At our distance education class this past week Carl Johnson from BYU copyright came and visited our class to discuss copyright issues and education. This had obvious implications for the course I'm taking in Open Education as well.
It was interesting to me that Carl seemed to promote the use of Creative Commons licenses and author rights. Although he was careful to say that he needed promote the interests of both authors and the university in general, he seemed to feel that a day of open-access was coming and that there are lots of benefits in this regard.
In the Open Ed class I was made aware of a comment by a member of BYU's legal counsel who said that on both professional and personal reasons he supported Creative Commons. I'm obviously spending too much time hanging out with open-access people but I started to wonder to myself, "What would happen if copyright was done away with?" Or, more practically, dramatically reduced?
For me as an author would I care? No--it seems doubtful that anything of value that I create will not be worthy guarding 10 years from now. But what if? What if I became like JK Rowling and came up with a slam dunk, home run of a story. How would JK Rowling feel if copyright ended after ten years. What would that mean?
So I could publish cheap versions of the Harry Potter books. That would be bad for JK Rowling (no longer receives royalties) and bad for the publisher (too much competition now). Would it wreck the brand of Harry Potter? Not likely. If somebody publishes Harry Potter 8 and it stinks, nobody will buy it. If on the other hand it is an amazing piece of work, I'd be grateful for new culture (though Ms. Rowling might not be).
What percentage of works are like mine, and what percentage are like Rowlings? An interesting finding by James Boyle in his book The Public Domain is the following: "We know that when U.S. copyright required renewal after twenty-eight years, about 85 percent of all copyright holders did not bother to renew."
Isn't that amazing! Boyle states that this can be viewed as an approximation of commercial viability. So if after 28 years people don't renew, it's likely that it wasn't worth it.
I wonder how many years copyright would need to be in place in order for half of people to bother renewing it. Let's suppose that it was ten years.
If that were the case, what if a mechanism was set in place so that copyright expired after ten years; however, those who wanted to renew could renew the copyright by paying a nominal (15$) fee. And they could renew it every 10 years until death. And as long as I'm proposing new policy, what if we made it so that nothing was copyrighted unless the author specifically asked for the copyright to be in place by affixing a little logo to the work.
Although others have pushed for a less radical solution, this is what I am proposing today. :)
This review of Lessig's book Remix also had some helpful insights for thinking about copyright.
Showing posts with label Open. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Open. Show all posts
Friday, April 3, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Open Ed: More on Finance Course
This week David Wiley was able to contact Bryan Sudweeks regarding his course, and it appears that there may be some exciting possibilities with setting this part of the finance course free. I helped draft a letter regarding to Dr. Sudweeks regarding OCW and CC licenses. I also spent a lot of time on the personal finance site mapping various parts of it to the course objectives for the state of Utah's personal finance course (see google docs). It is inspiring to see somebody like Dr. Sudweeks who has created such a complete course, and is willing to freely share it without trying to charge people money for it. I love it.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Open Ed: Quest 5
As you hopefully know, I am working in a guild with Justin Johansen and Sara Joy Pond to create an open “financial literacy” class for high school students. We have taken the Utah state standards and divided out the objectives. Mine focus on investment and retirement. I searched through oerrecommender.com, wikieducator and discovered.creativecommons.org to find resources. I also remembered hearing about a personal finance site created by a BYU professor. I was able to locate both the site and its creator. I sent him an email to see if he would visit with me about opening up the content. I had not heard back after a few days and so I called him and we had a great conversation. The upshot of the matter is that he is very open to it. He had not heard of creative commons nor MIT OCW, but it seems like he wants to share his work as widely as possible as long as it is used non-commercially. It is a very comprehensive course and includes assessments. I believe that for me personally, I enjoy and think it is better to find complete courses and be instrumental in setting them free than to piece together modules from a variety of sources. I’m hopeful that a productive conversation will ensue, setting some content free!
Friday, March 6, 2009
Quest #4 personal finance resources
Justin, SaraJoy and I formed a guild focusing on creating an open "personal finance" course. It is harder than I thought. Justin is going to post a "guild post" for quest 4. We are using the UT Core Standards for personal finance, and I'm focusing on the fourth standard. Thus far, here is what I have found:
4.2.2 Identify strategies for investing (e.g., diversification, dollar cost averaging.) dollar cost averaging, diversification http://www.discusseconomics.com/personal-finances/financially-fine-issue-7-dollar-cost-averaging/ *** http://earlyretirementextreme.com/2008/03/diversification.html *** SEE ALSO WIKIPEDIA
4.3.3 Describe the concept of the time value of money. time value of money http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money
4.2.2 Identify strategies for investing (e.g., diversification, dollar cost averaging.) dollar cost averaging, diversification http://www.discusseconomics.com/personal-finances/financially-fine-issue-7-dollar-cost-averaging/ *** http://earlyretirementextreme.com/2008/03/diversification.html *** SEE ALSO WIKIPEDIA
4.3.3 Describe the concept of the time value of money. time value of money http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money
Friday, February 27, 2009
Open: Quest #3
The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Religious Education
Abstract A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources (OERs). By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts. These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources; this openness is also specifically manifest in the field of religious education. I discuss different levels in which OERs can be “open” and the implications of these levels when creating OERs. Common motivations and obstacles to creating OERs are discussed. A particularly significant issue regarding openness concerns copyright issues. I discuss copyright implications both in terms of reusing resources others have made (resources that may or may not be copyrighted), and using Creative Commons licenses to license OERs so as to give the desired level of copyright protection. Although OERs are not appropriate in all situations, they can be an important part of improving pedagogy and increasing access to education.
Introduction A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources (OERs). By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts (McMartin, 2007). These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. Perhaps the most well-known institutional program is MIT’s OpenCourseWare Program which provides open materials for over 1,800 courses. Other significant providers that share completely open courses include Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Yale’s Open Courses and Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere courses. Some institutions, instead of offering full courses, offer small units of instruction such as a class module, flash video file, lesson plan. Curriki and Rice University’s Connexions are examples of institutions providing these smaller units of educational content.
This sharing takes place by individual teachers as well as institutions. Individual teachers have uploaded lectures to YouTube, posted PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare, and shared photos of religious sites to Flickr.
Open educational resources are being shared with increasing frequency. This trend is occurring throughout education generally, and also specifically in religious education. Yale Divinity School publishes a course on the Old Testament, Notre Dame has three religion classes available and MIT OpenCourseWare has a class called “The Bible.” More than twenty religion courses are offered on iTunes University.
The increasing number of available OERs leads to several questions. What does it mean to be “open?” Why would teachers want to share their educational resources? What are obstacles to creating OERs, and how does copyright affect openness? In this paper I will discuss answers to these questions. Let’s begin with the question, what does it mean to be “open”?
A Closer Look at “Open”
As stated previously, “open” generally means that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts (McMartin, 2007). More specifically, Wiley (2009) has described four “R’s” of openness. Each of these R’s represents an increasing level of openness. These R’s are as follows:
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 article to a colleague).
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.
Any open item allows reuse. 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. Depending on the goals of the creator of a particular OER, different levels of openness will be appropriate (Gurell, 2008). How the OER is licensed, a subject discussed later in this paper, also affects how open the OER will be.
In addition to these four R’s, 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 it, 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 scanned document that has been turned into a .pdf file is easy to open with free software, but is not easy to edit. Because free software exits to both open and edit a .doc file, this might be considered a more “open” format. Thus openness is increased when file formats are used that are easy to both access and edit. Another way to increase openness when distributing OERs is to make them available in as many formats as constraints allow.
Motivations for Sharing Open Education Resources
There are several reasons why individuals and institutions might be motivated to openly share
resources. Four common motivations are to (1) receive increased exposure, (2) do some good, (3) give new life to out-of-print works, (4) improve the quality of educational resources.
Receive increased exposure
One benefit of openly publishing OERs is that it has the potential to increase the distribution of
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 (a figure with which he and the publisher were both pleased). In addition, the book was downloaded 25,000 times in those six weeks. Boyle believes that the downloads do not represent lost sales (he believes that most people who downloaded the book would not have purchased the book anyways). Rather he believes that the downloads represent an increase in exposure (Boyle, 2008).
