Archive for the ‘Open Educational Resources’ Category

“Localization” is a term you’ll hear often in the open educational resources world, so it’s worth a post to sketch out a few aspects of the issue. Localization refers to the process of taking an educational resource developed for one context, and making it appropriate for one or more other contexts. Examples of localization include translation of materials into other languages, updating content to reflect field developments, and converting a lesson from MS Office format to html embedded in a Blackboard site.

There are at least four uber-categories of localizations:

• Currency: Updating materials to reflect new knowledge in the field.
• Cultural adaptations: Modifications made to render materials more culturally appropriate, such as translation into other languages and substitution of referenced examples (such as commercial products) with more familiar equivalents.
• Academic adaptations: Materials created within one academic system are often modified to fit into a new system, accounting for student skill level and preparedness, subject sequencing, and time available.
• Technical adaptations: Modifications made to adjust for the technical platform on which the content is delivered, such as the conversion of materials created in MS Word for classroom use to html formats intended for distance learning.

This of course barely scratches the surface of the complexities surrounding localization, but it’s a start at least.

The link to information on China in the previous post reminded me of one of my favorite open educational resources, the CIA World Factbook. The open educational resources movement has gained such momentum worldwide that it quickly outran my rusty geographical knowledge. The World Factbook has been a great resource for brushing up in a hurry and is a refernce I use quite often. One of the best parts about it is the frequency with which it gets updated.

Here’s another memo from Pew’s Internet & American Life project, which is actually about China. The numberrs when it comes to China always stagger me. The report predicts strong growth in Internet usage in China, where currently only ten percent of the population is online. As detailed below, the demography is interesting:

In China, just over 10% of the population uses the internet, according to the latest government accounting. Users are relatively young, male, urban, and are disproportionately composed of students. Just over 70% of the user population is under age 30 and almost 60% are men. The penetration rate in urban areas is about 20%, compared with just over 3% in rural areas. Among occupations, students make up nearly a third of Chinese internet users, and business workers account for 30% more. The rest are a mixture of self-employed, non-profit workers, the unemployed, teachers, government workers, and army personnel. Peasants or farmers account for only about 0.4% of the online population.

China is already an important piece of the open educational resources movement, with projects like CORE sharing vast amounts of educational materials created natively in Chinese and translated to Chinese from other languages. The influx of new Chinese users will no doubt transform the Internet as a whole (as Pew predicts), but given the enormity of the educational challenges there, I expect the impact on open and distance education to be even more pronounced.

A timely article in govtech.com today about just the point I was making. India has gotten into the open education arena with a project announced by NPTEL that shares courses which are designed for independent online learning. NPTEL is the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, and here is their description of the project from their site:

The main objective of NPTEL program is to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing curriculum based video and web courses. This is being carried out by IITs (Seven), IISc Bangalore and other premier institutions as a collaborative project. At IIT Madras, the project is evolving and it is our intent to provide learning materials, digitally taped classroom lectures, supplementary materials and links to state-of-the art research materials in every subject possible. Currently samples from approximately 70 courses offered by faculty in various departments and to students at all levels (B.Tech, M.Tech, M.S., M.Sc., Ph.D.) are given here. Approximately 140 courses are in various stages of preparation and distribution through internet.

This is a great illustration of how institutions with different focuses create OERs of different flavors. Most OCWs create sites containing materials for classroom-based instruction, but there are several great examples now of institutions with expertise in distance learning that are producing materials that support independent online learning–including OU UK’s OpenLearn project, UC Irvine’s OCW, and now NPTEL’s site.

When I wrote recently about influences on the open educational resources movement, I discussed educational technology from the perspective of the learning object concept only.  Since then, I’ve felt the need to circle back and say that the whole concept of distance learning has a strong influence on the OER movement as well.  Many people have come into the field with an interest and background in distance learning, and others from the perspective of sharing materials from classroom based courses.

Most OCWs are examples of open sharing of classroom-based materials, where no assumption is made that the materials by themselves are sufficient to support independent learning.  Other projects, such as CMU’s Open Learning Initiative are specifically designed to support independent online learning.  Understanding the perspective of particular project on this issue can also be helpful in understanding how the resources can best be used.

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.

Penn State’s Terra Incognita has a nice summary of some of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) initiatives UNESCO has undertaken in the education space, as well as a suggested roadmap for future activities. The posting has two parts: the first part describes the past and current UNESCO FOSS activities and the second part suggests a new activity aimed at building an integrated FOSS Education solution targeting universities. I’ve mentioned before the forums that UNESCO has supported, which I’ve found to be particularly useful, but this gives a somewhat wider look at UNESCO’s activities and the interrelationships between open source software and open educaitonal resources.

The Columbia University Libraries news site is reporting that Google has awarded Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures (DKV) a $50,450 grant to support preparation and submission of video content from Columbia for the Google Video site. Here’s CUL News’ summary of the content to be included:

New content will include a number of events from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, including the Distinguished Lecture Series and the Seminars on Sustainable Development designed for general audiences from experts on current pressing global issues.

Course content will include the Frontiers of Science course, part of Columbia’s unique core curriculum for incoming students. Each semester, scientists in different disciplines deliver a series of three lectures each describing the background, context, and current state of an area of research.

It’s great to see Columbia getting into the open education mix, of course, but maybe the more interesting thing here: It will be worth keeping an eye on how things play out as Apple and Google both position themselves as the place to go for open educational video.

