On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 04:12 -0800, simonfj wrote: > Just going through the strategy for wikieducator, Wayne's trying to > find ways to make things sustainable, and encourage the value adders. > So let's not just limit things to just the web stuff. The most > important thing, and the thing which is going to make the profit, or > provide the cost savings for institutions, is getting the asynchronous > networks to align with the real time ones.
Hi Simon, Appreciate the constructive inputs --- you're right building a sustainable ecosystem for Open Education should not be limited to the web stuff and we need to explore multiple avenues. Apology for the long response -- but I thought it would be better to keep the all these points relating to our emergent strategy together in one post. I must stress that the OER Foundation and WIkiEducator is (and will always be) a NON-PROFIT entity committed to charitable educational purposes and the essential freedoms (http://www.wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_free_content/Freedom_as_concept ) --- This is a core value on which our collective success is founded (Rest assured - We will not permit advertising on the WikiEducator site as a vehicle to generate revenue -- this does not fit in with the values of our project.) The Third phase of the WikiEducator strategy focuses on the implementation of sustainable OER development (see: http://www.wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:WikiEducator_3.0 ). In other words -- prioritising activities which support and promote the implementation of OERs into mainstream educational system as our contribution in achieving a sustainable OER ecosystem. Think of WikiEducator as one of many nodes in a larger OER system. Examples of these nodes within the eco-system include: * Educators: The success of WIkiEducator is first and foremost attributable to the thousands of teachers, lecturers and trainers around the world who through a culture of gifting donate many hours of their professional and personal time to the vision of developing free content resources in support of their respective national curricula. * Software developers: WikiEducator relies on the ongoing developments of the Mediawiki software engine. Any improvements commissioned by WikiEducator will always be released back to the wider Mediawiki community. Already COL has contributed to the development of the wiki ==> pdf feature in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation and Pedia Press (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable ) * Community website administrators who donate their time in supporting the WE servers and software infrastructure. * Educational institutions, development agencies and national chapters who allocate staff time to the WikiEducator project. Examples include, The Commonwealth of Learning (http://www.col.org/resources/knowServices/Pages/wikieducator.aspx ), Otago Polytechnic (http://www.wikieducator.org/Otago_Polytechnic:WikiEducator_helps_advance_open_learning_at_the_Polytechnic), University of Education, Winneba (http://www.wikieducator.org/UEW ), the India Chapter of WikiEducator (http://www.wikieducator.org/India ) etc, * Open Access publishers, who in the future can assist with print-on-demand publishing of open textbooks thus widening distribution of OER at cheaper prices for our learners (see for example: http://www.wikieducator.org/WikiPublishing , and Athabasca University Press - http://www.aupress.ca/ ). * Professionals who provide educational services , for instance, leaning design consultants who assist academic authors in developing high quality OERs. * Other OER projects like those administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, Connexions, the Community College Consortium for OER etc. We're very fortunate --- WIkiEducator is a very low cost and efficient system. We use free software and currently COL only funds the equivalent of about 0.6 staff who work full-time on the project. This is possible because of the thousands of people who donate their time to the project :-D. (For instance - I don't spend all my time working on WikiEducator as I have numerous other responsibilities at COL -- although I must concede that I spend lots of my free time working on WE :-) .) The purpose of the OER Foundation is NOT to make profit -- it will be a charitable foundation. We will need some money to pay for the servers, and a very small full-time staff to support the project during this next phase of growth. Initial thoughts on a prospective business model We envisage an institutional membership contribution model as the main source of funding to expand and improve operations. We estimate a break-even of 30 contributing institutions. All surplus funds will be reinvested in OER development --- that is all funding in excess of the first 30 contributing institutions. Surplus funds will be used to commissioning academic authors, multimedia developers, learning designers, editors etc to develop OER courses and resources according to the needs and criteria established by contributing members. Tentative calculations suggest that an institutional contribution of USD7500 per annum could conservatively generate a savings in direct course development costs in the region of USD250 000 for the institution concerned assuming that 10% of courses are developed as OER. WE also recognise that many institutions in the developing world may not have the funds to invest as contributing members. The OER Foundation is planning to implement a FTE4WikiEducator project whereby institutions can allocate, for example 2 FTE working days per week as part of the official duties of selected staff member(s) to work on WE related projects. We will also be sourcing funding from the international donor community for strategic projects -- for example software enhancements required for educational development. We do not wish to create a dependencies for ongoing operations from donor funding. In addition, we will be working with governments to assist with funding for the establishment of national OER collaborations. If you have any thoughts or suggestions for improvement --- please post these to the list. We need your inputs and experience to contribute to our ongoing success. Also - if there are any institutions on the list who are interested in joining us as founding members --- please get in touch :-). Cheers Wayne --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. 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