Allowing content to be revised can also significantly increase the impact a work can have. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University published his book Free Culture in 2004. According to the Bookscan database, this book has sold approximately 17,000 copies in the United States since being released. However, the book has been downloaded several hundred thousand times (L. Lessig, personal communication, January 17, 2009). Perhaps more importantly, it has been translated into seven different languages, audio versions are freely available, and it has been put into sixteen different file formats (Free Culture Derivatives/Remixes, n.d.). All of these translations and format changes are freely available for others to download. Allowing others to remix Free Culture vastly expanded its reach.
Although not all OERs will be translated into multiple languages or revised in multiple formats, even small OERs often benefit from increased exposure when shared. For example, a PowerPoint presentation on the subject of open education has been downloaded from http://slideshare.net 5,809 times (2009). This increasing visibility of one’s work can build one’s reputation within a given community of practitioners (OECD, 2007).
Doing good in the world
A second reason for creating OERs is simply to do some good in the world. Many students cannot attend college. On-campus students might like to learn about the content of a specific course, but not be able to fit that course into their schedules. Some teachers would benefit from reusing educational resources created by others.
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 post electronic copies of articles I've published to others, why not let them benefit? If my campus’s Center for Teaching made a flash video to help me explain conflict in the Middle East, why not put it online?”
Give new life to out-of-print works. A third reason to create OERs is to give new life to out-of-print works. A significant problem in the publishing world relates to orphan books (Boyle, 2008). These are books that are out-of-print, and the copyright owner of the books cannot easily be identified. As time passes the out-of-print book becomes increasingly unavailable, as publishers merge and authors change locations, it can become impossible to locate. One religion professor wrote a book discussing the results of a significant longitudinal study. Once the book was out-of-print, he was frustrated because he felt that the study needed to be seen by many more people. Posting the book online and referring people to the book’s website when he spoke on the study would allow the book to receive new attention and bring new life to a book that would have otherwise not been seen again.
Improve the quality of educational resources A fourth reason to create OERs is that it may improve the quality of both the resources and student learning. When an educational resource is published openly it may bring about the mechanisms of peer review (Wiley, 2009). If people know their educational resource will be viewed by others they might desire to make it better than they ordinarily would. In addition, as others use the resource they may improve it and return the revised version to the creator, who then benefits from the improvement.
For example, suppose a teacher creates a PowerPoint presentation featuring quotes from world religious leaders and puts it online. A teacher on another continent has a collection of related audio files and attaches some to the slides. A third teacher has a video clip of one of the quotations and adds that into the presentation. The resulting work may in some contexts be a better educational resource than the original, and everyone can benefit from the improved resource.
Openness has a tendency to lead to better material used in courses not only because faculty can build on other open resources, but simply because teachers can more easily see what other teachers are doing. Just as observing others teach has been shown to improve teaching (Elmore, 1997), observing the educational resources that others use in the classroom may also improves teaching. Thus OERs benefit both the teachers who used them and the students who receive them. In addition, because the resources are openly available on the Internet, teachers can refer students to the resources directly so that they can be utilized outside of class.
Obstacles to Openness
Although there are many reasons why an educator might want to create and share OERs, there
are also obstacles to creating such resources. Four common obstacles are the following: 1. the amount of time necessary to put the OER in a format that can be shared. 2. A desire to keep the resource from being seen by others. 3. There are few if any external reward mechanisms for creating OERs. 4. Some educators are concerned that nobody will want to use the OERs they create.
A primary obstacle to creating OERs is that although they are shared freely, 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 an 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 a professor does not have the technical ability to publish a podcast, the costs in time increase. In some cases this obstacle can be overcome by outsourcing the additional steps to “open the resource” to a Teaching Assistant with the requisite time and technical skill.
A second obstacle to creating OERs is that an individual may not want others to see the resource. This could be due to a professor not wanting to publish half-finished research, or a fear that others could copy ideas and profit on them. In some cases this is a legitimate obstacle. Openness is not the right solution for all educational resources. It is also important to note that how an OER is licensed, a subject discussed later in this paper, can sometimes ameliorate this concern.
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. For example, one individual took a book he had written about a city and turned it into an online resource for information about that city. When it came time to review his publications from the previous year, the academic committee did not know what to make of this online resource. Although this is a problem likely to remain in academia for some time, there are glimmers of change on the horizon. Some have suggested that in order to resolve this problem that a peer-reviewed outlet for publishing OERs could be created to provide external motivation (OECD, 2007). Others report that some OERs (such as contributing a chapter to a book that is openly distributed) may be included in a Vita (Bazerman, et al., 2008).
A fourth obstacle that may prevent some from creating OERs is the thought that nobody will use the resource (Brown, 2007). If nobody utilizes the OER some fear that the time spent creating may have been wasted. It would be like planning a big party, but having nobody attend. This obstacle is an important issue with respect to OERs (Dholakia, King, and Baraniuk, 2006). Attention does need to be focused on creating resources from which others will benefit, as well as developing a community of users sufficiently large to have a collective impact. This obstacle can be related to the question, “If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it?” In today’s world, the answer is, “If Google hears the tree fall, then others will hear it also (Wiley, 2009). As individual and collective capacities to effectively search online increase, it will become easier to locate and reuse OERs.
Another obstacle that prevents people from creating Open Educational Resources concerns copyright issues. This is a significant issue that is discussed in the following section.
Copyright Considerations
There are two key copyright issues with respect to OERs. First, ensuring that you have appropriate permissions to use existing resources as part of your OER, and second choosing a license for your OER.
Permissions
One professor teaching a Hebrew literature class used a series of articles as part of the class
readings. Because these articles were copyrighted he was not able to openly distribute them as a packet for others to use. Another professor wanted to upload his PowerPoint presentations but was not sure whether the images used in the presentation would constitute “fair use” and was worried about copyright violations. These are common concerns.
There are two ways that the permissions challenge can be overcome. One is to simply substitute open resources for copyrighted ones. Although not possible in all in all cases, it becoming increasingly easier to accomplish. For example at http://flickr.com one can search for photos that have been licensed for non-commercial use. There are 8,321 such photos of “The Dome of the Rock,” and 277 photos of “St. Peter’s Tomb.” Such photos might easily take the place of copyrighted photos in a PowerPoint presentation. Similarly, teachers sometimes can utilize articles that are already available for free on the Internet and combine them into a packet that can be used by others.
A second way to overcome the permissions challenge is to modify resources before they are openly shared. For example, if a teacher wanted to share a packet of course materials, the copyrighted materials could be removed prior to online distribution, and the rest of the resource could be openly shared.
Licensing Open Educational Resources
How an individual licenses an OER will significantly affect 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 (Lessig, 2004). One remedy to this situation is to use a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons provides several licenses to help creators of content license their work in ways 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.]" (Creative Commons, 2009).
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 revised or built upon then they could use the “NoDerivatives” clause. These licensing options provide creators of OERs the ability to license their works in ways that are consistent with their desires for openness.
Conclusion As the world becomes increasingly connected, open educational resources provide a significant opportunity to share both content knowledge and pedagogical practice. Openness is increased as educators provide resources that can be reused, redistributed, revised, and remixed. Openness also increases when resources are placed in a file format that is easy to open and edit. There are several motivations and obstacles for creating OERs. One frequently cited obstacle concerns copyright issues. Through the use of Creative Commons licenses educators can protect the rights they wish to keep while giving some of those rights to others. Although OERs are not appropriate in all situations, they can be an important part of improving pedagogy and increasing access to education.
Bibliography
Bazerman, C., Blakesley, D., Palmquist, M., & Russell, D. (2008). Open access book publishing in writing studies: A case study. First Monday, 13(1-7).
Boyle, J. (2008). The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Brown, J. S. (2008). Creating a Culture of Learning. In T. Iiyoshi & M. S. V. Kumar, (Eds.), Opening Up Education (xi-xvii): Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Creative Commons (2009). Creative Commons Licenses. Retrieved February 27, 2009, from: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses.
Dholakia, U., King, J., & Baraniuk, R. (2006). What makes an open education program sustainable? The case of Connexions. Retrieved February 26, 2009, from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/3/6/36781781.pdf.
Elmore, R. F., Burney, D., & (US), E. R. I. C. (1997). Investing in Teacher Learning: Staff Development and Instructional Improvement in Community School District# 2, New York City. National Commission on Teaching & America's Future; Consortium for Policy Research in Education; US Dept. of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Educational Resources Information Center.
Free Culture Derivatives/Remixes. (n.d.). . Retrieved February 27, 2009, from http://www.free-culture.cc/remixes/.
Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin.
