I mean, of course, with respect to appropriately licensed (Creative Commons, Gnu Free Document License, etc) open educational resources specifically.

And though the question is not staggering, it may be taken for granted, even at the cost of the long-term success of the web project.

Linking

The link approach typically uses hyperlinks to the target source document, but may use iframes to embed the element within a locally-hosted web page.

Linking…

1. preserves integrity of the original source by maintaining all original qualities
2. respects original source by trajecting traffic to the host site
3. saves local hosting resources (storage & bandwith)
4. ensures that source updates are reflected in the current version
5. is, therefore, particularly well-suited for frequently updated or improved sources, like wikis
6. is much easier, particularly when numerous multimedia files are embedded, or multiple files are referenced
7. may provide learners with context and hyperlinks that lead to further, relevant exploration of the source site and the web
8. avoids problems with licenses or terms of use that restrict copying

Many of these arguments for linking presume that there is more to the information than the information itself, and that the source has some inherent value that may be passed on to the learners or should be maintained for its own sake.

Copying

The copy approach is similarly self-evident: a digital copy of the source file(s) is downloaded, then hosted on the local server.

Copying…

1. provides for adaptation or modification (if the license allows) of:
   • content (cut, insert, remix, extend)
   • presentation (e.g. surface design)
   • interactions
2. supports localization
3. captures and preserves a version that may be discarded or replaced in the future
4. allows designers to produce seamless learning experiences that support learner focus
5. respects original source host’s resources (storage & bandwith)
6. ensures technical availability of the resource is within local control (no dead links)
7. allows contextual indexing for site (or public) search engines
8. may improve reach and increase circulation of source information
9. may thereby enlarge original author’s prominence and visibility
10. avoids problems with licenses or terms of use that restrict leech-linking

A couple notable obstacles to copying:

• Server-generated content, markup, interactions, or hyperlinks may be difficult to acquire or reuse (e.g.
• While CC By-ND allows reproduction of works, it may restrict modification of presentation or interactions in addition to the more clear prohibition on modification of content

Dynamic Scraping and Importing

There are other approaches that fall somewhere in between. For instance, web scraping of the source file(s) on the fly, followed by parsing and processing of the data on the local host. This sounds complex, but it’s not too bad; Google Docs & Spreadsheets has implemented this functionality into it’s data importing spreadsheet formulae:

• =importHTML grabs the content of a TABLE or list (OL / UL [/DL?])
• =importXML uses xPath expressions to target XML/XHTML elements
• =importData takes structured data files, such as comma separated values (CSV)
• =GoogleReader intakes the RSS or Atom of a target URL, such as a blog post

Often used for mash-ups, this approach can also be useful for replicating and formatting data. And, though Tony Hirst has found numerous exemplary applications for this feature using Google Spreadsheets, a Google Spreadsheet is not required; anyone with some significant Javascript experience could tackle this task, and there are a number of web scraping software apps that deliver varying results.

Begins by showing course project which requires students to write/revise an actual article on Wikipedia. Many questions about how the process worked. Good comment/question about opportunities, and leveraging this opportunity in foreign languages.

Brian discusses AP photo of Obama which describes an audience using cameras, phones, and even a laptop(!) to capture their participation in the moment (photo-taking as a social [or personal/individual] act). Flickr was able to track incoming camera phone uploads from this moment.

(JMS: If openness permeates professional fields like we want it to, will this defeat the so-called rise of the amateur? Does this diminish the evolution of a “participatory culture”? If so, do we care?)

Brian telling us how awful OCW has been for MIT: reputation is in the gutter, enrollments have plummeted, content has been sucked into fly-by-night engineering degree mills, faculty have revolted. It takes a while for the audience to get it and start to laugh.

Faculty using simple HTML flat files. Posts everything online. Has been doing it for years. This is DIY openness. “The most important thing is he didn’t need support to do this. He didn’t need a project. He didn’t need a process.”

Evangelizing the benefits of openness. “[Openness] is a show of respect to the students… and a show of respect to the public.”

Creative Commons short explanation. Surprisingly, about half the room didn’t know what CC is.

“I took that AP photo without asking. Poor AP! Poor AP… I’ll buy a copy of USA Today later to make up for it.” Brian can deliver strong opinions with humor, which really works on this audience.

Openness and Creative Commons means “you don’t have to steal intellectual property anymore”. Shows Creative Commons license search on Flickr.

Wikeducator uses an open format for its open content, bypassing the inherent restriction of “open” media but closed technology. MIT uses a lot of PDFs, Berkeley uses live Real Media, which requires an internet connection (sounds familiar!)

