Scheduled Seminar Discussions

Roger, thanks for the reminder of a key constituency for OER - universities in the developing world for whom access to OER content may provide a less expensive means to educate their students. This worthwhile goal can easily get lost amidst some of the other concerns expressed here, valid as those may be.

"The OER movement is strangely similar to the Learning Objects movement" - that made me laugh. Partly because it resonates, but partly because it only resonates when people are trying to force new models to fit old patterns. That to me is when OER start to resembles LO - for instance when you start from a posture of 'closed' and then figure out incrementally how to open select parts of it. Then all sorts of really dumb interoperability issues and questions of 'granularity' etc arise.

I say 'dumb' because as many many many many people are trying to show (I should say, "Have showed already"), if instead of starting from the position of everything being closed and then meting out access, bit by bit, we instead acknowledge the benefits of openness right from the get-go and provide network learning opportunities, many of these issues quickly fade away (as indeed they seem to do on the wider net, where remix and reuse just, well, happen.)

I wish you luck on the research project; feedback from intended reusers of OERs has got to be a positive thing, I would think. But I guess my comments above would be to urge you NOT to simply accept the terms of the problem as set out by the existing 'OER Publishers' but to challenge them to rethink these from the perspectives of what really would make this work, BOTH for your institutions and for themselves, as well as challenge them to think outside of the frame of straight 'publishing.' I know there are lots of folks who would be receptive to these ideas, and indeed it's my take at least that the way to "do OER" is not at ALL a 'done deal' but one that's still emerging.

Dear Gina,
Thank you for this thoughtful post about OER and teaching. What struck me is that manifesting more confidence about using OER can only really come with practice and exposure. You also mention that not everyone has a good experience when contributing to Wikepedia, for example. I think that learning is about the willingness to make mistakes and to learn from those expeiences -- and with OER -- that may mean having the courage to be criticized -- deleted -- over-ridden, or ignored completely. This brings me to the qualities of couraged and diligence that online OER need to find within themselves.

A light bulb came on that said -- content is only a small part of the delivery, as is the LMS, as is the amount of technology that we gradually add to our repetoire, if we teach online. Over the past three years I have dedicated a lot of my personal time to studying various aspects of distance education, teaching (especially online), and technology. My teachers were lifelong learners who were willing to risk exposure to "I don't know, but what do others think?" I have been reading the posts on this Scope e-conference and I sense that many of the professionals taking part -- lurking or adding posts -- are willing to share what they know, help others, and teach. Not all my many teachers along my rather long educational journey, knew the benefits of sharing openly. I have read posts about copyrights and appreciate that people work hard to produce new material. However -- I think we all re-create from others -- we are not islands unto ourselves and it has been my experience that the more we share -- the more our own lives are enriched -- deeply. Thanks everybody for all the valuable contributions that you have put into this learning environment through this OER called Scope.

Scott, I am enjoying your provocation .

So... "LMS are where OER go to die"... well, maybe they don't go to die -- nothing really dies on the internet -- but I can agree at least that LMS are where OER go to hibernate. You made a comment earlier this week: "if we start to identify the benefits to learners, the institution and instructors of learning taking place out in the open so that serendipitous interactions with real world experts can occur ... our efforts at openness will by default become sustainable." So both these comments got me thinking about our reasons for hiding the act of teaching behind LMS logins. Often we say it's to protect the privacy of our students but of course much of it has to do with the shyness of the instructors about making their (possibly substandard) work public. It is this focus on Creating Content as if content -- knowledge itself -- were somehow a fixed thing, a product rather than a process. How can we get used to teaching in the open?

I audited an online sort of course a couple of years ago from UC-Berkeley. The course was InfoSys296A: Open Source Development. Although one of the instructors was the founder of Lotus software company, the course itself wasn't really flashy: a bunch of (poor quality) videorecordings with some standard mp3 podcasts. The really interesting thing about the course was that the entire class delivery was radically open. There was a class website & all work was done in the class wiki. Nobody seemed to worry about the fact that the students' work was visible to the world. Our first assignment was to add something new or to substantially edit something in Wikipedia. This is an incredible lesson in contributing to open education & I think everybody should try it at least once (the experience is not always positive!) Anyway, it opened my eyes to what 'teaching in the open' could be like; to the notion that one's OERs need not be works of art, & that the teaching & learning process need not be something to hide behind closed doors.