McMartin, F. (2008). Open Educational Content: Transforming Access to Education. In T. Iiyoshi & M. S. V. Kumar, (Eds.), Opening Up Education (135-148): Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Giving Knowledge for Free. The Emergence of Open Educational Resources. Retrieved February 27, 2009 from: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/7/38654317.pdf
Gurell, S. (2008). Open educational resources handbook for educators 1.0. Logan, UT: Center for Open and Sustainable Learning.
Slideshare.net (2009). “Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education.” Retrieved February 27 2009 from: http://www.slideshare.net/opencontent
Wiley, D. (2009). Class lectures on January 13, January 27.
Abstract A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources (OERs). By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts. These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources; this openness is also specifically manifest in the field of religious education. I discuss different levels in which OERs can be “open” and the implications of these levels when creating OERs. Common motivations and obstacles to creating OERs are discussed. A particularly significant issue regarding openness concerns copyright issues. I discuss copyright implications both in terms of reusing resources others have made (resources that may or may not be copyrighted), and using Creative Commons licenses to license OERs so as to give the desired level of copyright protection. Although OERs are not appropriate in all situations, they can be an important part of improving pedagogy and increasing access to education.
Introduction A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources (OERs). By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts (McMartin, 2007). These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. Perhaps the most well-known institutional program is MIT’s OpenCourseWare Program which provides open materials for over 1,800 courses. Other significant providers that share completely open courses include Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Yale’s Open Courses and Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere courses. Some institutions, instead of offering full courses, offer small units of instruction such as a class module, flash video file, lesson plan. Curriki and Rice University’s Connexions are examples of institutions providing these smaller units of educational content.
This sharing takes place by individual teachers as well as institutions. Individual teachers have uploaded lectures to YouTube, posted PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare, and shared photos of religious sites to Flickr.
Open educational resources are being shared with increasing frequency. This trend is occurring throughout education generally, and also specifically in religious education. Yale Divinity School publishes a course on the Old Testament, Notre Dame has three religion classes available and MIT OpenCourseWare has a class called “The Bible.” More than twenty religion courses are offered on iTunes University.
The increasing number of available OERs leads to several questions. What does it mean to be “open?” Why would teachers want to share their educational resources? What are obstacles to creating OERs, and how does copyright affect openness? In this paper I will discuss answers to these questions. Let’s begin with the question, what does it mean to be “open”?
A Closer Look at “Open”
As stated previously, “open” generally means that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts (McMartin, 2007). More specifically, Wiley (2009) has described four “R’s” of openness. Each of these R’s represents an increasing level of openness. These R’s are as follows:
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 article to a colleague).
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.
Any open item allows reuse. 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. Depending on the goals of the creator of a particular OER, different levels of openness will be appropriate (Gurell, 2008). How the OER is licensed, a subject discussed later in this paper, also affects how open the OER will be.
In addition to these four R’s, 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 it, 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 scanned document that has been turned into a .pdf file is easy to open with free software, but is not easy to edit. Because free software exits to both open and edit a .doc file, this might be considered a more “open” format. Thus openness is increased when file formats are used that are easy to both access and edit. Another way to increase openness when distributing OERs is to make them available in as many formats as constraints allow.
Motivations for Sharing Open Education Resources
There are several reasons why individuals and institutions might be motivated to openly share
resources. Four common motivations are to (1) receive increased exposure, (2) do some good, (3) give new life to out-of-print works, (4) improve the quality of educational resources.
Receive increased exposure
One benefit of openly publishing OERs is that it has the potential to increase the distribution of
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 (a figure with which he and the publisher were both pleased). In addition, the book was downloaded 25,000 times in those six weeks. Boyle believes that the downloads do not represent lost sales (he believes that most people who downloaded the book would not have purchased the book anyways). Rather he believes that the downloads represent an increase in exposure (Boyle, 2008).
Allowing content to be revised can also significantly increase the impact a work can have. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University published his book Free Culture in 2004. According to the Bookscan database, this book has sold approximately 17,000 copies in the United States since being released. However, the book has been downloaded several hundred thousand times (L. Lessig, personal communication, January 17, 2009). Perhaps more importantly, it has been translated into seven different languages, audio versions are freely available, and it has been put into sixteen different file formats (Free Culture Derivatives/Remixes, n.d.). All of these translations and format changes are freely available for others to download. Allowing others to remix Free Culture vastly expanded its reach.
Although not all OERs will be translated into multiple languages or revised in multiple formats, even small OERs often benefit from increased exposure when shared. For example, a PowerPoint presentation on the subject of open education has been downloaded from http://slideshare.net 5,809 times (2009). This increasing visibility of one’s work can build one’s reputation within a given community of practitioners (OECD, 2007).
Doing good in the world
A second reason for creating OERs is simply to do some good in the world. Many students cannot attend college. On-campus students might like to learn about the content of a specific course, but not be able to fit that course into their schedules. Some teachers would benefit from reusing educational resources created by others.
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 post electronic copies of articles I've published to others, why not let them benefit? If my campus’s Center for Teaching made a flash video to help me explain conflict in the Middle East, why not put it online?”
Give new life to out-of-print works. A third reason to create OERs is to give new life to out-of-print works. A significant problem in the publishing world relates to orphan books (Boyle, 2008). These are books that are out-of-print, and the copyright owner of the books cannot easily be identified. As time passes the out-of-print book becomes increasingly unavailable, as publishers merge and authors change locations, it can become impossible to locate. One religion professor wrote a book discussing the results of a significant longitudinal study. Once the book was out-of-print, he was frustrated because he felt that the study needed to be seen by many more people. Posting the book online and referring people to the book’s website when he spoke on the study would allow the book to receive new attention and bring new life to a book that would have otherwise not been seen again.
Improve the quality of educational resources A fourth reason to create OERs is that it may improve the quality of both the resources and student learning. When an educational resource is published openly it may bring about the mechanisms of peer review (Wiley, 2009). If people know their educational resource will be viewed by others they might desire to make it better than they ordinarily would. In addition, as others use the resource they may improve it and return the revised version to the creator, who then benefits from the improvement.
For example, suppose a teacher creates a PowerPoint presentation featuring quotes from world religious leaders and puts it online. A teacher on another continent has a collection of related audio files and attaches some to the slides. A third teacher has a video clip of one of the quotations and adds that into the presentation. The resulting work may in some contexts be a better educational resource than the original, and everyone can benefit from the improved resource.
Openness has a tendency to lead to better material used in courses not only because faculty can build on other open resources, but simply because teachers can more easily see what other teachers are doing. Just as observing others teach has been shown to improve teaching (Elmore, 1997), observing the educational resources that others use in the classroom may also improves teaching. Thus OERs benefit both the teachers who used them and the students who receive them. In addition, because the resources are openly available on the Internet, teachers can refer students to the resources directly so that they can be utilized outside of class.
Obstacles to Openness
Although there are many reasons why an educator might want to create and share OERs, there
are also obstacles to creating such resources. Four common obstacles are the following: 1. the amount of time necessary to put the OER in a format that can be shared. 2. A desire to keep the resource from being seen by others. 3. There are few if any external reward mechanisms for creating OERs. 4. Some educators are concerned that nobody will want to use the OERs they create.
A primary obstacle to creating OERs is that although they are shared freely, 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 an 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 a professor does not have the technical ability to publish a podcast, the costs in time increase. In some cases this obstacle can be overcome by outsourcing the additional steps to “open the resource” to a Teaching Assistant with the requisite time and technical skill.
A second obstacle to creating OERs is that an individual may not want others to see the resource. This could be due to a professor not wanting to publish half-finished research, or a fear that others could copy ideas and profit on them. In some cases this is a legitimate obstacle. Openness is not the right solution for all educational resources. It is also important to note that how an OER is licensed, a subject discussed later in this paper, can sometimes ameliorate this concern.
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. For example, one individual took a book he had written about a city and turned it into an online resource for information about that city. When it came time to review his publications from the previous year, the academic committee did not know what to make of this online resource. Although this is a problem likely to remain in academia for some time, there are glimmers of change on the horizon. Some have suggested that in order to resolve this problem that a peer-reviewed outlet for publishing OERs could be created to provide external motivation (OECD, 2007). Others report that some OERs (such as contributing a chapter to a book that is openly distributed) may be included in a Vita (Bazerman, et al., 2008).
