Anto’stuff

I wish I had only a little part of the David’s imagination for writing an “alternate future” for OE, but unfortunately, I haven’t!

Then, I tried to elaborate on the OpenCourseWars paper, adding some thoughts while also reducing its US-centric point of view with some considerations ..from an Italian point of view :

1. The role of the government. I’m convinced that without a clear pronouncement from political institutions on this field OER will not have a real future. In Italy the government is presently (nominally..) committed to Open Source Software but there are still no signals of attention for Open Education (please try this search on Google… You’ll find that the fifth result is …my own blog (!), no comment for the first result… ). Maybe we (I and my wonderful Italian classmates) will try to take the role of OE evangelists..
2. Licensing. David is suggesting two important points. The first is the weakness of the NC and SA clauses of the Creative Commons license. In David’s vision, NC would not resist to a well organized attack launched by publishers while SA would survive. Is it a realistic future? What if would happen the contrary? I feel these licences are still fragile… The most important point (and I was happy to read what I too think) is the need for a someway unified license. I’m ready to add some (few.. I’m only a poor teacher…) euros to the Hewlett Foundation bounty if, over the compatibilty between FSF and CC, they’d further simplify the scene. I can deal no more with this terrific compatibility graph!!
3. Going beyond the OCW model. I agree with the David’s vision that OCWs are little sustainable. We discussed about it in the past weeks. OCWs are now in their early steps, financed by foundations and encouraged by University boards but their future is uncertain. Of course they are precious resources, validated by prestigious institutions but they are read-only, have generally olny course-level granularity, are high-cost producing and maintaining… My opinion (which I previously expressed) is that a “Wikipedia-like model” may be the winner. In fact, right now we can observe that Wikipedia is presently the very unique planetary project on OER, really multilingual, multi-prospective, crowd-feeded. For now, we in Italy have no OER/OCW initiatives in high education (nor in lower…) but we do have Wikipedia in Italian! And it is vital and growing! It is a real challenge for us: in Italy Universities are just approaching the “traditional e-learning”, generally based on LMSs, with high-protectionist policies: faculty generally live in fear for colleagues eventually spying and stealing ideas and materials.. It’s a long way to OER..
4. Trib. This point is strictly connected with the “Wikipedia model”. I’m sure this is a key point: maybe the future OER will not be named OER but they will be a mix of institutional content and user (students, teachers, parents, …)-created content. An OCW course could be really a disruptive resource if real students could add their comments, or materials from the real classroom. I’m figuring a sort of balanced content, not only institutional (it would be too read-only…) but also not only user-created (it would be not entirely reliable..). A good OER could result form a dialogue. This course and its evolution may be a good example: some valuable readings from the instructor but also very good content from the students’ assignments, the syllabus modified based on the interaction between the instructor and the students. Wow!
5. The competency-based Universities. I’m a little puzzled by the WGU example stated in the paper. Really could the future of higher education be based only on assessments for earning a diploma? This model seems very similar to the already diffused corporate certifications by Microsoft, Cisco and others.. e.g. you can obtain a certification from Microsoft by passing an online test that measures very specific skills. Of course, there is a wide offer of preparation courses.. Well, it seems to me this is very far from the university-as-a-community model… and I’m still devoted to this old, good model… But I have to admit that OER may have a disruptive role for the evolution of educational institutions. Maybe the community will evolve as global networks, breaking the walls of schools and universities, which will retain only a certification role: in the future people will learn from the network and in the network (we can refer to the learning networks by Stephen Downes, grounded on the connectivism by George Siemens), and will only ask to institutions to assess the acquired skills. It might work!
6. Mixing free content and paid services. I talked of such a model too. I guess it could be a very reasonable way for sustainibility.
7. The general context.
   1. An e-book reader has recently been launched by Amazon… It’s quite affordable (even if not yet “a $100 piece of hardware”, it’s wireless and… for now … it’s sold out!!! Is it a sign?
   2. The digital culture is growing among the young people. It’s a pre-requisite for OER.. but, for example, we in Italy have still a large cohort of digital illiterate teachers in any grade of school, including universities. I argue this may be an obstacle because the production of high-quality and valuable resources cannot prescind totally from the participation of the “teaching staff”…
   3. Language and localization. Will we all have to speak English for full benefit of OER? It’s a point connected with the model: why do we have an Italian version of Wikipedia but no OER initiatives? Is it only a problem of lack of awareness by our educational institutions? Or lack of sponsors? Or a combination of them? I argue that there is no (or very little) space for an “Italian OCW” by a single University, then only if we’ll have a shift in the general (and academic..) culture and the model will be the “wikipedia model” or anycase a bottom-up, trib-based model, maybe we too, as a “province of the Empire”, will have a chance… Alternatively, we can still translate, and translate, and translate…