Gardner Campbell mentioned with respect to his downloadable MP3 podcasts (thanks for mentioning my MP3 legality blog post). Nancy White being recorded, Creative Commons licensed, and she benefits through reputation, distribution of her “voice”.

SELF-DEFINED.

“I am a recovering Learning Object developer.” Martin Weller referenced.

Brian laments not doing a Twitter shout-out since Bryan didn’t do it yesterday.

Sharing doesn’t cost much any more.

Jim Groom referenced. Fake web garbage. Let’s use this spam blog tool and use it to aggregate student blogs. Turn evil into good. UMW is the best WordPress instance Brian has ever seen. (JMS: I love it too.Documentation is incredible. On an loosely related note, this example demonstrates to me the importance of the individual, of individual genius, focus, and dedication over lethargia of [some] communities.)

Findability of open resources is important. Brian shows Zaid in Malasia’s web page cataloging all open resource sites. You can make a Google custom search engine. Scott Leslie puts list into a wiki page, uses a Google custom search engine to ref wiki page links. Freelearning.ca. To bring a project like this into being so quickly “The secret ingredient is openness.” Brian mentions “a guy from England” but I miss the name. It’s gotta be Tony Hirst.

“I want to see if I can teach and interact with students on mobile devices.” Case study: accessing WebCT on phone. 5 minutes of pain results in finally getting to discussion screen, but still unusable.

(JMS: Brian may be cutting WebCT too much slack. I would rip their dessicated zombie heads off.)
Brian concedes that WebCT’s product was not developed for mobile devices. (JMS: True, but WebCT customers have been asking for mobile support for years, and the CE 4.1 example he is using actually functions in a mobile device, but all newer versions of WebCT/Blackboard do not.)

Everyday a newspaper goes under. “There’s a crisis in every cultural industry.” PirateBay, bittorrent site, has a section for textbooks.

Universities are not popular with the public. Perception of overpaid, underworked, radicals. Quoting a (neighbor?), “Taxpayers are only willing to substitute universities to the extent that they contribute to the national wealth.” Openness might alleviate that intercultural tension.

Nice job, Brian. Hope I captured some of the coherence and insight that you delivered this morning.

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I undertook this task as Rogue Quest 1 for David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed course. The Rogue character class that I’ve adopted focuses on content production with an emphasis on finding and releasing or untrapping “open” content to allow for reuse and remix. I have only theoretical experience with remixing OER, and so it is fitting that I begin at experience level 1.

–>

Reuse/Remix Estimates

As I purview each of seven different OER projects I will give each collection a reuse/remix value rating based on my initial impressions and observations. These estimates may change as I move forward to release, reuse, or remix some of these OER.

My reuse/remix rating is a scale of 1 – 5, where “1″ is extremely difficult or low value, and “5″ is extremely easy or high value, referring to the act of taking CC content and reusing or remixing it on a separate server. To produce these ratings I consider:

• technical openness of media (e.g. Java applet vs Javascript)
• quality of source
• variety of media sources
• semantic/standard structure (e.g. HTML tables vs semantically-correct XHTML; IMS)
• CC license compatibility
• hosted tools and support for remix

I expect to address the why of reuse and remix of OER in another post and catalogue some of the key benefits.

UK Open University’s OpenLearn

Though constructed in Moodle LMS, the UK Open University’s OpenLearn is less like a “walled garden” for OER and more like a playground. It takes advatange of some of Moodle’s learning tools and features and customizability, and content is of immediate to use to anyone else using Moodle.

The project’s LabSpace site is specifically design to encourage educators to “collaborate with others and publish new versions of [UK Open University] learning materials to share with the world.” I was nearly distracted by the ability to “join this unit”–identifying myself as willing to engage in a self-organizing learning community.

I began by checking out Start Writing Fiction. I’ve had the bad fortune of reading some particularly bad fiction this holiday season, and recognized how freeing this OER might benefit all mankind. In each OER the “Versions” block includes “Upload this unit” and “Make a copy for revising”–presumably on the LabSpace web site. Is this custom block’s source code available?

Another useful custom block is “Alternative Formats”, which provides versions of the entier OER including print (HTML), XML, RSS, OU XML, IMS, Common Cartridge, Plain Zip, Moodle Backup. I looked at Print and saw the whole unit in one file. I grabbed the URL (http://labspace.open.ac.uk/file.php/2861/formats/print.htm) so I could test this with Send To Wiki later. I also grabbed an IMS package so I could to try fitting it into other “IMS-compatible” systems, such as the the foppish Bb Vista.

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

OLI is like a museum: you can get in and see some fabulous artifacts, but don’t plan on taking any out as a souvenir … without some serious pre-planning.

