Octeto

Our good friend Cathy Casserly, former Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, as just been elected to the Creative Commons Board of Directors. While there were already people on the CC board who cared about OER, the addition of Cathy means that the Board now has one of the most articulate OER champions around in their ranks. This is great news! Congrats to Cathy, CC, and anyone who cares about OER!

Coverage at:

• Welcoming Cathy Casserly to the Creative Commons board of directors
• Open Education Resources Get a Big Boost: Cathy Casserly Joins Creative Commons Board

I’m happy to point to this comment by Vic Vuchic from the Hewlett Foundation on a previous post I wrote about what seems to be happening with OER. It’s a great perspective (that he is uniquely qualified to provide) that warmed my heart a bit. Some highlights:

Hewlett made over $16 million in grants last year that were 100% OER focused… In 2009 alone, foundations such as Gates, Lumina, MacArthur and many others pumped over $10 million of investments into OER focused projects. VCs made a couple of forays into OER… And a number of governments made their first investments in OER. In all 2009 was a record year both in the amount and diversity of OER funding, which is amazing considering most other things in the world collapse financially.

So from Vic’s point of view, the field of OER is in transition, and definitely for the better! This is a great perspective that I’m happy to hear.

Vic also writes, “Just to put a a stop to the rumors, Hewlett is not shutting down OER, and it is very much a part of what the education program is doing moving forward.” I re-read my previous post and I don’t think I implied anywhere that Hewlett was shutting down its OER program – just that funding seems to have slowed down. Vic indicates that Hewlett’s and other foundations’s endowments are down 40%, so that makes sense.

Vic’s perspective of what’s happening as the field transitions is good news for everyone who cares about OER.

First, Mike and Cathy left the Hewlett Foundation, where they had provided incredible vision and incubation support for early OER efforts. (While Hewlett is still running its OER program there didn’t seem to be many OER-related grants made in 2009.) Then, a few weeks ago, I blogged about the departure of Ira and Chris from the Mellon Foundation, caused by the RIT program being merged into another program, where they had also provided vision and support for open educational software.

Today, we read of another “merger” of programs – and top leadership exit – at Creative Commons:

We’ve decided that we can best support the open education and OER communities by focusing our resources and support where we are strongest and provide the most unique value… Such changes mean that some of the activities and, sadly, personnel cannot be integrated successfully with the new structure… In this current transition, Ahrash Bissell, the Executive Director of CC Learn, has left the organization.

Has left – past tense. Apparently, surpassing their year end public fundraising goal (with $533,898) wasn’t enough resource to keep ccLearn going.

I know some well-known ed tech bloggers will comment “good riddance,” claiming that organizations are inherently evil anyway, and that the space is better off without them “investing in” and “supporting” the work of open education (which is best done by a lone individual living off-grid on a rural Appalachian subsistence farm). But does no one else see an “interesting” pattern here?

Newly minted Dr. Justin Johansen’s dissertation study, The Impact Of Opencourseware On Paid Enrollment In Distance Learning Courses, is now available from BYU’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) archive.

This dissertation is the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing opencourseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it. In other words, Justin’s study not only demonstrates that it is possible to publish opencourseware without requesting donations from users or foundations, it goes further and demonstrates that it is possible to make money publishing opencourseware. And if you can make money publishing opencourseware, you can continue publishing opencourseware for a very long time. This capacity is also known as sustainability.

Congratulations to Dr. Johansen!

P.S. John Hilton will be defending his dissertation, which applies a similar methodology to examine the impact of giving away free e-books on the sales of printed books, February 11!

The Salt Lake Tribune recently ran a front page feature on the Open High School of Utah that generated a number of comments online. (More recent OHSU coverage at eSchoolNews). Many of the comments about the online school ran along these lines:

So much for peer relationships! Social growth is also a good idea – or was….

Re Taxpayer… these online courses lack the academic interaction between students that is so crucial to a great education

The fact that these readers are arguing with one another in the online comment thread about whether you can have meaningful academic or social interactions in an online setting is really just too delicious.

More interestingly, several students from the OHSU (who someone apparently forgot to tell that they can’t have meaningful interactions online) have joined the argument, with posts like:

I would like to ask those who are posting on the article how much they REALLY know what they’re talking about. Honestly. What do you know about OHSU (Open High School of Utah–what this article is all about)? Next to nothing. You know that it is an online charter school, it’s curriculum is “open,” and that there is a student named Jizelle. Am I missing anything? As a student at OHSU, I would like you all to stop trash talking my school until you understand exactly what it is you’re talking about.

Hi, my name is Robin, I am a thirteen year old girl. I have been public schooled, home schooled, and I am in OHSU at the time being… I have more time to learn, and grow with OHSU. I am sorry if you like brick and mortar schools better, but the facts are, when there are 45+ students in a class with one mentor it becomes babysitting NOT teaching!

I am also a student of the Open High School of Utah… I really wish that people would cease with the stereotyping that children who learn at home lack social skills, have some sort of mental problem or disability (I’m pretty sure my mental health is great, thank you very much), or that this type of learning isn’t as effective. Like what LisaMaren stated, OHSU uses discussion boards, in which we are REQUIRED to read through and respond to what the other students have to say. Yes, the posts are longer and well thought out since students are given the chance to sit there, think, and type it down rather than how it would be in an impromptu face-to-face conversation. Everyone has an equal chance to speak their mind and be heard–unlike in the traditional school, where the shy girl may be overshadowed by the know-it-all geek.

Is there a more enjoyable critic to listen to than the one who disproves his own point as he argues for it?

I love these longer, more thoughtful discussions…

The Reverend contributes to the latest round of the conversation about “openness:”

The larger question in my mind is that what is under girding this discussion is an even more insidious logic than a denatured sense of open, and that’s a sense of entitled leadership. Fact is, the push to make sense of open as a term and discuss it’s meaning, future shape, and ultimate value seems to be the most definitive step in forming an institutional structure of power around it.

What is the alternative to ‘pushing to make sense of the term “open” and discussing it’s meaning and future shape?’ Studiously ignoring the term? Turning a blind eye to what is happening in the field? Is the concern about “institutionalizing a structure of power around the term open” that only a few get to participate in the discussions?