Some final words for briefly answering to my friends Alessandro and Stian (hey guys, the syllabus was so poor, that you felt encouraged to add a couple of questions? ):

• I don’t see significative effects in K-12 due to the minor impact of “content” in this area. Yes, there are textbooks for elementary and first secondary schools and maybe we’ll arrive to define open curricula, alternative to commercial ones, but we’d have to print them since I don’t think that children should necessarily use electronic media in their early age. For now, I’m convinced that the real effective impact of OER is for high education and lifelong learning.
• For developing countries, OER could be a real opportunity, an alternative to the “market model” that is dominant in education too… Yes, there are significative problems (in the previous weeks we talked about the risk of a “cultural colonization” by means of “western culture” OER) but I see more possibile benefits than threats. I consider especially important the signal that OER, Free Software and Open Education are carrying: it is that knowledge and instruction are not commercial products but they are a right for all the mankind. We, as citizens of the richest countries, have some obligation in this sense.

Questo/a opera è pubblicato sotto una Licenza Creative Commons.

Four years ago, I co-wrote a book about Learning Objects. It was one of the first to be written in Italian. I and my co-writer mainly grounded on the work of David Wiley and tried to explain to the italian readers the “LO movement” and present a critical point of view on this subject.

Our main criticism, that we also presented in a later article, was about the implicit pedagogical model of LOs. Maybe LOs were misundertood by the “market” but the reality is that they were (and still are…) largely intended as equivalent to SCORM packages, i.e. closed, single-user, self-paced, web-based multimedia content. The recent article by Wiley makes a “checkpoint” on the argument and presents an objective review of this very complicated matter, but I argue that the situation is almost consolidated on this equivalence.

I guess one reason for this difficulty is because we are pursuing an almost impossible goal: an easy, automatic, complete, reuse of content.

If we ask to any experienced teacher, he/she could says us that this “total reuse” is a chimera. Yes, of course, previous year materials could be reused, but near certainly they have to be adapted.

For me, this is the key: adaptation, not reuse!

So, first of all, we should think to LOs as those small units of content of which we talked in week 9 and limit the strong connections with technical specifications: standards are important but not so much important!

Next, if we need to modify them, we need source code, we need openness, not closed packages. It should be clear that if LOs are not open to modification and adaptation, they are not effective.

Even though we can continue to think to LOs as mere content, only if we can adapt them for use in different contexts (for example, we could translate or cut off some parts or add some other) they can be a good base for our work as teachers. It is necessary to abandon the idea of the LEGO metaphor: it’s definitely not working!

So, the OER movement could be important for “opening our eyes” on the real nature of educational content and the real meaning of reuse. Widening the perspective beyond economic advantages of reuse and shifting to think to reuse as sharing for adaptation.

I started to read the Italian edition of Free Culture but I realized I would not be able to finish this book in time. I further admit that Lessig’s book had not fascinated me too much… So, lately I shifted to one of the Benkler’s papers. I previously appreciated this author for his paper proposed in week 8, thus I chose it.