I’ll come back to Creative Commons and the important role they’ve played in the open educational resources movement at some point, but I wanted really quickly to point to Science Commons as an important related project. Here’s how Science Commons describes itself:

Science Commons serves the advancement of science by removing unnecessary legal and technical barriers to scientific collaboration and innovation.

Built on the promise of Open Access to scholarly literature and data, Science Commons identifies and eases key barriers to the movement of information, tools and data through the scientific research cycle.

Our long term vision is to provide more than just useful contracts. We will combine our publishing, data, and licensing approaches to develop solutions for a truly integrated and streamlined research process.

The point being, it’s not just in the arena of teaching materials that intellectual property rights law is a problem, but also in spaces affecting access to the data and tools required to conduct basic academic research. It might not be apparent at first glance, but the problems Science Commons is attempting to tackle are among the thorniest out there in the open sharing world.

I’ll explore these in more depth in later postings, but for those new to open educational resources, I think it’s helpful to sketch out a few of the important influences that have contributed to the development of the movement. These different influences underlie many of the approaches taken by OER project and can be of help in understanding the differences between projects. They are also at the root of many OER community debates. This is a posting I expect to refer back to with some regularity as a context-setter for other posts.

Open Source Software: There’s no doubt that the single most important influence to date has been the OSS movement, and a starting point for many in thinking about OER is as open source applied to content instead of software. It’s an imperfect metaphor, but one that gets you part way down the road to understanding OER, and is close enough to have been a major inspiration for OER. The two gifts of OSS to OER are the open license concept and a demonstration of the power of collaborative community development models.

Open Content: The term “open content” was coined by David Wiley, and the genesis story is that–lawn mower in hand–he had exactly the thought that the principles of open source software could be applied to content as well. David adapted open source source software licenses to create his Open Content License. The Open Content movement really gained traction when then-Harvard Professor Larry Lessig and others fought back against the ever increasing length of copyright protection by creating open licenses that could allow content creators to forgo some of their copyrights without giving up ownership entirely. Lessig et al’s gift to OER was the observation that most content really didn’t need to be under full copyright and wasn’t intended to generate profit. Further, by forgoing some of the protections guarding financial benefit, these materials could produce tremendous social benefit, either by promoting wider distribution of the work or by permitting the creation of derivatives (not necessarily through community creation, but through chains of individual creators building on and incorporating prior works). In short, the biggest gift of Open Content to OER has been a passionate belief in the power of openness, that less copyright means more social benefit.

Learning Objects: In the 1990’s, as digital learning materials were emerging, it became apparent to many–including the afore-mentioned David Wiley, who has written at length on the subject–that especially in the emerging web environment, learning materials might be made in a modular and reusable fashion, so that they could be reused and reconfigured by many learners and educators for many different purposes. This is often described as the Lego model, where simulations and course units could be unplugged from one another and stacked up in different ways for different uses. Quite a number of educational technologists became energized by this model and developed it in a number of contexts, in both for-profit and open sharing models. The excitement over learning objects had died off somewhat, as technical and contextual challenges have been hard to overcome, but many people involved in the learning object discussions (including myself) have made the transition to the OER field, and many have brought with them a strong interest in technological solutions to educational problems.

I’m sure there are some in the OER community who would debate finer points of the above but this is (I hope) at least close enough to provide a starting point for understanding the field. These three influences express themselves in different ways in different OER projects. Connexions is in many ways a child of the open source software movement, with its community development model; MIT OpenCourseWare is largely an experiment in openly sharing content that was previously held under lock and key; MERLOT is a repository of learning objects. Understanding the influences behind these project helps to understand how they have developed and what they have to offer.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has been a pioneer in supporting open educational resources (OER) projects, recently announced new support for a number of initiatives, including $1 M over two years to support the OpenCourseWare Consortium. The Consortium has now grown to include around 150 institutions from around the world, and materials from more than 4,200 courses in nine different languages are available through the OCWC portal site.

Other open educational resources projects receiving funding from the Hewlett Foundation this year include the Development Gateway Foundation, projects at Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, WGBH, ISKME’s OER Commons, and Yale University’s Open Educational Resources Video Lecture Project.

Open Vault is one of my favorite new additions to the the open content library. It represents the opening of a vast resource of clips from Boston’s flagship public television station, WGBH. Simply making this material freely available is a service in itself–it runs the gamut from recordings of poets reading their work to interviews of participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Civil Rights Movement.

WGBH, however, went above and beyond by offering the content in a site that is well-designed, easy to use, and offers a nice set of annotation tools to help you organize and tag the content. The videos can be browsed by topic, keyword search, and a visual navigation “mosaic,” all of which manage to be complementary rather than confusing. I sincerely hope that WGBH will inspire other public broadcasters to begin opening up their back catalogs as well.

The Hindu’s coverage of UNESCO’s new “Model Curricula for Journalism Education for Developing Countries and Emerging Democracies” highlights some of the potential pitfalls of open educational resources. The curricula is put forward as a general framework specifically intended to be adapted for local conditions in developing countries.

UNESCO‘s ‘Model Curricula for Journalism Education for Developing Countries and Emerging Democracies’ is a “valuable work in progress,” and it reflects the “universal principles revolving around freedom of expression.” Commending the Model Curricula in this perspective, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu N. Ram, said at a media conference here on Tuesday that there was no cause for “worry” that the UNESCO project might have been designed to create cultural homogeneity across the world.

Openly shared educational resources are occasionally subjected to colonial critiques even when not making explicit claims to be models or represent universal principles. UNESCO is as well-positioned as any organization to put forward curriculum as a model in this way, but it remains to be seen how well it will be received by potential users of these materials.