Who gets to discuss what open is? Where do they do it?

It is being discussed in the blogosphere by anyone who cares about it enough to type, right? George chimed in, I chimed in, the Rev chimed in, Stephen has chimed in… Anyone who wants to can take part. I’m sure many more will join the fray.

Importantly, there are at least two parts to this conversation. There is global part of the conversation, where we will discuss aspects of openness (openness of content, openness of research, openness of software, openness of credentialing, etc.) outside the context of specific implementations (i.e., individual institutions or projects). Then there will be the very concretely grounded discussions about specific implementations in specific contexts. The comparison is a little rough, but these will be akin to theory / practice conversations. Both are important, and they should inform each other.

Companies don’t really care to much about that discussion, they just care about appealing to users through a term, and if they make up the table, along with administrators at universities and the like, then why do we need to go to the table at all? Isn’t the push away from these legacies of power and privilege a part of what open is working against on it’s most powerful and truly transformative levels?

Why do we open education people need to have a seat at the table in department meetings, dean’s council, and when the VPs meet with the provost and president? The same reason that open source software needs a seat at the table with Dell, HP, Gateway, and Lenovo. Sure, the hackers of the world can blow away that Windows 7 install, repartition their hard drive, and do a clean Ubuntu install. But how many more people would open source reach / how much more influence would open source have if the major vendors shipped Ubuntu or Red Hat or (name your favorite distro here) straight to consumers? Significantly more – infinitely more.

And, of course, the radicals on each campus can put their course notes on their personal website with a CC license without engaging their administrations – just like hackers can write open source software without talking to hardware vendors. But how many more people would open educational resources reach / how much more influence would open educational resources have if the institutions themselves made wide-reaching commitments to the principle of openness? Significantly more – infinitely more.

Yes, we want a seat at that table. We need a seat at that table. And until we have it, the potential good of open education is going to be severely limited in reach – restricted to the educational equivalent of the computer user who is capable of repartioning his hard drive and doing a clean Linux install. Yes, those users are out there, but they’re the vast, vast minority.

Why does their need to be a continental congress on open? Why do we have to conflate it with system and then elect officials to define it for us? Part of the power and the hope of this space for me is a new scale of working though this ideas that is both hyper-individual and communally local at the same time. To frame the discussion around a table of designated players that move us forward seems in many ways contrary to possibilities these connections and relationships provide us.

Where is this conflated meeting of elected officials happening? The conversation I’m participating in about the meaning of openness is on publicly accessible, openly licensed blogs that have comments and trackbacks enabled. How much more open and participatory is the conversation supposed to be? What am I missing?

I don’t think of this so much as radical as an alternative to the models of leadership, promotion, and adoption of ideas that have utlimately placed them squarely within a system that is moving in a unilateral direction of progress in the name of growth and profit.

Isn’t growth the whole point of openness – growing the number of people who have access to educational opportunity? For an institution like BYU, that for years has had a “zero square foot growth” policy with regard to buildings on campus, wouldn’t a commitment to openness be all about growing the number of people the institution can reach, support, and bless? If openness isn’t about growing or increasing both the amount of educational opportunity available and the number of people who can access those opportunities, what is it about?

And – here comes the part where you can all throw things at me – if we want those opportunities to still be available 3, 5, and 10 years from now, shouldn’t someone worry about how we support them? I’m not saying that we need 2008-destroy-our-economy-and-take-the-world-with-it-style capitalism in open education. But we do have to get over this notion that any time we talk about money or sustainability we’ve tainted and contaminated ourselves.

In his summary of this round of the conversation, Stephen notes:

David Wiley responds to George Siemens’s post calling for more radicalism for open education. It’s a moderate response, reminding people to heed to the goals of education, and not the means. In this I agree – open education is not an end in itself, but part of the means by which we reach our goals of an education for all in a just and sharing society.

See! It can happen! Stephen and I can agree with each other…

And he argues that, therefore, “the ideal [of openness] needs to mean specific things in specific contexts in order for it to be applied usefully in those contexts.” This is true as well – at the margins. But the examples cited by Siemens – Twitter, Blackboard, Facebook – aren’t marginal cases, and claims that they are somehow ‘open’ in a way that is conducive to a free education in a just and sharing society somehow ring hollow.

Perhaps I need to use all caps to make my point clearer than I have been able to in my past posts. MY DISCUSSION OF THE MEANING OF OPEN DOES NOT EXTEND TO SOFTWARE (LIKE TWITTER, BLACKBOARD, OR FACEBOOK). WHEN I TALK ABOUT “THE MEANING OF THE ‘OPEN’ IN ‘OPEN CONTENT’,” I MEAN I’M DISCUSSING THE ADJECTIVE “OPEN” AS IT MODIFIES THE NOUN “CONTENT.” This is the same “open” that occurs in “open educational resources.” This is the world to which the 4Rs framework applies.

It is NOT the same “open” that occurs in “open source software.” We don’t need to discuss whether software is open or not. “Open source software” is already a trademarked term with a vouchsafed definition. Twitter, Blackboard, or Facebook are not open source, full-stop, end of story. They can claim that their software is “open” in some other manner, but no one believes it – I don’t even think they believe it. (Facebook also goes around saying that they care about protecting your privacy. Do we need to define privacy? No. Everyone knows Facebook is doing whatever is in its best interest and that it could care less about privacy or openness.) There’s nothing to discuss here except to complain about companies who mislead the public to make a buck. But there is no special relation to openness in this regard.

Stephen writes that my claim “the ideal [of openness] needs to mean specific things in specific contexts in order for it to be applied usefully in those contexts” is only true at the margins. In this case, I think Stephen is simply wrong. (See, we can disagree, too!)

The differences between software and content are not marginal. The necessary and appropriate considerations of openness in these two contexts are significantly different. People taking the naive position of “OER is like open source software for content!” fail to carefully consider what they’re saying and consequently miss important differences. (It’s like when people used to say “learning objects are like LEGOs!” After some reflection, we can see that this metaphor stuck so powerfully in people’s minds – and was so wrong – as to have contributed meaningfully to the inability of learning objects to deliver on their (over-hyped) promise.)

