In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson (The Long Tail). He illustrates how savvy businesses are raking it in with indirect routes from product to revenue with such models as cross-subsidies (giving away a DVR to sell cable service) and freemiums (offering Flickr for free while selling the superior FlickrPro to serious users)… A generational and global shift is at play—those below 30 won’t pay for information, knowing it will be available somewhere for free…(Publishers Weekly)
Free education! Free instructional materials! It seems that if the Internet is free, then education delivered through the Internet should also be free since knowledge should not be proprietary. However, just what does free mean? Free—as in available at no cost? Or free—as in “free beer”—a way to bring people into the restaurant to pay for a meal? Free also means unrestricted use, as in the definition of open educational resources, which are “learning materials that are freely available for use, remixing and redistribution.”
Today, Curriki (www.curriki.org) is a robust platform, a resource-rich repository and a vibrant and rapidly growing community that is provided free to all. As a non-profit in a challenging fundraising environment, the most pressing question we now face is, ‘how do we make it sustainable?’ Given all that we’ve accomplished, we’re now setting our sites on how we financially support the Curriki’s infrastructure to guarantee that we will exist in 2, 5 or 10 years or (permit the non-profit flight of fantasy) even become an icon of the open and shared curricula movement. Without an in-depth exploration of these questions along with innovative ideas for implementation, the open education movement will cease to exist.
For the sake of this blog, let’s describe Curriki as being simultaneously a community, a repository, a start-up and a non-profit organization. Using these parameters, there are several models that should be considered to ensure that open and shared educational resources and communities, such as Curriki, will continue to exist and drive forward innovative approaches to improving teacher effectiveness and student achievement. Here are a few that we’re looking at:
Sponsorship: This is a model that has been successfully employed by many other non-profit organizations such as NPR and public television. In Curriki’s case, we have a large and rapidly growing community of technology-literate educators. They are self-starters, committed to creating the very best lessons possible and often intensely loyal to the open source education movement. To this highly targeted group, sponsorships can be sold on the home page and throughout the site, on newsletters, email messages and around custom content packages.
Sustainability fees: Curriki continues to grow and attract both attention from the news media, for-profit publishers and state and federal government agencies. These groups see Curriki as a game changer and as an innovation that changes the process of teaching and learning for the better. As an open platform, both our content and platform can be used and integrated into other products and services. Shouldn’t those that use the content, the platform and the functions of the site support the ongoing existence of Curriki? Without this support, products and communities such as Moodle and Wikipedia would all cease to exist.
Technical Support and Licensing Maintenance Fees: Building a robust platform for building and sharing open educational resources has been a very significant endeavor of Curriki. The platform is completely built on open source code and can be downloaded and used by other parties. However, if the user wants technical support and maintenance of the code, then they should be willing to pay a fee for these services. Other companies such as BrainHoney and Redhat have replicated and improved upon this model.
Membership fees: As Curriki grows, we need to determine if there are a set of services and functionalities which add enough value to our basic services that many of our members would be comfortable paying a fee for premium access. Think of this similar to the upgraded account on Linkedin or Flickr
Custom Content: Given the breadth and depth of the content in our repository, that content has value when properly packaged. For example, a school district might be willing to pay for a new unit of study in algebra or government if the content is modularized and delivered via multiple mediums and modes of instruction (see Flatworld Knowledge). They also might pay to have custom content developed that meets the highly targeted needs of their district. For example, a district might work with Curriki in a consultative arrangement to develop custom collections of open resources that directly address the results of last year’s standardized tests as well as the districts own learning priorities. Unlike high-priced and static textbooks, the services to assemble and package these collections of resources are significantly less expensive and are as flexible as an iTunes playlist, where if one item is found to be ineffective, another can be easily swapped in.
Virtual fundraiser: This approach is used by almost every non-profit organization that has a presence on the web. The organizations appeal to their loyal communities to contribute. Sometimes they ask for just a donation and sometimes they offer services or products as a way to encourage their community members to donate. I hope Curriki can find the correct message to encourage our members to donate.
So let’s now begin a community conversation to determine which models work and could be the most effective for Curriki. Which of these models will most likely drive sustainability? If you believe in Curriki and the open education movement, donate now?
Executive Director
www.Curriki.org
Note: A similar version of this post was originally posted on the Huffinton Post. To read the original post, click here. The image above can be found in its original version on Wikimedia Commons and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Tags: Barbara Kurshan, Bobbi Kurshan, classroom content, curricula, Curriki, Education, OER, open education resources, sustainability, sustaining OER