The odd title, “Coase’s Penguin…”, is a little pun: the penguin is of course the Linux logo while Coase is the Nobel-prized Ronald Coase who in the late ‘30 wrote “The nature of the firm”, in which the motivation of the emergence of firms (intended as managed organizations) was explained. It’s the well known theory of the transactional costs, aiming to explain why the economy is mostly based on firms and hierarchic organizations rather than self-employed individuals operating in the market.

According to Benkler, the emergence of the free software movement represents a sort of third way of being in the market: the commons-based peer production. Starting from the free and open source software movement, Benkler identifies this strategy as peculiar to the information goods and analytically exposes the features and the problems of this solution.

It’s a very interesting discussion, from which I can extract a couple of points that in my opinion are very related to OER development and management:

1) The nature of the projects.

In the past weeks we learned about various models of OER projects. The main ones are driven by academic institutions, mostly funded by foundations, directed to offer high-quality, complete and “branded” coursewares. This model is more like the “firms model” in economy rather than free software model, because individuals are often engaged by their organizations, not on a full volunteer basis. Anyway, they works inside the organization, under the direction of the institutional management.

On the contrary, Wikipedia and other similar initiatives rely directly on individuals, independently of their eventual affiliation to any organization.

There are some hybrid cases, i.e. the OU OpenLearn LabSpace provides a development environment for individuals, based on original courses, but open to remix. The Connexions project is a repository of LO, open to contributions by anyone.

Anyway, it is important to note that only Wikipedia has presently a large-scale, worldwide dimension, while the others are generally valuable but still limited projects, still largely dependent from the main funding. We discussed about this issue last week, when we cope with sustainability issues.

The key point is: if we were able to identify the properties of successful large-scale commons-based projects, we could apply them to OER projects.

Benkler identifies some of these properties in:

a) motivation of the participants. It is necessary for a project to identify and offer to individuals some forms of rewards, especially non-monetary. In fact, in the volunteer peer-production monetary remuneration is not so important as hedonistic and socio-psychological rewards (besides it is often difficult to pay due to budget limitations…). For example, guaranteeing the visibility of the authors could be a better way, compared to anonymous contributions. If an author could acquire reputation through participation, it would be a valuable socio-psychological reward.

b) structure of the project. Peer production are best fitted with project that are modular, high-granular with a low-cost integration of the pieces. They should be modular for allowing individuals to indipendently author a small piece, the dimension (granularity) of this piece should be minimized for admitting occasional, small-sized contributions from everyone and, finally, these pieces should integrate without a high, centralized effort. Of course, the integration relates also with quality, which is attained mostly by peer-review. So, I want to add one more constraint, related to the size of the community: peer-reviewing is usually well done if the number of reviewers is high or they are very specialized (but this case would lead to rise integration costs…)

It seems the identikit of Wikipedia!

But OER are not only encyclopedias: more structured productions are neeed too, as textbooks or coursewares. Unfortunately, they have not all these characteristics… Maybe that in these cases, the “firm model” is more suitable, providing the necessary information and control for coherence and consistency. Furthermore, educational resources have often to be more contextualized than an encyclopedia entry. This implies the need for additional efforts and/or for specialized roles for participants.

As stated by Yu-Chun who addressed this book too, maybe “participants who take charge of the consistency for some contents are necessary”.

2) The intrinsec efficiency.

Benkler stresses a very important point about matching of resources and human capital. His theoretical conclusion is that

the widely distributed model of information production will better identify who is the best person to produce a specific component of a project

If it was true, we could obtain the better resources from the “crowds”! We have to admit that Wikipedia has effectively showed evidence of the average high quality of its entries, indirectly confirming this theory.

According to the author, this efficienfy is more effective in remixing and derivating from “information inputs”. Thus we can connect with the importance of lowering copyright: in this vision intellectual property rights are limits to this process. We need more openness to have the opportunity of widening the range of intellectual inputs!