Our inability to speak and write with precision and clarity about the differences in the openness of content and the openness of software is a huge roadblock to the progress of open education. The “OER is open source software for content” metaphor is so powerful as to be blinding. These differences are not marginal. The differences in the openness of research, the openness of data, and the openness of credentialing are not marginal, either. We need a more mature, more developed, and more precise discourse about open education. And I think that open blogs on the open web is the right place to have it.

I’m extremely grateful for George’s recent post, “Open isn’t so open anymore.” It’s thoughtful and thought-provoking. I won’t respond to the post sentence for sentence, but I do want to respond to some of the major points. Hopefully an interesting dialog will ensue (I believe this is George’s goal as well). I’m going to cut and paste pieces from throughout together in order to respond to similar thoughts in one place.

We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know, the types that have a vision and an ideological orientation that defies the pragmatics of reality. Stubborn, irritating, aggravating visionaries. Today, I fear, open education is beset with a more moderate spirit…

Richard Stallman has been somewhat replaced by, or even written out of, the open source movement. Stallman was (and still is) an uncompromising radical. Or at least that is how the well established proprietary software field sees him. The open source movement developed in response to what others perceived as Stallman’s unpalatable views for mainstreaming openness.

I’ve stated in the past that I’m concerned about open education suffering the fate of Stallman – marginalized because it is not palatable at the “power table”. I still think this is a valid concern. But we first need a Stallman in open education before we can even begin to marginalize him. We need an idealist that sets the stage for thinking and debate around openness.

I would disagree and say that we have plenty of stubborn, irritating, aggravating voices in the open education space. A few examples that I respect greatly: First, it’s well known how much Stephen aggravates me, and how uncompromising he is. Second, Kim Tucker works so hard to bring the purity of Stallman’s ideas into the open education space that he sometimes appears to be a reincarnation of St. Ignucius himself. Derek Keats is also a champ in this regard. The UNESCO listserv “discussions” (aka battles) over licensing issues, which are at the very core of openness, were really something.

I don’t want to launch into a full-on defense of pragmatism; however, it is easy to see why the open source movement had to emerge from what Richard was doing with the “free software” movement. He couldn’t get a seat at “the table” because he wouldn’t speak in a language anyone at the table cared about. He still refuses to – and he still doesn’t have a seat at the table. Now, being uncompromisingly committed to principle is fine, as long as you don’t mind being ignored by certain groups. It can mean a life of “being translated” so that others can understand you, which consequently means a life of not having a direct impact, because your message is always being rewritten by a mediator so that it can be understood. (Hence, Eric Raymond has been an extremely popular consultant and wielded a huge direct influence on the computing industry, while Richard has not.) If you want the attention of those groups “at the table,” and you want the opportunity to engage them directly, you have to speak their language. And sometimes you have to adapt your message. I believe that protecting one’s ability to adapt appropriately for different audiences is one of the key benefits of openness, so I will be curious to hear whether George thinks adaptations are appropriate or not.

While we often hear criticism of Stallman’s inflexibility, he has done more to advance openness by not accommodating than he could have possibly done by assuming a moderate or even commercial stance.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Without translators like Raymond, who adapted Stallman’s message so that a broader audience could both (1) understand and (2) see the value of it, Stallman and his philosophies would still be niche players on the global scale today. (Let the firestorm begin.)

David Wiley states that open is a function of gradients (“a continuous, not binary, construct”). According to Wiley, openness is not an ideological concept, like democracy, but rather a functional or utilitarian construct: like a door or window being open or partly open. I can see the appeal of this view – the value of something is discovered in its implementation. But it seems wrong to me when applied to an ideological concept such as openness.

I’m not sure why George makes the leap from my more nuanced view of openness to my somehow not believing that openness is an ideological concept. Of course openness is a concept – and of course people are ideological about it’s meaning. But, like democracy, little concrete debate can be had about the concept (and no implementation of the concept can occur) until it has been operationalized. How can you debate a concept without a concrete proposal as to it’s meaning?

Unfortunately, many people have taken the stance that the open education movement’s notion of openness should be exactly the same as the open source software movement’s definition. Because software and content are different in meaningful ways, I don’t think such a simple-minded, whole-cloth adoption makes sense. This is why I have proposed the 4Rs Framework for thinking about openness specifically with regard to content (including educational resources):

1. Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form
2. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
3. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new
4. Redistribute – the right to make and share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

I guess George doesn’t see value in my “framework” for thinking about openness. His discussion makes me believe that he doesn’t see the 4Rs Framework as being able to disqualify things from being open (“The gradient of democracy has a threshold”). However, as I’ve discussed in the past, there is content that clearly fails to grant any of these rights (and so is closed). There is also content that only grants reuse and redistribution rights, while denying revision and remixing rights (which I call “2R open”). Finally, there is also content that grants all four rights (which I call “4R open”). Clearly, traditional textbooks are not open according to this framework. Anything with a standard (c) statement is not open according to this framework.

In response to my statement:

Licenses have therefore provided people with license options to help them more effectively accomplish their personal goals. This tolerance for different goals and explicit support for people in achieving them is something we should cherish and extend beyond our licenses into our community discourse and behavior. If another person or institution’s approach to openness doesn’t help you meet your goals, then look for help somewhere else – don’t criticize them.

George says:

We should criticize. We should debate. By not criticizing gradient views of openness, by failing to establish a solid foundation on which to discuss openness, we are providing an ideology for our generation, not one that serves as a future-focused movement. Openness is a hard topic to discuss ideologically because it’s important. Yes, pragmatics are easier. But pragmatics have a short life span.

Openness is not a methodology. Openness is an ideology along the lines of democracy. It is worthy of theoretical discussion. And various modes of implementation should be subject to debate and criticism.