A fourth obstacle that may prevent some from creating OERs is the thought that nobody will use the resource (Brown, 2007). If nobody utilizes the OER some fear that the time spent creating may have been wasted. It would be like planning a big party, but having nobody attend. This obstacle is an important issue with respect to OERs (Dholakia, King, and Baraniuk, 2006). Attention does need to be focused on creating resources from which others will benefit, as well as developing a community of users sufficiently large to have a collective impact. This obstacle can be related to the question, “If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it?” In today’s world, the answer is, “If Google hears the tree fall, then others will hear it also (Wiley, 2009). As individual and collective capacities to effectively search online increase, it will become easier to locate and reuse OERs.
Another obstacle that prevents people from creating Open Educational Resources concerns copyright issues. This is a significant issue that is discussed in the following section.
Copyright Considerations
There are two key copyright issues with respect to OERs. First, ensuring that you have appropriate permissions to use existing resources as part of your OER, and second choosing a license for your OER.
Permissions
One professor teaching a Hebrew literature class used a series of articles as part of the class
readings. Because these articles were copyrighted he was not able to openly distribute them as a packet for others to use. Another professor wanted to upload his PowerPoint presentations but was not sure whether the images used in the presentation would constitute “fair use” and was worried about copyright violations. These are common concerns.
There are two ways that the permissions challenge can be overcome. One is to simply substitute open resources for copyrighted ones. Although not possible in all in all cases, it becoming increasingly easier to accomplish. For example at http://flickr.com one can search for photos that have been licensed for non-commercial use. There are 8,321 such photos of “The Dome of the Rock,” and 277 photos of “St. Peter’s Tomb.” Such photos might easily take the place of copyrighted photos in a PowerPoint presentation. Similarly, teachers sometimes can utilize articles that are already available for free on the Internet and combine them into a packet that can be used by others.
A second way to overcome the permissions challenge is to modify resources before they are openly shared. For example, if a teacher wanted to share a packet of course materials, the copyrighted materials could be removed prior to online distribution, and the rest of the resource could be openly shared.
Licensing Open Educational Resources
How an individual licenses an OER will significantly affect 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 (Lessig, 2004). One remedy to this situation is to use a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons provides several licenses to help creators of content license their work in ways 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.]" (Creative Commons, 2009).
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 revised or built upon then they could use the “NoDerivatives” clause. These licensing options provide creators of OERs the ability to license their works in ways that are consistent with their desires for openness.
Conclusion As the world becomes increasingly connected, open educational resources provide a significant opportunity to share both content knowledge and pedagogical practice. Openness is increased as educators provide resources that can be reused, redistributed, revised, and remixed. Openness also increases when resources are placed in a file format that is easy to open and edit. There are several motivations and obstacles for creating OERs. One frequently cited obstacle concerns copyright issues. Through the use of Creative Commons licenses educators can protect the rights they wish to keep while giving some of those rights to others. Although OERs are not appropriate in all situations, they can be an important part of improving pedagogy and increasing access to education.
Bibliography
Bazerman, C., Blakesley, D., Palmquist, M., & Russell, D. (2008). Open access book publishing in writing studies: A case study. First Monday, 13(1-7).
Boyle, J. (2008). The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Brown, J. S. (2008). Creating a Culture of Learning. In T. Iiyoshi & M. S. V. Kumar, (Eds.), Opening Up Education (xi-xvii): Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Creative Commons (2009). Creative Commons Licenses. Retrieved February 27, 2009, from: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses.
Dholakia, U., King, J., & Baraniuk, R. (2006). What makes an open education program sustainable? The case of Connexions. Retrieved February 26, 2009, from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/3/6/36781781.pdf.
Elmore, R. F., Burney, D., & (US), E. R. I. C. (1997). Investing in Teacher Learning: Staff Development and Instructional Improvement in Community School District# 2, New York City. National Commission on Teaching & America's Future; Consortium for Policy Research in Education; US Dept. of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Educational Resources Information Center.
Free Culture Derivatives/Remixes. (n.d.). . Retrieved February 27, 2009, from http://www.free-culture.cc/remixes/.
Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin.
McMartin, F. (2008). Open Educational Content: Transforming Access to Education. In T. Iiyoshi & M. S. V. Kumar, (Eds.), Opening Up Education (135-148): Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Giving Knowledge for Free. The Emergence of Open Educational Resources. Retrieved February 27, 2009 from: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/7/38654317.pdf
Gurell, S. (2008). Open educational resources handbook for educators 1.0. Logan, UT: Center for Open and Sustainable Learning.
Slideshare.net (2009). “Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education.” Retrieved February 27 2009 from: http://www.slideshare.net/opencontent
Wiley, D. (2009). Class lectures on January 13, January 27.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Open Quest #2: Explaining openness--round 2
To those who will read this post before 2/23. I welcome feedback. I'm not worried about spelling/missing words as much as substantive changes. What areas do see as being weak? Where should I add? What could I do to strengthen the work? How to conclude? I feel that I still need more specific examples from the realms of religious education, though I have improved in this iteration. All comments are welcome. Thank you.
Openly Sharing Your Classroom Content
Introduction
A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources (OERs). By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts (McMartin, 2007). These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. Perhaps the most well-known is MIT’s OpenCourseWare Program which provides open materials for over 1,800 courses.
Other significant providers that share completely open courses include Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Yale’s Open Courses and Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere courses. Others organizations, such as Curriki and Rice University’s Connexions provide ways to share smaller units of educational content.
Educators are sharing open educational resources with increasing frequency. This trend is occurring throughout education generally, and also specifically in religious education. Yale Divinity School publishes a course on the Old Testament, Notre Dame has three religion classes available and MIT OpenCourseWare has a class called “The Bible.” More than twenty religion courses are offered on iTunes University. Other teachers have uploaded lectures to YouTube, posted PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare, and shared photos of religious sites to Flickr.
The increasing number of available OERs leads to several questions. What does it mean to be “open?” Why would teachers want to share their educational resources? What are obstacles to creating OERs, and how does copyright affect openness? In this paper I will discuss answers to these questions. Let’s begin with the question, what does it mean to be “open”?
A Closer Look at “Open”
As stated previously, “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 article to a colleague).
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 item that is open 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. Depending on the goals of the creator of a particular OER, different levels of openness will be appropriate (cite source). How the OER is licensed, a subject discussed later in this paper, also affects how open the OER will be.
In addition to these four Rs, 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 it, 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 scanned document that has been turned into a .pdf file is easy to open with free software, but is not easy to edit. Because free software exits to both open and edit a .doc file, this might be considered a more “open” format. Thus openness is increased when file formats are used that are easy to both access and edit. Another way to increase openness when distributing OERs is to make them available in as many formats as constraints allow.
Motivations for Sharing Open Education Resources
There are several reasons why individuals and institutions might be motivated to openly share resources. Four common motivations are to (1) receive increased exposure, (2) do some good, (3) give new life to out-of-print works, (4) improve the quality of educational resources.
Receive increased exposure
One benefit of openly publishing OERs is that it has the potential to increase the distribution of 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 (a figure with which he and the publisher were both pleased). In addition, the book was downloaded 25,000 times in those six weeks. Boyle believes that the downloaders do not represent lost sales (he believes that most would not have purchased the book anyways), but rather an increase in exposure (Boyle, 2008).
Allowing content to be revised can also significantly increase the impact a work can have. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University published his book Free Culture in 2004. The book has sold approximately 17,000 copies in the United States since being released (Bookscan, 2009). However, the book 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 file formats. All of these translations and format changes are freely available for others to download. Allowing others to remix Free Culture vastly expanded its reach.
Although not all OERs will be translated into multiple languages or revised in multiple formats, even small OERs often benefit from increased exposure when shared. For example [either use David Wiley # of times a slideshare presentation is seen, or iTunes example of number of times a course has been downloaded). This increasing visibility of one’s work can build one’s reputation within a given community of practitioners (source: Giving Knowledge for Free (available here).
Doing good in the world
A second reason for creating OERs is simply to do some good in the world. Many students cannot attend college. Others would like to learn about the content you teach, but cannot fit it into their schedule. Some teachers, particularly in developing countries, cannot access the latest research and would benefit from reusing educational resources created by others (cite source).
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 post electronic copies of articles I've published to others, why not let them benefit? If my campus’s Center for Teaching made a flash video to help me explain conflict in the Middle East, why not put it online?”
Give new life to out-of-print works.
