🌐Overview

Done well, sustainability is a signal to your institution that OER is not just a one-time experiment. It’s a commitment. It’s a practice. It’s a shared responsibility. That shift requires real resources—both people and budgets. But it starts with leadership, vision, and your ability to advocate for integration at every level. Move from heroic effort to institutional structure. Your project and your students deserve it.

📖 Table of Contents

Sustainability Is a Budget Decision
Secure Diverse and Stable Funding Streams
Staff It Like a Program, Not a Passion Project
Connect to Institutional Planning Cycles
Prepare for Turnover: Document, Onboard, Repeat

✔️ Sustainability Is a Budget Decision

OER work often begins with energy, pilot funding, and individual initiative. However, the long-term impact depends not on how passionate one faculty member is but on how well OER is resourced and embedded within the institution’s financial and staffing plans. For OER to last, it must be seen not as a side project, but as core educational infrastructure.

As a project lead, your role is to ensure that your initiative isn’t sustained solely by personal labor or temporary grant cycles. This means making the case for operational funding, securing strategic staffing support, and aligning your OER efforts with budget cycles and institutional priorities.

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✔️ Secure Diverse and Stable Funding Streams

Too many OER initiatives begin with enthusiasm and disappear with the last dollar of a grant. The challenge is not just to find money, it’s to build a diversified, layered approach to funding that includes one-time start-up money and long-term operational support.

One pathway is to leverage existing institutional funds earmarked for student equity, instructional materials, library innovation, or digital learning. Frame OER as an enhancement to goals your college already values: cost savings, retention, equity, and digital access. Make sure OER work is not only represented in program reviews but also built into department and division budget requests. If your college has committed to ZTC pathways, those commitments must be backed by ongoing financial investment.

Examples of sustainable OER funding include:

A recurring $2,000 line in your department’s budget for OER review and accessibility updates.
$500 stipends for faculty revising existing open materials.
Equity funds are used to develop ZTC course sequences for disproportionately impacted students.
Library budgets that absorb hosting costs for OER platforms or tools like Pressbooks or LibreTexts.

When justifying this work, don’t only use passion, use data. Reference textbook cost comparisons, adoption metrics, and student success indicators. Connect your funding request to state-level priorities.

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✔️ Staff It Like a Program, Not a Passion Project

Sustainable OER projects are collaborative, cross-functional, and formally supported. No initiative will scale or survive if it relies on one burned-out champion. Instead, create a sustainable staffing model by recognizing the core functions your OER initiative needs and planning how to fill them.

This doesn’t necessarily mean new hires. It may mean advocating for reassigned time for faculty project leads, embedding OER responsibilities into librarian and instructional designer roles, or building student assistant support into grant proposals. Even more important than titles is defining the work:

Who manages timelines and documentation? Who ensures accessibility compliance? Who updates licensing information? Who gathers and responds to student feedback? If no one is tasked with these responsibilities, they will be inconsistently handled—or ignored altogether.

To strengthen your team:

Collaborate with faculty and deans to align OER adoption with instructional goals and ensure recognition of OER work within faculty responsibilities and workload planning.
Partner with DEI, Guided Pathways, or Online Education teams who may already be tackling adjacent work.
Use PD/FLEX days to build shared awareness and invite collaboration.
Build MOUs or simple role outlines that define contributions and expectations clearly.

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✔️ Connect to Institutional Planning Cycles

Funding and staffing can’t be reactive. They must be part of how your institution plans, sets goals, and measures outcomes. That means inserting OER work into the cycles that shape those decisions.

Some key entry points include:

Annual program review narratives.
Strategic equity and enrollment plans.
Division-level instructional goals.
Budget prioritization cycles and resource requests.

If your college discusses equity, retention, innovation, or cost transparency, make sure OER is part of that conversation. When OER work appears in campus-wide planning documents, it becomes harder to cut, ignore, or minimize. It becomes part of the institution's fabric.

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✔️ Prepare for Turnover: Document, Onboard, Repeat

One of the most overlooked sustainability tools is documentation. Projects don’t fail just because people leave. They fail because no one knew what they did, how they did it, or where anything lives.

Think like a systems builder:

Maintain a shared folder with budget requests, templates, version logs, and status trackers.
Draft a 1-page "Welcome to the Project" guide for new faculty or collaborators.
Create and update a visual tracker showing which courses are OER/ZTC and which are still in progress.
Schedule an annual or quarterly review where your core team updates status, needs, and changes.

By embedding documentation and shared ownership, you make your project resilient, not just productive

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