Two things are entangled in my comment and George’s response – the productive criticism of the ideals of our movement, and the criticism of individuals or institutions that gets personal and becomes both unprofessional and unproductive. I strongly believe that we should engage in criticism and debate with regard to the ideals of our movement itself. No meaningful progress can be made if we don’t. We also desperately need to engage in criticism and debate about the processes and methodologies in which these naked ideals are clothed in the real world. No meaningful progress can be made if we don’t. However, when everyone starts bashing MIT, or starts talking about how stupid anyone is that would ever use the NC clause, or what a waste of space institutions who share pdf files are, then what could be productive conversation turns into vindictives that move the field backward.

Why spend days, even months, debating seemingly insignificant details of openness? Why not just produce something and share it in any manner you wish?

The debate is great, and productive, and I think this series of posts shows that some of us are engaging in it. We just don’t want to discourage people from making their first forays into being open by slamming their “moronic decisions.” They’re worried enough about whether or not they should be open without us attacking their first attempts. We should be supporting them, not belittling them. I’m not claiming that George belittles people, but there is far too much of that in the open education movement right now.

As I’ve said above, I believe that because content and software are meaningfully different from one another, their definitions of open should be meaningfully different as well. I’m not sure if George shares that sentiment, since his article seems to flow freely between software systems and other aspects of open education. Though he does make this nod:

What does it mean to be open? What is an open methodology? What does openness look like in relation to technology, information, learning content, administrative systems (transparency of the student record and related data collection by an institution), and pedagogy?

George continues with a quote:

Robert Hutchins has stated that “the death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment”. A similar concern exists for openness in education.

I think a great example of that undernourishment is the belief that open means the same thing no matter where you find it. While we’re appreciating the differences in software and content, we should look ahead and see that when the ideal of openness finally starts to make its way into the broader institutional policy discussion, it’s definition will have to adapt again. Neither the Open Source Definition nor the 4Rs Framework will be sufficient for the language spoken at that particular table.

We also have to realize, admit, and feel comfortable with the fact that openness does not belong everywhere in education. For example, if students want to keep their grades private, they should be able to. And the existence of one area where openness does not and should not apply should lead us to look sincerely for other areas where it does not and should not apply. I don’t believe George is promoting it, but you don’t have to look far to find voices calling that all copyright should be abolished and all information should be open. This is the cry of a zealous fanatic, not the impulse of a thoughtful person.

Remaking our educational institutions into places where openness is a core, ambient, unconscious value of all who work there is a more intricate and involved matter than giving everyone on campus a copy of the OSD and saying “apply this in all aspects of your professional and personal life.” “Openness” the ideal needs to mean specific things in specific contexts in order for it to be applied usefully in those contexts. It will mean one thing in the IT context, another in the research / scholarship context, another in the teaching and learning context, another in the broader policy context, etc. And we need to thoughtfully develop these different meanings through writing and debate.

Many of us, myself and George included, are aggressively pursuing systemic change in education. (Some of the more radical voices in the field simply want to burn education down and plant new seeds in its ashes.) George asks an important question that each of us should be open about answering – ‘why are we pursuing this change?’ Personally, my reasons for wanting to increase the openness of all aspects of education, each in their own appropriate way, are moral, ethical, and ultimately religious. I continue to be inspired by the great 1975 address by LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball to the BYU community, which included the following statement:

We must be willing to break with the educational establishment (not foolishly or cavalierly, but thoughtfully and for good reason) in order to find gospel ways to help mankind. Gospel methodology, concepts, and insights can help us to do what the world cannot do in its own frame of reference.

Ideas like “sharing” are not concepts that flow directly out of the market, and there is little that the market can tell us about how to do it well. I would never claim that Mormonism (or Christianity more broadly) has cornered the market on loving and serving your fellow man, but my personal belief that I should “love my neighbor as myself” is the bedrock on which my life-long pursuit of increasing openness is built. That principle, sometimes called the “second great commandment,” is one which certainly requires adaptation to the individual, but never needs to be compromised.

I received a communication from the Mellon Foundation today announcing that they’re “merging” the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) with their Scholarly Communications Program, and that Ira and Chris are both leaving the Mellon Foundation. I won’t attempt to second guess why the restructuring is happening. From the email:

The Foundation is making a number of organizational changes designed to consolidate resources and concentrate them more effectively on the Foundation’s central objectives in support of its five core program areas: the liberal arts and humanistic scholarship in higher education, scholarly communications, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. As part of these changes, the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) will be merged into the Scholarly Communications program and cease to exist as a standalone grantmaking program of the Mellon Foundation, effective January 4, 2010. The Scholarly Communications program, which will be renamed so as to indicate, explicitly, that technology-based grantmaking is part of its mandate, will assume responsibility for managing existing RIT grants and the planning of future grant initiatives that emphasize the development of information technologies in support of the Foundation’s core focus. As this merger occurs, my colleagues, Ira Fuchs, who founded the RIT program at the Foundation in 2000, and Christopher Mackie, will both be leaving the Foundation.

The RIT Program at Mellon has been a major funder of open source / open education projects we know and care about, like Zotero, Sakai, Kuali, and Folksemantic. When Hewlett funded content development in open education, Mellon funded software development for open education. Their combined efforts have had a huge, positive impact on the field. With Mike and Cathy both leaving Hewlett last year, and now Ira and Chris leaving Mellon, the field really feels like it’s in transition…

A hearty “God bless” to Ira and Chris as they set out on new adventures.

Sometimes I’m wrong, and I don’t mind admitting when I am. The numbers in Ryan’s article in The Tech yesterday were not terribly representative of the way money has been working at MIT OCW recently. Consequently, the numbers I ran in yesterday’s post weren’t terribly reflective of the current reality, either. (In other words, yesterday’s numbers were wrong.)

In that post I invited people to send me more current information if they had it. Both Ryan and Steve Carson of MIT OCW accepted the invitation and provided more updated financial data. (In his reply, Steve good-heartedly suggested that I’m poor at math. My math was correct based on the numbers in Ryan’s article; I think Steve meant that I should redo my calculations based on more recent numbers.) So here we go.

