open quest #1: explaining openness to a faculty group

Bard Quest #1

I have "revised" the bard quest and am working on a paper geared towards college professors who are not very familiar with the idea of open educational resources. This paper will continue to improve over the next three quests.

I still need to refine the introduction, I begin this version of the paper with a closer look at the word "open." Sorry for format troubles, copy/pasting from Word is killing me!

I'm particularly interested in feedback on the diagram of the Rs. Perhaps it is unnecessary, but I thought it would be helpful of having a visual way to conceptualize it. I tried various versions and I include one in the body of the paper, and another one at the end with a discussion on the two. Any suggestions on the below are welcome. It should be clear that some parts are pretty polished and others are more outline-ish.

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A Closer Look at “Open”

"Open” generally means that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts (McMartin, 2007). More specifically Wiley (2007) has described four “R’s” of openness. Each of these R’s represents an increasing level of openness.

Reuse—This is the most basic level of openness. People can use all or part of the work for their own purposes (e.g. download a copy of a song to listen to at a later time).

Redistribute—People can share the work with others (e.g. email a digital book to a friend).

Revise—People can modify, translate, or change the form the work (e.g. take a book written in English and turn it into a Spanish audio book).

Remix—Take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (e.g. take audio lectures from a course and combine them with a video from another course to create a new course).

The following diagram represents these R’s in terms of how they can be combined to increase openness.

With any open item there is an assumption that reuse is allowed. A more open approach is to allow individuals to reuse and redistribute the work. To allow others to revise, remix and redistribute resources is the most open approach.

How an individual licenses an OER also affects its openness. United States law states that anything you create is automatically copyrighted; therefore it is legally “closed” unless the author takes steps to open it. Creative Commons provides several licenses to help creators of content license their work in way that is consistent with their desires for openness. There are four important provisions of the Creative Commons licenses. They are: Attribution, Non-Commercial, No-Derivatives and Share-Alike. The Creative Commons website defines these terms in the following way:

"Attribution. You let people copy, distribute, display, perform, and remix your copyrighted work, as long as they give you credit the way you request. All CC licenses contain this property.

"NonCommercial. You let people copy, distribute, display, perform, and remix your work for non-commercial purposes only. If they want to use your work for commercial purposes, they must contact you for permission.

"ShareAlike. You let people create remixes and derivative works based on your creative work, as long as they only distribute them under the same Creative Commons license that your original work was published under.

"NoDerivatives. You let people copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work — not make derivative works based on it. If they want to alter, transform, build upon, or remix your work, they must contact you for permission" [Note: the NoDerivatives clause would prevent individuals from revising or remixing the work.] (cited either from http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions%20%5D or
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses double check).

If people wanted their resources to be as open as possible they could simple license them by asking for attribution. If a university did not others reusing its resources for commercial purposes it could license the resource in such a way so as to prevent commercial use. If authors do not want their works to be remixed then they could use the “NoDerivatives” clause.
In addition to licensing, there are other considerations that authors of OERs should take into account when designing for openness. Even if a work has been licensed so that users are free to reuse, redistribute, revise and remix the format in which the work is stored can make a large difference in how open it is. Some file formats are easier to open and edit than others. For example a .pdf file is easy to open with free software, but it cannot be edited using the free software file. Because free software exits to both open and edit .doc files, these could be considered a more “open” format. One way to increase openness when distributing OERs is to make them available in as many formats constraints allow.

Motivations for Sharing Open Education Resources

There are several reasons why individuals and institutions might be motivated to openly share resources. Three common motivations are to (1) receive increased exposure, (2) do some good, (3) create opportunities to collaborate and improve OERs.

Receive increased exposure

One benefit of openly publishing OERs is that it has the potential to increase the number of people who see your work. James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University openly released a book entitled The Public Domain. Within six weeks of publication the book had sold 3,000 copies (very respectable for an academic text) but had been downloaded 25,000 times. Boyle believes that the downloaders do not represent lost sales (most would not have purchased the book anyways), but an increase in exposure.

Allowing content to revised also significantly increases the impact a work can have. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University published his book Free Culture in 2004. The book has sold about 17,000 copies in the United States since being released (Bookscan, 2009). However, the books has been downloaded several hundred thousand times. Perhaps more importantly, it has been translated into seven different languages, audio versions are freely available, and it has been put into sixteen different. All of these translations and format changes are freely available for others to download. Allowing others to remix Free Cultures vastly expanded its reach.
Although not all OERs will be translated into multiple languages in formats, the possibility that the will remains.

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

Do some good in the world

Massive numbers of students cannot attend college. The UN says, Everyone has a right to free and compulsory education in the primary grades. Main purposes of education to teach kindness, tolerance. An individual might say, “If I've already made a set of PowerPoints for a class I teach, why not post them for others to view? If I can email electronic copies of articles I've published to others, why not let them benefit?”

Advantages for students
• Teachers can refer students to other courses they have taught.

Create opportunities to collaborate and improve OERs. Mechanisms of peer review – I will create something better if I know that others are going to view it.
• Better material used in courses (b/c profs can see what other profs do).
• Increased speed/cheaper course design
• Faculty collaboration may increase.

Obstacles to Openness A primary obstacle to creating OERs is that although they may be given away for free they are not completely free to create. For example suppose a professor wants to podcast her lectures. Although she will be preparing and presenting her lectures anyway, there is still a additional cost in time needed to record and upload the lectures. Even for a technologically proficient individual it might take five minutes to publish a new lecture. And if the professor does not have the technical ability to publish a podcast, then the costs increase. In some cases this obstacle can be overcome by outsourcing openness to a Teaching Assistant with the requisite time and technical skill.

Another obstacle to using OERs is that in most institutions there is little external motivation for doing so. An individual might want to increase exposure, or do some good by sharing, but feel a pressure to focus on activities such as publishing or committee work that will lead towards tenure. Some authors have suggested that in order to resolve this problem that a peer-reviewed outlet for publishing OERs should be created ([source: The book Giving Knowledge for Free (available here) .].

A third obstacle that may arise is the nagging doubt that nobody will use the resource. If nobody utilizes the OER some fear that the time spent creating it will have been wasted.
Does anybody care? Talking about “if a tree falls does anyone hear it” Wiley's answer is, “If Google hears the tree fall, then others will hear it.” 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).

[add in...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.”]

Conclusion

I still need to write the conclusion.

Below is another version of the diagram. This one illustrates that an item could technically be be licensed in such a way so as to allow revisions or remixing, but not to allow distribution. But since no CC license would allow that I thought it was a point to fine to make in a paper for my intended audience. I also put a dashed line to separate revise and remix, because from a practical standpoint there is no way to allow somebody to revise your work but prevent remixing it. Even considering the distinction that remixing brings up the issue of the licenses of the different works being remixed, from a permissions standpoint, if I give you permission to revise you also have permission to remix.