Archive for July 2007

I was looking up this podcast for other reasons, but it reminded me I should link to it here. Charles Vest was president of MIT when OCW was first proposed, and immediately recognized the potential of the idea. In this recording, he describes a vision for how the idea may develop further. Here’s the abstract:

Global connectivity via the Internet presents many challenges and opportunities for higher education. One major opportunity is the democratizing and empowering force of openly shared educational materials. Reflecting on MIT’s experience to date with its OpenCourseWare initiative and related activities, this presentation envisions the rise of a global meta university.

An encouraging sign o’ the times. Open education is being considered by an advisory committee of the Virginia Joint Commission on Technology and Science (JCOTS). Here’s their description of what they do:

Welcome to the Virginia Joint Commission on Technology and Science (JCOTS) Open Education Resources Advisory Committee Blog. JCOTS is a permanent legislative commission within the legislative branch of state government. JCOTS is charged with developing appropriate public policy relating to all aspects of science and technology within the Commonwealth. Although created to allow continued discussions among our advisory committee members, this blog is a new step in engaging the public in the policy making process.The Open Education Resources Advisory Committee is currently studying the use of open education resources in Virginia’s public schools. Please feel free to leave comments related to the postings of our committee. For more information please visit http://jcots.state.va.us/.

It’s great to see open education making the leap from project to policy.

One book that has really influenced my understanding of how open education affects the production of course materials is MIT Professor Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Published in 2005, this book doesn’t address open education or educational resources directly, but rather it discusses how companies are taking advantage of lead user innovations in a range of fields including, among other things, the manufacture of kite surfing equipment.

von Hipple’s book has a lot to say indirectly about how educational materials may or may not be suitable for reuse. One basic idea von Hippel puts forth is that the wider an audience a particular product is designed for, the less satisfied on average any one audience member is likely to be with the product. This is one challenge that designers of learning objects must grapple with.

He also describes how innovators often are less interested in the details of a particular product’s implementation than in the approach taken to create the product. The details usually differ enough that the innovator cannot directly borrow the product, but can fashion a similar product from scratch using a similar approach. This makes me wonder whether localization is less a process of adapting existing materials to local conditions and more a process of using openly published models to fashion new materials from scratch to address local needs.

Like Wealth of Networks, Democratizing Innovation is available for free as a PDF under a Creative Commons license.

Open education is not addressed directly in this report, but it’s a useful primer on the challenges faced by Least Developed Countries, and issues of how to support and promote the learning as an underpinning to development run throughout this report. An example from the overview:

…the effectiveness of ODA [official development assistance] for non-agricultural technological learning and innovation has been severely compromised because donors typically do not support this activity. Although agriculture is still the major source of employment and livelihood in the LDCs, the employment transition which they are undergoing means that this position is not tenable if development partners wish to reduce poverty sustainably and substantially. There are, however, difficult issues regarding how aid should be used to support technological learning and innovation outside agriculture.

One challenge for the open education community is to understand the role OER can play in helping LDCs to improve their own educational systems. I suspect the answer will be somewhat more complicated than straightforward adoption of open content. (via Information Policy)

Creative Commons announced ccLearn on the Creative Commons blog the other day. Here’s the mission as articulated in the announcement:

Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

• With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
• With technical barriers, we promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.
• With social barriers, we encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions.

The language of “advocate”, “promote” and “encourage” is a little less concrete than the missions of some of CC other undertakings, so I’m interested in seeing how the project develops. One concrete element of the project that will be a great contribution to the OER world is the Open Education Search.

Just that kind of a day, I guess. Here’s a prepreint posting of David Wiley’s review of learning object literature. David’s written and thought about learning objects more than anyone I know, and this lit review provides great perspective on the concept. No indication of what license this is made available under, but I’m sure David won’t mind my quoting the preamble.

The learning objects literature is a collection of journal articles, book chapters, white papers, and blog entries that as a whole recognize few seminal works, share few common definitions of terms, and rarely reference or build upon one another. Learning objects research generally falls into one of two categories. The traditional approach to using learning objects focuses on enabling the just-in-time automated assembly of carefully structured learning objects to create personalized educational experiences. The permissive approach to using learning objects focuses on making the reuse and localization of all resources, regardless of their structure, as effective and efficient as possible. The field is subject to a large number of criticisms. Nascent work in open educational resources points to the likely future of the field.

