Source of revenue for OCW

clipped from ocw.mit.edu Help support MIT OpenCourseWare by shopping at Amazon.com! MIT OpenCourseWare offers direct links to Amazon.com to purchase the books cited in this course. Click on the Amazon logo to the left of any citation and purchase the book from Amazon.com, and MIT OpenCourseWare will receive up to 10% of all purchases you make. Your support will enable MIT to continue offering open access to MIT courses.

OpenLearn 2007 - Panel session about the future of OER (day 2)

Research Panel Toru Iiyoshi, M. S. Vijay Kumar, Andy Lane, Diana Laurillard & Stuart Lee: Opening Up Education: Removing Barriers, Fostering Participation, and Promoting Sustainability.

Currently, there seems to be an abundance of ‘open’ educational initiatives, many with the potential to radically transform the ecology and economics of education. These initiatives address various pieces of the educational landscape, including infrastructure, tools, resources, practices, and knowledge. Yet, despite the availability of tools and resources, we risk missing the ‘transformative’ opportunities from a wide range of perspectives—from improving teaching and learning in a single classroom to creating the necessary educational capacity for nation building. As a global educational community, we can benefit from a deeper understanding of how open educational tools and resources are being created and used, what local educational innovations and challenges are emerging, and how we can learn from and build upon each other’s experience and knowledge.

The panel starts with advertising a new book, published by MIT Press, which addresses the open education movement. They say it will be available on PDF, but I have not found it so far. The main pillars of openness relate to technology, content, and knowledge. Would like to see a definition of all, but since the book is still unavailable as OER, I cannot tell anything about it.

Throughout the panel discussion, a number of examples or initiatives are mentioned, such as

Keep Toolkit

The KEEP Toolkit is a set of web-based tools that help teachers, students and institutions quickly create compact and engaging knowledge representations on the Web. With the KEEP Toolkit you can:

• select and organize teaching and learning materials.
• prompt analysis and reflection by using templates.
• transform materials and reflections into visually appealing and intellectually engaging representations.
• share ideas for peer-review, assessment, and collective knowledge building.
• simplify the technical tasks and facilitate knowledge exchange and dissemination.

LAMS International (Learning Activity Management System) (pretty similar to OU’s Knowledge Mapping Tool called Compendium )

LAMS is a revolutionary new tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. It provides teachers with a highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. These activities can include a range of individual tasks, small group work and whole class activities based on both content and collaboration.

Encorewiki

ENCORE is an Educational Network and Community for Open Resource Exchange. It is created, managed, and maintained by volunteers from within the learning sciences. Our goal is to support researchers as they exchange open source or open content materials, including relevant support documentation, constraints to implementation, and contact info. ENCORE is implemented in an enhanced wiki format, allowing for easy maintenance of small thematic spaces and collaborations. Researchers may find great materials here, and get support from colleagues to embed or intermingle those materials effectively and appropriately. Instructors or students in learning sciences courses may find and contribute reviews of papers, technologies, or other resources. Small groups can form “Collaborations” to support their efforts to exchange materials or develop new ones.

PHOEBE Pedagogic Planner

The aim of the project is to guide practitioners working in post-compulsory learning (FE, HE and ACL) in designing effective and pedagogically sound learning activities. To realise this aim, the project team proposes to:

• Develop a prototype online planning tool that will offer users both flexible and guided paths through the planning process and enable them to access a wide range of models, research findings and examples of innovative learning designs, intended to encourage them to explore new approaches and tools in their pedagogy;
• User-test the planning tool for functionality and usability; and
• Investigate the feasibility of further development and the integration of the planning tool into pedagogic practice by embedding use of the planning tool into a specific context for piloting and evaluation: namely, initial practitioner training and/or continuing professional development.

The London Pedagogy Planner

The London Pedagogy Planner is a prototype for a collaborative online planning
and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing
learning designs.

Andy Lane explains that the value of OER is determined and influenced by

• Availability (how many and in what forms)
• Accessibility (where found and by whom)
• Level of use (degree of participation)

The influence for teaching and sharing concern the following factors:

• Granularity of offerings (size & interdependence);
• Resource-based learning, stand-alone;
• Tuition and support separated from content;
• Versioning & localization.

On the conference blog, Anesa further mentions the implications for learning:

• Judging the appropriate mix between (i) pedagogic support (built into content), (ii) personal support – self reflection and guidance, (iii) professional support – expert reflection and guidance;
• The importance of new social computing technologies in facilitating support and interaction;
• Co-creation of learning experiences in a dull partnership of being a learning broker for self designed programmes;
• Assessment only or ApL (Applied Learning) courses.