A third reason to create OERs is to give new life to out-of-print works. A significant problem in the publishing world relates to “orphan books” (Boyle, 2008). These are books that are out-of-print, and the copyright owner of the books cannot easily be identified. As time passes the out-of-print book becomes increasingly unavailable, as publishers merge and authors change locations, it can become impossible to locate. One religion professor wrote a book discussing the results of a significant longitudinal study. Once the book was out-of-print, he was frustrated because he felt that the study needed to be seen by many more people. Posting the book online and referring people to the book’s website when he spoke on the study would allow the book to receive new attention and bring new life to a book that would have otherwise not been seen again.
Improve the quality of educational resources
A fourth reason to create OERs is that it may improve the quality of both the resources and student learning (cite source). When an educational resource is published openly it may bring about the mechanisms of peer review (cite source). If people know their educational resource will be viewed by others they might desire to make it better than they ordinarily would. In addition, as others use the resource they may improve it and return the revised version to the creator, who then benefits from the improvement.
For example, suppose a teacher creates a PowerPoint presentation featuring quotes from world religious leaders and puts it online. A teacher on another continent has a collection of related audio files and attaches some to the slides. A third teacher has a video clip of one of the quotations and adds that into the presentation. The resulting work may in some contexts be a better educational resource than the original, and everyone can benefit from the improved resource.
Openness has a tendency to lead to better material used in courses not only because faculty can build on other open resources, but simply because teachers can more easily see what other teachers are doing. Just as observing others teach has been shown to improve teaching (cite source), observing the types of educational resources that others use in the classroom also improves teaching (cite source).
The improved OERs benefit the students who use them. In addition, because the resources are openly available on the Internet teachers can refer students to the resources directly so that they can be utilized outside of class.
Obstacles to Openness
A primary obstacle to creating OERs is that although they are shared freely, 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 an 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 a professor does not have the technical ability to publish a podcast, the costs in time increase. In some cases this obstacle can be overcome by outsourcing the additional steps to “open the resource” to a Teaching Assistant with the requisite time and technical skill.
A second obstacle to creating OERs is that an individual may not want others to see the resource. This could be due to a professor not wanting to publish half-finished research, or a fear that others could copy ideas and profit on them. In some cases this is a legitimate obstacle. Openness is not the right solution for all educational resources (Osguthorpe, 2009, others?). It is also important to note that how an OER is licensed, a subject discussed later in this paper, can sometimes ameliorate this concern.
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. For example, one individual took a book he had written about a city and turned it into an online resource for information about that city. When it came time to review his publications from the previous year, the academic committee did not know what to make of this online resource. Although this is a problem likely to remain in academia for some time, there are glimmers of change on the horizon. Some have suggested that in order to resolve this problem that a peer-reviewed outlet for publishing OERs could be created to provide external motivation ([source: The book Giving Knowledge for Free (available here).]. Others report that some OERs (such as contributing a chapter to a book that is openly distributed) may be included in a Vita (First Monday article, 2008).
A fourth obstacle that may prevent some from creating OERs is the thought that nobody will use the resource. If nobody utilizes the OER some fear that the time spent creating may have been wasted. It would be like planning a big party, but having nobody attend. This obstacle is an important issue with respect to OERs (Dholakia, King, and Baraniuk). Attention does need to be focused on creating resources from which others will benefit, as well as developing a community of users sufficiently large to have a collective impact. This obstacle can be related to the question, “If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it?” In today’s world, the answer is, “If Google hears the tree fall, then others will hear it also (Wiley, 2009). As individual and collective capacities to effectively search online increase, it will become easier to locate and reuse OERs.
Another obstacle that prevents people from creating Open Educational Resources concerns copyright issues. This is a significant issue that is discussed in the following section.
Copyright Considerations
There are two key copyright issues with respect to OERs. First, ensuring that you have appropriate permissions to use existing resources as part of your OER, and second choosing a license for your OER.
Permissions
One professor teaching a Hebrew literature class used a series of articles as part of the class readings. Because these articles were copyrighted he was not able to openly distribute them as a packet for others to use. Another professor wanted to upload his PowerPoint presentations but was not sure whether the images used in the presentation would constitute “fair use” and was worried about copyright violations. These are common concerns.
There are two ways that the permissions challenge can be overcome. One is to simply substitute open resources for copyrighted ones. Although not possible in all in all cases, it becoming increasingly easier to accomplish. For example at http://flickr.com one can search for photos that have been licensed for non-commercial use. There are 8,321 such photos of “The Dome of the Rock,” and 277 photos of “St. Peter’s Tomb.” Such photos might easily take the place of copyrighted photos in a PowerPoint presentation. Similarly, teachers sometimes can utilize articles that are already available for free on the Internet and combine them into a packet that can be used by others.
A second way to overcome the permissions challenge is to modify resources before they are openly shared. For example, if a teacher wanted to share a packet of course materials, the copyrighted materials could be removed prior to online distribution, and the rest of the resource could be openly shared.
Licensing Open Educational Resources
How an individual licenses an OER will significantly affect 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 (cite source). One remedy to this situation is to use a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons provides several licenses to help creators of content license their work in ways 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 from
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses).
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 revised or built upon then they could use the “NoDerivatives” clause. These licensing options provide creators of OERs the ability to license their works in ways that are consistent with their desires for openness.
Conclusion
As the world becomes increasingly connected, open educational resources provide a significant opportunity to share both content knowledge and pedagogical practice. Although OERs are not a panacea for all educational problems, they can provide an important role in improving the teaching and learning of religious topics.
Openly Sharing Your Classroom Content
Introduction
A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources (OERs). By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is freely available to others to reuse in different contexts (McMartin, 2007). These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. Perhaps the most well-known is MIT’s OpenCourseWare Program which provides open materials for over 1,800 courses.
Other significant providers that share completely open courses include Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Yale’s Open Courses and Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere courses. Others organizations, such as Curriki and Rice University’s Connexions provide ways to share smaller units of educational content.
Educators are sharing open educational resources with increasing frequency. This trend is occurring throughout education generally, and also specifically in religious education. Yale Divinity School publishes a course on the Old Testament, Notre Dame has three religion classes available and MIT OpenCourseWare has a class called “The Bible.” More than twenty religion courses are offered on iTunes University. Other teachers have uploaded lectures to YouTube, posted PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare, and shared photos of religious sites to Flickr.
The increasing number of available OERs leads to several questions. What does it mean to be “open?” Why would teachers want to share their educational resources? What are obstacles to creating OERs, and how does copyright affect openness? In this paper I will discuss answers to these questions. Let’s begin with the question, what does it mean to be “open”?
A Closer Look at “Open”
As stated previously, “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 article to a colleague).
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 item that is open 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. Depending on the goals of the creator of a particular OER, different levels of openness will be appropriate (cite source). How the OER is licensed, a subject discussed later in this paper, also affects how open the OER will be.
In addition to these four Rs, 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 it, 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 scanned document that has been turned into a .pdf file is easy to open with free software, but is not easy to edit. Because free software exits to both open and edit a .doc file, this might be considered a more “open” format. Thus openness is increased when file formats are used that are easy to both access and edit. Another way to increase openness when distributing OERs is to make them available in as many formats as constraints allow.
Motivations for Sharing Open Education Resources
There are several reasons why individuals and institutions might be motivated to openly share resources. Four common motivations are to (1) receive increased exposure, (2) do some good, (3) give new life to out-of-print works, (4) improve the quality of educational resources.
Receive increased exposure
One benefit of openly publishing OERs is that it has the potential to increase the distribution of 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 (a figure with which he and the publisher were both pleased). In addition, the book was downloaded 25,000 times in those six weeks. Boyle believes that the downloaders do not represent lost sales (he believes that most would not have purchased the book anyways), but rather an increase in exposure (Boyle, 2008).
Allowing content to be revised can also significantly increase the impact a work can have. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University published his book Free Culture in 2004. The book has sold approximately 17,000 copies in the United States since being released (Bookscan, 2009). However, the book 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 file formats. All of these translations and format changes are freely available for others to download. Allowing others to remix Free Culture vastly expanded its reach.
Although not all OERs will be translated into multiple languages or revised in multiple formats, even small OERs often benefit from increased exposure when shared. For example [either use David Wiley # of times a slideshare presentation is seen, or iTunes example of number of times a course has been downloaded). This increasing visibility of one’s work can build one’s reputation within a given community of practitioners (source: Giving Knowledge for Free (available here).
Doing good in the world
A second reason for creating OERs is simply to do some good in the world. Many students cannot attend college. Others would like to learn about the content you teach, but cannot fit it into their schedule. Some teachers, particularly in developing countries, cannot access the latest research and would benefit from reusing educational resources created by others (cite source).
