Open Content, Open Courses, Open Degrees by Gary Matkin, UCI

Editor's Notes

• #2: The purpose of this presentation is to describe the progress and current state of the Open Educational Resources movement as it faces the last crucial and important step, from OpenCourseWare to Open Degrees.
• #9: By the end of 2009, MIT had experienced 50 million visits.
• #10: Around 2005/06 MIT’s example was attracting the interest of other universities around the world and MIT began convening meetings of those interested in emulating its example. These meetings eventually led to the formation of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) which has gained separate legal status as a non-profit corporation chartered in the State of Massachusetts.
• #11: Here you see the OCWC home page.
• #14: This membership includes 22 U.S. institutions including of course, MIT, but also including UC Berkeley, Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Utah State, and UCI—the first UC and first west coast university to join the OCWC.
• #17: But, of course, the OCWC is not the only game in town. There are many other sources of open courses, including most prominently iTunes U which focuses on the video capture of classroom activity.
• #18: The list of universities adding to the iTunes inventory is growing rapidly as well.
• #19: Now the general public is taking notice of OCW and is posting ratings of open offerings.Examples: The University of California, Berkeley and MIT began posting recorded video versions of courses to various publically available sites including Google, YouTube, and iTunes.Other UC campuses are considering doing this as well.
• #20: Video capture is becoming easier and easier—we now have ratings of pod casts.
• #21: The growing supply of open courses has clearly stirred attention about how this wonderful set of learning assets might be used to best benefit the world. Certainly the need for such material is very great.
• #22: Again, we have the broadest vision of what the open educational movement is all about and I have already positioned open degrees on the pathway to open knowledge.
• #23: With OCW well developed, people are working on the next level of the sense-making hierarchy – open degrees. They are inspired by a lofty vision.The need for open degrees is urgent.
• #24: On this slide we see the names of the various movements related to openness in education. We start with open source which is generally applied to the software industry and usually refers to publically available and free software code which has been developed and is maintained by a community of users. The remaining open movements were inspired by this early open source movement, but differ in some respects, primarily in that there are only very rudimentary communities established to date around the other open movements. But, the remaining open movements often utilize open source software in what they do (Moodle, for instance). I have already talked about OER, OCW, open degrees and open knowledge. The open text book movement has a life of its own and can be viewed as an offshoot of the OER movement. But as open textbooks are developed and as they begin to take advantage of the technology that hosts them, they begin to take on the aspects of an open course.
• #25: But there are more practical considerations as well.
• #26: However, the step from open courses to open degrees is a big one and those involved in this process face some very significant hurdles. Among them:Content and courseware are a relatively small part of the total cost of degree education.Degrees require construction of a social context for learning and communities of learners in open environments are formed and supported in ways not well understood.Awarding credit for coursework requires either an instructor/evaluator or a learning assessment process that is expensive and complex to create.The degree awarding authority must be seen as legitimate and trustworthy, attributes which are achieved at a cost.Just as courses need to be constructed of learning objects which fit the context created by the course, so too do degrees need to be constructed of courses that form a coherent experience. This is especially important when open degrees are offered across international and cultural boundaries.
• #27: I hope I have made the case for OCW and the progression to open degrees. This holds the promise for a positive world-wide impact, which in itself should spark interests in institutions for joining the movement.I have enough of a practical understanding of how institutions work, that I know something more is needed to prod institutions into making public service contributions. I firmly believe that there is clearly a self interest involved in getting institutions to join the OCW movement and the OCWC in particular.
• #28: Why Should Your Institution Join and Support the OER Movement?From the experience of the current member of the OCWC, becoming active in the OER movement, particularly with OCW have the following advantages:Fosters the common institutional goal of making a contribution to the social welfare of the worldShowcases the institution’s top instructional efforts and makes course materials free on a global scale to educators, students, and self-learnersProvides a high quality and high visibility example of the educational offerings of the institution to the general public, prospective students, and parentsCreates a repository where faculty and researchers can deposit their work and have is seen by the worldProvides potential funding agencies with attractive and useful opportunities for disseminating research results
• #29: Attracts funding for public service projectsAttracts traffic to the institution’s OCW Web site, and through that site to other institutional sitesProvides a channel for the training of institution staffIncreases the legitimacy of the use of high quality material from other sources by the institution’s own facultyProvides entree to a world wide community of dedicated educators
• #32: One of the barriers to open educational movements has to do with intellectual property rights and digital rights management. Without going into the details, this barrier has been addressed by the Creative Commons license upon which most of the OER and OCW is now based. The increase in the use of CC licenses has seen geometrical increases.
• #33: Another barrier has been what is called “discoverability”—the ability for users to find the appropriate open material they want. Currently this barrier is being addressed in three ways. First we have the general search through web browsers such as Google. One can refine one’s search by adding in the CC license as part of the search parameters. There are also searches now available and being developed which search in a more focused way on parts of the open spectrum such as OCW. You see a list of these on the screen.Specialized search engines are making open resources easier to find. There are two types: those that actually crawl the internet looking for CC licensed materials. (Google Advanced Search); and those that search for RDF descriptions of OCW content or aggregate RSS feeds. OCWC, OERCommons, Creative Commons search, and OCWC Course Finder are all doing this.
• #34: Open content is increasing rapidly. Specific collections of open material that have been developed. This slide presents a large, but by no means exhaustive list. For instance, the CSU Center for Distributed Learning developed MERLOTand it has now expanded. The University of Georgia System, Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, University of North Carolina System, and the California State University System created an informal consortium representing almost one hundred campuses serving over 900,000 students and over 47,000 faculty.Connexions is a learning object repository of over 6,314 reusable items sponsored by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Maxfield Foundation, and individual sponsors.Research and Corporate Support includes: The National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation Program, National Instruments, and the Hewlett-Packard Corporation, George R. Brown Endowment for Undergraduate Education, The CLASS Foundation with university support from Rice University.
• #35: Finally we have university websites with significant collections. I have listed UCI on this page just for your reference—compared with the others we have a relatively small collection of about 20 open courses now.
• #36: MIT was really the first and the initiator of the OER and OCW movements beginning in about 2001 with its first postings. It has consistently tracked its progress; the next few slides show some interesting statistics about the volume and patterns of use of the MIT material.
• #37: Here you see the MIT OCW web site.OpenCourseWare really got started at MIT in 2001. MIT now has 1,800 courses openly available.