Open Ed: Intro

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is Introduction to Open Education. You may be feeling left out that you cannot take the course. Fear not! You can. Register for the course here. It's free. C'mon mom and dad, maybe you should try it!

This week I read about the beginning movements of Open Education (OE). Here are some of the highlights:

I began my study of the history of Open Education by reading A review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. It’s available here.


Ten years ago there were not many open education resources; certainly not in the organized way that we have now. Hewlett provided funding to get OE going and the authors of this report believe that Hewlett has done an effective job of getting a movement started.

The flagship OER provider is MIT. They were the first to bring substantial resources to the community. Other significant providers are Rice Connexions, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Utah State’s COSL.

One of the additional links described as an "open education" resource was to Chengo—a “free” resource to learning Chinese. Sadly it no longer is free, which makes one wonder about the “sustainability” issue. They discuss several sustainability challenges the first on their list was funding. They said:

“A challenge of any fixed-term, externally funded initiative is long-term sustainability by an entity other than the original investor, in this case the Hewlett Foundation. In the MIT project, bringing a course to the OCW costs approximately $25,000 per course plus maintenance and enhancement. The MIT OCW model involves professional staff taking course material in almost any form from faculty and bringing it into a uniform, professional format. This was appropriate for the rapid startup of a large-scale, pioneering project but it will not work for many other places. It does appear, however, that MIT will be able to sustain the maintenance through internal funding and external contributions. Additional approaches to sustainability need to be explored, including the following:

1. Encourage institutions, rather than just individual pioneer-faculty, to buy into the OER movement so that institutional resources will be committed to sustain it.

2. Situate OER collections not as distinct from the courseware environment for the formally enrolled students but as a low marginal cost derivative of the routinely used course preparation and management systems. Increase the amount of course preparation and management systems that service closed and open institutional courseware...

4. Explore roles for students in creating, enhancing, and adopting OER. Consider an “OER Corps” in which students receive training, small stipends, and prestige to assist in material preparation, enhancement, and use (especially in historically disadvantaged domestic communities and developing countries).[I thought this idea was especially cool.]...

...Sustainability of OER is becoming a subject of academic study. Dholakia, King, and Baraniuk,81 for example, argue that current thinking on the topic is often solely tactical with too much attention on the “product” and not enough attention on understanding what its user community wants or on improving the OER’s value for various user communities. Their proposal is that “prior to considering different revenue models for a particular OER and choosing one or a combination of them, the OER providers should focus on the issue of increasing the aggregate value of the site to its constituents to the greatest extent possible. In other words, unless the OER site is able to first gain and maintain a critical mass of active, engaged users, and provide substantial and differentiated value to them in its start-up and growth phases, then none of the available and/or chosen revenue models will be likely to work for the OER in the long run.”

In other words, one of the challenges with OER is that we may be planning a big party (creating lots of OERs) but nobody wants to come (or wants the resources). Other sustainability challenges include the following:

* Preservation of Access
* Object Granularity and Format Diversity—they started out using .pdf as the key format but now that there many other file formats that can be easily converted they believe that xml is the method of choice.
* Intellectual Property Issues—some of the licenses are in conflict; there is also a “learning commons” movement.
* Content Quality Assessment and Enhancement—assessing which resources are good, and helping point people towards the best ones.
* Computing and Communication Infrastructure—especially in third world countries.
* Scale-up and Deepening Impact in Developing Countries

One very interesting statement occurred at the end of the sustainability section. The authors quote Sir John Daniels, saying

“Half of the world’s population is under twenty years old. Today, there are over thirty million people who are fully qualified to enter a university, but there is no place available. This number will grow to over 100 million during the next decade. “To meet the staggering global demand for advanced education, a major university needs to be created every week” (page 33).

This statement indicates that although there are several challenges to sustainability, the problem is real, and solutions must be found to meet the needs of these 100 million individuals.

The book Giving Knowledge for Free (available here) also had some great insights.

It described in greater detail MIT's reasons and history for beginning OE.Contrary to what was said in a previous article about the sustainability challenge of formatting, these authors state“While the OCW model is sometimes criticised for offering only static lecture notes in PDF format without interactivity, user evaluations from MIT OCW show that 97% of users find PDF a suitable format for their purposes (d’Oliveira, 2006).”

The authors also referred to MERLOT, which I think is interesting in its “peer reviewed” way of judging the educational artifacts submitted. I believe that something like “MERLOT for Seminary Teachers” could greatly improve the teaching quality of seminary.

The authors also observe that the majority of users of MIT OCW come from outside the US, a finding that is not true for all OER providers.

I thought the chapter on motivations and barriers for sharing was the most intriguing. Motivations for sharing include:


* It's good to share
* Educational institutions should leverage tax payer dollars by creating resources that others can freely use
* Others may improve what I've done (bread cast upon the water...)
* Good PR/free advertising
* May get people to purchase another form of the product eventually
* Increased reputation
* Ego of seeing yourself online and other people using your resources
* Prevention of monopolies

Drivers to share include


Increased access to broadband, and decreased cost for the creation of digital content is a driver in increasing OERs.

A prime barrier could be lack of funding as well as lack of reward systems for people who create OERs. Lack of licensing compatibility can increase the difficult of remixing, which decreases the motivation to provide content.

It is interesting how law could effect OERs. What would happen if government only funded open-education projects—the amount of resources would quickly multiply. Some European countries are investing in this way (such as the Dutch OpenER).

Another interesting thought, one similar to that which was shared by David Wiley in his lecture: “To establish a credible academic reward system that includes the production and use of OER might, therefore, be the single most important policy issue for a large-scale deployment of OER in teaching and learning.”


One last little nugget that I cannot help but repost. I think this is a very interseting question regarding what sort of expectations one should have when trying to create an open community of learning and how to increase participation:

Box 4.2. OLCOS Roadmap to open learning communities:

How much contribution can be expected, and how can the level of

participation be raised?

“One observer suggests: “It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.” (Arthur, 2006) For this pattern he cites available data for community content generation projects such as Wikipedia and discussion lists on Yahoo!. For example, on the Yahoo! Groups, 1% of the user population might start a group and 10% participate actively by starting a thread or responding to a thread in progress. The initial idea of a “1% Rule”, i.e. that about 1% of the total number of visitors to an “online democratized forum” (such as a wiki, bulletin board or community that invites visitors to create content), was promoted by the marketing consultants Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (2006).

The ratio of creators to consumers is also important with respect to learning communities

which, among other activities, create content. But what really is important is not the “1%

Rule”, but the question of how to achieve at least 10% of people who add something to the initial activity and content. In an OLCOS expert workshop, Graham Attwell from Pontydysgu (Bridge to Learning) proposed what may be called the “searching–lurking–contributing” theory of learning processes: i) first, persons interested in a topic will “Google” some links; ii) then they will find denser places of content, such as a website of a community of interest, a thematic wiki, weblogs of experts on the topic, etc.; iii) then they will become “lurkers”, i.e. come back to find new information, discussions, commentaries, links, etc. If the community has a newsletter or an RSS feed they may also subscribe to such services. Finally, iv) if they feel “familiar” with the community they may also become contributors. So, a strategy for educational communities that want to raise the number of active participants and content contributors is first of all not to shut out learners who just want to observe what is going on. Furthermore, it is important to actively “grow” the community through direct information channels (e.g. a regular e-mail newsletter or RSS feed) and opportunities to participate (for other options that help to “familiarise” interested people, see the practical suggestions by Ross, 2002, and SitePoint Community, 2003).