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 post electronic copies of articles I've published to others, why not let them benefit? If my campus’s Center for Teaching made a flash video to help me explain conflict in the Middle East, why not put it online?”
Give new life to out-of-print works.
A third reason to create OERs is to give new life to out-of-print works. A significant problem in the publishing world relates to “orphan books” (Boyle, 2008). These are books that are out-of-print, and the copyright owner of the books cannot easily be identified. As time passes the out-of-print book becomes increasingly unavailable, as publishers merge and authors change locations, it can become impossible to locate. One religion professor wrote a book discussing the results of a significant longitudinal study. Once the book was out-of-print, he was frustrated because he felt that the study needed to be seen by many more people. Posting the book online and referring people to the book’s website when he spoke on the study would allow the book to receive new attention and bring new life to a book that would have otherwise not been seen again.
Improve the quality of educational resources
A fourth reason to create OERs is that it may improve the quality of both the resources and student learning (cite source). When an educational resource is published openly it may bring about the mechanisms of peer review (cite source). If people know their educational resource will be viewed by others they might desire to make it better than they ordinarily would. In addition, as others use the resource they may improve it and return the revised version to the creator, who then benefits from the improvement.
For example, suppose a teacher creates a PowerPoint presentation featuring quotes from world religious leaders and puts it online. A teacher on another continent has a collection of related audio files and attaches some to the slides. A third teacher has a video clip of one of the quotations and adds that into the presentation. The resulting work may in some contexts be a better educational resource than the original, and everyone can benefit from the improved resource.
Openness has a tendency to lead to better material used in courses not only because faculty can build on other open resources, but simply because teachers can more easily see what other teachers are doing. Just as observing others teach has been shown to improve teaching (cite source), observing the types of educational resources that others use in the classroom also improves teaching (cite source).
The improved OERs benefit the students who use them. In addition, because the resources are openly available on the Internet teachers can refer students to the resources directly so that they can be utilized outside of class.
Obstacles to Openness
A primary obstacle to creating OERs is that although they are shared freely, 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 an 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 a professor does not have the technical ability to publish a podcast, the costs in time increase. In some cases this obstacle can be overcome by outsourcing the additional steps to “open the resource” to a Teaching Assistant with the requisite time and technical skill.
A second obstacle to creating OERs is that an individual may not want others to see the resource. This could be due to a professor not wanting to publish half-finished research, or a fear that others could copy ideas and profit on them. In some cases this is a legitimate obstacle. Openness is not the right solution for all educational resources (Osguthorpe, 2009, others?). It is also important to note that how an OER is licensed, a subject discussed later in this paper, can sometimes ameliorate this concern.
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. For example, one individual took a book he had written about a city and turned it into an online resource for information about that city. When it came time to review his publications from the previous year, the academic committee did not know what to make of this online resource. Although this is a problem likely to remain in academia for some time, there are glimmers of change on the horizon. Some have suggested that in order to resolve this problem that a peer-reviewed outlet for publishing OERs could be created to provide external motivation ([source: The book Giving Knowledge for Free (available here).]. Others report that some OERs (such as contributing a chapter to a book that is openly distributed) may be included in a Vita (First Monday article, 2008).
A fourth obstacle that may prevent some from creating OERs is the thought that nobody will use the resource. If nobody utilizes the OER some fear that the time spent creating may have been wasted. It would be like planning a big party, but having nobody attend. This obstacle is an important issue with respect to OERs (Dholakia, King, and Baraniuk). Attention does need to be focused on creating resources from which others will benefit, as well as developing a community of users sufficiently large to have a collective impact. This obstacle can be related to the question, “If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it?” In today’s world, the answer is, “If Google hears the tree fall, then others will hear it also (Wiley, 2009). As individual and collective capacities to effectively search online increase, it will become easier to locate and reuse OERs.
Another obstacle that prevents people from creating Open Educational Resources concerns copyright issues. This is a significant issue that is discussed in the following section.
Copyright Considerations
There are two key copyright issues with respect to OERs. First, ensuring that you have appropriate permissions to use existing resources as part of your OER, and second choosing a license for your OER.
Permissions
One professor teaching a Hebrew literature class used a series of articles as part of the class readings. Because these articles were copyrighted he was not able to openly distribute them as a packet for others to use. Another professor wanted to upload his PowerPoint presentations but was not sure whether the images used in the presentation would constitute “fair use” and was worried about copyright violations. These are common concerns.
There are two ways that the permissions challenge can be overcome. One is to simply substitute open resources for copyrighted ones. Although not possible in all in all cases, it becoming increasingly easier to accomplish. For example at http://flickr.com one can search for photos that have been licensed for non-commercial use. There are 8,321 such photos of “The Dome of the Rock,” and 277 photos of “St. Peter’s Tomb.” Such photos might easily take the place of copyrighted photos in a PowerPoint presentation. Similarly, teachers sometimes can utilize articles that are already available for free on the Internet and combine them into a packet that can be used by others.
A second way to overcome the permissions challenge is to modify resources before they are openly shared. For example, if a teacher wanted to share a packet of course materials, the copyrighted materials could be removed prior to online distribution, and the rest of the resource could be openly shared.
Licensing Open Educational Resources
How an individual licenses an OER will significantly affect 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 (cite source). One remedy to this situation is to use a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons provides several licenses to help creators of content license their work in ways 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 from
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses).
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 revised or built upon then they could use the “NoDerivatives” clause. These licensing options provide creators of OERs the ability to license their works in ways that are consistent with their desires for openness.
Conclusion
As the world becomes increasingly connected, open educational resources provide a significant opportunity to share both content knowledge and pedagogical practice. Although OERs are not a panacea for all educational problems, they can provide an important role in improving the teaching and learning of religious topics.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Distance: Field Trip
This past week my "Distance Education" class took a field trip to BYU's Independent study center. The size and scope of their business surprised me. Some of the things that stood out to me are below:
I also was reminded of how widely learning styles can differ. When it came to a discussion of "religious education" my views about how learning should take place came on somewhat strongly. But others at the table had their own views that they held equally strongly. So again the theme came back to having as many different approaches as possible so that people could select what was good for them as opposed to "the one true way."
(As I write that it makes me think how the "do whatever works for you" as opposed to "the one true way" philosophy isn't always a good idea.
Another thing that interested me was that they allow people to get their money back up to 60 days after beginning the course. So in terms of thinking about the "free" courses they are going to offer, what is the difference between letting them do the course for free VERSUS signing up for the course in the regular way and quitting after 25 days. Still was free.
The difference I see is that the "open" option allows them to be free as in "I don't have to give you my credit card info." I think one interesting thing to look at as this project moves forward is to see how many people sign up for the course because it was free. Obviously the hope is that people who would have never paid money upfront for the course do take it for free, and some buy it. I look forward to Chris Anderson's book on this topic.
- They serve about 125,000 students and employ 250 people (I may be off a bit on my numbers, feel free to correct me).
- Most of the students they serve are _high school_ students
- They have a team that aggressively markets IS courses to school districts (e.g. they are not just sitting around hoping that somebody finds their course).
- They receive about 2,000 help calls a day, and have multiple tiers of service. Only 1% of problems need to go to the professor for resolution.
- As part of a research study a few years ago they implemented the idea of having tutors who provide a free (to students) service of helping them with problems.
- They have a machine that opens their envelopes! (okay, that wasn't the highlight, but it was pretty cool). ]
I also was reminded of how widely learning styles can differ. When it came to a discussion of "religious education" my views about how learning should take place came on somewhat strongly. But others at the table had their own views that they held equally strongly. So again the theme came back to having as many different approaches as possible so that people could select what was good for them as opposed to "the one true way."
(As I write that it makes me think how the "do whatever works for you" as opposed to "the one true way" philosophy isn't always a good idea.
Another thing that interested me was that they allow people to get their money back up to 60 days after beginning the course. So in terms of thinking about the "free" courses they are going to offer, what is the difference between letting them do the course for free VERSUS signing up for the course in the regular way and quitting after 25 days. Still was free.
The difference I see is that the "open" option allows them to be free as in "I don't have to give you my credit card info." I think one interesting thing to look at as this project moves forward is to see how many people sign up for the course because it was free. Obviously the hope is that people who would have never paid money upfront for the course do take it for free, and some buy it. I look forward to Chris Anderson's book on this topic.
Friday, February 6, 2009
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.
**
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.
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.
