s talked about in terms of how does that help assist, support, a learning teaching strategy, whether it be for formally registered students. Whether it’s for informal learners using open media. Whether it’s for outreach, whatever it is.

So it’s more about saying how does Open Education Resources support those activities? How does it support collaborative work with industry? Work-based learning. So it’s not just about OER themselves, it’s about how does the openness of Open Education Resources support the activities we’re doing? You looked at the Open Learning Research report, there’s quite a lot about this.

A good example around this is that in the first two years we set up the Open Learning Repository to be out there for learners. Without any formal policy or practice around it, our online advisory staff, also telephone advisory staff, when students or others ring in saying, can you help with this? Because the way we had to operate things with students of a distance all over the place.

Many of those advisers, off their own bat, were using and referring students, potential students, to Open Learn as part of the advisory service they were offering. So we found out they’re doing this and doing that, and we talked to the Student Services Division. They said, oh, yeah. This is great, we need to embed this. This is important. It’s not all those variety of services.

It’s just they’re realising, ah, this repository, this offers a scope for us to help advise students around what’s your mathematical ability? Well go and look at this material on mathematics, basic mathematics. Can you work through this? People who for English is not their first language. Will I cope? Is my English good enough? Go and look at this material. Work through it. Can you understand it?

Can you post to some of the forums in Open Learn? Can you get other people, too? You see, you know, foreign postings in there from people who are saying, how good is my English? I’ve written something, how good is it? And other people saying, yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s not bad. So it’s about some of those confidence building. The ways in which another example that we found is we’ve had little projects involved in this.

Is that one of certainly secondary school teachers, particularly of a sort of sixth form level using Open Learn as a supplement to what they’re teaching in their A-level programmes. Or as part of a guide to saying, for getting some of their students to think about going to university. Not necessarily going to Open University. Just think about you’re concerned about going on to higher education. Look at this material.

Do you think you can cope doing this? This is the toughest type of material you’re going to be finding when you get there. If you can work through this, you can understand this, you’re okay. So again, it’s that way in which once it’s out there, and it’s open, different people can use it for many different purposes. In ways which it wasn’t necessarily set out designed like that.

There are obviously things you can do if that’s what you want to do, to purpose it for those reasons. So, the best way to make OER stick is to make sure that OER is useful and seen as valued to as many parts of the institution’s work as possible. Whether it’s teaching and learning, or it’s research, or whether it’s outreach. Recruitment, whatever it is. Recruitments can be important.

We already talked about it being there as a shop window for recruitment. And typically the second bullet point there, a typical model for online resources, or doing things like that, particularly online academic resources, is what’s called the Freemium model. Freemium model is not new. It’s actually the late 19th century when – I can’t remember if it was Mr Gillette or whether it was one of the others – first came out with the safety razor. And they give away the blades for free. Then people would – I can’t remember which way around it is. But anyway, you can either give away the blades or the holders. Giving millions of them away to people for free. And of course then people say oh, I like this, I’ve tried this, and they have to buy more blades.

Come to think of it, I think it’s probably one free one with one blade in it. Try this, oh, it’s great. Of course then people want to come pay for something. So you provide something for free, which entices people to buy something else. So it’s not new. It’s used throughout. And Open Education Resources – in particular an institution repository – is a typical Freemium approach. Because oh, here’s something for free.

You can see something about what our teaching materials are like. Oh, you want to find out more? Get on things? Oh, register with us, sign up for the course. That happens.

But you can look at that Freemium model in many different ways, because it could be signing up for a whole course, or you could, as is what is happening with a lot of those outfits and institutions, and FreeTechnologyAcademy, and University of the People, is they might be starting to disaggregate some of those functions. You can get all the content for free, but you want some tuition? Ah, you pay for that.

You want somebody as a personal tutor? Ah, you want to have some accreditation, let’s have some assessment. Oh, here’s this little exam. Oh, but you have to pay for that. So again, it’s people looking at those models to do that. I mean, it’s separate to doing the one which is obviously a lot of online internet companies do, which is having the advertising there.

