How do (students’ | faculty | staff) attitudes toward institutional learning and communication systems differ from attitudes toward informal learning and communication systems?

This isn’t nearly as relevant to the WPMU system as originally intended, but I do expect to be able to address the system through this survey without overwhelming participants. Some of the survey questions that pop into mind ask about personal use of social media, perceptions of institutional technology, relevance of both toward learning, perceived efficiency for learning, likelihood of using new institutional technology, etc.

I’m posting this here in case any readers (who I haven’t lost yet through neglect) have ideas on how to keep this useful while maintaining a sharp focus. Suggested questions are, of course, welcome.

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.