This is the first time I have attended the Open Education Conference, hosted this year at University of British Columbia at their downtown campus in Vancouver – which if the weather over the course of the last few days is anything to go by, seems to be having a summer similar to the one we left behind at home in the UK!

The strap line of the conference is “Crossing the Chasm”, and there have certainly been some thought-provoking sessions – many describing how the OER movement is transitioning towards an era of self-sustainability, thus gradually becoming less reliant on philanthropic funding.

David Wiley’s session this morning Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Openness on Paying Enrollments in Distance Education Courses and Implications for Sustainability put some real world metrics around the real cost and early impact of publishing open courseware at Brigham Young University. Although to date there is no statistically significant trend showing either a negative or positive correlation between the availability of open courseware and enrollments on paying courses, David did present a cost tracking system and methodology which is starting to track the impact on revenue, and the cost of creation, of OCW at BYU.

Attempting to measure the educational impact of OERs provoked much discussion within the audience yesterday at David Cormier’s session (We Are Not Your [insert expletive] Resource: Sustainable Use of Established Communities in Open Education) – Cormier’s position being that learning is not something that can be measured in units – one cannot say they have achieved “one learn” more as the result of a given approach. Although not in direct argument, Wiley put forward the assertion that the community cannot expect to keep receiving substantial grants without being able to demonstrate some measurable evidence or unit of impact – “it’s not good enough to sit around the campfire singing Kum Ba Ya”.

Perhaps some evidence of chasm-crossing can be found in the number of commercial organisations now seeking to build businesses by embracing the open education ecosystem, by innovation over open IP, rather than seeking to lock down and ringfence ideas and intellectual capital. These organisations add real value to open resources, much in the same way that Redhat make Linux valuable for enterprise by providing valuable essential enterprise services around software.

One example is open textbook provider Flat World Knowledge, which provides free access to open textbooks, charging for audio and print-on-demand copies (at a much lower rate than traditional textbook publishers), offering value-add services such as study aids along the way. They profit share 20% with the authors and the works are available under Creative Commons licenses.

And guess what? 40% of students purchase the print on demand copy even though the digital copy is free. One FWK exec I spoke to reported that compensation to the author was pretty much on par with the closed textbook model – making the open production of open content in this case both accessible and sustainable.

In the words of Tim O’Reilly, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”.

Image credit: cogdogblog on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3817318868/ CC-BY