In an article both Ryan and Steve suggested, called OpenCourseWare: Working Through Financial Challenges, we read:

To date, this effort has been funded by a combination of grant funding (41% of FY 2009 expenditures and 72% of total OCW expenditures since inception), Institute funds (49% in FY2009 and 22% of total to date), and donations and other revenue (10% in FY2009 and 6% of total to date).”

Using the FY2009 numbers, and the total of $3.6M for FY2009, that breaks down as follows:

MIT Internal funds – 49% – $1,764,000
Grants – 41% – $1,476,000
Donations, Amazon.com affiliate revenue, and all other sources – 10% – $360,000

This is a much better scenario for MIT OCW than the one suggested by the overall “since inception” numbers Ryan originally reported in The Tech. Still, 40% is a huge percentage of one’s budget, and MIT OCW is not out of the woods. The articles states:

In the next two years the grant funding that has supported OCW since its earliest stages will run out, and foundations generally do not provide new funding to support ongoing operations. Meanwhile, Institute funding has become tighter with the financial downturn, and like all units at MIT, OCW is under pressure to further reduce its reliance on the General Institute Budget. In the current economic climate, it is increasingly difficult to attract corporate support.

I didn’t realize this, but the article also states that MIT OCW has already cut its production activity in half – from publishing / updating 400 courses per year for five years to now publishing / updating only 200 courses per year.

However, none of the above items are the most interesting thing contained in the report, authored by Cecilia d’Oliveira and Steven Lerman. The most interesting thing of all (to me) was the following:

Proposals for generating revenue based on OCW are also reflected in the Institute-wide Planning Task Force Report [unfortunately, "You must log in to view the report."]. These ideas include various types of certificate, credit, or degree-granting distance education programs that rely on the OCW materials. At this writing, a pro bono team from management consultants Bain & Company is helping us assess the Working Group’s ideas in terms of their potential for financial return, alignment with OCW’s core principles as well as the perceptions of OCW’s stakeholders and users, and the cost of implementing those ideas.

As you may recall, this past May I wrote a post on The Future of OCW in which I forecasted that:

Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit will be dead by the end of calendar 2012.

BYU has already demonstrated a profitable “Click to Enroll” business model where OCW materials are used simultaneously as (1) a public good, and (2) marketing materials for credit-bearing programs. There is anecdotal (but positive) evidence from the Click to Enroll experiments at UC Irvine, the OU UK, and the OU NL (these are described in the BYU study). Reducing the cost of OCW development isn’t enough to make the program sustainable – I still contend that the OCW program has to generate real revenue in order to be sustainable.

If MIT OCW is going to adopt a “Click to Enroll” business model, then chances are that we can stop worrying about its sustainability. In fact, if MIT OCW goes C2E, they can probably become entirely financially self-sustaining, without relying on donations or the institution. They already take the lion’s share of OCW traffic, and despite the nature of their course offerings (e.g., the lowest math they offer appears to be single variable calculus) MIT OCW will likely take the lion’s share of the OCW Click to Enroll revenue, too.

The BYU study found that over 2.6% of all OCW site visitors chose the Click to Enroll option and became paying customers enrolled in formal online courses. Can you imagine the revenue generated by applying BYU’s conversion ratio to MIT OCW’s million visits per month? With a conservative tuition of $400 per class, that’s revenue of over $10,000,000 per MONTH. Even with a terribly low conversion rate of only 0.1%, they would still generate almost $5,000,000 in revenue per year.

As always we’ll all be watching MIT OCW closely and hoping for their success. As the article says, “More than 250 universities have committed to openly publishing course content in the OCW model.” Hopefully that will soon mean the Click to Enroll model, and OCW will become a sustainable fixture at all universities.

In an opinion piece for The Tech titled OpenCourseWare and the Future of Education, Ryan Normandin lays out MIT OCW’s funding breakdown. It’s the first time I’ve seen the numbers shared publicly. He begins by stating that MIT OCW’s budget is $4.1 million per year (though he notes that OCW cut $500,000 in costs for 2009), and then analyzes revenue by source:

Since its creation, 22 percent of OCW’s expenditures have been covered by the Institute, 72 percent has been paid for through grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and 6 percent has been covered by donations, revenue, and other sources.

(His article states that these numbers are “since it’s creation,” but they’re the best breakdown of numbers I know of. If you know of a similar breakdown for MIT OCW’s 2009 finances, please drop a link in the comments below.)

If we work these numbers out, each year that’s roughly:

- $2,952,000 for 72% covered by Hewlett and Mellon,
- $902,000 for 22% covered by MIT internally, and
- $246,000 for 6% covered by donations, corporate sponsors, Amazon.com affiliate revenue, and all other sources of revenue.

Ryan’s article is an extended argument for why MIT should continue to support OCW after its grant funding runs out in two years. I (and I expect most readers of this blog) agree with the importance he places on the project and the very important public good it has become. More importantly, MIT OCW is terribly important to the broader field of open education.

Because MIT OCW receives such a large percentage of the OCW world’s traffic and media attention, potential problems for MIT OCW are potential problems for all of us.

I keep asking myself how you support a project when 3/4 of its funding is pulled out from under it. Two years is not that far away. And it already feels like I’m getting a “Please remember to donate to MIT OCW” email once a month. On 25% annual budget, what would MIT OCW do? If MIT OCW were to go into stasis (like USU OCW recently did), how would that be viewed by the world?

More importantly, what is Plan B for the broader OER field? Imagine that two years from now MIT OCW announces drastic cutbacks (or temporary suspension) of its program. How do the rest of us argue for open sharing on our campuses then? Perhaps these arguments would revolve around the sharing model, or the way sharing happens – “we’ll do it differently in the following way…” Perhaps they would revolve around business models and using OCW to generate revenue (e.g., by using them to market for-credit online courses). How else do we make the argument for open sharing on our campuses in a post-MIT OCW world?

I’ve already heard “just because MIT can do it doesn’t mean we can” about a thousand times from faculty and administrators. What if that becomes “Not even MIT can do it for longer than a few years…”

With apologies to Pasteur’s Quadrant, here’s another take on the Golden Ration of OER from earlier in the week. Mary made several points in the comments on that post about the interpretability of the measure. So, how about asking the same question visually?