You could have advertising there, and more people advertising. But generally I don’t think many higher education institutions are going to probably go down that model of having lots of advertising on their site. But it could be as well. Of course you can get donations from supporters to keep you going. You can get grants from funding bodies, but say they’re periodic and they never last forever.

And you can get the free labour of volunteers. That would appear to be a university. If you can get a system going which people just give all of their time free, then of course it can sustain itself. It’s just like any community initiative, just on a bigger scale where everybody gives of their time to do something. But it does need those people who’ve got the time. It means they have to have an income of some sort from elsewhere.

They need to be happy and give their volunteer labour. Because even the biggies still need donations, for sure. You’ve been on Wikipedia about every December. You get an appeal from Jimmy Wales saying can you give us some money?

They need about 25 million dollars to run for the small core of full time staff who are sort of maintaining the system and things like that, but they still need some money. Still need to get it. And so let’s make an appeal every year. Let’s get that sort of money in, just to keep them going.

I mean, otherwise Wikipedia rests upon a volunteer labour of all those people who go in and make all the contributions, whether they’re valued or not. But I mean, it’s that contributor to model. You’ve already seen this before, the Open Education Resources Foundation, it’s sitting behind WikiEducator, now the OER University Foundation is such that you join as a member.

You can be a platinum member by offering 10,000, 25,000 US dollars per year. Sign up, join in, you can be part of the club. What do you get in return? I don’t know, you have to look at the details and see what you get in return for that. But it’s a sort of membership model, a bit like the OpenCourseWare consortium is for MIT. Donate now.

It’s all free, but your contribution helps us share MIT’s course materials around the world. So donate. You can make those calls. So it’s not just big players like Wikipedia, it’s other big players like MIT OpenCourseWare can do this. It’s not enough to fund their whole operation by any means, but they’ve got a lot of alumni donations and things, and it does work, it does bring in some monies.

But it’s working hard to go. And of course if you want to work on this, I’ll just point out that there’s a free course on Open Learn about building relationships with donors. Finding out how to do that. And if that’s not enough, you can actually do the module, full module as well.

Hope it’s still running, I can’t remember. I didn’t check whether it is. But there are these things doing. But it’s recognising that obviously getting that type of funding is hard work.

SPEAKER 1:

I guess when you’re kind of looking at this now, with the idea of the collaborate and complete, it brings it very much back to sort of you’re competing for funding.

PRESENTER:

Yes, you can be competing for funding. Because you can do things like this. It’s one of our school fellows has worked on this – CharityWise. It’s another good example of where you can do things for a sector and extend out HE resources where you might not expect to.

So this is about working with the voluntary sector, and all those trustees, those charities have got to run these things, and know what it is they’ve got to do. Can we provide materials to support the training and development of those trustees? And this sort of CharityWise is just pointing to stuff on Open Learn, which is relevant to that.

So there is an element in which when it is free, it does add to that voluntary economy, that sort of sharing gift economy out there. It’s not just about the market economy, it’s not just about can we get some money in? There are other ways in which we can measure that value. Not just in the monies. And as I say, this is not just about publicly funded institutions as well.

It’s a not for profit private corporation, KaplanUniversity. It’s actually a member of the OpenCourseWare consortium. It’s feeling that there’s opportunities in here. And just like some educational publishers have picked up on it, just like the music industry. If you really want to find out about a lot of the sort of models, you can find the just funded Strategic Content Alliance.

And their blog has these business modelling publications. It’s about the different sort of strategies that different institutions are using to fund it. But when you look at them on the whole, you’ll find there’s still many of them seen as projects or activities which are not necessarily central to the institution’s mission.

My view is that, you know, to make OER viable, you have to work out how does it support the vision and mission of your institution. And so it’s equally important that what you put out as Open Education Resources reflects something of the institution or vision and mission. It’s got to fit in with what you’re doing, because quite quickly institutions have tried to evolve.

And it’s not just Open Education Resources. Some of these start with open access publishing of the research and the like, but it’s all a way in which they’re trying to look at how that openness adds value to that institution. And what it does, and how it does it. So it’s again about retaining and being true to your identity as an institution, and thinking about it.