Here’s a great site out of University of Wisconsim-Milwaukee that provides a clear explanation of the learning object concept that I’ve discussed before as an influence on the open educational resources movement. The site provides a description of the learning object concept as follows:

• Learning objects are a new way of thinking about learning content. Traditionally, content comes in a several hour chunk. Learning objects are much smaller units of learning, typically ranging from 2 minutes to 15 minutes.
• Are self-contained – each learning object can be taken independently
• Are reusable – a single learning object may be used in multiple contexts for multiple purposes
  Can be aggregated – learning objects can be grouped into larger collections of content, including traditional course structures
• Are tagged with metadata – every learning object has descriptive information allowing it to be easily found by a search

Notice that the learning object idea is an educational technology concept and is agnostic about copyright and ownership issues, thus differentiating them from open educational resources. (Although learning objects may of course be openly licensed and thus be OERs as well).

Don’t miss the really great list of learning object repositories here as well. It’s interesting to see an OpenCourseWare site in the list, as OCW materials are not usually as granular or manipulable as true learning objects, though they can be. (via EduResources)

The New York Times carries this depressing description of access in Africa:

Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the continent. Less than 4 percent of Africa’s population is connected to the Web; most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa. A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, communications networks were destroyed during years of civil conflict, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems. E-mail messages and phone calls sent from some African countries have to be routed through Britain, or even the United States, increasing expenses and delivery times. About 75 percent of African Internet traffic is routed this way and costs African countries billions of extra dollars each year that they would not incur if their infrastructure was up to speed.

So while educational video is clearly an attractive option for many in developed regions, it is going to have limited impact in these conditions.

New from Pew, a report on online video access in America. Here’s the headline:

Online video now reaches a mainstream audience; 57% of online adults have used the internet to watch or download video, and 19% do so on a typical day.

The growing adoption of broadband combined with a dramatic push by content providers to promote online video has helped to pave the way for mainstream audiences to embrace online video viewing. The majority of adult internet users in the U.S. (57%) report watching or downloading some type of online video content and 19% do so on a typical day.

• Three-quarters of broadband users (74%) who enjoy high-speed connections at both home and work watch or download video online.
• Looking separately at those who have access to a high-speed connection at home, 66% report online video consumption, compared with 39% of home dial-up users.
• Yet, some online video viewers who have dial-up at home are able to supplement their access with broadband connections at work. Among those who are truly relegated to slow connections at home and work, just 31% say they have watched or downloaded video online.

Video is among the most popular forms of open educational materials, and buried in the report is the stat that 22% of adult internet users in the US have accessed educational video. That’s higher than I would have imagined and demonstrates the demand for educational content.

I was talking today with some colleagues about what makes for an effective newsletter, and it reminded me of the Berkman Center’s Filter, one of the few e-mail newsletters I actually look forward to getting. The Filter comes with great information about projects going on at the Berkman Center, and upcoming conferences related to cyberissues.

The June edition includes a discussion of the business model for Christopher Lydon’s RadioOpenSource, which attempts to streamline public broadcasting funding models via a web-based approach. I’m keeping a close eye on public broadcasting business models as they develop for the web, because this is the closest analogy I can think of to open publication of educational resources.

InfoWorld has a nice piece on Plone, which occupies an interesting place at the interface of open source software and open content.  As an open source content management system, it’s the tool of choice for open education folks committed to more than just the spirit of OSS.  Plone, of course, is the guts behind the increasingly popular eduCommons OpenCourseWare management system out of Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning.

I’ve written before about Science Commons and the complexity of the issues they address. PopSci is carrying a great article where you can learn more strait from John Wilbank’s mouth, as it were. Here’s just a taste of the overall vision:

In five years, if everything comes out as I hope, you’ll have a system that looks like Amazon for the life sciences. You could click on one thing—a relevant cell line, for example—and get recommendations for related research or tools. You could one-click and order that cell line from a third party instead of having to ask another laboratory to stop doing research and manufacture it for you. There’d be management systems that would join data from around the world, and you could use Google Maps API to flag brain images with comments. Scholarly literature would be available for free because the peer-review charges would be paid as part of the cost of research instead of through subscription models, and the annotations or comments that had been made on any given paper would be readily available.

No lack of ambition here.

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo has a nice exploration of open education on MediaShift. For me, anyway, the post and subsequent comments illustrate one of the big challenges facing open education and open educational resources–branding, for lack of a better term. With multiple models of distance and online learning, and a confusing array of open education projects out there, it’s no wonder an intelligent person trying to make sense of the field can struggle to understand what one can get from each.

As open educational materials have been developing, one big curricular gap (in OpenCourseWare circles, anyway) has been Law. I’m glad to see CALI and the Berkman center getting together to begin addressing this gap.

The partnership will establish the Legal Education Commons - known as eLangdell for Harvard Law School’s first Dean and the Law Library’s namesake, Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell - where law faculty can share and use openly-licensed course materials to offer students free or low-cost course packs, casebooks, podcasts and video. Berkman and CALI will also research and develop innovative teaching tools to advance practice skills like client interaction, negotiations, and trial advocacy.

