It's a question that has been obsessing me for the last couple of years, along with many other edtechs and e-learning related researchers and policy makers. I put in a proposal to the upcoming Open Source and Sustainability Conference last month, titled Sustainability as a key factor in a multi-site roll out of the Moodle open source learning platform:
"I’m currently in the second year of a multi-site VLE roll out, across 5 FE Colleges (total student number circa 60,000) and two schools. The first year of the project consisted of evaluations of a range of mainly proprietary platforms, against the project criteria, of which ‘sustainability’ was a dominant consideration. This paper will outline the variety of concepts and outputs the project addressed under the umbrella term ‘sustainability’, looks at how these have stood up in practice during the second year."
So it's with his usual perfect timing that Stephen Downes posts the excellent Models for Sustainable Open Education Resources, which takes a whole spectrum approach to the question of sustainability, and settles on the key fact Open Education Resources need to be contextualised "as only part of a larger picture, one that includes volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management and control."
One of this years key papers and a comprehensive reading list to boot.
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