<!–

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.

Problem of Sustainability

The success of early OER projects such as MIT OCW rely in part on funding, some of it massive. For example, MIT OCW began with grants totaling $11 million, contributed in equal amounts by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and committed $1 million of its own funds during the first two years of the project. Yet such grants may be drying up (ref needed), regardless increasing interest and participation in OER projects will heighten competition for and further limit availability of such funds. On their own few public institutions could be expected to come up with that money, and currently many US institutions, particularly state institutions, are facing budget cuts that threaten to limit, decrease, or prevent local OER projects.

The OER Handbook describes the problem of sustainability in context of successful open source software projects:

In open source software projects, money is raised by soliciting donations, selling manuals, training, software development and providing technical support. While some of these methods can be applied to OER, some can not, and some funding methods remain largely untested. Few of the well-known OER projects exhibit the same vibrant communities of contributors that well-known open source software projects have. This issue is one of the most serious the OER community faces.

Though others have found fault with it I was encouraged by the Cape Town Declaration’s suggestion that the open education movement “[has] the opportunity to engage entrepreneurs and publishers who are developing innovative open business models.” Further, some may disagree and even convulse with the idea of linking OER projects with commercial ventures, even as a means of providing sustainability. As a strong-minded capitalist, I do not. Rather, I look forward to working examples of such innovative business models (e.g. Flat World Knowledge), and anticipate innovative adaptation to what I believe is a fundamental shifting of the (sometimes conflicting, often confusing) relationship between creator/consumer/copyright holder.
However, as the OER Handbook describes, such approaches remain largely untested.

Mainstreaming Openness

At UVU I’ve maintained the mindset that long-term success of OER will depend upon mainstreaming it, integrating the mentality of authoring for OER and the activity of publishing as OER into the normal course development and teaching processes. In taking this position I merely echo what others have said, e.g. David Wiley, as in On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resources (2006), Stephen Downes, as in Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources (2007), and Andy Lane, as in Sustaining OERs: a brief and provocative road map (2008), albeit from my own perspective of being in an institution interested in OER projects, but with no explicit funding for it.

For distance learning programs the goal of integrating OER activities is most feasible. Quality digital content production is part of the practice, and distance learning programs should already be auditing third-party copyright materials. Another approach could be to set a goal of zero third-party copyright content from the course design phase onward, ensuring that no new course includes copyright content. UVU we have played with hosting course content on a public server (called “Shadow Files”) and “mixing” it with copyright content and “private” course activities via the learning management system (LMS). Further, the LMS may be used as the OER publishing platform itself, technology provided (as I’ve prototyped on Moodle with the OpenShare block). However, in such a case the ability to release just parts of the course as OER is necessary, and most LMSs are void of such features.

OER investments may interweave with distance learning initiatives in other ways as well. Terri Bays, Dan Charchidi, Sunnie Kim in presentation Open Sharing, Local Payoff note, “OCW can complement a distance learning initiative, taking content from and directing learners toward an … e-learning curriculum”. It’s a two-way street: developing OER can result in distance learning; developing distance learnign can result in OER.

Additionally, many of the same justifications for distance learning as a cost-reducing and education-enhancing vehicle apply to OER. Mark Pesce notes, “Recording is cheap, lecturers are expensive, and students are forgetful.” Capturing teaching materials in a digital form has perhaps the highest potential for institutional ROI. Reuse reduces redundancy: capturing allows reuse, and access to reusable materials has the potential to dramatically reduce redundancy, diminish the cost of lecturing both in the expenditure of dollars and time, and improve student learning. Stephen Downes argues that “non-economic definitions of ‘sustainable’ should not be dismissed lightly”. He mentions that different organizations will have different objectives for practicing distance learning, and some are not cost-saving. Indeed, OER provide a potential means of relieving faculty lecture time for other teaching activities, such as actually interacting with students and providing more feedback.

Brainstorming Institutional Changes Towards Openness

I’ve collected the following ideas on how to successfully mainstream and integrate OER across the institution. Many of these are based on the practices of other institutions, and conversations with colleagues and the OER community. These ideas are based on the need to grow positive attitudes toward OER support across the institution, and the fact that different institutional staff may require different arguments to catalyze support (here especially I welcome feedback, altertions, or additional ideas from the community).