I’m aware this is mostly theoretical , but it is important for demonstrating that peer-production is not only a sort of hobby for altruistic people but it can be grounded on a sound socio-economical theory. Be aware that contributors to Wikipedia are not only volunteers but they can have a role in the knowledge economy.

This week I’m really late with my assignment. I read the main papers and saw the CC video (thanks to Alessandro for the Italian version!) but I’m not able to answer in a convinving way to our questions.

My strongest feeling is that this field is still too complicated, so, for example, I don’t think that CC is missing some options! I guess we should simplify, if possible also unify licences, not create one more flavour of copyleft! Please take a look to the compatibility grid, also proposed by David, if you are still not convinced..

Why the open education movement should need a special license?

Last week I was almost sure that CC-SA and/or CC-NC were good choices for OER. Now I have some more doubts, but I’m still sure that OER need some protection against uncontrolled wide commercial use. I now see that Stian, for example, shares my strain on this point.

About a possible “non-attribution” CC license, it could be an interesting option (a CC-SA only, for example), but, are we sure that remixing and reuse are so heavily limited by a little citation of the original author?

On the contrary, as stated by Leigh, maybe that CC-BY could be the “basic” license for OER, until we’ll surrender to the power of PD!!

I realize that copyleft IS a limitation (one of its mottoes is “some rights reserved”, isn’t it?) but I still think that some limitation is required.

I want to dedicate a final comment to the reflection on the “openness” of most courses, made by Alessandro. I often discuss of it with faculties: in our universities the physical classroms are open, anyone can attend a lesson, without requiring enrollment, while virtual classrooms are mostly closed! Isn’t it an inconsistency? In the case of Moodle, why not make courses open to the “guest” account? Guests cannot participate in any activity, i.e. they cannot “disturb” the classwork, while they could access resources and see “what happens” in the course: a valuable opportunity for colleagues..

Wow! No readings this week: only (!) browsing six websites. It seemed easy, but it wasn’t . A great help went from my friends in LTEver (OpenEd Community) for providing evaluation grids, concept maps and, above all, a constant presence and support. Many thanks!

So, let’s answer to the questions…

1) What do these representative open education projects have in common?

I could easily answer that they all are projects that aim to offer open contents for education, mainly for higher and adult learning, almost totally available only in English, chiefly directed to single learners engaged in informal learning and mostly released under a CC license.

But, I want to point out another trait: five out of six projects are funded, at different levels, by Hewlett Foundation! The sixth, of course, is from UNESCO…

I guess this fact should make us reflect… Are OER initiative uniquely possibile (and economically sustainable) if supported by generous foundations? Maybe I’m anticipating week 8… but I was struck with it..

2) What differentiates them?

I found substantial differences that I tried to classify into these main categories:

It’s worth also noting that only UNESCO and Connexions contain non-English materials.

3) In the context of open education projects, what does “quality” mean?

Quality is a key point for every informational resource and, all the more reason, for educational ones. In my opinion, quality for OER is mainy connected to reliability, accuracy, ease of use, reuse and remix, good instructional design, clear licensing policy.

For reliability and accuracy, I realize that some initiatives (for example, OCW) resolved the problem at the root: they do not allow external contribution! Their materials are so “guaranteed” by their trademark: as we trust MIT as we can easily trust OCW! Though, this enforce a producer-consumer model (as stated by Karen). Other systems, open to everyone’s contributions (like Connexions) are more exposed to the “Wikipedia syndrome”: how to assure quality without institutional control?

The other quality parameters are only partially connected with institutional source of the materials. We can surely find very good resources authored by single teachers. An example from Italy: take a look to the Sloop project (you can also dowload the final booklet of the project)

Anyway, the voice of the users is fundamental: a “folksnomy quality control” similar to the “Amazon model”. Comments, stories from real use, reccomendation from other users. In one word: a community around content. This can be a real-world metrics for quality…