Page:A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement.pdf/11



In this section we present a qualitative retrospective evaluation of the Hewlett OER program. The evaluation is based on a survey of 134 grants and their websites made in 2002 to 2006, in-depth reviews of some of the largest and most significant grants, ad hoc conversations with grantees, and extensive discussions with Marshall Smith and Catherine Casserly.

We began with a review of Component 2 of the Strategic Plan for the Education Program, which is dated October 2002 and titled Using Information Technology to Increase Access to High-Quality Educational Content. This plan, which is summarized in the Theory of Action drawing in Figure 1, has served well as a framework for the portfolio of OER investments from 2002 to 2006. In reviewing the grant portfolio with respect to the original Theory of Action, we decided to adopt the later simplified model shown in Figure 2. We have done a first-order classification of the 134 grants with respect to the three goal components in service of equity of access: providing high-quality open content, removing barriers, and understanding and stimulating use. We associated reducing barriers with technology issues and understanding and stimulating use with R&D, feasibility studies, plus awareness creation. In the final analysis, however, we could not make a clear distinction between these later two and thus merged them.

Under these assumptions we estimate that of the total of $68 million in grants, $43 million has gone to the creation and dissemination of open content and $25 million into reducing barriers, understanding, and/or stimulating use. Of the total, about $12 million has gone to non-U.S. institutions primarily in Europe, Africa, and China for capacity building, translation, and/or stimulation of established institutions such as the Open University in the United Kingdom and Netherlands so they will be more aggressive in providing open content. About half of the $12 million has gone to enhance the ability of developing countries to take advantage of the open content and contribute to it.

The goal of high quality has been achieved largely by supporting branded content from well-established, high-reputation institutions. This is a reasonable starting point, but as we will discuss in later sections, in the future Hewlett needs to find additional mechanisms for vetting and enhancing educational objects in social settings, ways to close loops and converge to higher quality and more useful materials.

Overall we are impressed with the systematic balance of the OER portfolio and the effort that has gone into creating a microcosm of a global-scale activity. We note here a point we will reinforce later: private foundations like Hewlett have