• Reuse – verbatim (easy)
• Redistribute – share (fairly easy)
• Revise – derivatives (harder)
• Remix – combinations

Open is a continuum; “Things can be more or less open, like a door.” Watch for 2R vs 4R OER. 2R is waaay better than nothing, but 4R (should be) far superior still. E.g. open Access movement (free access to peer-reviewed articles). Paraphrasing Wayne Mackintosh: “I’d rather have an #@$!? open resource over a great proprietary resource because I can fix the #@$!? resource.”

Media issues outside of licenses (SLAM):

1. Meaningfully editable? (e.g. HTML vs. JPG/PDF of notes or printed text)
2. Self-sourced? Ready-to-edit and ready-to-use? (e.g. HTML –> HTML vs. fla –> swf )
3. Access to editing tools? (e.g. HTML vs. MS OneNote)
4. Level of expertise? (e.g. DOC/ODT doc vs. 3D model, Flash quiz)

If you’re not paying attention, an open-licensed OER may still be “closed” for all intents and purposes, because of the 4 Rs.

OCW Examples:

• MIT Simplicity Theory. Clearly handwriting on lined binder notes, scanned in.
• MIT Mathematics. Powerpoint and LaTeX source files are available upon permission.
• MIT Linear algebra. Video, transcripts, downloads in different formats, YouTube.
• OLI Predicting college success. Course has Flash-based quizzes and diagrams.

Context suggests meaning. E.g. Airplane: Q. “Surely you’re joking.” A. “I’m not, and don’t call me Shirley.” and Police Squad: Q. “Cigarette?” A. “Yes, I know.”

Putting things in time or place suggests more meanings. (e.g. Obama, Obama by Lincoln, Obama by bin Laden, Obama flanked by two black athletes). The more things are put together, the more we specify intended meaning.

We can usually tell when things don’t fit the context.

Size of a resource is a function of the context inside the OER.

David’s reusability paradox. An OER/LO teaches effectively vs easy to reuse. (JMS: this plays into what I recall of George Siemens’s work, especially re. connectivity. Will teaching invest in helping students make connections, creating or finding context. Does the (immediate) future of networked information culture require that users be able if not deft at finding connections and making context or meaningful connections between disparate pieces of information? Will technology soon be able to facilitate connecting or providing context for an individual resource? Would “new” ideas of information fluency allow students to adapt to the deficits of high reusability? For instance, scanning and ignoring non-critical information?)

MIT structured content like course so context is apparent, but you can take the context apart. The structure is an aid for helping you find and use individual components. Course as (full of) disposable content. (JMS: Another good perspective on my recent conflicts with textbook publisher e-packs.)

Collections — a collection of marbles doesn’t exist in a strict sequence, but a string of pearls does.

Referenced today’s article in Chronicle on “courseocentrism”. What can we do with “courses” that we have been too limited to do? 2R “open” resources have been accused of being a “Trojan horse”, as evidence of hedgemony of the West, of cultural imperialism. (JMS: Whatever.)

Dr. Wiley introduced this segment with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral:

The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Motivations are fluid (Important to admit). (JMS: How are they tied to benefits and incentives? I think this is how motivations change, especially as sustainability rears its head.)

(JMS: I spotted a copy of “The Social Life of Information” on John Hilton’s desk. Bumping it up on my “to read” list.)

Four Case Studies for Motivations in Open Education

1. Learning Objects

   LOs are “any digital resources that can mediate learning” described by “scope and sequence” (size and ordering/structure) and analogized by pearls on a string. Problem of mashing up or changing LOs; reuse : if (c) this means “as is”. But adaptability is critical — (c) is the culprit(?) in restricting adapt/remix. In the world of universal (c) gaining permission to use product is too hard/too expensive. So folks give up, or break the law, (JMS: or make your own).

   Ted Nelson as the “godfather of learning objects” — “how about … micropayment system”? (since mid 60s) e.g. Xanadu
   DRM is too hard and too expensive (JMS: and unpopular re. changing culture of medium consumption/participation). based on the (inhibitive idea), “If you can’t protect you can’t collect” (i.e. $ is the only incentive[?])

   LO + “freely adaptable” = OERs

   (JMS: Why is Hippocampus sometimes referred to in the same breath as open educational resources?)

   (JMS: this revisits the classic Web conceptualization of content vs. presentation vs. behavior.

2. MIT OCW

   Q: “How do we remain ‘MIT’?” (i.e. preserve reputation and advanced [brand] placement in the world).

   A: “Give it away!” — but “giving” is not the same as “lending”, just as McGill et al note that “sharing” is not the same as “exchanging”.

   “…knowledge as a public good for the benefit of all … [MIT] can make a difference” (? MIT President ? someone help me out here)

3. Missing Title

   72M kids don’t attend school. “Today [2007] there are over 30M who are fully qualified to enter a university.” Sir John Daniel.

   (JMS: Beware Article 26.1′s “education should be compulsory” for it may easily trample on the rights and liberty of the individual. In the USA I don’t think that “opportunites” as opposed to “obligations” to obtain an education in the first half of our nations’ history has been detrimental to our society. It is clear that contemporary government education programs view it’s obligation as that of socializing students as a part of education. But top-down socializing may not fit the beliefs or ideals of the family, and the family, not the federal government, is the critical social unit in society. Fortunately Article 26.3 “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”)

4. LDS Church

   “Come unto me all ye ends of the earth, buy milk and honey, without money and without price.” (Isa. 55:1). Motivation 4 is to lift up (and prepare to receive the gospel).

