Archive for the ‘Access’ Category

Livemint.com is suggesting OCW as a solution to the talent crunch in India. Freeman Murray writes:

I gave a talk on open-source education and pointed to a variety of examples such as MIT Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu and the Digital Studyhall Project http://dsh.cs.washington.edu, in which videos of expert teachers are freely distributed to the global community. I believe this model of open source education is the only scalable solution to the talent crunch facing the technology sector in India, as evidenced by the much talked about exodus of Riya.com from India because of the difficulty and expense of finding quality senior software developers.

Unlike China, India has yet to start sharing its own courseware widely, which is too bad, because the IITs would be a great addition to the worldwide body of opencourseware. Like China, India faces tremendous connectivity challenges as well, with no mirror site or other similar program so far that I am aware of.

WorldChanging.com has a nice summary of OCW in China. Chinese universities have some 1,100 total courses from more than 220 schools openly published on the web through the CORE China Quality OpenCourseWare page. I notice in the comments below that someone raises the issue of connectivity, which is certainly a challenge. It’s worth noting that CORE maintains a network of mirror sites throughout China to help address this issue.

Accessibility is a challenging issue for open educaitonal resources. Because OER are often not part of accredited programs but rather derivatives thereof, they are not held to the same accessibility standards as online course materials (at least in the US). Nonetheless, producers of OER are acutely aware that OER can present unique opportunities for persons with disabilities to access educational materials otherwise unavailable to them.

I’ve yet to meet a producer of OER who didn’t want to meet the maximum possible standard of accessibility that was practical given the costs of doing so. As with everything else, meeting accessibility standards becomes a tradeoff between format and volume. Projects can publish at higher volume with less accessability, and in meeting higher standards of accessibility, end up publishing at lower volume. This is a difficult tradeoff, especially knowing that materials that don’t meet the highest standards of accessibility often cannot be easily imported into the LMS systems of schools providing for-credit instruction.

Pew has a new report [ PDF ] discussing the difficulty of encouraging broadband adoption in the US. An excerpt:

Non-internet users as a group are disproportionately old and poor. The median age of non-internet users is 59, and 25% report having household incomes under $20,000 per year. It is not, however, simply a question of money or age. Non-internet users do not have very positive attitudes about information technology. Many report worries about information overload and few link information technology to greater control over their lives. Moreover, non-internet users are apt to see the online environment as a dangerous place – that is, a place with inappropriate or irrelevant content. Given that these non-users are people with worries about information technology and not a lot of extra disposable income, luring them online won’t be an easy task.

This kind of information to me illustrates how it may be unrealistic to expect that OER can help the populations most in need if it is designed solely for online use. It shows why online educational resources and resources that can be printed and distributed offline are complementary and important elements of the OER ecology alongside fully online learning experiences.

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)

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.

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.

Another indication of the spread of high-speed internet access, this from the International Telecommunication Union:

In 2002, broadband services were available in just 81 countries, mostly industrialized OECD countries, transition economies in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and some developing countries in Asia-Pacific. By 2006, the number of countries with commercial broadband service had more than doubled to reach a total of 166 countries, with a number of operators in African countries launching broadband services, including in Botswana, Ghana, Rwanda and Libya.

In all, the article reports that 170 countries now have at least some broadband access. This doesn’t mean that open educational resource projects can assume high speed access for end users, but it does offer opportunities for transferring and updating locally cached copies of resources. The growth in access is pretty dramatic, although I’m assuming broadband penetration in most countries is extremely low. (via Information Policy)

The Pew Internet & American Life site is one of my favorites. Here’s a quick shot of data from a memo that’s just been released:

47% of adults have high-speed internet connections at home as of early March 2007, up five percentage points from a year earlier.

Obviously, one goal of open education is to reach those who don’t have advantages like high-speed access to the internet, but increasing access to broadband can only magnify the impact of open educational resources.