Openness as a Catalyst for Education (2009)

Editor's Notes

• #3: I’m going to quickly hit on 3 topics to give you some flavor of the open education movement so you can join in on your own.
• #5: Let me start by telling you the story of Rob Kalin. He’s the founder of the eBay-like web site etsy.com Here’s the story Rob told at this year’s Hacking Education meeting. Either Rob Failed or the Educational System Failed Rob. But he was motivated, he wanted a personalized, individualized path to learning, and he took it. Rob is one of many self-learner success stories, and he may be exceptional. But you don’t have to fake an MIT ID to access MIT teaching.
• #6: I’m speaking, of course, of MIT’s OCW project. For nearly a decade MIT has been publishing its faculty’s learning materials online, free and open to the world. As of July 2009 MIT OCW had published materials from over 1900 MIT courses.
• #7: MIT calls their project opencourseware, but OCW is just a part of a larger category we call OER. By open we mean freely available, and for everyone Educational, for learning or teaching Resources are online, which facilitates fast, nearly limitless distribution for little cost
• #8: OER are free, but unlike free kittens OER is stuff people really want. So what does an OER look like?
• #9: An OER can be as small as a syllabus
• #10: OER may be a single activity...
• #11: OER may be a video...
• #12: OER may be an entire course. OCW is OER structured as an entire course. Speaking of OCW...
• #13: One measure of the growing interest in OER around the world is the OCWC, a international collection of insitutions that have each shared 10 open courses or more ...
• #14: ...which lists around 200 member institutions engaged in the sharing of open courseware.
• #15: People pay to go to universities to learn. Many universities like MIT are attractive because of the high profile faculty they employ. So why would universities like MIT give their learning content away for free?
• #16: PR – reputation, maintain, faculty reputation economy Philanthropic – sharing content, giving it away for free to the world, especially when it could be useful to those not able to learn otherwise Visionary - Life-long learning Era’s of education OER can be seen as a Sustaining practice as well By digitizing and opening up learning content, students have increased access and can better plan their academic careers, faculty can collaborate and share with colleagues, possibly reduce workload, and institutions can showcase content to serve in recruiting new students Justin’s PhD (here or later?) Individualized learning Where we are going – open web, who’s winning (Encarta vs Wikipedia)
• #17: Dr Justin Johansen of BYU’s Independent Study program just completed his doctoral dissertation, which examined the impact of publishing a free and open version of their pay-to-take IS courses. In short, publishing the free version had no negative impact and appears to have a consistent and statistically significant positive impact on number of student registration for the paid courses. The cost to BYU of publishing these courses as OER was insignificant compared to the long term positive gains.
• #18: Visionary - Where we are going – open web, who’s winning (Encarta vs Wikipedia)
• #19: Visionary? In their recent book Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology Collins and Halverson argue that we are moving from an era of “universal schooling” to an era of “lifelong learning”, where learning not only happens continually, but anywhere, and individualized for learners needs. The internet is what makes this not only possible, it’s what makes this probable. Free and open access to learning materials on the internet may be key to individuals’ success. I believe our internet-driven culture seeks free and open alternatives whenever possible.
• #20: Take for example Wikipedia. One of the most robust sources of open learning material is Wikipedia, of course, the online, publicly edited encyclopedia. Unlike MIT OCW, there’s little guarantee that Wikipedia content is written by credible experts, but according to a controversial study by the journal Nature Wikipedia is comparable to Encylclopedia Britannica in terms of accuracy of information. Accuracy of our information sources is important, but if Wikipedia has taught us anything it’s that authority and maybe even accuracy is trumped by open access.
• #21: That’s why Wikipedia has put Encarta out of business. Is Britannica next?
• #23: I have some experience finding and using OER. I took part in a project where, using state curriculum guidelines we have to compile useful learning materials that could be used in the design of a fully online high school course. The catch: all the materials had to be open licensed. This was a tall order, but not impossible, and though we were often frustrated with lack of materials, we were just as often impressed with what learning materials were already freely available to use.
• #24: There are a number of mass-collaborative open projects. These leverage global contributors and network effects to generate large amounts of content that is quality-checked by the community. Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikieduactor, aimed primarily at K12 educators, is a place for teachers to compose and share learning materials, curriculuum, and resources for the classroom
• #25: As the OCWC listing shows, there are many university institutions dedicating resources to OER. Here are 5 of my favorite.
• #26: What's LabSpace ? This is where educators come to find and reuse content, remix it, adapt it for their local audiences, and share it with others.
• #31: Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources is to identify, create and/or repurpose existing OER as Open Textbooks and make them available for use by community college students and faculty
• #32: So lets look at a few ways you can not only contribute to the open educational resources movement, but also encourage open experiences for learning. I’ll start with a couple examples from my institution…
• #33: I’ve used a lot of wiki-based examples, because wikis are so easy to use. Wiki means “quick” after all. At UVU we have a fledgling wiki project just for UVU faculty, staff, and students called WikiLearn. Though editing is not fully open, access to the content is. Wikilearn is still growing…
• #34: … but some of it’s pretty good, like Kirk Love’s Computer Science courses. Kirk had made his course content available through Blackboard for years, but has now opened it up. Since most of it was online anyway, it wasn’t the tremendous task it might seem, and it coincided with his redesign of the course.