   “Gospel methodologies, concepts…”

   Hope for motivations of charity and love.

Discussion

Brand as a proxy for quality. (JMS: Also, increasing brand visibility shores up conversion rates, especially for “unknown” institutions. Also, brand is a way of maintaining attribution–a way of maintaining ego.)

Seth (basically) asks, how is OCW valuable to the institution by itself, especially in competition with Bb hosting?

Short answer: get rid of Bb. Longer answer (adapted from list collaboratively authored on the whiteboard):</P

• Transparency (e.g. world can see some of class content out.
• Accessibility (e.g. Blackboard is not accessible on mobile devices, and is cumbersome, and is slow to load)
• Academic advising becomes more accurate (may lower drop rate), cheaper (self-service).
• Provides landing points for post course review.
• If wiki-ish, collaborative authoring of content (amongst faculty peers, or amongst instructor and students).
• Better course materials built more efficiently when based upon past curriculum.
• Reusability at a more modular level within the institution: Blackboard templates still don’t work. But OCW as a template does
• Cognitive apprenticeship possible when faculty collaborate in view.

The 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration more specifically harkens back to the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“Everyone has the right to education.” Article 26.1), declaring a shared goal…

[to create] a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

This has been interpreted by a number of major educational institutes to motivate providing their educational resources to poor or disadvantaged peoples, especially in the third-world. A current example is Rice University’s Connexions program, which publishes resources for K-12 target audiences in Africa.

In a word, the primary motivation is philanthropic.

But it’s also clear that there are strategic motivations as well, the most prominent being tied to the changing information culture, driven by the accessibility of the Internet. In Good intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials Lou McGill, Sarah Currier, Charles Duncan, and Peter Douglas note, “The rise of social networking tools, such as flickr, Facebook and blogs has caused a revolution in approach for both individuals and institutions as they have begun to embrace a more open approach to sharing information, practice and resources”(8). In David Wiley puts it to the US Secretary of Education, “With significant changes occurring in its societal context and participant base, higher education must innovate in teaching and learning, as well as other areas, to hope to
remain relevant.” (4)

This is echoed in the UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education produced Final report of the discussion on Free and Open Source Software
(FOSS) for Open Educational Resources, in which it describes a desire to do for education what FOSS has done for software: “FOSS and OER share a common conviction that access to resources, whether software code or learning materials, should be free and open for use, modification and sharing” (1; my emphases).

The implication of this statement highlights additional motivations: accesibility and (perhaps more importantly) cost-savings, both to the end-user and the educational institute.

Another motivation, though more subtle, is to improve the quality of an institution’s educational products and pedagogy. David Wiley notes, open education “exposes teaching to the quality-increasing pressures of peer review.”

In summary motivations for open education can be described as:

• Philanthropic: Sharing and providing education to people all over the world, with special attention to those in third-world countries or without access to high-quality local education.
• Strategic: Adapting educational practices to the changing world culture may increase viability of educational institutions. (Additional motivations exist here as well, but are perhaps more subtle or less overarching).
• Pedagogic: The act of sharing may increase attention to quality; the act of adapting or remixing may increase quality; the utlization of new technologies may enhance educational engagement amongst learners.
• Economic: Cost-savings to the institution by digitally archiving their own materials, and then sharing and reusing within the institution and amongst peers.

Later this week I’ll look at how these motivations are realized through the “open education” efforts of several institutions/organizations.

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.)

Brief Background History of Open Education

While interest and movements toward ideals of “open education” predate the Internet, the modern open education (or, perhaps more specifically, the open educational resources) movement was born of several simultaneously developing initiatives that coincided with the popularization of the Internet, and especially the World WIde Web. The rapid development of informational resources publicly on the Internet led to conflict between copyright holders and consumers. To accommodate demand, commercial software led to shareware, which led to freeware. Most of these energies gathered around software in the mid to late 1990s, but at the same time many online users published and consumed copyright materials outside the law, further demonstrating the demand for what Lawrence Lessig would come to describe as Free Culture movement. and soon an “free culture” movement began to develop.

And while debates over use and meanings and benefits of the terms “free” versus “open” ensued, the idea of “open content” emerged through the thinking and efforts of David Wiley, who founded the Open Content Project which after some interations eventually bore the Open Publication License in 1999, the clear precursor of Creative Commons licenses in 2002, the same year UNESCO conducted it’s Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education.

Though the birth of open education is popularly ascribed to the UNESCO Forum as early as 1999 MIT was discussing the idea of releasing content on the internet, and in 2001 the Mellon and Hewlett foundations announced $11 million in grant funding for MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. and followed with the release of 50 open courses. It is tempting to generalize all the institutions that have followed MIT’s trailblazing example, and even joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium, as proponents of open education, but that may not always be the case, and we must not make the mistake of equating the two. “Open education” as a movement can not be made synonymous with other “open content” or even “open educational” efforts”, for it is possible that proponents of the OCW project or publishers of OER in fact conflict with the broad stated goals of the Cape Town Declaration or the UNESCO statement. I’ll look at this later when I seek to exam case studies of organizational motivations for engaging in open education or related efforts.

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.