While the following is related more to "open access" publishing (a subset of the 'open' movement but arguably not the same as OER) I think it still really important - http://jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/01/houghton.aspx is reporting that a study in the UK finds that in addition to the benefits to the public of having open access to knowledge,

Now those are the kinds of numbers to get people's attention. So while the playing field is slightly different, I'd warrant the effect would be similar with OERs.

Sylvia, these are really good, thanks. Some more stuff from OCW/MIT along the lines of the value proposition of OER - this presentation lists the following as potential benefits:

• fulfilling your insitutional mission
• institutional reputation
• faculty reputation
• recruitment
• retention
• advising
• evaluating for tenure
• service learning
• international engagement (expanding connections and reach)
• create a lifelong connection with students
• improvements in teaching materials and transparency of teaching methods

Many, but not all, of these are 'institutionally' focused, but some of them seem pretty compelling (improving advising, recruitment and retention, in measurable ways).

Am really enjoying this thread. I will try, when time permits, to go through and see if I can't pull out (and myabe put in the wiki) all the different "why's" of sharing OERs that we've managed to come up with so far. Do people have others, especially ones that could be directed to the individual faculty member? I like the idea someone suggested of 'examples' and 'success stories' as I think these can work - people have other ones they can share, either their own or ones they've heard?

I really like the suggestions people are coming up with regarding benefits of OER. I spent some time throughout 2008 trying to amass a comprehensive list of OER benefits, partly to substantiate the OER initiative we have at BCcampus and partly in the hope that making explicit the motivators will encourage participation.

Here is what I came up with:
Benefits associated with Open Educational Resources are:

1. Social benefits
Higher education sharing knowledge for the benefit of all is an altruistic public service. Sharing boosts human capital through better education and skills by providing access to resources that encourage participation in higher education. Open resources accessible to all bridge the gap between informal and formal learning, and promote lifelong learning. Open resources widen access and provide supply where there is shortage.

2. Economical benefits
By sharing and reusing, the costs for content development can be cut, thereby making better use of available resources. Leverage taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources developed by publicly funded institutions. Eliminates the weeks and months of time it can take to seek permission to use existing digital materials. Educators can use the asset immediately without having to go through a permission seeking process. Leverages a unique aspect of digital assets - the marginal cost and effort in making copies and distributing online learning resources over a network.

3. Quality improvements
Quality improves over time, compared to a situation in which everyone always has to start anew. Creates a web-based, viewable, useable record of quality educational materials. Allowing others to reuse and modify original work provides a means for continuous improvement of online learning resources by a collective of professional peers. Shifts emphasis from content to teaching and learning process and services involved with using content.

4. Collaboration and Partnerships
Creates opportunity for faculty to see, collaborate on, and reuse each others work. Provides a reputation boost to faculty whose materials are widely used.

5. Academic Planning
Helps students make academic plans, be better prepared, and pursue learning of personal interest.

6. Public Relations and Advertising
Good for public relations and functions as a showcase to attract new students. Acts as advertisement for the institution, and as a way of lowering the threshold for new students, who may be more likely to enroll – and therefore pay for tutoring and accreditation – when they have had a taste of the learning on offer through open content. Increased contact with alumni.

I'll be revising these based on all your posts and look forward to seeing how these morph over time.

Paul

Gina-

I find your pushing the boundaries of ownership and the role of education to be very refreshing, especially when we hegemonically work within systems where we often find challenging the dominant paradigms to be fraught with other issues. I digress . . .

One of the items you mentioned I especially found interesting,

"Wouldn't it be FAR more efficient, making better use of taxpayers' money, if we were legally allowed & institutionally encouraged to build on existing resources, using our precious time to update, contextualize, & even translate if necessary? In fact, this is what I understand that BCcampus has done by insisting that all curriculum developed with provincial monies must be made freely available to other partners in the system."

In many ways, this makes sense. Public funds that support public education should ultimately benefit the public. Along the same lines, I have never been paid to develop my content (the tradititional adjunct experience in the US), so my content is my content. Universities hire me to teach my content, and they do not own that content themselves. When I create content at my full-time employer, this is a different situation.