The talk ends with the question whether higher education is ready for open education, mentioning two things: inertial frames (scarcity vs abundance/pundit-pupil vs peer-peer…) and enabling structures (sense making/accountability/accreditation). An interesting panel discussion with some informative slides.

OpenLearn 2007 - TESSA and an interesting typology (day 2)

Peter Bateman delivered an excellent talk about his typological approach for OER. Why such an approach, he asks? Well, a typology provides an analytical framework for investigating OER initiatives, and can provide a basis for devising an OER strategy. Quite useful, wouldn’t you think?

‘Knowledge’ is becoming an increasingly important commodity in the economic, social and cultural development of a globalised world. As centres for innovation and the creation of knowledge, higher educational institutions in Africa must continually and progressively set the pace and direction for this development. Yet educational institutions and the ministries that support them struggle to enact the policies and processes that would facilitate Africa’s participation in the global ‘knowledge’ discourse. This paper suggests that, in the context of the limited resources available to Higher Education and Training institutions in Africa, evolving a Participatory Open Educational Resources Architecture has immense potential.

I will shortly sum up the main factors that make this typology. Peter describes four higher categories or components that constitute the OER evolutionary process. Each categorie is constituted by a sub-category, which has proporties, and these properties have dimensions. I desccribe the four main categories with their respective sub-categories… have a look at the paper or slides if you want to have a better understanding of it all.

1. Creation; Authoring original OER/Interoperability & compliance to support remix/Collaborative processes for OER creation
2. Organization; Governance & Management systems/Storage & Portal mechanisms/Institutional development/Sustainability/Research
3. Dissemination; Sensitization/Delivery methods/Technical infrastructure/Packaging
4. Utilization; Mechanism for updating & accessing OER/Using existing OER/Re-authoring & Re-purposing OER/Quality assurance mechanism/Accreditation of materials/Pedagogical models

He further explains a strategy for Higher Education in Sub Saharan Africa addressing 7 key components: research, pedagogy, technology support, sensitization, collaboration, capacity enhancement and training, and a policy framework.. Would this also count for Delft OCW or are other factors more important?

OpenEd week 13 - The OpenCourseWars

The OpenCourseWars (13 pages) is a short story depicting a possible future for open education from a historical perspective. Written by David Wiley, it is both highly entertaining and informative. It not only has given me more insight in some problematic issues of open licensing and consequences, but also shows interesting and appealing futures of learning with in an open education landscape. After an overview of the most important issues, and some personal reactions, I describe my personal ideas about the future of open education, from a slightly different persective than David’s.

2005 – 2012: The OpenCourseWars

The initial beauty of open education quite rapidly turns grey with problems of the NC license again, with public opinion turning against OCW. Problems with defining Non-Commercial quickly becomes not only a theoretical problem, but a real problem indeed:

Creative Commons’ own publicly posted discussion draft of Proposed Best Practice Guidelines to Clarify the Meaning of Non-Commercial in the Creative Commons Licenses suggested we approach the meaning of the term noncommercial from the “Nature of the User”. To put it simply, the guidelines asked if the would-be user of the noncommercially-licensed material was an individual or non-profit institution. If so, everything was kosher. If not (if the would-be user was a for-profit company), then they were not permitted to use materials. Seems very straightforward, right? MIT OCW, however, saw things in a very different way. They provided their own definition of Noncommercial, in which they said, “Determination of commercial vs. non-commercial purpose is based on the use, not the user”, and that as long as you’re not trying to make money off of their materials, they were cool with whatever else you did.

So on the one hand you had Creative Commons suggesting that Noncommercial should be determined by the nature of the user, and on the other hand you had MIT OCW defining the very same clause of the very same license in the completely opposite way. I had known about this problem for years, and had email discussions with a number of people at both Creative Commons and MIT hoping to get it fixed. But the problem was extremely thorny politically, and nothing had happened yet.

The publishers, clearly not very happy with the whole open education movement, follow with a brilliant strategy attacking the NC clause, and win in court: the NC clause is struck down, and all the content that used to be licensed only for non-commercial use, suddenly became available for commercial use. After this apparent success by the publishers, they could now use and commercially distribute the OCW content, which they did. Still, they would be obliged to mention the Creative Commons license, and share the (now commercial) content under the same open license (Share-Alike). Surprisingly, they even ignored this clause, and they did not Share-Alike, because the publishers thought they could attack and bring down the SA clause as well… but to no avail, and to their own demise.