I recently reviewed OLI’s project on this web site, so let’s cut to the chase:

OLI’s OER content is a mix of non-semantic HTML and media, usually SWFs. The HTML pages are all generated from what looks to be a Java Servlet using Javascript to set cookies and carry the “context”, or unique identifier. This will prevent any normal “spider” software from loading all the pages automatically (they would ignore the passed variables and just re-download the same “page” over and over), inhibiting the download of an entire “course” as a single collection. The passed context appears to be arbitrary; at any rate, it’s not predictive, so if we want to automatically download the content we will have to do so based on spidered links, and will have to rename links and files as we go (Nate Snapp suggested I just use a PERL script in cURL. It seems obvious to me to use the [non-semantic] context IDs as the file name, so page?context=b487c83c80020c69016e6ce63813c727 simply becomes page_b487c83c80020c69016e6ce63813c727.html)

Because there are currently no ways to download an entire package for remix, I intend to ask the OLI warden when the OERs are up for parole, if ever. Of course I’ll phrase it more nicely.

MIT OpenCourseWare

I knew I was not the first to traverse this part of town, so I needed to make sure my target was something of a challenge. Thanks to a list of audio/video-enhanced MIT ocw I was able to find a worthy mark. Linear Algebra contains video lectures and interactive Java applets, presumably already of the lowest usable granularity. Anytime I see the TM Java I want to call it a day. But it will be worth investigating how these applets might be found and extracted for localized reuse, if at all.

Looking a little deeper into the course I found several paths to other course media, and was pleased that videos were available as MP4–most of the early MIT OCW media I’ve seen is in RM format.

Though the media and formats in MIT OCW may vary from course to course, the OCW structure of each is reliable and learnable, making traversing the resources as potential remix “maps” feasible.

As far as extracting the OER from the host, this should be no problem: the course provides a zip file which contains all the course except audio and video files. If I recall, this is even in an IMS package of some flavor. The question will be, once the ZIP is free, what will it contain? And how can it be reused?

webcast.berkeley

Webcast.berkeley is UC Berkeley’s multimedia forray into OER. Strangely, at the bottom of the page I saw Copyright 2002-2009, Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved but maybe that’s just for the web page design, which I admit is striking.

Courses are navigated through semester; I chose History 4A – The Ancient Mediterranean World, which contained MP3s of nearly all Isabelle Pafford’s lectures from Fall 2007. I noticed a podcast RSS feed, which I grabbed: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/rss/course-archive.php?seriesid=1906978476 — opening this in a podcast-ready media player, like iTunes, is one rapid method of extracting all the media files for reuse.

There is some video on the site (e.g. ASTRO C10), some of it SWF, some of it streaming RealMedia, which I still haven’t found a suitable codec for on Ubuntu (comment if YOU have). As far as the streaming video goes it is possible, of course, to capture this onto your hard drive with desktop software. However…

I was nagged by the fact that the only licensing info directly on this page was still © All Rights Reserved, so I took a detour and go to the bottom of things. A quarter of a way down the page under Policies we find the actual licensing details:

Beginning in 2007, the default license attached to media recordings for distribution is Creative Commons – non-commercial, attribution, no derivatives (CC2.5 license).

This showed that the Ancient Mediterranean course that I had begun looking at was still ©. Also, the ND was unexpected and puts an entirely different spin on things, eliminating the option of remixing altogether, and thereby reducing my Reuse/Remix rating by a full point. Ben Hubbard of the webcast.berkeley project noted in the comments that the CC license info on all OER published after 2007 is featured prominently at the top of the page, and h.264 video is available via RSS feeds.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere

Stanford School of Engineering‘s CC By license was the first thing I noticed, and offers just a bit more freedom for remix/reuse.

I’d never been to the SEE site before, and I chose from a list of SEE’s more “popular” courses: Oussama Khatib’s Artificial Intelligence | Introduction to Robotics. Scrolling through the first page I found a link to “Download Zipped Course Materials”. The ZIP file did not have an IMS manifest, which is a minor disappointment, but it was a self-contained web site with hyperlinks back to media files served only on the SEE web site.

I took a look at the media files found under Lectures, provided as streaming video as well as the following formats: YouTube, iTunes, Vyew (which actually facilitates compiling and downloading the videos), WMV Torrent, and MP4 Torrent.

Note that many of these videos aren’t actually stored on the SEE web site, and yet they haven’t sacrificed reuse/remix by not making MP4/WMV formats available. Instead they made a brilliant choice: Torrent to facilitate and distribute the server load of these videos. (Based on the speed of delivery of the YouTube version I highly recommend downloading the files, which facilitates localized reuse and remix.)

