David Wiley in a report to Secretary of Education indicates that one motivation for open education is to improve educational quality by creating educational opportunities that are
Digital, Open, Mobile, Connected, Personal and Participatory (in other words to help education catch up with the rest of the world. Doing this allows students to get involved with courses before they enroll (or after they have long left the course.) His report can be read at: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/3rd-meeting/wiley.pdf
I have hear sections of this testimony on many occasions. In many ways I am persuaded by his arguments. I do wonder however if the extra effort to make the course open (however marginal that may be) is worth the effort. For example, do we really need an “open algebra class” from BYU, MIT, Notre Dame, Harvard, UVU, Utah State, etc.? Wouldn’t one be enough?
I think David would say that the more material that is out there, the more likely a person would be to be able to customize what was out there to meet their needs. This presupposes that there is a large body of individuals who are out there just waiting to access the content. Again, I’m not sure how true this is.
For example, BYU Independent Study offers a free (though not open) Book of Mormon class. Approximately 1,000 people enroll in the course each year. On its face, that seems pretty good. But if on further examination it turns out that those 1,000 individuals spend an average of 5 minutes in the course then I would question whether it was worth the effort to make it happen.
On the other side of that argument there is Elder M. Russell Ballard who has said that even if you are only reaching a small group; how important is the one! I’m not discounting the value or motivations of Open Ed, just pointing out that I don’t think that the need for it is always clearly defined.
The need definitely exists. Gordon B. Hinckley’s discussion of the Perpetual Education Fund makes it clear that there are people with low incomes who will greatly benefit from education; it’s just hard to tell how open education fits into the puzzle. Would open education resources make it so a person in Peru could get free education to give him or her a better job?
For me personally my motivation in providing open educational content is to extend the sphere of my classroom. If I've already made a set of PowerPoints for the Book of Mormon class I teach, why not post them for others to view, even if only a few people see them? If I can email electronic copies of books I've published to others, why not do that and let people who would never buy a copy benefit from reading it online? So I am persuaded that the motivation to share is obviously good, and that paritcularly when the cost to share is low, and the benefits are high open education clearly makes sense.
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I like the "why not open?" consideration. In working with faculty I've found that many fear openness. They see their scholarly or creative work as tied to their livelihood, for that work is the product of their education and their profession, both of which sustain them intellectually and financially. But most fail to consider that unless they are writing under a textbook contract or have clear plans to market what they have written, there is really no need to restrict access to their works through normal copyright. Why not instead share those works with an open license? What else are you going to do with them? Closed as they are, it is likely no one will ever see or benefit from them, and less likely that you will make money from them. But opening them may provide positive compensation that is neither monetary nor tied to copyright holdings. So, why not?
(Disclaimer: I'm following the course from a distance.)
"I think David would say that the more material that is out there, the more likely a person would be to be able to customize what was out there to meet their needs. This presupposes that there is a large body of individuals who are out there just waiting to access the content. Again, I’m not sure how true this is."
You are spot-on. I don't think the "If you build it, they will come," mantra has been empirically validated.
This is why, when I talk about why I do things openly (source, ed, etc.), I'm not doing it out of some high moral imperative, but for selfish, and sometimes, egotistical reasons.
I blog my thought because it hels *me* develop them. ... I was going to say more, but I'll save it for my blog post.
http://browelearning.org/
Thanks Jared and Jeremy. I concur that David would say the more the merrier. I am interested in studying exactly what types of resources people want. Jeremy-I couldn't locate your "open ed" blog, where is it? I did love the worksheet you posted.
It's not a matter of "the more the merrier." This comment contains as assumption that the "more" are "just more of the same." If you were to ask me how many English language Calculus courses for undergraduates at Carnegie Research Intensive universities we need, I would say just a few. However, when you consider differences in language, culture, and academic level, and the number of ways in which these can be combined, it becomes clear that yes, we really do need hundreds of versions of calc, and of algebra, and of biology. When you move out of the "hard sciences" into humanities courses like literature, the very content itself changes, as people from different cultures will read different authors' works, etc.
Yes, we need hundreds if not thousands of versions of each and every course. Now, many of these might be derivatives of a smaller number of "original" courses, but we definitely do need all these versions.
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