This lack of judgment started a great new movement in open education, led by students, who happily participated in creating a vast infrastructure of open content. But… another licensing war mounted the surface: CC versus GFDL. This was settled as well, finally, and then there was the dawn of a beautiful period in open education: power to the people, in this case students. David uses the following quote to explain that younger university faculty started to ignore the standard opencoursewares altogether in favor of working:

Putting professors’ lecture notes and things on an university website where students can’t trib test questions and photos and things makes about as much sense as using email. It’s for old people who just don’t get it. I mean, even this eBook reader thing I just got from my sister (who finally graduated, by the way) is pointless. Why would anyone use a device that won’t let you trib

Tribbing is contributing, as you might expect. On the other hand, the opencoursewares are R/O, or read-only, and is “associated with the kind of “authority” young folks want to rebel against, and embodies an entire generation’s frustration with top-down, un-democratic, un-participatory approaches generally.”

Following the pandemonium concerning licensing, opencoursewares, and learner participation, a new kind of university emerged: the competency-based university, where students only had to pass a test or exam to be accredited. One of the first universities adopting this model, a traditional online university, started an IBM/Linux like collaboration with the largest site for open content educational materials, creating an enormous synergy; increasing the quality of learning materials, and cost savings for the university itself. A spin-off of the university provided an additional service, where students could approach experts worldwide through Skype for personalized support, paying a certain fee. This service initiated a kind of e-lance economy in itself, because anyone could be an expert. These experts, most of them students, were not inclined to give bad service, because they would be rated by the user, and bad ratings lowered their future chance on flexible employment.

NB.Despite the beauty of the above depicted future, I have an extra note about the accreditation-only model: it will only be valuable if the diploma itself represents value, which depends on the type of assessment: if it is personal, competency-based, and practical, I think these universities might have a chance for survival. If they don’t, and assess students with normal exams and tests, I see little future in this model.

An important quote in the postlude represents the most important difficulty with current OCW initiatives:

Generally speaking, OCWs were difficult-to-sustain R/O endeavors that relied on relatively small numbers of university employees and outside funding. As important as they were, they could never scale and were unsustainable in the ways their original funders wanted them to be. On the other hand, OER projects were generally democratic remix projects that lived and died on the quality of the trib’ing.

Embracing the trib culture, David says, opens up opportunities for new business models and new ways of learning, something I totally agree with. He created a very interesting future history of open educational resources, going through different transitions, mentioning important problems in licensing, student contribution, and describing great opportunities in learning, competition, and creating value in society. In all, the end depicts a very similar look on the future as I have described earlier (and just posted on this blog), about “How I want to wake up one day…”.

Criticisms and additions

I will provide some additions and criticisms to the very interesting view on the future of open education, by using the same narrating style David uses.

The shift from a teacher-centered university, with professors standing on a stage and transferring knowledge, towards a learner-centered university happened slowly but steadily, when experts are no longer able to transfer knowledge any better than high quality video and multimedia learning materials. In addition, traditional classes turned into some kind of open (and closed) discussion groups in an online virtual world, and face-to-face interaction started to happen in smaller groups for brainstorming and praxis, and large groups in conference like gatherings, organized by students.

Decentralization started to spread into all facets of the learning process, including curricula: students were more and more able to follow learning tracks personalized for them. When the point was reached that faculty and university educators were no longer able to make personalized tracks for each and every one of them, this process is finally decentralized and students were able to make their own learning profile and track, changing and adapting it along the way. Any student could make any track he or she wanted, by aggregating courses, and finding experts to help him (gain knowledge, get employed). These experts were initially paid by universities to do this, but later on another mechanism started to mount, replacing this financial incentive with another one. Lifelong learners got involved in this process, and learning networks came into existence where different facets of society are represented: industry, university, and lifelong learners (including students as we know them today).

Facing quite some opposition, the replacement of normal faculty by these learning networks (ranging from a few to thousands of people) took some time. Learning networks gradually overtook the role assumed for so long by universities: they started to accredit the people in their networks, and were responsible for creating meaningful resources for learning, including challenges and prize competitions, something that became very popular in these learning networks. Universities changed their business models, and flexibly offered hardware (rooms, technology, labs, etc.) and services (creating high-quality materials from bare content, catering, human resource management, etc.) to these learning networks.

