We touched on innovative aspects of higher education instruction and credentialing in last week’s blog post on Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity initiative. This week we explore another factor that impacts innovation: alternative funding sources.

Udacity receives some support from venture capital, although Thrun has spent $200,000 of his own money to create Udacity. While many agree with the ideals that motivate this kind of learning and credentialing, only a few have the resources to fund such a venture themselves. As a result, these thought leaders look toward alternative revenue streams to fund their projects. Such innovators include University of Mary Washington professor Jim Groom, and University of Buenos Aires’s Pablo Cosgaya, both of whom have used Kickstarter to fund their open learning initiatives.

Groom teaches a popular digital storytelling class, colloquially known as “ds106,” that he first taught in an open course format in Spring 2010. The community that formed around this course has spun off a television station, a radio station, and a community of art and blogs, which have grown immensely since the project began. In fact, the project has outgrown its currently shared server and must migrate to its own server in order to maintain the content being created. However, servers aren’t free, and Groom called on the community that had developed around the course to fund the new server.

Groom turned to Kickstarter to raise the money required for the server. A website popular among musicians and artists, Kickstarter is gaining traction among educational innovators looking to fund their projects.  Kickstarter’s platform allows communities of donors to contribute as much or as little as they desire to a given project. If the project fails to get sufficient funding, the money is returned to the original donors. Groom’s ds106 did not have this problem, as it met and exceeded its funding goal on the first day. Groom calls this approach the “PBS model” and cites it as a way for open content, community-driven projects that have historically struggled, to generate necessary funding.

The Open Educational Resources for Typography (OERT) project from Professor Pablo Cosgaya and his colleagues at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina is another project that used Kickstarter to fund their educational initiative. This group of professors created a series of booklets on typography to support their curriculum, and wanted to hire professional typographers to update content so that it could stand alone, and translators to make the content freely available to learners worldwide. These professors also succeeded in meeting their goal.   

The community-sourced funding phenomenon raises interesting possibilities for experiments in higher education innovation. Communities of learners, like ds106 and OERT, seem to be willing to fund projects and programs they deem worthwhile, regardless of their university enrollment status. In order for these communities to develop, however, colleges and universities must allow open access to the content that they teach. While Groom and Cosgaya seem to be some of the first to utilize Kickstarter in this way, it will be interesting to see if this model is replicated.