Regardless, I do choose to share my own content at times because I am beginning to see more of a value in getting the feedback from others who use and or comment on it. Perhaps this is more the issue--it may be easier to share if there is a sense that others appreciate the efforts and thus the benefits then get spread around (somewhat like karma)?

Jeffrey

Hello all I am late joining the discussion and am finding the posts so far very interesting. It is good to hear about the beneficial flow-on effects following your contributions to WikiEducator Gina. We have had similar experiences at Otago Polytechnic and academic staff and managers are at last "seeing the light".

As some of you may know we have a blanket IP policy whereby all our educational materials by default have Creative Commons by attribution copyright to promote collaboration and sharing in line with an OER philosophy. If staff, for some reason want a different copyright statement, they have to apply to Leadership Team with their rationale. This has caused a bit of a flurry.

It is a slow process and I am still not convinced which is the best way to change attitudes. I don't believe that many people really understand yet or know about the new IP policy so there is work to be done this year. In my role as an educational developer, I am able to help people with the philosophies and principles of OER. For some they can accept a small part of OER such as sharing some materials and not others. Other people are ok if they get resources for free but are not as willing to share their stuff. And of course there are others who embrace the idea wholeheartedly when they understand the benefits. For example, a colleague (Dr Ruth Lawson) has created an open textbook for a vet nursing course using Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anatomy_and_Physiology_of_Animals), and managed to convince her manager that it would help promote the course, dept and programmes - it has - and bring in revenue via Lulu.com (http://www.lulu.com/content/1920743) - it has - and she is now sold on the idea. Additionally, other organisations are asking for the resource - to buy - as people still like hard copy, and they are seeking expertise from our organisation - and paying for it!

Perhaps the best way to convince people, Scott, is to share success stories. MIT in USA is certainly one and WikiEducator and the many others happening all over the place.

I wonder, how do people believe they can convince their colleagues to make a switch to creating open resources and what sort of issues do they see with managers in their organisations?
Bronwyn

I'll jump in here too and suggest that if we approach the issues of how we create and deliver our online courses, how we then share our online courses, and how we then sustain our sharing efforts as separate issues, then I think we are doomed from the start. In my mind, this is, for better or worse, the situation the field as a whole largely finds itself in now, but over the past 3 or 4 years people have been thinking this through and coming up with some interesting alternatives.

If instead we broaden our frame as educators (especially those educating in publicly funded systems) and start to identify benefits of openness and sharing not as subsidiary acts, but as a core part of both the teaching and learning process, then I believe what will emerge are sustainable solutions that do not need to go looking for the next grant or start the next big insitutional project to help sharing to occur.

So, just for instance, if we start to identify the benefits back to the educator, the learners and the institution of having learning materials under constant public scrutiny, open to improvements by many (the 'all bugs are shallow with enough eyeballs' phenomenon of open source); if we start to identify the benefits to learners, the institution and instructors of learning taking place out in the open so that serendipitous interactions with real world experts can occur; if we (insert your arguments here)...then not only will our own students and faculty benefit, but our efforts at openness will by default become sustainable.

I will take up this strand of how to create educational content in more sustainably ways in another thread, as I believe it is a full topic on its own. But I'll just leave off here saying that what the last 6 years of wrestling with the OER issue has taught me is that the what, how and why of OER are intimately connected. Far from being an insurmountable, unsustainable challenge, OERs have the potential to help us re-invent our educational practices and our institutions in ways that will not just benefit everyone involved, but will ultimately become understood as the transformations our institutions needed to adapt to the 21st Century's demands. Heady claims, I know, but they really do seem a part of a bigger picture to me.

Gina/Gerry:

Great to hear you mentioning the value of OER provides as a stimulus for ideas and aid in academic planning not just content reuse. I've begun to really pay attention to the value proposition OER provide around academic planning.

Here is what I'm seeing. From an academic planning point of view OER are valuable not for providing reusable content, but reusable pedagogy and macro view of a subject area or domain and how best to teach it. This is, in my view, one of the great unsung benefits of OER.

Perhaps instead of inviting faculty to look at OER as a source of reusable content we should be encouraging them to look at OER as a professional peer's representation of a subject domain and the best ways in which to teach it.

Paul