I think you could still measure the vertical axis in standard deviations and the horizontal as change in budget (with savings being positive and additional costs being negative). To be clear, we would not expect to see learning gains simply because a piece of content has an open license. We’d hope to establish (a) at a minimum, no impact on student learning and some cost savings, or (b) more hopefully a positive impact on student learning and cost savings.

If you end up in any quadrant other than the one with the cloud, you or your project may be in serious trouble…

Last year I began having conversations with Utah public school educators about sharing their educational materials as open educational resources. The conversation generally went like this:

Me: Would you be willing to share the lesson plans and other materials you create with others for them to reuse?

Teacher: Sure!

Me: Great! The best way to do that is by applying this Creative Commons license to your work.

Teacher: A copyright license?

Me: Right. So that others know for certain that they’re allowed to reuse, revise, and redistribute your work.

Teacher: I don’t think I can make copyright assignments. I’m happy to share informally, but when it comes to formal sharing, I don’t know who actually holds the copyright in the materials I create for use in my class. Sorry.

After hearing this a few times I dug into the Utah Administrative Rules to answer the question of who owns the work teachers produce for their own use in their own classrooms. The answer? The issue was not addressed anywhere in the UAR. A call to the State Superintendent’s office and some research by their staff confirmed that there was no explicit statement about who owned the teachers’ work. Consequently, no one knew who could share what with whom.

So, last summer I testified at a meeting of the Interim Education Committee and had a longer conversation with our State Superintendent and one of his staff asking for a new Administrative Rule, explicitly stating that teachers can in fact share their work under open licenses. State Superintendent Larry Shumway then grabbed a hold of the idea and worked on making it happen.

The result is the shiny new Rule R277-111: Sharing of Curriculum Materials by Public School Educators, which includes the following language:

The purpose of this rule is to provide information and assurance to public school educators about sharing materials created or developed by educators primarily for use in their own classes or assignments. The intent of this rule is to allow or encourage educators to use valuable time and resources to improve instruction and instructional practices with assistance from appropriate materials developed by other educators….

Utah educators may share materials under a Creative Commons License and shall be personally responsible for understanding and satisfying the requirements of a Creative Commons License…

The presumption of this rule is that materials may be shared. The presumption is that Utah educators need not seek permission from their employers to share personally-developed materials.

I haven’t done an in-depth review of state policies, but I believe that Utah is one of the first (if not the very first) to formally adopt language (a) saying that teachers are allowed or encouraged to share their educational materials or (b) actually mentioning Creative Commons by name. Many thanks to Superintendent Shumway and his staff for making this happen!

I appreciate the usefulness of open educational resources in supporting informal learning as much as anyone. I also care very deeply about the adoption and use of open educational resources in formal education settings. The kinds of things I lay awake at night worrying about differ depending on which of the two I’m thinking about when I go to bed.

The more people I talk to, the more convinced I am that OER has failed to establish a digestible value proposition for formal education. For better or worse, many people caught up in the day-to-day vortex of teaching, advising, mentoring, and grading don’t have the spare time to problematize publisher-school power relations, realize the virtue of local control of curriculum materials, or fully appreciate the transformative benefits of transparency.

We need to refine our messaging if we mean to impact formal education – particularly in K-12 where so many curricular decisions are made “above” the individual teacher. Perhaps our messaging can take a cue from the intersection of the current, outcomes-obsessed political climate and the slashing of school budgets in response to global economic realities. Perhaps we should begin discussing a “golden ratio” of open educational resources that compares (1) (differences in outcomes) with (2) (differences in cost) when a OER are used instead of traditional, proprietary educational materials.

(1) I’ve written at some length about why we should anticipate the delta in learning outcomes to be near zero when comparable open educational resources and proprietary educational curriculum are measured against one another. When teachers actively take advantage of the local control provided by OER licensing and engage in substantive adaptation / localization exercises, we can reasonably hypothesize an improvement in student performance. Either way, I believe we can anticipate the “differences in outcome” factor to be zero or positive. The appropriate unit for this factor is probably a standard deviation.

(2) Differences in cost need to be accounted for completely. Time spent reviewing traditional textbooks and other curriculum materials should be compared to time spent finding OER. The costs of purchasing or licensing traditional materials, distributing at beginning of term, collecting at end of term, and storing / managing between terms should be compared to the costs of storing, standards aligning, etc. open educational resources. Costs of keeping OER up-to-date should be compared with textbook replacement costs or annual licensing fees for online curriculum. Et cetera. The appropriate unit for this factor is probably percentage change in the organization’s curriculum spend.

That gives us a golden ratio of OER that looks something like:

change in performance (as standard deviation) : change in money spent on curriculum (as percentage)

Now, it is terribly important to note that a great finding like [+0.2 : -7%] is only applies to the specific open educational resources studied – THE FINDING DOES NOT EXTEND TO ALL OER. However, if we could demonstrate either (a) stable performance and money saved, or (b) performance gains and money saved, several times across different grade levels and subject matters, then we would have an argument that formal education would have a very difficult time ignoring. If we can’t show one of these two outcomes, we should seriously reconsider our work in the field.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, I don’t think I know of any OCW or OER projects looking seriously at either of these factors (though the recent CMU OLI paper in JIME is obviously headed in the right direction). If you know of any, please drop a comment below.

What do you think? Should OER have to “put up or shut up”? If so, what metrics would you use besides learning gains and cost?

Two units at Brigham Young University have adopted open access policies – both the Harold B. Lee Library faculty and the faculty in my own department, Instructional Psychology and Technology, voted to adopt the policies earlier this month. IP&T’s policy was based on the HBLL policy, which was based on existing OA policies at other universities.

I am giddy with excitement to see some of my own published articles beginning to appear in BYU’s institutional repository – they now have an open, permanent, curated home and I can link to them with confidence. And the whole world can and will be able to access and read them, legally, in perpetuity! This is the way science should work.