New diplomas and certificates were popping up everywhere online, and it seemed that any group was able to give out diplomas, creating quite a disturbance and call for the past. It was not long before a standard appeared, a kind of Netiquette, applying to these diplomas. Diplomas were still given in abundance, but the information relevant to the diplomas were instantly available and linked to the diploma. A group of open source software developers, linked with the group responsible for the diploma Netiquette, created software that aggregated the information of different online diplomas and certificates, automatically scrutinizing them with a number of criteria. Their site, http://cert-check.org, became the number one portal for certification quality check. In the years to come, they developed an advanced technology that could provide anyone with advise on career and learning, based on all the aggregated information.

When trust in diplomas and certificates was restored, other facets became more important. Since any learner was putting their learner results directly on the web, data about their added value was much more consistent and valid than any diploma, which soon assumed a decorative role, a kind of achievement award, only to be given to persons really having shown something, and usually in combination with some kind of research fund. Someone’s online ID, being aggregated by more and more advanced machines, took over the role of certification, and after the students, the companies and industry quickly became aware of this. For persons in a learning network, this created another incentive to add value to a network, because added value would return to you in employment opportunities, and/or access to expertise. Adding value clearly happens not just personal social networks, but merely in professional learning networks. A person’s online ID, combined with the social and professional “tacit” contacts, provided everything a person needed. If someone was not inclined to help anyone in his or her learning (and, by now employment network), (s)he was probably not helped either.

OpenED week 12 - Review of blogposts on LO

Jennifer Maddrell created a nice overview of the shift from learning objects to open educational resources, explaining the differences in form, intentions of reuse and setting, types of systems and licenses, learner focus and interaction, design objectives, technology, sustainability, and extent of use. There clearly are great differences, and the latest version of providing reusable educational resources (OER) show much more promise than the earlier one (learning objects). Still, she emphasizes some of the problematic issues that need to be solved in order to be able to overcome the problems that are related to learning objects.

Even though costs associated with elaborate proprietary systems may be eliminated, OERs are not cost free. Therefore, sustainability continues to be a concern. In addition, availability does not equal use. I’m not sure we have a good handle on either the extent of OER use (by teachers or learners) or the best ways to facilitate use of OERs by users. Further, I think there is a lot to be learned from an instructional design perspective about both open educational practices, as well as OERs as instructional content.

I agree, it is too early to be able to speak about fixing problems with learning objects. By the way, I haven’t got any experience with them either, and after consuming some of the literature provided (by one person, so not really objective), I suppose should be happy not to. I do agree with the arguments mentioned against the original idea of learning objects, and think that most of them are sound. Still, regarding OER, we have discussed in length the related difficulties, so we must not think that OER are sacred and good and “fix” problems. We must first fix our own OER problems, before we can be considered a solution for something. A great number of challenges is awaiting us, but I think we are on the right track.

Rob Barton uses the framework proposed by Souza & Preece (2004) about online communities. There are 2 points by which an online community can be assessed: sociability (people, purposes, and policies) and usability (software).

In their framework, these two components have to be aligned to produce success. Any community (whether online, offline, or a hybrid) will have sociability factors that change as the people (or purposes or policies) in the community change. For any online community, the software has to work with those people, purpose, and policies.

Clearly, these two are not aligned in the learning objects community, because educators for example do not embrace the provided metadata formats that are needed for reuse in traditional learning objects systems. Erik Duval, one of the persons responsible for the creation and adoption of the LOM metadata format, acknowledged during a talk on the OpenLearn conference that educators just do not use the format. Instead, he said, they use collaborative tagging and other simple options to describe their learning objects. Quite a statement by someone responsible for a widely adopted LO metadata format. The alignment between people and technology is most easily done when taking technologies already used by people, by leveraging their existing behavior instead of imposing or asking to change their behavior.

My go: learn from the past, and follow the free… :)
Another go: not all giants deserve to be stood on, especially when they face David;)

OpenLearn 2007 - Learner generated contexts (day 2)

The concept of learner generated contexts (LGCs), without knowing exactly what it was, directly interested me. Many discussions are about user-generated content, distributed development of OER, etc. but, although acknowledging the importance of the learning process, little focus has been on learner generated contexts. The first session after John Seely Brown’s inspiring keynote speech focused on LGCs, which was defined as

“a context created by people interacting together with a common, self-defined or negotiated learning goal. The key aspect of Learner Generated Contexts is that they are generated through the enterprise of those who would previously have been consumers in a context created for them.”

