Freemiums, Opencourseware, and Sustainability

“Free for All,” the new Digital Campus podcast (episode #26) is now online. Mills Kelly discusses his End of Western Civilization As We Know It proposal to offer the general education requirements to students for free while charging for premiums like using the Writing Center or the high end digital computer lab on campus. They also address the challenges of financing the development and use of digital tools like the Omeka exhibit application.

The Digital Campus contributors discuss the very real problem of sustainability and grant initiatives. Foundations expect that grantees will raise the funds to sustain a major digital project or a public program after an initial grant period (often three years)–however the recipient organizations are often not set up to sustain those costs and there are few sources to turn to for on-going and operating expenses. For example, the Ohio Humanities Council hopes that their support for a single teacher institute will lead to long terms offerings or benefits. Sometimes this is the case, as when the Dayton Public Schools, other partners, and I applied for a teacher institute grant and went on to obtain a three-year Teaching American History project grant. In other cases, the opportunity to collaborate on the course development, the tools and resources developed, the new strategies will be folded into other courses while the teacher institute itself might not be repeated. With the TAH grant, we developed a major online resource for teachers but then had to scramble because the schools did not have a budget item for the small, but crucial component, the site’s search engine. The Ohio Humanities Council’s Gateway to History site was designed, in part, to address the sustainability question for ours and other Ohio TAH projects. The Ohio Historical Society and its contributors stepped in to help sustain Dayton’s National History Day program after we wrapped up the three-year TAH grant.

The Digital Campus presenters also link to RSS Day as a good introduction to what RSS Feeds are — the topic of my previous post.