Open Yale Courses

Reuse/Remix Estimate: 3.5 – Easy. Fair captured content, delivered for reuse, easy to extract as a package, but some remix limitations from license.
License: CC By-NC-SA
Media Types: HTML, XML, MP3, FLV, MOV, PDF, (IMS ZIP)
Though I’d visited Open Yale Courses before I hadn’t deeply investigated the media or packages. My impression was that this project’s results are very much like MIT OCW–a “Polaroid” version of the on-ground class. I checked out a couple of courses before settling on the featured course and favorite author ENGL 220 Milton.

Milton, like the other Open Yale Courses I checked out, is primarily a collection of media files with some PDF notes. Though no feeds are available, all media files are listed under Downloads, making it simple to grab all the MP3s or MOVs at once with a Firefox add-on like FlashGot or Down Them All. The rest of the course is available as a downloadable ZIP files featuring HTML and media structured by an IMS manifest. Hyperlinks to audio files point to the Yale server, but I expect some search and replace can link them to the local copy I just finished downloading.

Rice Connexions

This OER project’s site is similar in many ways to the UK Open University’s LabSpace, providing not only packaged content but also resources and tools to facilitate reuse, remixing, and republishing of OER. “Feel free,” the candy store clerk says, “to help yourself. Take some for your friends. Do you want to help me make taffy?”

I first stumbled on Places in Egypt, but became moderately uneasy when I was whisked away to a separate, domained web site called Travelers in the Middle East Archive. This was not quite what I’d expected, but I explored and discovered CC-licensed photos, illustrations, and enhanced images, as well as several e-texts, for instance The Nile : notes for travellers in Egypt in both HTML and XML. Connexions is far deeper than I had fathomed.

Going back to Connexions I next browsed by subjects, into Arts, and found Musical Travels for Children, which used an e-text with images of sheet music and MIDIs(!) within the Connexions standard framework. Musical Travels also presented the text as a PDF and as a ZIP “multimedia” package–very useful for local reuse/remix.

I took a moment to learn about Connexion’s homegrown XML schema, CNXML, a semantic markup language “for education” parsed (probably on the backend) to produce content, similar, I’m hypothesizing, to the way the UK Open University’s OpenLearn project is stored and generated. Connexions provides several tutorials on writing and using CNXML, though it’s not immediately clear how this is useful to the general-use public. (is CNXML usage required for user contributed uploads?)

As I headed back to check a third OER on Connexions, I noticed a hyperlink to the metadata for each resource, which cued me into their unique search system. I used that search system this time, and came across a number of interesting “modules”–short, tutorial- or lecture-like OERs that are typically HTML or PDF with hyperlinks to other subjects on connexions. In some instances I could not immediately determine where one module began and another ended. One can add modules to a “lens”, but it’s not apparent whether or not one can then download a “package” based on lenses.

Intrigued by the Connexions search engine’s options, I next searched based on popularity, and found music OER at the top of the list, though I could not immediately determine how that metadata was stored, or if there was public access to any of it.

Though the media use may vary from OER to OER, and the diverse organizational structures and interfaces may inhibit reuse for novices, the markup and accessibility of the content allow for great potential reuses, and the Connexions system is bolstered by the potential impact of the fostered user input and folksonomies that may result.

Having some experience examining both projects prior to this review, I brought in the following generalized opinions:

• MIT: broad, but shallow -many courses with marginal amount of content and activities
• OLI: deep, but narrow – few courses with significant content and activities constructed for learning

The motivation for these directions seems clear: MIT OCW seeks to reinforce itself by providing semi-useful, translucent access to content from each and every existing course. OLI seeks to define itself as a provider of in-depth, quality, online learning experiences. UNESCO’s OER Wiki describes the two projects as follows:

• OLI “adds instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence”
• MIT’s OCWs “convey the parameters of the course’s subject matter and pedagogy, ideally representing a substantially complete set of all the materials used in the course”

MIT’s French 1

French 1 from MIT OCW is comprised primarily of a syllabus, calendar, readings list, and assignments list based on the textbook Parallèles–a textbook that the syllabus almost fails to mention. the navigation is find and click, but simple enough to learn and use.

The syllabus reflects the fact that this is an existing course that has been “photocopied” for the MIT OCW project–instructions and expectations are restricted to registered students. For instance, it references the MIT Language Learning and Resource Center — a resource unavailable to distance students.

The course site provides PDFs of instructions for in-class activities. Otherwise assignments simply walk learner through textbook activities. Online resources are tacked on to the end almost decontextualized from real learning patterns.

As I opened separate pages for the materials, I wondered, why not combine assignments with readings into calendar as one big course guide? There seems to be no usability rationale for current architecture, except that it fits a single MIT OCW template.