The emphasis on contexts is clear: learning is a social process occurring across a continuum of contexts, and learning must be “fit for context”. The generation of context is characterised as an action on tools where a user actively selects, appropriates and implements learning solutions to meet their own needs (Bakardjieva, 2005). In their paper they introduce the concept as follows;

The rapid increase in the variety and availability of resources and tools that enable people to easily create and publish their own materials as well as to access those created by others extends the capacity for learning context creation beyond teachers, academics, designers and policy makers. It also challenges our existing pedagogies. Another challenge is that of finding ways in which technology can support learners to effectively create their own learning contexts and how this contributes to sustainability of open education.

The following are key issues emerging from this concept:

• learners as creators not consumers
  
• learning: from regulation and practice towards participation
  
• co-configuration, co-creation, co-design of learning
  
• changing roles of educational participants or “agile intermediaries”
  
• pedagogy (teaching of children), andragogy (teaching of adults), heutagogy (self-determined learning)
  
• needs or questions which enable new relevant learning contexts
  
• learning design allowing learners to create their own context or space
  
• learner needs to participate in the control of how their environment feels and works; however,
  
• the ‘preferred’ and ‘best’ learning context may not be the same: understanding purpose in learning design
  
• environment as physical, social and cognitive
  
• the role of narrative in learning
  

Changes in learning and teaching should not start with embracing new technologies. Rather it is about contextualising learning first before you support it with technology. Still, these ideas have their roots in the affordances and potentials of a range of disruptive technologies and practice; web 2.0 and participative media, mobile learning, learning design and learning space design. John Seely Brown’s participative architecture (or ecosystem) was brought forward here again, but there are a lot of obstacles/issues, such as roles, expertise, knowledge, pedagogy, accreditation, power, technology, participation and democracy.

LCG glasses for curriculum, organization, and administration
An “Ecology of Resources” model of context was depicted with the following characteristics, viewed with LGC glasses;

• Knowledge and Curriculum
• learners have agency and are pro-active in identifying a social learning need and/or a knowledge gap;
• learners work is published and accessible outside of institution/school and ‘visitors’ or experts are brought into the dialogue via physical meetings or virtual spaces;
• learners are generating content and meta content that is recognised by others, thus validating the organisation of their contextually generated knowledge; and
• learners can understand the relevance of their knowledge gap to the rest of their lives, beyond their current environment.
• Resources and Administration
• available to learners to appropriate them to meet their needs; and
• learners can understand the functionalities and affordances of the resources that make up their environment and how these match to their recognition production gap.
• Environment and its Organisation
• loose frameworks and freedom of choice; and
• learner ability to understand the elements that make up their environment in terms of multiple perspectives, such as physical, social and communication so that they can marshall them into symbiotic relationships. This activity might operate from scratch or may simply mean the tailoring of existing relationships and interactions.
• Learning process
• personally meaningful for the learners;
• facilitated in some way by their environment; and
• ever widening boundaries of dialogue with and between multiple participants across multiple locations.

World of Warcraft
John Seely Brown argued that World of Warcraft fosters the creation of Learner Generated Contexts, and other, more specific educational games might be even better appropriate for fostering the creation of LGCs. He made the notions of considering the dialectic between institution and learning, and the vocabulary which impedes considering certain environments as learning environments. I remember something I read online, about the work processes within the IT company Geek Squad in the USA. An IT manager in that company tried to implement a certain technology to make the employees collaborate better, but concluded that they already found their own platform and context for collaboration: World of Warcraft.

And what about the relation with OER?
Maybe we will will see a shift from OER to OEC (Open Educational Contexts). I see great potential in learner generated contexts and open learning designs that can be remixed by the learner. I understand the concept as something that lets the learner free to make his own learning environment, solo or in collaboration with others. This requires quite a significant change in institutional design of current educational institutions, but one that may be needed. Of course, students may create their own content, but I think that in a world where so many different opportunities for learning exist, an institution cannot define the exact learning environment or context for each learner. A learner may find his/her own, but to what extent are guidance or formal rules needed? What about tacit knowledge? I think an important issue to address in creating a LGC relates to content: how can relevancy be determined and the right resources be linked, and in that way make a learning context, consisting of many different people, types of content and media, possibly environments, etc…

I hope that this research will provide some answers on these questions, because it might be very relevant for decisions on policies about learning and learning environments within institutions.

Some links

• Learner Generated Contexts wiki
  
• Open University Knowledge Network
  
• Extract
  
• Presentation (difficult to read)
  
• Wikipedia entry (improve!)
• Nardi, B. (1992). “Studying context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models and distributed cognition” Proceedings East-West Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. August 4–8, St. Petersburg, Russia. p 352–359.