Quest 0.5 - Sustainability in Open Education

"Carefully review at least 50 pages of information on issues relating to the sustainability of the open education movement. Write a post describing the nature and level of success of sustainability work in the field."

Success is doing what you set out to do or, in other words, achieving your goals. And this really is what sustainability is all about. This is why Wiley (2007, p.5) defines sustainability as "an open educational resource project's ongoing ability to meet its goals."

So, to discuss the "nature and level of success of sustainability work in the field," we really need first to talk about what our goals actually are. Stated more generally, to talk about sustainability in the context of one's own OER project, one must first understand what the project's goal's are (Wiley, 2007, p. 19). For right now, let's talk about overall goals for the field of open educational resources in general, leaving aside for the moment any discussion about institutional OER projects.

One need in the world of OERs is quantity.  Options.  We need diversity in our open educational resources because there are so many diverse needs for these materials. And after all, the more resources that become available, the greater chance that someone will find something they can actually use. (This is a blatant half-truth. More on that in a minute.) Also, if we're going to produce a large number of OERs, we are going to need a large number of people to produce them.  So, two perpetual goals that we might set for the field of OER are:

• Increase the quantity of diverse open educational resources


• Find more people with enough motivation to build these OERs

Are these ongoing goals sustainable?  Can the quantity of available OERs and the number of developers continue to grow in the future?

It would be hard to deny that the OER field is having some success with respect to the sheer number of open educational resources that are becoming available on the Web and the number of people that are producing them.  A simple search on the web for something like "Viking ships" (Benkler, 2005, p. 1) gives an idea of what kind of resources already exist.  According to Benkler (2005, p. 10):

The size of the pool of developers and the very discreteness of the objects suggest that there will be a steady flow and accretion of learning objects [(educational resources)], and those among them that will be released under an open license of some form or another will be able to be improved by further incremental contributions over time.

So, Benkler doesn't think we need to worry about the number of OER materials.  As long as people have hobbies and interests, are motivated, and are connected by the internet, the number of OERs and the number of people developing them will continue to grow.  It would seem that at least these two goals of the OER field are sustainable.

However, let's go back to when I told you that "the more resources that become available, the greater chance that someone will find something they can actually use" is a blatant half-truth.  One obvious goal of the OER movement would be to have people be able to find appropriate OER resources in order to utilize them. It turns out that as the pool of available OERs has increased in quantity, people's ability to find OERs of sufficient quality and and scope has decreased. Again, quoting from Benkler (2005, p. 10):

The long term threat of failure in the development of learning objects will therefore come not from lack of objects, but from a lack of search and integration functions to apply to a growing universe of discrete objects.

Currently, there is a lack of order and structure in the OER community regarding the storage and retrieval of this growing mountain of OER objects.  There are several repositories with thousands of OERs each, as well as thousands (even tens, hundreds of thousands) of personal web pages that offer OERs as well.  Given the broad spectrum of quality represented by all of these OERs and the lack of centralized storage location and search ability, a user's ability to find OERs of sufficient quality and scope significantly decreases as the quanitty increases.

This goal having users find what they need is therefore not always achievable, and becomes less so as time goes on.  For the OER movement in general to be truly sustainable, we must find a way to navigate through a veritable ocean of OERs and improve users' ability to find OERs that meet their specific needs.