Sustainable Financial Models for Funding OERs

Open Educational Resources (OER) can help to reduce costs and increase access to education because they are free, modifiable, and distributable educational materials. The labor of creating, editing, and distributing OERs is additional, uncompensated work for many of the educators, students, and other institutional partners who create these resources (review our chapters What is an Open Educational Resource (OER)?, OER and its Benefits, Creating and Publishing New OER, and Critical Perspectives when Engaging with OER).

For this reason, one of the key questions in open education is whether OERs can be economically sustainable for educational institutions. To answer this question, UNESCO conducted a study in 2020 to determine which financial models can build economic sustainability for OER in higher education. The researchers, professors from the Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, and the International University of La Rioja (UNIR), in Logroño, Spain, grounded the study on this idea: “OER should be based on new sustainability models”¹ (Emphasis added).

Based on this premise, the UNESCO researchers interviewed 30 experts who identified financial models, ranked them as either “established, emergent, future potential, and inapplicable,” and gave examples. In this chapter of the Toolkit, we list the most reliable models identified by the UNESCO study so that you may decide which might work for your project or can be promoted at your institution. The complete results of the study can be found in the document The evolution of sustainability models for Open Educational Resources: insights from the literature and experts.

It is important to note that institutions do not usually use just one model but a combination of one or more. What is essential, in addition to the model, is that it is aligned with the objectives and goals of the institution and is part of a broader strategy.

Image by Oyster Haus from Pexels (free use).

As the name implies, in this model, the institution covers the costs of creating, remixing, and distributing OERs as part of its annual budget. Examples of this model are the Monterey Institute's HippoCampus initiative, an Institute-sponsored platform that provides content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge, and the Open University of Tanzania, which has a detailed policy on the use of OER that can be found in the website OERafrica.org. The University of Edinburgh, the University of Southern Queensland, and Cadi Ayyad University are other examples that can illustrate this model.

The challenges of this type of funding involve the scarcity of resources that some institutions are able to provide for this project. As the authors of the UNESCO study point out, the persistence of traditional publishing models, on the one hand, and the limited awareness and capacity of faculty to produce OERs, on the other hand, represent systemic obstacles to implementing this model.

However, major well-resourced universities like NYU may find this funding the most appropriate path to support OERs. There are ways to implement this model without significantly increasing budgets, such as by rewarding the use and creation of OER in tenure and promotion processes. For example, the University of British Columbia indicates in its Guide to Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Procedures (RPT):

“Evidence of educational leadership is required for tenure/promotion in the Educational Leadership stream… It can include, but is not limited to… Contributions to the practice and theory of teaching and learning literature, including publications in peer-reviewed and professional journals, conference publications, book chapters, textbooks and open education repositories/resources”² (Emphasis added)

The collaborative group Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) built an adaptable advisory model that guides faculty members who wish to incorporate their work with OER in their tenure and promotion process. DOERS3 understands that many institutions value teaching, service, and research the most for these processes. In this sense, their chart in OER in Tenure and Promotion is a matrix that divides the different work that can be done with OER and outlines how it can be included as faculty teaching, research, and service work for their tenure and promotion processes.

With the public funding model, OERs are generally financed by international, national, or local funds, mainly through grants and funded projects. The European Commission (ESCO) and the United Nations offer funding possibilities for OERs. According to the UNESCO study, this is the most established and, in this sense, the most reliable model. BCcampus, funded by the state of British Columbia in Canada, or Class’Code, supported by the French Ministry of Education, are examples of this model.

What can hinder the success of this model is that it depends on public policies that may not continue with specific projects and sometimes force an OER project to seek other forms of additional funding to ensure its sustainability.

In this case, funding for OER is provided by donations from foundations, individuals, or crowdfunding. MIT, for example, mixes donations with its internal funding to finance its MIT OpenCourseWare.

Of course, this means that the funds received through this model may be insufficient for an OER project. Another concern with this model is the lack of freedom that may come with being funded by private-sector donations.

Universities can be part of a consortium dedicated to supplying the creation and distribution of their OERs. OERu consortium, the Merlot project, and the Open University of Brazil are examples of networks employing this funding model that institutions can approach.

NYU is, for example, part of the Open Education Network. As a result, the NYU community has access to a comprehensive resource for openly licensed academic textbooks, is part of a community that works to make higher education more open, and participates in events, workshops, and certificates to ignite and support the creation and distribution of OERs in the University.

Regarding this model, it is important to carefully review the resources of the networks to see if they are relevant in terms of language or content (check out our Evaluating OER chapter to find out what to review before using an open resource).

Internal and public funding, donations, and OER networks are not only the most reliable financial models for creating and distributing open resources in educational institutions but also the ones that maintain the spirit of OERs: free and accessible resources.

The financial sustainability of higher education is an important issue to students, instructors, and institutions alike; investing in the sustainability of OERs with thought and care can be an excellent opportunity to find innovative ways to prioritize the teaching and learning enterprise of a university.

The information in the last part of the chapter was adapted from The evolution of sustainability models for Open Educational Resources: insights from the literature and experts (2020), made for the , licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 IGO License.

Go to: What is an Open Educational Resource (OER)?; OER and its Benefits; Finding OER; Evaluating OER; Revising and Remixing OER; Creating and Publishing OER; Reusing and Redistributing OER to Students; The Myths of OER, or Critical Perspectives for Engaging with OER

^{1. [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, 3-4.]↩ 2. [Guide to Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Procedures at UBC. The University of British Columbia. September, 2020, 15.]↩}