You can download (presumably all) course materials; each index page of PDFs or other content features the CC By-NC-SA license.

OLI’s Elementary French 1 Online

OLI’s French 1 course’s subtitle, “Open and Free: Jan – Jun 09″, immediately reinforces OLI’s assertion that these are full courses to be taught by instructors, or taken by students. The content confirms that this is a complete online learning experience: the structure provides enhanced linear navigation using a combination of tabs and in-page hyperlinks. I found the navigation is somewhat similar to Moodle‘s and I wondered if it may have been based on this LMS originally. Aside from a couple broken links, the content itself seems to be fully-fleshed out learning materials, richly media-enhanced with no textbook needed. The content pages include text, images, and video with inline Flash-based q&a activities for self-learning.

Like the MIT course, OLI’s French 1 included a number of external online learning resources, however these came in context at the beginning of the course, and thus I was more inclined to click on several to investigate how they might enhance what was to come.

There does not seem to be a way to easily download all course materials at once, though they are clearly marked CC By-NC-SA on each page. This brought me to a question re. the Flash files: if I download the SWFs and crack them, essentially converting them to FLAs, is that acceptable use under the applied CC By-NC-SA license? Presumably yes, as the source code is inseparable from the finished product.

MIT’s Logic 1

MIT OCW’s Logic 1 course utilizes a web site architecture that is very similar to French 1, ensuring that user learnability of the web system is high. In addition to the basics of syllabus, calendar, and readings this course provides PDFs of lecture notes, which provide surprisingly good, text-book like information and examples. Indeed, I read through several of these and got at least the “feel” for the course.

OLI’s Logic and Proofs

As a user trained to recognize shifts in my scent of information, the first thing I noticed in Logic and Proofs is that this course site’s navigation system was inconsistent with the French 1 navigation system. This is not to say that the alternative navigation is illogical, only that the change hurts my head.

This course features introductory movies that orient the learners to the subject, with a media-enhanced transcript for alternate learning styles. A note on my personal preference: for a subject like this, I prefer text with images over video.

The main content of the course is primarily text, but notably enhanced with relevant learning comprehension and self-assessment questions that open in new window (they didn’t in French) with a separate look. Because of this, Logic seems to be quilted together from 2 different systems.

I have to say that symbolic logic has always captivated me, and while the MIT OCW Logic course intrigued me, the completeness and linearity of the content in the OLI course kept me interested and engaged. As I was indulging in one activity I thought, “I should be getting college credit for this!” Upon investigating this impulse I found that not only does OLI provide instructions for instructors and learners, it provides a means by which students can use the OLI web site to receive credit through their home institution. Talk about mashing up your education. Brilliant!

MIT’s Paradox and Infinity

Similar structure to previous MIT OCW courses–enough so that I see a very predictable pattern here. Readings refer to a standard textbook and (usually “closed”–few available online) articles, as well as problem sets — PDF available for self-challenge (however, notably absent is any electronically mediated method of receiving feedback–automated, community-based, or otherwise).

Interestingly, the course site provides hyperlinks to (discounted) purchase via Amazon.com; does MIT get a cut as a way to offset production costs?

OLI’s Physics With the Andes Workbench

OLI Physics features similar navigation and structure to Logic 1, which is unfortunate as I believe OLI’s French 1 had the most modern and intuitive nav system so far. This OLI course is highly activity-based; lesson information (primarily text, but some video) is immediately taken up into “Learn by Doing” activities use Andes tutor software, available for download and installation on Windows (I couldn’t get it running on Ubuntu through WINE).

Again, I found elements of other OLI courses: complete content, linear construction, self-learning activities and assessments. I am not overstating my impression when for a fleeting moment I thought about quitting my job and returning to student life; I am envious of this and future generation of students who can make their own schedules with flexibility provided by the Internet, and I regret to admit I probably got away with a lot simply by exchanging seat time for credit. If personal responsibility is adhered to, the accountability and outcomes of online learning may be higher, and achieved more efficiently.

Aircraft Systems Engineering

MIT OCW’s Aircraft Systems Engineering course site follows the structural pattern of the other MIT OCW courses (syllabus, calendar, readings, etc), with one notable enhancement: video of class lectures. Listed under lecture notes, the video components make this the most compelling MIT OCW course reviewed so far. Fairly rough Real Media video of in-class guest lectures by experts in the field are provided with PDFs of lecture slides, and MP3s. On Ubuntu I couldn’t locate the RM codec I needed to view the video, but did give the audio files a listen, and these were high enough quality to download and bring on bus rides or road trips. Combined with the slides this makes an interesting, remixable OER.

