Archive for the ‘Open Educational Resources’ Category

Back in 2005 when I first started writing about free educational materials, my Stingy Scholar blog posts were just a personal attempt to keep track of some good sites I came across. As I kept looking I was amazed by the depth and quality of sites such as Learn Out Loud and Textbook Revolution. I was also amazed by the number of people interested in free educational materials.

Two years down the line more and more universities, companies and individuals have gotten on board to develop and share great resources for free. Many good lists have been put together such as this one. Skimming through the list you see iPod courses from universities, reference pages, free software and eBooks.

We’ll take at some of the great sites and new entries in these sub-categories in posts to come.

Open innovation topics have always seemed to me to be very relevant to open educaitonal resource development, especially as they move away from open source software into other fields. Open Innovators in doing a series on 12 recommended open innovation books, the first four of which are:

• Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
  - by Patricia B. Seybold
• Motivation in Open Innovation
  - by Robert Motzek
• Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
  -by Henry Chesbrough
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
  - by Chris Anderson

I found Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation to be really helpful in thinking about how open innovation might occur with educational materials. I won’t be surprised if it appears in future posts.

You may have caught Andy Ihnatko, the technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, on the CBS Early Show, touting the latest gadgetry for back to school. He led off with the iPod and played a clip of Walter Lewin’s Electricity and Magnetism video lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare.

As it so happens, I got my first chance to play with an iPhone this weekend as well, and yes, they’re way to expensive to make a difference in the short term for people with limited incomes, but they and other devices like them will get cheaper, and they are definitely the first handheld platform I’ve seen that really makes learning from open educational resources a viable experience.

I checked out many of my favorite OER sites, including MIT OCW, MERLOT, Connexions and Korea University OCW (an eduCause site). All of them behaved flawlessly, and the ability to view PDF documents with ease makes the OCW sites very useful on the platform. The iPhone will make the most connected more so, but as the technology becomes cheaper ($200.00 at a time?), it and other devices will have an increasing impact.

Here’s a discussion not to miss: Terra Incognita is hosting SPARC’s Gavin Baker discussing the linkages between open access publishing and open educational resources. More about him:

Gavin Baker is an IT and public policy consultant. Currently he is developing a student outreach campaign for SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, on the subject of open access to academic journal literature. Gavin also serves on the board of directors for FreeCulture.org, which is an international student organization that promotes the public interest in intellectual property and information & communications technology policy.

I’ll definitely be tuning in for this one.

Here’s a great summary of articles posted in the not-too-distant past in Terra Incognita addressing the relationship between open source software and open educational resources. Here is the abstract of the summary:

In March 2007, a group of authors wrote short articles about the impact of Open Educational Resources and Open Source Software on education and engaged in dialog on the topic. The articles were posted on Terra Incognita. Several themes surfaced from the 11 articles, which included the roles of common-based peer production as an emerging economic and social model, organizational enablers and challenges, the critical nature of localization for reuse, and Learning Design as a form of Open Source Teaching.

Here’s a useful site for anyone trying to better understand global usage of an open educaitonal resource. The site feels a little cheesy, but the underlying stats are from the ITU and Nielsen, as well as other reliable sources, and the information is organized for easy access.

The issues faced by open science efforts such as Science Commons are some of the most complex in the open education arena. This article in University Affairs is a nice overview:

…an international scientific counterculture is emerging. Often referred to as “open science,” this growing movement proposes that we err on the side of collaboration and sharing. That’s especially true when it comes to creating and using the basic scientific tools needed both for downstream innovation and for solving broader human problems.

(via Open Access News)

I’ve just finished Charles Vest’s The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web. Vest was president of MIT when OpenCourseWare was proposed, and has been one of the strongest proponents of the project and the concept. The American Research University (published under full copyright by the U of C Press) is based on speeches given by Vest as the 2005 Clark Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society.

Vest was president of MIT for thirteen years, an extraordinarily long tenure during which he witnessed extraordinary changes in how universities do business, and this book is filled with observations that can help emerging leaders of open education projects understand the pressures faced by senior leadership at universities. The book contains four chapters covering the relationship between universities and government, universities and philanthropies, universities and terrorism, and finally universities and openness. While the last is the most directly on the topic of openness (it recounts the development of MIT OCW), the others are probably as relevant, especially given that nearly all open education projects have sustainability issues, and because opening knowledge is both more challenging and important in a post 9/11 world. Very much worth the read.

