Page:A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement.pdf/29

 #Explore roles for students in creating, enhancing, and adopting OER. Consider an “OER Corps” in which students receive training, small stipends, and prestige to assist in material preparation, enhancement, and use (especially in historically disadvantaged domestic communities and developing countries). Sustainability of OER is becoming a subject of academic study. Dholakia, King, and Baraniuk, for example, argue that current thinking on the topic is often solely tactical with too much attention on the “product” and not enough attention on understanding what its user community wants or on improving the OER’s value for various user communities. Their proposal is that “prior to considering different revenue models for a particular OER and choosing one or a combination of them, the OER providers should focus on the issue of increasing the aggregate value of the site to its constituents to the greatest extent possible. In other words, unless the OER site is able to first gain and maintain a critical mass of active, engaged users, and provide substantial and differentiated value to them in its start-up and growth phases, then none of the available and/or chosen revenue models will be likely to work for the OER in the long run.”
 * 1) Consider a voluntary (or mix of voluntary and paid) wiki-like model, in which OER is the object of micro-contributions from many. This approach raises complex issues of quality, but much work on collective “converging to better” is under way.
 * 2) Examine ways that social software can be used to capture and structure user commentaries on the material. More generally, find ways to instrument the use of the material with special attention to capturing problems encountered by diverse student communities. Do the same for teachers using, remixing or repurposing the material.

As digital OER content grows, so will the need for systematic reliable infrastructure for curating and preserving access. The Internet Archives has made pioneering contributions in this area. Fortunately, academic libraries and major and cultural heritage institutions, including the National Archives and the Library of Congress, are now giving more attention to preserving digital objects. As part of their mission, academic libraries are creating large digital repositories intended to be persistent. Similar activities are under way in the