Prior to embarking on this particular task I had generalized these two OCW projects as being about shallow breadth (MIT OCW) or narrow depth (OLI). My reviews supported this earlier generalization if the primary quality objective is prêt-à-porter OER. With respect to learner value I considered an additional analogy: these 3 MIT OCW are like Polaroid snapshots of authentic MIT courses, scanned in and uploaded to bear the MIT brand; these 3 Carnegie Mellon OLI are more akin to planned, staged, shot, enhanced, and sequenced for online learning, and specifically created to define the OLI project (not the other way around).

So what is the open education movement, and what defines it? The closest thing to an open education manifesto may be the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (September 2007), a product of a convening of the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. It states that open education “is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.” It implicitly seeks to free education from copyright constraints, and its rhetoric echoes the argument that education is a right, not a privilege, recalling the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, in Article 26.1, states, “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. … Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit” (my emphases). It should be no surprise, then, that the open educational resources movement is credited as having been born of UNESCO in it’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education. Though both the UNESCO forum and Cape Town declaration were preceded by others’ efforts to open content, knowledge, and courseware, these two documents provide the fundamentals of a definition of open education.

What may be surprising is how long it took UNESCO to get around to promoting the idea of open educational resources, but that can be attributed to the lack of technology by which information can be easily published, reproduced, and accessed by consumers from around the world–it’s clear that the Internet provides the key solution here, though it’s less clear what role evolving cultural attitudes, particularly in the west, to “free” or “open” products or content may have played.

On the first day of Dr. David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education course he answered a student’s question about the challenges that now face open education as including, first and foremost, sustainability. I have on a few occasions suggested that as we continue to move from the “traditional” classroom with chalk and photocopies to “hybird” and even fully online classrooms, the opportunities for publishing open educational resources will expand, and engaging in open education will be facilitated. In fact, not only can the practice of open education become a part of the normal process of creating and publishing educational resources, I believe it must for two reasons: first, I don’t believe open education will ever be widely adopted if it is reliant on millions of dollars in grant moneys (though those grant moneys were clearly important for kick-starting the open education movement, as demonstrated by the pioneering work of MIT OpenCourseWare, USU OpenCourseWare, et c.). Second, if the open education movement is not owned by the day-to-day practicing educators, instructional technologists, and designers, if its banner is not carried by both students and teacher, I believe it has a hard chance of sticking. Brian Lamb, recently spun off a blog post in which he voices his grassrooty motivation, and, spinning off of an article by fellow Canadian Michael Geist, suggests that the key problem is lack of leadership, not funding.

I agree that much of the work of perpetuating and enlarging the open education movement must and will come from the “grassroots”, and it can be a natural step in the digitization and technological enhancement of education that I have had the joy of being involved in for nearly a dozen years. Hook them gradually. Use freely available OER as a gateway drug. Use blogs and wikis and the power of the reputation economy to develop the drive. Through small steps we might take the learning materials and activities that are masked behind the opaque walls of the classroom into a translucent, and sometimes transparent setting of the public internet.

P.S.
(It’s possible that open education may be moved forward not first by educators, but first by administrators; to this end so far we’ve seen institutions use the carrot of financial compensation; I wonder what might happen if they chose to use a stick instead. At my institution, Utah Valley University, most of the content that would be considered for open educational resources is already owned by the institution, as it was produced under work-for-hire or with significant enough institutional resources to justify ownership. UVU could very well say, “We are doing OER, we are going to publish these faculty-created materials, and you can pound sand if you don’t like it.” If any of you know of institutions who have taken this approach–especially if you work at such an institution–let me know.)

The course is IPT 692R: Intro to Open Education, and Dave has structured the activities in homage to World of Warcraft; for example, each student will be required to select a class to identify the direction of their coursework, and our guild will embark on a series of quests both individually and collaboratively as we seek to level-up.

As I work through the course requirements (er, quests) I’ll be posting my outcomes and reflections here on Flexknowlogy–for the convenience of Dr. Wiley and my classmates I’ll be categorizing them under “IPT692R”. And for the benefit of everyone else, I will aim my writing at providing a context and message in line with my regular postings.

I’m not the only person who will be sitting in on this course: numerous attendees from around the world will be joining in at a distance.