This report by Eldis is one of the best primers I’ve read recently on the World Summit on the Information Society and the major players in world ICT policy. It has, I’m sure, its own biases but it provides good background on the summit, UNESCO, WIPO, UNDP and many of the other players in this space. If you have an open education project and you are seeking to develop a better understanding of how OER might play a role in global development, this is worth the time to read. I am interested to see that there are at least 10 WSIS activities discussed in the Tunis Agenda for which OER might play an important role:

• Building ICT capacity for all and confidence in the use of ICTs by all – including youth, older persons, women, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, and remote and rural communities – through the improvement and delivery of relevant education
  and training programmes and systems including lifelong and distance learning.
• Implementing effective training and education, particularly in ICT science and technology, that motivate and promote participation
  and active involvement of girls and women in the decision-making process of building the information society.
• Improving access to the world’s health knowledge and telemedicine services, in particular in areas such as global cooperation in
  emergency response, access to and networking among health professionals to help improve quality of life and environmental conditions.
• Using ICTs to improve access to agricultural knowledge, combat poverty, and support production of and access to locally relevant agriculture-related content.
• Supporting educational, scientific, and cultural institutions, including libraries, archives and museums, in their role of developing, providing equitable, open and affordable access to, and preserving diverse and varied content, including in digital form, to support informal and formal education, research and innovation; and in particular supporting libraries in their public service role of providing free and equitable access to information and of improving ICT literacy and community connectivity, particularly in underserved communities.
• Enhancing the capacity of communities in all regions to develop content in local and/or indigenous languages.
• Strengthening the creation of quality e-content, on national, regional and international levels.
• Promoting the use of traditional and new media in order to foster universal access to information, culture and knowledge for all people, especially vulnerable populations and populations in developing countries and using, inter alia, radio and television as educational and learning tools.
• Promoting the development of advanced research networks, at national, regional and international levels, in order to improve collaboration in science, technology and higher education.
• Digitising our historical data and cultural heritage for the benefit of future generations.

(via Information Policy)

People’s Open Access Education Initiative is an intriguing new project, one of a few I’ve seen emerging that I call “second generation” in that they don’t create OER from scratch, but instead build on the open resources already made available by others. In this case, the project intends to use a collaborative development model to localize public health content for developing regions. Here’s an excerpt from their About page:

The inspiration

The open source software movement provides an inspiration for an affordable and credible solution - Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS . Many hundreds of individuals have contributed to the development of high quality software which is freely available on the Internet.

In the education field, there are now parallel developments of Open Educational Resources (OER), with an ever expanding range of high quality on line resources that are freely available through the Internet. (http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Main_Page).

Our solution

Develop educational context around freely available open educational resources on the Internet – Peoples-uni.org. This is an open activity, to be developed in partnership across the global and digital divides. We are in development phase, and hope eventually to m ove towards the establishment of a ‘ Peoples Open Access University’.

Organisation

We do not plan to have a centralised organisational structure and are calling on various individuals and organisations to undertake various of the required tasks. We are calling this ‘Volunteersourcing’ – a variant of ‘Crowdsourcing’. While many of these tasks might be performed by volunteers, others will require funding (such as accreditation).

Computerworld is running an interview with MIT Professor Hal Abelson, who had a hand in launching both Creative Commons and MIT OpenCourseWare. Few have thought as long and hard about open licensing and open education as Professor Abelson. Here’s a taste:

The great power of the Web is that people can share stuff and remix it and build on each other’s work. But the way copyright law has evolved, it’s just not well matched to the Internet. Since 1986, in the U.S., if you create stuff, at that moment, it’s actually copyrighted. You don’t have to register it. What that means is, if you go out on the Web and see stuff, you have to assume you can’t use it. What should be a shared thing that people can use and contribute to ends up being an IP minefield.

I recently came across this site which seeks to explore how viral marketing might benefit OER. I’ve spoken with Todd Richmond once or twice and he’s a compelling thinker, so this looks like an intriguing project to me. It points to a larger question, too, which is how does one make learners aware of open educational resources? Hewlett has invested large sums of money in open educational resources and they are I’m sure eager to insure the materials are widely recognized and widely used.

Hewlett has certainly made good first moves in drawing together a disseparate group of projects that share a commitment to openness in education under the OER brand, and that brand is being reinforced by portal sites such as OER Commons (another Hewlett project), but there are enormous challenges is getting users to understand 1) that there are high quality educational resources out there that can be accessed for free 2) what the different types of resources are in this broad and rapidly developing field, and 3) how each of the resources might best be used.

It’s an enormous marketing challenge, and not just for Hewlett. And like everything else in the field, the approaches are in early stages of development. I’m hoping this project continues to develop, as it looks like it might generate some interesting ideas.

Open Innovators has included WOE in the first edition of the Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing Carnival. A carnival, if you are not familiar, is a meta-blog where a carnival organizer assembles interesting blog posts and articles on a given topic, and then puts all those posts together in a blog post called a “carnival”. WOE is pleased to have been included, and the carnival promises to be a great opportunity to see how open innovation models operate across a range of fields beyond education.

David Wiley is announcing his new course, Introduction to Open Education, and–no surprise if you know David–it’s open. To anyone. He describes:

I’m also very happy to say that this class will be completely online, run completely in the open, and is welcome to all comers. If you would like to take the course for credit, just sign up for an independent study at your university and find a supervising faculty member to whom I can send a grade at the end of term. Be sure to contact me directly to let me know you’re taking the course for credit and send contact info for your supervising faculty member. Then add your info to the syllabus as directed (Name :: School :: Email :: Blog) so the rest of us can find you. If you don’t need credit but would still like to participate in the course, I’d also love to have you! Please just go ahead and add yourself to the syllabus.

For anyone looking to understand the open education field, even just a browse through the reading list is a great start. Participating in the class is a great way to really understand in a deeper way how the field has been developing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)