There are many challenges to the adoption of open educational practices. Certain aspects like technology have received greater attention than others but all of the factors below inhibit widespread use of open educational practices:
Technology - Lack of or insufficient investment in broadband access as well as up-to-date software and hardware
Business Model - OER and OEP can incur a significant provider cost. Typically financial models focus on technology, but they also need to account for staff; i.e., those who create, reuse, mix, and modify the content.
Law & Policy - There is either ignorance on open access licenses, such as Creative Commons License and Gnu Public License, and/or restrictive intellectual property rights that limit the development of OEP.
Pedagogy - Traditional models of learning are teacher-centric where teachers dispense knowledge to students, and teachers/professors may not know how to integrate OEP into courses.
Quality Assessment - There is not a quick and universal way to assess the quality of OER. MERLOT, based on the academic peer review process, has only reviewed 14% of submitted material.
Cultural Imperialism - There is the concern that Western institutions use OEP to design educational courses for developing countries.
Strategies & Recommendations
In order for there to be widespread adoption of OEP, legal and educational policy must change and OEP needs to become sustainable.
Funding - Develop a sustainable funding model for OEP that addresses technology and staffing. Various funding models being explored and examples:
Endowment Model, e.g. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Project.
Membership Model, e.g. Sakai Educational Partners Program where member organizations pay a fee.
Donations Model, e.g. Wikipedia and Apache Foundation. Even though Apache has modified it so that there are fees for some services.
Conversion Model, e.g. Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSe. They convert free subscribers to paying customers for advanced features and support.
Contributor Pay Model, e.g. Public Library of Science (PLoS) where contributors pay for the cost of maintaining the contribution.
Sponsorship Model, e.g. MIT iCampus Outreach Initiative, which is sponsored by Microsoft & China Open Resources for Education, and Stanford on iTunes, which is sponsored by Stanford & Apple. They are free for users with commercial messages by sponsors.
Institutional Model, e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare Project.
Government Model including UN programmes, e.g. Canada's SchoolNet Project.
Partnership and Exchange, e.g. Universities working together to create OER systems.
Law & Policy - In terms of law, there should be an open access mandate for partially or fully publicly funded research. Also teachers and researchers should be better informed about their intellectual property rights. Researchers and teachers who use public funding should sign non-exclusive copyrights so their institutions make their work available under appropriate licenses.
Open advocates should demand public-private partnerships
Build stakeholders -
Quality Assessment -
Pedagogy - Help teachers change to facilitate use of OEP to emphasize learners' developing competences, knowledge, and skills. Therefore, teaching is no longer educator-centric, but instead it focuses on what learners can do for themselves.