For those who are interested, here’s the text of the IP&T policy:

The faculty of the Instructional Psychology and Technology Department adopts the following policy:

Each Instructional Psychology and Technology Department faculty member grants to Brigham Young University permission to make scholarly articles to which he or she has made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available as part of the Harold B. Lee Library’s ScholarsArchive system, or its successor, and to exercise any associated copyright in those articles. This includes the right to deposit, use, reproduce, perform, publicly display, distribute, and publish the scholarly articles in the university’s institutional repository or any other method or medium of delivery, whether now known or hereafter developed. Accordingly, the permission granted to the University by each faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to exercise the above-mentioned rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for profit and are properly attributed to both the author(s) and the journal of first publication, if applicable.

This license is not meant to interfere in any way with the rights of the IP&T faculty author as the copyright holder of the work. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the IP&T Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy which have existing licensing commitments or copyright assignments which are inconsistent with the intent of this policy.

The term “scholarly articles” includes articles prepared for presentation or publication, whether in electronic or print media. Other scholarly works in connection with the faculty member’s academic or professional activities may be included at the discretion of the faculty member.

The IP&T Department Chair or the Chair’s designate shall waive application of the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need. The IP&T Chair, in consultation with the faculty, will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the faculty. This policy will be formally reviewed two years after implementation, by September 30, 2011.

As of the date of publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the University Librarian’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the University Librarian’s Office.

I’ve seen a lot of confusion on the interwebz lately about the meaning of the term open – like people linking to copyrighted videos posted illegally in YouTube as examples of OERs. Since I have a keen interest in people understanding the term “open content” the way I originally intended for them to, I will soon be adding a “definition” section to opencontent.org. (I think of the “open” in open educational resources the same way, though I neither have nor claim special authority to clarify its definition.) Here’s a first draft of what will appear there. Your feedback would be appreciated. (You may recognize some of this as material that has appeared on my blog in the past.)

What is the History of the Term “Open Content?”

The words “open” and “content” were first used together in the spring of 1998. “Open content” was and is an attempt to appropriately adapt the logic of “open source” software to the non-software world of cultural and scientific artifacts like music, literature, and images.

The term “open source software” and the corresponding movement were established earlier in 1998 in reaction to perceived problems with the term “free software” and its associated movement. While advocates of free software focus their message on the philosophical principle of freedom, advocates of open source software focus their message on the pragmatic benefits of being open. Consequently, arguments in favor of free software run primarily along the lines of “because you should,” while arguments in favor of open source software run primarily along the lines of “here’s how you’ll benefit if you do.”

I waited to make the decision between the terms “open content” and “free content” until discussing the choices with the leaders of both camps (Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman). I then made the decision very deliberately. I wanted the open content movement to be about demonstrating usefulness and value that people would hopefully find persuasive.

So there you have the history of the term – “open content.”

What Does the “Open” in Open Content Mean?

“Open” is a continuous, not binary, construct. A door can be wide open, completely shut, or open part way. So can a window. So can a faucet. So can your eyes. Our commonsense, every day experience teaches us that “open” is continuous. Anyone who will argue that “open” is a binary construct is forced to admit that a door cracked open one centimeter is just as open as a door standing wide open, because their conception of the term is overly simplified and has no nuance.

Alternately, a would-be definer might adopt an artificial definition, in which a door opened 20 cm or more is considered open while a door opened 19 cm is not considered open. But this type of arbitrary definition is unsatisfactory as well. For example, the “open” in “open source” has no nuance as it has been artificially binary-ized. The open source definition tells us very clearly what a license must and must not do in order to be permitted to describe itself with the trademarked term “open source.” In the eyes of the defenders of the “open source” brand, if you’re not open enough you’re not open at all.

Much as we might measure the openness of a door in centimeters, we measure the openness of content in terms of the rights a user of the content is granted. The 4Rs Framework describes the four most important rights:

1. Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form
2. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
3. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new
4. Redistribute – the right to make and share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

To the degree that a license provides users with no-cost (free) permission to exercise these rights with regard to content, that content is open. So, whether these rights are granted unconditionally, or permitted only if the user meets certain conditions (e.g., requiring attribution, requiring distribution of derivatives under a specified license, or prohibiting commercial redistribution), it is still appropriate to call this content open. But the more conditions placed on the user, the less open the content. The fewer restrictions a license places on a user’s ability to exercise 4R rights in the content, the more open the content is.

Haven’t Other’s Already Defined “Open” in this Context?

In the past, some people unaffiliated with opencontent.org have taken it upon themselves to “define the open in open content” and propose artificial definitions like those described above. The Open Knowledge Definition is one such attempt, which is an adaptation of the Open Source Definition, which is itself an adaptation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

At the top of this article I wrote that “open content” was and is an attempt to appropriately adapt the logic of “open source” software to the non-software world of cultural and scientific artifacts like music, literature, and images. I don’t believe that changing the words of DFSG is an appropriate way to arrive at a definition of the open in open content. The context of content is quite different from the context of software. For example, the DFSG and its descendants fail to distinguish between revision and remixing. This may be fine for software, but failing to consider these activities separately in the context of content has lead to endless confusion among educators. After a decade of talking to educators and other academics about open content (and open educational resources) I feel that a new framework – specifically, the 4Rs Framework – is a more productive way to talk about openness than the DFSG or its adapted children.

How Open is Open Enough?

People make the choice to use an open license with their content for a variety of reasons. Starting with the Open Publication License and including the Creative Commons licenses, the open content licenses have been crafted in a way that recognizes that people choose the path of openness for different reasons. The licenses have therefore provided people with license options to help them more effectively accomplish their personal goals. This tolerance for different goals and explicit support for people in achieving them is something we should cherish and extend beyond our licenses into our community discourse and behavior. If another person or institution’s approach to openness doesn’t help you meet your goals, then look for help somewhere else – don’t criticize them.

A summary of the core argument of my recent keynote at the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (slides at http://slideshare.net/opencontent/).