**
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.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Open: Sustainability
This week I focused on Yochai Benkler's Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials (http://www.benkler.org/Common_Wisdom.pdf)
One thing that impresses me about Benkler is his commitment to open publishing because it is the right thing to do. The fact that he personally releases books free and openly say a lot about his commitment to open education.
With regards to sustainability it is interesting to note how he describes the power of free time. He says, "A billion people in advanced economies have between two and six billion spare hours among them, every day. In order to harness two to six billion hours, the entire workforce of almost 340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty hour weeks without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years!"
With that kind of free time every day it seems like there are few problems that could not be solved! Indeed this surplus time is one of the reasons that Wikipedia has been able to be so successful. So some might wonder, why haven't Wikipedia style textbooks taken off?
Benkler states, "The main problem with even a successful project seems to be that textbooks that look and feel like textbooks, and, more importantly, that comply with education department requirements, are not quite as susceptible to modularization as an encyclopedia or a newsletter like Slashdot. The most successful book on Wikibooks, for example, is the cookbook. But the cookbook had 1301 “chapters” as of July of 2005. In other words, each module was effectively a single recipe."
So are there sustainable solutions for textbooks? Particularly in fields that are not changing rapidly? I am involved in a project right now concerning Flatworld Knowledge, a company that is creating and distributing open textbooks. There business model is such that profit can be gained even by books that they are allowing free (and open) access to (more on this later).
As I was researching open textbooks and looking at sustainability issues I stumbled across an article that talks about motives people have for creating free textbooks. I believe that sustainbility is important, but not necessarily financial sustainability. I am persuaded by the volunteer hour count that Benkler cites and believe that incentives can be set forth to harness the power of this leisure time.
Below are other excerpts from Benkler's work that I found to be particularly important:
[all of the below are quotations--I'm not trying to integrate them, just quoting them because I want to save these excerpts.]
The problem of quality is best exemplified by the K-12 textbook market.i Significant consolidation in the past decade has left four major textbook publishers in the United States. At the same time, statewide adoption practices have meant that decisions by government officials in California, Texas, and Florida control the demand in roughly a quarter of the K-12 textbook markets. The combination has led to the content of most textbooks being determined through intense lobbying in the three state capitals. Because of the benefits of economies of scale in not producing different texts for these states, and then for others, textbooks have become relatively homogenized and aimed at some lowest common denominator—which may be challenging for states with cultures as different as those of Texas and California.
Beyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more, rather than less, likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience.
This leads to the more general statement of the problem of motivation. Our standard economic models for productive human action tend to assume that motivation is more or less homogenous, capable of aggregation, and reflects a utility value capable of summing within a single individual, even if not for purposes of interpersonal utility comparisons. This simple model was useful for economic modeling, but is wrong. There is now significant literature on the diversity of human motivation, on the availability of different forms of social, psychological, and material gain, and on the fact that there can be “motivation crowding out:” that is, that adding money to an activity will not necessarily increase the activity.iv Intuitively, this is hardly news to anyone who has not been indoctrinated in economics. That is, sometimes we do things for money.
Sometimes, however, we do not. Ranging from trivial acts like responding truthfully and with diligence to a stranger’s request for directions on the street, to quite substantial efforts we go to in order to help friends and family, or pursue a fun hobby, or do what we believe we ought to do as well adjusted members of society.
In the mid-1990s firm-centric views competed as strategies for searching and indexing the newly growing Web. The first were search engines like Altavista or Lycos. The second was Yahoo. The theory behind the search engines was that smart software developers would write the best possible algorithm to extract human meaning and relevance from a mechanical analysis of text and metatags in webpages. Yahoo’s innovation was to add human beings—its employees would look at websites, decide on their meaning and quality, and include and index them in a directory of the Web. In both cases the idea was that firms would pay smart employees to map the web, each in its own way. Both were largely wrong, and each in its own way lost to a competitor that used peer production instead. Google’s search algorithm, we have already seen, is aimed at the best possible capture of the opinions of website authors about which sites are good and relevant, rather than aiming at having the software itself be good enough to make that judgment mechanically. As for Yahoo, its peer produced alternative was the Open Directory Project. While Yahoo continues to be a successful company, it has done so by moving in very different directions. Its staff of paid employees could not effectively compete with sixty thousand volunteers, each monitoring one or two areas of particular interest to them, including and excluding sites as they spent small increments of time reading and surfing things they might well have spent time on anyway, but adding their knowledge in small increments to a volunteer run and peopled directory.
...Horner, for example, is considering a new system based on xWiki that would allow the implementation of a system with much smaller chunks, that would not be posted into a text, but into a database for peer review moderation. These, in turn, would be moderated, accepted, edited and or included. Such a system would also require integration of a reputation system, through which authors who contribute regularly and at high quality can be recognized by the system and given a greater role in moderating and editing the text so as to smooth it out. The trouble with such controls, however, is that they make it harder to capture the power of very large numbers of contributors. Indeed, the question of the extent to which Wikipedia would be and remain free for anyone to edit, with or without logging in, and without hierarchical preference for “authorized” and authoritative users was a critical, self-conscious, and contentious decision at the early stages of Wikipedia. It led Larry Page, who had been originally employed by Jimmy Wales to edit and set up the encyclopedia, to leave and vociferously criticize Wikipedia from the outside. But it turned out to have been a critically successful organizational choice. Whether greater modularization does indeed require tighter technical controls on contribution to maintain consistency, or whether in fact, the greater the modularization the lower the barriers necessary because no single contributor is likely to make a very large mistake, and because the contributions of many are required to move the project forward in these newly-smaller chunks, is a critical design question for the next phase of open textbook development.
This brings us to the second question, of whether or not, given such an open engine, educational materials, learning objects and contexts will in fact be authored, by whom, and with what degree of openness to further extension.
One thing that impresses me about Benkler is his commitment to open publishing because it is the right thing to do. The fact that he personally releases books free and openly say a lot about his commitment to open education.
With regards to sustainability it is interesting to note how he describes the power of free time. He says, "A billion people in advanced economies have between two and six billion spare hours among them, every day. In order to harness two to six billion hours, the entire workforce of almost 340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty hour weeks without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years!"
With that kind of free time every day it seems like there are few problems that could not be solved! Indeed this surplus time is one of the reasons that Wikipedia has been able to be so successful. So some might wonder, why haven't Wikipedia style textbooks taken off?
Benkler states, "The main problem with even a successful project seems to be that textbooks that look and feel like textbooks, and, more importantly, that comply with education department requirements, are not quite as susceptible to modularization as an encyclopedia or a newsletter like Slashdot. The most successful book on Wikibooks, for example, is the cookbook. But the cookbook had 1301 “chapters” as of July of 2005. In other words, each module was effectively a single recipe."
So are there sustainable solutions for textbooks? Particularly in fields that are not changing rapidly? I am involved in a project right now concerning Flatworld Knowledge, a company that is creating and distributing open textbooks. There business model is such that profit can be gained even by books that they are allowing free (and open) access to (more on this later).
As I was researching open textbooks and looking at sustainability issues I stumbled across an article that talks about motives people have for creating free textbooks. I believe that sustainbility is important, but not necessarily financial sustainability. I am persuaded by the volunteer hour count that Benkler cites and believe that incentives can be set forth to harness the power of this leisure time.
Below are other excerpts from Benkler's work that I found to be particularly important:
[all of the below are quotations--I'm not trying to integrate them, just quoting them because I want to save these excerpts.]
The problem of quality is best exemplified by the K-12 textbook market.i Significant consolidation in the past decade has left four major textbook publishers in the United States. At the same time, statewide adoption practices have meant that decisions by government officials in California, Texas, and Florida control the demand in roughly a quarter of the K-12 textbook markets. The combination has led to the content of most textbooks being determined through intense lobbying in the three state capitals. Because of the benefits of economies of scale in not producing different texts for these states, and then for others, textbooks have become relatively homogenized and aimed at some lowest common denominator—which may be challenging for states with cultures as different as those of Texas and California.
Beyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more, rather than less, likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience.
This leads to the more general statement of the problem of motivation. Our standard economic models for productive human action tend to assume that motivation is more or less homogenous, capable of aggregation, and reflects a utility value capable of summing within a single individual, even if not for purposes of interpersonal utility comparisons. This simple model was useful for economic modeling, but is wrong. There is now significant literature on the diversity of human motivation, on the availability of different forms of social, psychological, and material gain, and on the fact that there can be “motivation crowding out:” that is, that adding money to an activity will not necessarily increase the activity.iv Intuitively, this is hardly news to anyone who has not been indoctrinated in economics. That is, sometimes we do things for money.
