Earlier this week, I had a conversation with someone in GVSU Provost's office about opportunity costs and prioritizing spending and projects at the university. I realized that I'm not sure that I would support a mandate at GVSU that all faculty share all of their course materials under Creative Commons licenses in an institutional repository. Here are some of the concerns that I have:

• The opportunity cost is likely to be very high when one considers the time, financial resources, and political capital necessary to
  1. convince faculty of the benefits of such a plan;
  2. make faculty who don't want to do it, do it;
  3. build and implement processes and resources for sharing course materials;
  4. create processes and strategies for how those materials will improve instruction in an institution (e.g., assessment and instructor evaluation);
  5. consider all the discipline/department specific needs (contexts) in achieving these goals.
• Could creating a culture of sharing all course materials in a university increase the quality of instruction provided to students? Certainly, but an institution might also achieve a similar level of improvement over a five year period by improving assessment and professional development processes already in place, with less investment.
• Would sharing resources provide a benefit for improving our global society? Sure. But there are other initiatives we might choose to do that could have equivalent, but different, benefits.
• The one type of OER that I believe faculty will readily agree that there is a need for in U.S higher education is open textbooks. Yet, because faculty don't create open textbook readings as part of the regular work that they do in course development, institutional OER repository initiatives aren't necessarily going to get us closer to satisfying that perceived need.

Currently, I am participating in an online forum discussing issues related to OER, hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and there is lots of discussion about institutional sharing of OER. Stephen Downes recently raised the following point,

These forums have a habit of becoming discussions of how these resources can be produced by institutions and used by teachers in the classroom. Inevitably, the issues then become (a) the cost of institutions producing them, and (b) how to get teachers to actually use them. But it would be a more fruitful, and more accurate, discussion to consider OERs, first, in the much wider context of community production, and second, in the much wider context of use (and reuse) outside the institutional educational context.

In thinking about a follow-up post to A Model for Open Textbook Sustainability, I realized that my previous comparison of much open textbook publishing to "vanity publishing" might seem disdainful of the many teachers who have created such texts. That was not at all my intention, but rather to point out that vanity publishing has been looked down on by academia when it comes to hiring job candidates or in tenure and promotion. While open textbook authors could argue the importance of their work by demonstrating impact (e.g., how widely a text is used), additional ethos will be gained by publishing in academic presses, journals, or otherwise peer-reviewed publications, or even through well-respected commercial publishers.

I've been thinking a lot about David Porter's post, Nowhere Near Critical Mass, and OER sustainability. David makes a strong point,

. . . my belief was that it would take actual teachers, instructors and students who could demonstrate success in an OER context to bring consolidation and sustainability to the goals of the open movement. Further, it seemed that little real effort was occurring on the inclusion or promotion of teachers and teaching, and that OpenEd conferences continued to be conversations within an insular community of theorists and advocates – not the stuff of implementation, nor a demonstration of broad impact.

I don't want to try to speak about OER in general, but when it comes to open textbook production, I agree with David. For the open textbook movement to become successful, it needs to go outside the innovators who began it, the activists who are part of the community. Regular teachers will need to be involved, and open textbook adoption and publishing will have to become a common element of an academic and teaching life.