• #35: Kirk Love was motivated to open his materials up because he wanted to share, and because he wanted students to contribute as well. Ron Hammond had a different motive: He decided that the cost of textbooks is immoral, and so he did an act of community service to the whole country (and world). He wrote his own intro to sociology textbook and now gives it away for free under a CC license. He’s working on a follow-up textbook now.
• #36: Of course, you don’t have to write an entire textbook. There are many small ways you can contribute on a daily basis. I teach courses on Web design, in classroom and online. Every now and then I’ll make a small discovery that I want to share with my students. I’ll describe it, source it, and then bring it to my students. But I don’t just bring it to class, I don’t just post it to the Moodle discussion forum, I post it with a CC license on my blog, then invite my students—and everyone else in the world—to consider it. Being open is as easy as that.
• #37: Most teachers would have posted the info to Bb or Moodle or D2L, but consider what you’re doing. Some think of the closed nature of a LMS like a walled garden, or even more flattering, a biosphere. Good reasons for being closed: student privacy, intellectual property and copyright
• #38: But the more I used LMSs the more they seem like Rusty Cages, closed systems that do not keep up with the changing culture or technology. The most obvious hindrance is that learning content is “trapped” inside for the duration of the semester. Not only do LMSs tend to lock content, they lock experiences as well. So-called blogs and wikis in LMSs are poor imitations of the real thing, and discussion forums tend to be more homogenous and limited compared to discussion forums of a public, informal nature found on the open web. Sometimes this is done because instructors aren’t sure how to break into the open, or even that such a thing is possible. Sometimes instructors choose closed environments because they can be controlled, and are “safe”. Not bad for getting started, but not exactly exciting.
• #39: How many of you like to ski? Consider how this unfortunate environment compares to the real thing. In his book Brain Rules John Medina describes how engaging learners in affective, complex learning is better for memory, and teaching them in real situations is better for performance in real situations. So I guess the the question is, how real do you want it?
• #40: Indeed, the LMS is built to reflect the traditional, terminal model of education, not supportive of an era of lifelong learning. In terms of group interaction, a LMS allows a classroom community to grow—but then executes it at the end of the semester.
• #41: A more open model, maybe one that utilizes Personal Learning Environments rather than an LMS, may support growth of learning communities beyond the semester … and even beyond the registered students.
• #42: Let me usher you past some tools and platforms that you can use to begin opening up.
• #43: I mentioned a blog as an easy way to publish openly. Just ask Jim Groom: blogs ain’t just for blogging anymore. Wordpress.com lets you have your own free blogs But if you want to have your own blogging server, the WordPress software is free and open source and ready to install.
• #44: I mentioned our UVU Wiki project WikiLearn. It uses the free and open source wiki software MediaWiki.
• #45: Don’t have to run your own wiki, there are free services like wikispaces that make it easy to get a wiki up and running.
• #46: Beyond text, you can post images on services like Flickr, and even customize the open license. For video there’s youtube and ustream. The list goes on and on.
• #47: Those are all informal solutions to publishing OER. Here’s a solution made for opencourseware: educommons – free and open source Strong on workflow Easy to use A separate system from your LMS
• #48: Speaking of LMSs, I work in Distance Education we have around 200 online courses, and we’ve begun –very slowly—to release content from certain courses under an open license through Moodle. We’ve customized Moodle to allow for this, because the nature of an LMS is closed.
• #49: Copyright in the USA is automatic – as soon as you write something, you own it. That’s nice for owners, but the problem for everyone else is that they must get express permission to use it, so if you’re going to be open be sure to mark your materials with an open license.
• #50: The most common open license for OER is CC. CC allows copyright holders to expand how the public is allowed to use their IP .
• #51: Creative Commons allows you to customize your open license, to share, to remix, to attribute back to you, to restrict commercial use, to require others to share alike. It’s all there on creativecommons.org
• #52: Openness isn’t binary. There are different degrees of openness, from simply allowing reuse, to revising and remixing.
• #53: Might ask the audience why find and use OER? Resource saving Key feature of OER = digital Most OCW not full courses, but some are Study on faculty time devoted to developing distance ed Currency Textbook editions keeping up? How expensive Contrast with Wikipedia – many hands make light work – network effect Remixing and sharing Find, reuse, remix, share Contributing Alternative expertise? Potentially more diverse than textbooks Potential access to international points of view
• #54: You check Wikipedia for an article, and find it doesn’t exist. What do you do? Login and create a “stub”. Maybe come back later and flesh it out. Being open is that easy.
• #55: ??HERE or at the VERY END? We can’t stop the tsunami of information. We have to learn to deal with it. We have to learn to filter the noise We have to be able to discriminate on our own. We have to teach our students to judge accuracy and quality If we want to fight poor quality with good quality, we have to be willing to step up to the plate. If we do that, we’ll be able to find gems, discover networks, and build new communities that go beyond the 4 walls of the classroom.