Throughout the late 20th century, and into the early 21st, when we spoke about “innovation” we largely meant impressive technical feats. Think Jobs and Woz creating the Mac, or Larry and Sergey creating Google, or the kinds of things Tony Hirst and Jim Groom seem to pull off regularly. We made heroes of the two geeks working in their mom’s garage… We made heroes of the lone coder, working late at night armed only with Emacs and Mountain Dew. These legends engaged in mythical man-versus-nature battles, subduing the wild frontier of source code and bending the Internet to their wills. They’re just plain cool.

However.

The kind of innovations these legends produce – technological innovations – are the easy kind of innovation. They are innovations that manipulate inanimate entities free of agency. During John Seely Brown’s visit to BYU last week, I heard him say that while the 20th century was a time of technological innovation, the 21st century must be a time of institutional innovation. This is the most insightful statement I’ve heard made in recent memory. It impacted me deeply, as it neatly summarized a frustration I’ve been feeling more and more keenly.

Anyone who has worked to reform an institution will readily admit that the more people are involved, and the more they are invested in maintaining the status quo, the harder it is to affect change. Even something as small as a stepwise incremental policy change can be a multi-year battle. I can hear you now thinking, “Just burn it down and plant a new institution in the ashes,” or “Just punch out and create a new institution to compete with the first.” Sometimes these are legitimate approaches to getting things done, but sometimes they aren’t. I seem to keep finding my interests lie in problems and institutions where these more radical methods simply don’t seem to apply. This seems to portend many difficult years ahead for me.

Imposing your will on bits and bytes is “easy.” Leading an established institution through the valley of the shadow of reform and up the opposite bank toward innovation is “hard.” But it is absolutely critical work, and precious few people are in positions that afford them opportunities to provide this kind of leadership.

The new, special issue of IRRODL on Openness and the Future of Higher Education is available now at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/issue/view/38. Here’s the introduction John Hilton and I wrote for the special issue:

Once considered to be mostly hype, the idea of open education has spread to hundreds of universities across the globe – including many of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Open access to teaching and learning materials significantly empowers individuals who are not affiliated with formal educational programs and levels the playing field across competing institutions. These two occurrences – the empowering and leveling – portend significant changes in the structure and practice of higher education. The purpose of this special issue of IRRODL is to address various specific ways in which openness can affect the future of higher education.

In the opening article, Wiley and Hilton overview societal changes that decrease the alignment of higher education institutions with the supersystem in which they exist. Their paper argues that increasing institutional openness is a prerequisite to other critical changes required to keep higher education relevant in a quickly changing world.

The next two articles address potential barriers to the expanded use of OER and discuss how to address these barriers. Morgan and Carey explore how academic literacy in English can be a barrier to the use of many open educational resources. Their paper examines ways in which open courses can provide significant benefits to students of English as an Other Language. Lane identifies how technology and cultural barriers can impede the effective use of open educational resources. He proposes that the mediated use of open educational resources can help to reduce the diverse social and cultural digital divides within education.

Next, Baker, Thierstein, Fletcher, Kaur, and Emmons address how openness could impact the high prices of textbooks. They report how Rice University’s Connexions and the Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) have developed a proof-of-concept free and open textbook, and they identify lessons learned about open textbook use by students and faculty.

Two key issues relating to openness and higher education are credentialing and sustainability. Schmidt, Geith, Håklev, and Thierstein address the significant issue of the role higher education plays in providing credentials and certifications for learning. They discuss how social web technologies offer opportunities for learning, which build these skills and allow new ways to assess them. They make the case that a peer-based method of open assessment and recognition is a feasible option for accreditation purposes.

For openness to affect higher education, it needs to be sustainable. Friesen presents the results of an informal survey of active and inactive collections of online educational resources, emphasizing data related to collection longevity and the project attributes associated with it. He shows how OER initiatives are in danger of running aground of the same sustainability challenges that have claimed numerous learning object collection or repository projects in the past.

The last two articles address how learners interact with OER. Many OER are available, including open courses. Fini examines one such course, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (2008), facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. He looks at the the technological dimensions of the course and its impact on the participants. Ultimately, for openness to impact higher education, learners need to be willing to use OER on a large-scale basis. How do everyday learners view open courses? In the final article, Arendt and Shelton examine how residents of the state of Utah (in the United States) view the incentives and disincentives for the use of open educational resources.

Overall, this special issue presents an excellent discussion of open education issues ranging from useful descriptions of successful projects to empirical data about user attitudes to thoughtful criticisms of present work. These criticisms are particularly valuable because so much of the extant literature about open education is almost uniformly positive in tone. We hope this special issue will help to begin a more balanced discourse about the benefits and very real challenges of open education.

I’ve written about this before, but here we go again…

In educational research there is a long and storied history of people conducting studies along the lines of “is video-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “is text-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “”is video-based instruction more effective than text-based instruction?,” etc. This pointless family of research has a name, the “No Significant Difference Phenomenon,” and even has it’s own website: http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/. From the website:

This website has been designed to serve as a companion piece to Thomas L. Russell’s book, “The No Significant Difference Phenomenon” (2001, IDECC, fifth edition). Mr. Russell’s book is a fully indexed, comprehensive research bibliography of 355 research reports, summaries and papers that document no significant differences (NSD) in student outcomes between alternate modes of education delivery…. The primary purpose of the NSD website is to expand on the offerings from the book by providing access to appropriate studies published or discovered after the release of the book.

Hundreds of “horse race” studies comparing alternate modes of education delivery show us that nothing interesting happens in these studies. Indeed, careful forethought will demonstrate that we should expect to find nothing interesting in these kinds of studies. And yet eager graduate students and younger faculty continue to conduct them.

Unfortunately, I’m hearing more and more people talk about a new generation of media comparison studies – “License Comparison Studies.” These absolutely pointless studies would ask questions like “do CC BY-NC-SA licensed materials teach more effectively than traditionally copyrighted and licensed materials?” or “do CC BY-SA licensed materials teach more effectively than CC By-NC-SA materials?” Again, careful forethought will demonstrate that we should expect to find nothing interesting in these kinds of studies. Please, if you’re in a position to discourage these kinds of studies, save all of us the trouble and embarrassment by steering your students and colleagues in another direction.