Some notes from the first session:

1. Several students said they “want to change the world”. Dave suggested that one goal for the course is to “be able to say that with a straight face“.
2. I asked myself if there is a CC license post plug-in for WP. Looks like WPLicense may be the best. I’ll try it out tonight. Matthew Tabor just informed me that Per Post CC License is more in line with my needs.
3. GNU is a recursive acronym, like PHP and LAME. I note this only because now I have the right vocabulary for a long-standing geek naming tradition.
4. The “magic” of the Internet is resources are nonrivalrous: Make one and any number of people can access it.
5. Dave used a photo of one of my geek heros web standards guru Tantek Çelik. Is he involved in the open content movement?
6. Sure, we know all about Creative Commons licenses, but I hadn’t heard of CC0 (“C-C zero”) or CC+ (“C-C plus”) before. CC0 will allow for creators to give up as many rights as they can. CC+ sounds like the opposite–a Creative Commons license plus additional custom restrictions.
7. NC is predictably popular amongst producers.
8. Do we have any data as to how substantively useful SA is to users/consumers? Are there measurements of the demand for reusability?
9. While CC By is the least restrictive, some copyleft folk argue that CC By-SA is the most “free” license for philosophical reasons (i.e. it preserves “freeness” in perpetuity; restrictions aren’t mutually exclusive from freedom.)
10. I enjoyed a good lecture.
11. Three greatest challenges to OER/OCW in near future: Sustainability, Incentives, Licenses
12. Re. sustainability , universities have to say, “Look how much we can save money. Look how much we can improve on-campus education.”
13. I’ve talked about potential sustainability of the UVU OER model, but I had some more ideas:
    • We can make the tools part of the system. (e.g. use technology that can be opened up)
    • We can make publishing part of the process. (e.g. convince Distance Education or campus IT to adopt OER/OCW as part of it’s mission)
    • First encourage translucent education among faculty so it’s easy to encourage open education later (e.g. real blogs, real wikis).
14. Dave suggested that people still make money even after they’ve published an “open” version of a work because some consumers will still choose to buy the work. My question is how much of that is due to consumer ignorance vs. consumer preference?
15. My note: Copyright is the de facto license for any work in the USA. There is no legal question about it. Open licenses modify or replace the default copyright.

I can’t make this post without reflecting on a myriad of others who have written on (and, more importantly, engaged in) openness, but most prominent on my mind today is Scott Leslie‘s recent post, Planning to Share Versus Just Sharing, in which he pulls the curtain on institutional decisions to share. While Scott notes his intention was not to address OER projects, the points he hits on resonated strongly with our open project. In the comments Jim Groom calls out “the inanity and paralysis that pervades the whole conversation around sharing at an institutional level”, and I must concede the past three years of slowing and intermittently petitioning administration to let us license stuff under Creative Commons has been paralyzing and inane indeed. Chris Lott notes, “It’s easy to overlook how much easier planning and getting read and getting ready to get ready are than actually doing anything.” So true. And now there should be no more excuses for UVU.

The most important part of this announcement is not that UVU will be engaging in opencourseware, nor even that we can officially join the OpenCourseWare Consortium (though we intended to do so, and soon!)—the key for me is having the chance to explore and articulate a vision for openness at UVU, and how we might proceed in a way that contributes uniquely and with impact.

Scott argues that a problem with institutionally-guided sharing is “they [the planners/sharers] didn’t actually know what the compelling need was, it just sounded like a good idea at the time.” In our case the “need” has driven me from the beginning. Instead of just saying, “Hey, OCW is cool and the OCWC has a lot of big names (not to mention the press coverage!)” I had to understand why anyone in the world would care that Utah Valley University, a former trade college, would be sharing it’s course content, activities, and educational materials.

Really, with so many bigger, better funded, and more reputable institutions out there doing this, what’s the point?

The answer: Because we are a trade college. Because we have a vocational history. Because we have dozens of expert faculty in vocations and trades, and skilled students preparing to excel in their fields.

Because learning materials in the vocations and trades have the greatest potential for impacting in a positive way the opencourseware audience that everyone talks about but very few reach: the people who can’t afford to go to college, but desperately need the education to survive. The people who need to kick-start a new career to improve their lives. The people who have intrinsic motivation to learn something new from the ground up. Am I being idealistic? Perhaps, but I maintain my idealism is better than PR/marketing-oriented cynicism. UVU Open may encourage students to attend, but hopefully by sparking enthusiasm with our materials, not through bylines in The Chronicle.

So to me it is of critical importance that UVU Open encourage sharing and opening of learning materials from the trades and vocational departments as a priority. If we put any money into content development or publishing it should be focused there, and it should aim at complete learning content published in sequence.

Now UVU is not just a vocational/trade school (though I daresay there is more than one administrator who would like to de-emphasize that fact now that we are a university); most of our programs are in the liberal arts and sciences, and I know faculty in those areas will be interested in sharing what they are doing, too. Because we have only recently become a university, I know we have a lot of faculty who are seasoned and enthusiastic teachers, not researchers, and that may make them more likely to share what they do best. So our approach has to facilitate these folks as well, and keep the process as unencumbered as possible. To this end, the process we have proposed neglects the OCW/OER labels, and focuses on re-licensing of UVU-owned (“work-for-hire”) content under a Creative Commons license. At this point it’s a single form, and once it’s been signed by UVU administration the faculty member will be free to publish the content under any medium available.