• IT should be encouraged to work with OER advocates to find streamlined technology solutions for publishing OER, and then budget for maintenance of these solutions.
• IT may need proof that OER will either not overload hardware, or be worth the increased load. Also, discussions on whether or not OER may increase susceptibility to malicious attacks.
• Administration may need evidence that OER does not diminish profitability or marketability of institutionally-own content, and in fact may provide satisfactory ROI through PR, student retention, quality improvement, international competitiveness, adaptation to changing cultural and educational paradigms, etc.
• Student services and advisement may need education and training on the potential value to students of OER, and how to access and utilize OER in a manner similar to that in which they access and utilize course catalogs and descriptions
• PR should be educated on the goals, scope, and potential impact of institutional OER efforts that they might better.
  Faculty may need reassurance that the value of opening and sharing is competitive with the value of locking down and isolating learning materials.
• Faculty and technology support staff may need workflows and technology training to facilitate publication of OER.
• Finding, reusing, and remixing of OER should become just another faculty skill set, and trainings should be provided–similar to (now commonplace) trainings on use of word processors, e-mail, and the web.
• Everyone should be involved in discussions of the potential value and responsibility of using non-rivalrous resources to provide access to educational content to a new, broad international audience.

I believe OER can be mainstreamed and integrated into existing processes for course development and publishing, but the needs identified in this list above require organizing, supervising, supporting, and proselytizing. Institutions serious about engaging in open education would be well served by funding at least one full-time position, such as “OER Coordinator”, if not a small team. Such a position may be situated in context of campus IT, faculty development and training, or distance learning. Investment in such a position could cohere OER efforts and reduce waste, redundancy, poor planning, and, perhaps most significantly, mis- or failed communication. At the very least, an existing staff member should be appointed as OER coordinator, and responsibilities shifted or condensed to allow for these needs.

My experience with the OER community has shown me that the passion, reasoning, and ideas of individuals will fuel and maintain the global effort regardless–Andy Lane states that “the success of OERs is also dependent on a thriving and healthy OER movement”. But to foster the movement in the long-term it behooves us to focus on the immediate needs of local sustainability. Unlike purchasing computers or licensing an LMS, with OER we are not buying a solution, we are building a solution. In doing so we are investing in the people of the institution, and can obtain a new kind of ownership: a grassroots, shared ownership of the learning materials cultivated by access to and encouragement of open and shared learning resources.

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).

The following table is adapted from CreativeCommons.org:

Name	Characteristics
Version 3.0 Licenses:
Attribution
CC By. Usage requires citing, referencing of the creator/source. For OERs this is the most “open” license, in my opinion. Unlike Share Alike (see below), it does not mandate any particular license on subsequent adaptations or derivations.
Attribution-NoDerivs
CC By-ND. Usage additionally mandates that no derivative works or adaptations may be made. For OERs I think this is most applicable when a creator is concerned about losing the integrity of the original work if adaptaions, derivations, or remixes are made.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC By-NC-ND. Usage additionally mandates that no commercial use will be made of the work, whatever that means. This is for paranoid creators of OERs, or those who legitimately want to protect the integrity of their work..
Attribution-NonCommercial
CC By-NC. See above. I think this is an underused license in OERs, as it stipulates non-commercial usage but doesn’t limit adaptations to using the same license.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC By-NC-SA. Usage additionally requires that any derivatives, remixes, or adaptation of the work be licensed under the same Creative Commons license. This seems to be the most common CC license for OERs, as it stipulates that all uses are non-commercial, presumably “for educational purposes only”, and preserves the open-ness of the work and any and all future derivatives.
Attribution-ShareAlike
CC By-SA. See above. This is a common CC license for OER where the creator wants to forever preserve the open-ness of the work and all derivatives.

Additionally, there are two notable licenses in draft on the Creative Commons wiki:

Creative Commons Zero (CC0)

According to Creative Commons, Creative Commons Zero (or CC0)…

…is a protocol that enables people to WAIVE to the fullest extent possible under applicable copyright law all rights they have and associate with a work so it has no (or minimal) copyright or neighboring rights restrictions attached to it.

In the US we typically call such works “public domain”, but some writers (e.g. Terry Hancock in FreeSoftware Magazine) have noted that public domain is not a license at all, while CC0 will be.

Creative Commons Plus (CC+)

Creative Commons Plus (or, CC+) is simply an existing Creative Commons license plus “some other agreement which provides more permissions” or, perhaps, requirements. For example, Creative Commons refers to a commercial license “tailored for specific uses with specific names of copyright holders”.

Commentary: I like the idea of both of these additional licenses, as Creative Commons has made the idea of sharing works more accessible and understandable, but is not yet sufficiently encompassing for all uses. Plus and Zero seem to fill the gaps, and for open education might provide creators and institutions with flexibility while still conforming to the Creative Commons label in such a way that basic usage is more instantly understandable (without reading through paragraphs of legalese).

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.)