Sustainability Strategies for Open Educational Resources and Repositories

The Open Educational Resources (OER) model was presented as the best way to reinforce the production, sharing and reuse of educational resources in an economically effective way. Educational organizations, content providers, teachers and, in particular, students would be able to benefit from the open and/or free access to these resources. However, OER do cost money to develop, to curate, to maintain and to scale. And this cost is proportional to the OER complexity: interactive applications, games and simulations require much more design, development and maintenance time and technical resources than static lecturing contents like texts and presentation slides. Therefore, specific strategies are required to ensure the sustainability of those resources as a direct income is not expected to be generated out of their use. This article presents an overview of suggested solutions for this issue that have accompanied the actual evolution of the OER model.