Sometimes, however, we do not. Ranging from trivial acts like responding truthfully and with diligence to a stranger’s request for directions on the street, to quite substantial efforts we go to in order to help friends and family, or pursue a fun hobby, or do what we believe we ought to do as well adjusted members of society.
In the mid-1990s firm-centric views competed as strategies for searching and indexing the newly growing Web. The first were search engines like Altavista or Lycos. The second was Yahoo. The theory behind the search engines was that smart software developers would write the best possible algorithm to extract human meaning and relevance from a mechanical analysis of text and metatags in webpages. Yahoo’s innovation was to add human beings—its employees would look at websites, decide on their meaning and quality, and include and index them in a directory of the Web. In both cases the idea was that firms would pay smart employees to map the web, each in its own way. Both were largely wrong, and each in its own way lost to a competitor that used peer production instead. Google’s search algorithm, we have already seen, is aimed at the best possible capture of the opinions of website authors about which sites are good and relevant, rather than aiming at having the software itself be good enough to make that judgment mechanically. As for Yahoo, its peer produced alternative was the Open Directory Project. While Yahoo continues to be a successful company, it has done so by moving in very different directions. Its staff of paid employees could not effectively compete with sixty thousand volunteers, each monitoring one or two areas of particular interest to them, including and excluding sites as they spent small increments of time reading and surfing things they might well have spent time on anyway, but adding their knowledge in small increments to a volunteer run and peopled directory.
...Horner, for example, is considering a new system based on xWiki that would allow the implementation of a system with much smaller chunks, that would not be posted into a text, but into a database for peer review moderation. These, in turn, would be moderated, accepted, edited and or included. Such a system would also require integration of a reputation system, through which authors who contribute regularly and at high quality can be recognized by the system and given a greater role in moderating and editing the text so as to smooth it out. The trouble with such controls, however, is that they make it harder to capture the power of very large numbers of contributors. Indeed, the question of the extent to which Wikipedia would be and remain free for anyone to edit, with or without logging in, and without hierarchical preference for “authorized” and authoritative users was a critical, self-conscious, and contentious decision at the early stages of Wikipedia. It led Larry Page, who had been originally employed by Jimmy Wales to edit and set up the encyclopedia, to leave and vociferously criticize Wikipedia from the outside. But it turned out to have been a critically successful organizational choice. Whether greater modularization does indeed require tighter technical controls on contribution to maintain consistency, or whether in fact, the greater the modularization the lower the barriers necessary because no single contributor is likely to make a very large mistake, and because the contributions of many are required to move the project forward in these newly-smaller chunks, is a critical design question for the next phase of open textbook development.
This brings us to the second question, of whether or not, given such an open engine, educational materials, learning objects and contexts will in fact be authored, by whom, and with what degree of openness to further extension.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Open: CC Licenses
I started out my research on Creative Commons with this question in mind: Suppose I have a book that is published in print. The publisher has exclusive print rights to the book, but I have exclusive digital distribution rights. Can I/should I put a creative commons license on my digital version. What effect (if any) would it have on the publisher’s copy?
As I explored the CC site, I found some very helpful information. From the video on their front page, I learned that whenever you create anything you are automatically given 100% copyright over whatever you created. If you want your work to be freely shared it technically is illegal without your permission.
A basic question that many have is: [quoting from creative commons:] “What are the terms of a Creative Commons license?
The key terms of the core suite of Creative Commons licenses are: Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives and ShareAlike. These license elements are succinctly described as follows:
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.”
These elements can be “remixed” into six difference licenses. The key acronyms are:
BY—meaning attribution is required.
SA—meaning that users are required to put the same CC license that you used on any remix or redistribution of your work.
NC—meaning that there can be no commercial uses of your work.
ND—No derivatives allowed. The whole work can be copied, but no remixes.
The associated symbols are:
Attribution 
Share Alike 
Noncommercial 
No Derivative Works
Their definitions of licenses are here:
My short version follows:
BY—least restrictive. Only attribution is required.
BY-SA—people can remix as long as they attribute you and use your same CC license.
BY-ND—people can share your work in its entirety, (commercially or not) as long as you are given full credit.
BY-NC—people can remix your work, but can’t make commercial uses of it, though they can relicense it however they want. I have a hard time seeing why people would choose this license.
BY-NC-SA—like BY-NC, except people have to use the same license you did.
BY-NC-ND—Like BY-ND, except no commercial uses. Most restrictive license.
Another question that comes up is, “If I use a photo that has been CC licensed, am I guaranteed that I won’t have any legal issues with it?” Sadly, the answer is NO!
From the CC website:
“You should learn about what rights need to be cleared and when a fair use or fair dealing defense may be available. It could be that the licensor is relying on the fair use or fair dealing doctrine, but depending on the circumstances, that legal defense may or may not actually protect her (or you). You should educate yourself about the various rights that may be implicated in a copyrighted work, because creative works often incorporate multiple elements such as, for example, underlying stories and characters, recorded sound and song lyrics. If the work contains recognizable third-party content, it may be advisable to independently verify that it has been authorized for reuse under a Creative Commons license. If the work contains images, voices, or likenesses of people, educate yourself about publicity rights. The result of this is that you should always use your informed good judgment, and you may want to obtain legal advice.”
To me this is very disappointing—it somewhat negates the positives of using CC images on Flickr. The story of Virgin Mobile getting sued for using a CC licensed photo gives one pause.
So back to my original question--can I relicense my digital version without affecting the rights of the print version? I believe the answer is yes, if I put a BY-NC-ND license on it. With such a restrictive license, one asks, "What is the point of even using it?" From what I understand the purpose would be so that people could email the e-book to each other freely which they technically could not do if the regular copyright restrictions were in effect.
As I explored the CC site, I found some very helpful information. From the video on their front page, I learned that whenever you create anything you are automatically given 100% copyright over whatever you created. If you want your work to be freely shared it technically is illegal without your permission.
A basic question that many have is: [quoting from creative commons:] “What are the terms of a Creative Commons license?
The key terms of the core suite of Creative Commons licenses are: Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives and ShareAlike. These license elements are succinctly described as follows:
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.”
These elements can be “remixed” into six difference licenses. The key acronyms are:
BY—meaning attribution is required.
SA—meaning that users are required to put the same CC license that you used on any remix or redistribution of your work.
NC—meaning that there can be no commercial uses of your work.
ND—No derivatives allowed. The whole work can be copied, but no remixes.
The associated symbols are:
Attribution Share Alike Noncommercial No Derivative WorksTheir definitions of licenses are here:
My short version follows:
BY—least restrictive. Only attribution is required.
BY-SA—people can remix as long as they attribute you and use your same CC license.
BY-ND—people can share your work in its entirety, (commercially or not) as long as you are given full credit.
BY-NC—people can remix your work, but can’t make commercial uses of it, though they can relicense it however they want. I have a hard time seeing why people would choose this license.
BY-NC-SA—like BY-NC, except people have to use the same license you did.
BY-NC-ND—Like BY-ND, except no commercial uses. Most restrictive license.
Another question that comes up is, “If I use a photo that has been CC licensed, am I guaranteed that I won’t have any legal issues with it?” Sadly, the answer is NO!
From the CC website:
“You should learn about what rights need to be cleared and when a fair use or fair dealing defense may be available. It could be that the licensor is relying on the fair use or fair dealing doctrine, but depending on the circumstances, that legal defense may or may not actually protect her (or you). You should educate yourself about the various rights that may be implicated in a copyrighted work, because creative works often incorporate multiple elements such as, for example, underlying stories and characters, recorded sound and song lyrics. If the work contains recognizable third-party content, it may be advisable to independently verify that it has been authorized for reuse under a Creative Commons license. If the work contains images, voices, or likenesses of people, educate yourself about publicity rights. The result of this is that you should always use your informed good judgment, and you may want to obtain legal advice.”
To me this is very disappointing—it somewhat negates the positives of using CC images on Flickr. The story of Virgin Mobile getting sued for using a CC licensed photo gives one pause.
So back to my original question--can I relicense my digital version without affecting the rights of the print version? I believe the answer is yes, if I put a BY-NC-ND license on it. With such a restrictive license, one asks, "What is the point of even using it?" From what I understand the purpose would be so that people could email the e-book to each other freely which they technically could not do if the regular copyright restrictions were in effect.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Open Ed: Motivations
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.
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.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
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).
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).
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