Many universities require seed funding, usually from a foundation such as Hewlett or a national body such as the JISC, to establish OER projects, but external project funding is not a long-term solution. At the Open University the OpenLearn project operates on a USU model, and has made OER release part of standard practice. Each new course is required to designate a set of materials to be released, which are then ‘scrubbed’, formatted and made context independent by a central team and released through the OpenLearn repository. The cost of this additional work is covered by the recruitment value of the open material, which covers its costs in terms of student registrations, i.e., those learners who come to OpenLearn and then go on to sign up for a formal course (Perryman, Law & Law, 2013).
OERs can be sustainable therefore, but there are some costs involved in initial start-up. An alternative model is provided by the open textbook field, who argue that current costs allocated to purchasing textbooks for colleges can be instead diverted to creating textbooks which are open and free to use.
As well as sustainability, some of the issues that beset learning objects have not been completely overcome by OERs. Reluctance by educators to adopt OERs is still an issue, which can arise from difficulty in finding OERs, the time taken to adapt them and their context (Wiley’s reusability paradox) (McGill 2012).
There is still a supply problem, which arises from a cultural issue in teachers sharing material readily, despite growing awareness of OERs. For instance, a survey of teachers in the flipped learning network found that whilst 70% of respondents reported that open licensing is important when using free online resources in their teaching, only 43% of teachers publish the resources they create publicly online and only 5% under a CC license (De Los Arcos, 2014). However, there is greater awareness of sharing material,