(via Online Learning Update)

A great many people (including myself) have become involved in the open educational resources movement out of an attraction to the mission–out of the sense that sharing educational materials openly is a good thing and can help people on a global level. There is not a more passionate, well-reasoned, and compelling description of the role that increased opportunity (including educational opportunity) plays in global development than Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom.

It’s definitely a book about economics, so be prepared from some relatively dry technical discussions of economic issues, but the book is imbued a strong moral argument that you don’t measure development by wealth but rather by the opportunities and freedoms that people have to make choices regarding their lives. From the introduction:

Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states. Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to to vast numbers–perhaps even the majority–of people. Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger, or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses, or the opportunity to be adequately clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities. In other cases, the unfreedom links closely to the lack of public facilities and social care, such as the absence of epidemiological programs, or of organized arrangements for health care or educational facilities, or of effective institutions for maintenance of local peace and order. In still other cases, the violation of freedoms results directly from a denial of political and civil liberties by authoritarian regimes and from imposed restrictions on the freedom to participate in the social, political and economic life of the community.

Sharing educational materials openly is an opportunity to feel that one has directly made the world a little less unfree, and perhaps provided some tools for others to make it even less so.

Perhaps a little bit of self-promotion, as I’m the author, but a good source of data on the impact OCW is having worldwide is the 2005 MIT OCW Program Evaluation Report. The data is admittedly getting a little long in the tooth, but is a detailed accounting of the access, use and impact of the MIT OCW project.

One of the best general backgrounders to intellectual property issues in higher education I’ve come across is Who Owns Academic Work? by Corynne McSherry. It was published in 2001, and so predates the open education movement, but it’s a great exploration of the intellectual property battles leading up to that point.

What I enjoy most about the book is the breadth of it. Rather than simply being a legal history of intellectual property, it explores the epistemic underpinnings of the concepts of the author and intellectual property. It then uses this framework to explore many of the controversies surrounding ownership of academic work, including ownership of course materials. It’s a great book for developing a deeper understanding of just why universities would choose to give educational materials away for free.

The State Department web site is carrying a nice piece on the eGranary Digital Library developed at the University of Iowa. The idea behind eGranary is pretty simple: Many universities in developing countries have high-speed fiber optic LANs, but the link from the LAN to the wider Internet has less bandwidth that many desktop connections in developed regions. The eGranary is basically a big hard drive loaded with useful resources, including materials from more than 1,000 Web sites, Project Gutenberg’s complete collection and the entire Wikipedia Web site (and–full disclosure–MIT OCW), that the project distributes to universities in developing regions. eGranary goes a bit further in providing an interface to make access to content easier and systems for updating the content once the disk has been delivered.

Last time I checked, many of the resources on the eGranary disk were under full copyright and included under special license from the copyright owner. In part because of this, eGranary highlights the importance of plain old access to content–how in many circumstances, just being able to get to the right content can make a tremendous difference. I definitely believe that permitting flexible reuse of content is important, but I also worry that we can’t solve all problems at once, and hopefully demonstrations of the value of widened access, such as eGranary, will pave the way for more sharing materials under less restrictive circumstances.

I’ve been a little hesitant to write about open education licensing issues here, because I’ve found the discussions can quickly get distracting, but I’ve come across two different blog postings that illustrate some of the issues, so it’s a good opportunity to point to them.

One post is by David Wiley, and it discusses the issue of license incompatibility. One reason for publishing under open licenses is to permit others to mix the materials with other open materials to create new open derivative works. As David points out, even if many of the licenses currently being used are almost identical in spirit, the self-perpetuating (share-alike) requirements of these licenses make it problematic to combine materials published under different licenses.

The other post, one one of my favorite blogs and one that I rarely have time to keep up with–The Patry Copyright Blog, is an interesting read given where David’s ends up. The gets back to the original inspiration for Creative Commons: The length of copyright protection is too long, and it’s a bad thing for society. If copyright restrictions were more along the lines of those suggested in the post, a great deal more material would be available for unrestricted reuse and less would require open licensing.

The majority of OpenCourseWare projects out there are republishing materials created for classroom use. There are a few OCWs that are creating course materials specifically for open use online, and UC Irvine is a good example. They announced the launch today of courseware to support teacher certification in California. These sets of courseware are interesting from a number of angles–they have a different set of cost challanges, and they are generally directed at a particular audience, rather than being made openly available to an unspecified audience for unspecified uses. It will be interesting to follow how sustainable these efforts are as compared to resuse models, and how attractive they are to their intended audiences.