Speaking of publishing media, because we’ve never solicited grant dollars for endeavor, we’ve always known we would have to do openness on the cheap. In fact we have a designated budget of zero. This is not a drawback; rather, this fit perfectly with our intention of putting the power of openness into the hands of the authoring faculty, not in the workflows of a committee or team. Openness and sharing should be an integral part of the authoring/publishing process, not an ancillary process. In order to do this our technical solutions would have to be inexpensive to implement, inexpensive to maintain, and easy to use. Some options:

• The technical publishing plan has included using Moodle as an OER/OCW-publishing platform. If you teach on Moodle, you can publish your stuff on Moodle. Simple as that.
• We now have a (pilot-phase) campus wiki, called WikiLearn. It’s open to faculty and the students they teach, and is organized by department or academic discipline. This will be a place faculty can go to author content, and, surprise! it’s open to the public, too.
• For a number of years campus IT has hosted a basic Web server on research.uvu.edu, and folks using that will simply want to indicate the CC-status of any open content published there.
• I plan to work toward the implementation of a campus blog service as well, inspired in part by my own joy in blogging and Jim Groom’s work on UMW’s WordPress MU system. This platform is importantly different from a wiki but still naturally open and conducive to sharing, and will give faculty (and students?) a place that they feel they have ownership of.

So that’s the news. There’s still a lot of work to be done before UVU Open is worth checking out; not all of the dominoes that we’ve set in place are still standing, but with the power to tip the first one we are in an exciting place.

Tonight I’ve released the first all-new version of the OpenShare modification for Moodle 1.9, which I demonstrated last week at OpenEd 2008.

You may view OpenShare documentation or simply download the OpenShare mod now.

Overview of OpenShare

OpenShare turns Moodle into a veritable open educational resources (OER) or opencourseware (OCW) platform by allowing instructors or designers to mark all or part of their Moodle courses as open (public) or closed (enrolled students and teachers only). The open/closed status of any module applies to Moodle’s anonymous Guest role, but OpenShare goes further, adding an Open Learner role that can actually interact and complete open activities such as quizzes. This feature provides a means by which a fully online distance education or independent study course in Moodle can be released as a self-directed informal-social learning environment for the general public, something not provided by typical opencourseware.

License, Open, or Close Resources & Activities

Though based on our old Open Mod for OER, I have renamed this version and reset the numbering because the scripting is 100% new and based on new logic. I owe a lot of thanks to Mike Franks, Jovca, and Eric Bollens of UCLA for explaining their own Public/Private modification to me, and setting me in the right direction with respect to Groupings.

Further, this version of the mod is a Moodle block that requires no modification of core Moodle code. I do, however, have two add-ons to the block that provide advanced usability of the mod. These will be available soon on the OpenShare page.

An optional modification allows for OpenShare changes on the fly.

There are several exciting applications of the OpenShare mod:

• open all or part of live Moodle courses during the semester(s) they are offered; students do not mingle with public unless you so desire
• duplicate complete or self-contained Moodle courses and open them up for public self-enrollment
• duplicate a live Moodle server with courses intact and serve those courses with self-enrollment

One of the most significant advantages of this mod is that it provides an alternative to redundant OER/OCW publishing platforms, and diminishes the need for dedicated OER/OCW staff by putting the power to control the license and release of resources and activities in the hands of the course creators.

From informal conversations and feedback I recognize that the next step is to tackle the problem of getting OER out of Moodle so it is interoperable.

For more info see my OpenShare documentation & download page.

Presentation slides are now available and you are welcome to participate in the backchannel through the chat window provided below.

Presentation Slides

openmod.ppt

Web Sites Referenced

• OpenCourseWare Consortium
• Open Educational Resources Commons
• David Wiley’s OpenContent Wiki
• David Wiley’s OpenContent blog
• Utah Open High School
• Creative Commons licenses
• MIT’s “Making the Case for OCW”
• Why a Reputation Economy?
• UK’s Open University LearningSpace
• OpenContentDIY
• Leigh Blackall’s slide on Another Way

P.S. After my presentation was over, I came back to my hotel to find this bus in the parking lot. It’s nothing less than a sign for a questioning open education convert.

Of course, prior to the conference Ken and I will have to work pretty aggressively with Clark Nielsen and John Krutsch to ensure that the mod’s features and functionalities are stable and presentable.