Category Archives: Open Access, open ed, OER

Presentation on open education at AAPT

Last weekend I attended the biannual meeting of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. I’ve already blogged about one of the sessions I attended, here.

I also gave a presentation at the conference/workshop, on open education. I didn’t count how many people were there, but I’d estimate around 12 or so, which was a nice number to have. We had some good small group discussions, from what I could tell. The main problem is that I relied on the idea that someone in each group would have a computer or tablet to write the group’s ideas on a google doc. That only worked for two of the four groups (and for one of those, one person was trying to edit the google doc on an ipad and it wouldn’t type on the doc. Apparently you need to switch to desktop view on the google docs site to edit: https://sites.google.com/site/gappsforipad/docs).

Someone in another session had groups write ideas down on paper, and then he collected those and typed them into a single document himself. Next time I’d have some handouts available to do that for the groups w/o easy access to the google doc!

Here is the agenda I wrote up for the session, to give you a sense of what we did: AAPT2014-PhilOpenEdu-agenda

Click here for the google doc I asked people to put their group’s ideas on: You’ll notice that only two groups could type on the doc; the other ideas didn’t get written down. I wanted to type them on there as people spoke, but I was too busy responding, facilitating, etc.

And here are the slides I used for the session:

 

“Why Open?” course at P2PU is back, August 2014

Last year I was part of a team that ran a course at P2PU called “Why Open?”, in which we discussed the various meanings of openness, engaged in some open practices, and talked about potential benefits and drawbacks/obstacles to openness.

We’re running it again starting August 10, and registration is open now!

You can see the course itself at https://p2pu.org/en/courses/2314/why-open/

Or read a blog post summarizing it at the School of Open blog.

Last year I learned a lot from participants, and expect to do so again this year!

Workshop on Open Education at UBC, June 2014

In early June of 2014 I facilitated a workshop on open education during the CTLT Institute (Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology). I have a few slides that I used in the workshop, which are embedded below.

 

Also, with the help of Will Engle, Strategist for Open Education Initiatives at CTLT, I made a wiki page for this workshop, that has most of the workshop information on it. Through the magic of UBC blogs, I’m embedding that wiki page here. There’s this cool thing on the UBC wiki that allows you to get a shortcode to embed wiki pages, and then the info below should update when the wiki page is updated. Neat, hey? If you want to see the original wiki page instead, it’s here.

The agenda for the session is probably of the most interest to people; that’s the first item below. There are also results from an informal survey I did on open education (which is still open until about July 28, because I’m doing another workshop at the end of July, so feel free to add your response too!), links to what people said in their groups during the workshop, links to sites talked about by the panelists who spoke at the session, and more.

The attendance at this session was not as great as I would have liked, so the groups pages on the wiki are not as populated as they might have been if there had been more people. But we had interesting discussions nonetheless!

One lesson learned: we need to market sessions like this not so much as ‘open education,’ because that only tends to attract people who are already interested in and often already doing open educational activities. Rather, we should advertise them as ways to improve your teaching (b/c if teaching work is open, people feel pressure to make it as good as possible), ways to improve student engagement and quality of student work (same thing), and ways to incorporate the “students as producers” idea into classes (if open educational activities involve students creating part of the course content). That might attract more people who may not initially be interested just in open education, and open education can be valuable for these and other, generally-applicable pedagogical reasons!

Why not develop a course in the open?

Last week I attended the Spring workshop for ETUG: the BC Educational Technology User’s Group.

Among the many great presentations I saw was one by Paul Hibbits, who spoke of doing course development openly, meaning not just sitting in your office trying to develop and plan a course on your own, but doing it more publicly. You can see slides for his presentation here, and they are embedded below.


Basically what he did was do all his planning on a public space (he chose Workflowy and made it open to view), and sent out messages on Twitter and other social media sites to get feedback. The most interesting part, though, was that he got a list of emails of the students in his class (the one he was developing) and sent them the planning document so they could (a) get a better sense of what the class will be like before it starts, and (more importantly) (b) give feedback. He didn’t actually get any feedback from students, which, as he mentioned, isn’t surprising because after all they’re going to be students of yours and don’t want to give a negative impression. But he did offer them an option to give anonymous feedback, so I’m a bit surprised that no one took that option.

As I sat there and listened to the presentation and discussion, I thought: “Duh…why didn’t I ever think of this?” I like to open up my teaching practice while it’s happening, and I reflect on it quite a bit in this blog, but why not actually share my outline, learning objectives, assignments/activities before it happens and see if I can get feedback from anyone?

I’ve heard in various “open” forums that sharing not just the product but also the process is important, and I know from DS106 that it’s crucial for learning how to do things that people share not just what they’ve created but how they did it. But why I never thought to do that with my teaching, I have no idea. So I’m very glad I attended this session!

 I am in the process of developing a second-year course on moral theory for Fall 2014, so I’m going to follow Paul’s lead and make my planning process public. I just have to decide whether I’m going to use Workflowy or something else. Google docs would work too. Paul said he tried a mind map, and it didn’t work so well, and I’m just not personally very drawn to doing my own mind maps, so I think I’ll go some other route. Suggestions?

Informal, anonymous survey on open education

I’m doing a workshop on open education at UBC in June, and another at the American Association of Philosophy Teacher’s conference in July.

Here’s a teaching kit for the UBC workshop I made with Mozilla Thimble by remixing another teaching kit.

I know a fair bit about why I think being more open in teaching and learning is a good thing, but I’d like to hear from others what they think (positive and negative) to help me plan the workshops. I’d also like to use the anonymous responses to this survey in the workshops themselves, in case there are things there that we don’t come up with ourselves in discussion!

No matter your views on open education, I’d like to hear them! Here’s the survey (on Google Forms, but you don’t need a Google Account to fill it out). All that I can see of the responses is the day/time and what was said, nothing more (no IP addresses even). So from my end, it’s quite anonymous, though I can’t say exactly what Google collects when you fill out these types of forms (at least probably info on your browser, where you got to the survey from, and the like, but a thorough review of the terms of service and privacy policy from Google didn’t answer this question for me with any specifics).

If you’d be happy to participate but would rather just send the info to me personally (and I promise not to reveal any identifying information if you do!), you can send me an email: clhendricksbc@gmail.com

UBC’s Policy 81 and Open Education

In my previous post I discussed UBC’s Policy 81 on the use of teaching materials for for-credit courses. The following will make more sense if you’ve read that post!

Here I would like to talk a bit about my own views of the policy and my fears about how it may set back efforts to promote open education at UBC.

Some general thoughts on Policy 81

 

I may be an anomaly in this regard, but when I first read the policy I wasn’t really concerned about it. That’s probably because I already share my teaching materials using a Creative Commons CC-BY license (see here for an explanation of CC licenses). The idea of sharing my teaching materials widely amongst the UBC community wasn’t a problem for me because I had already made the decision to share them with anyone who wants to revise and reuse them, asking only for attribution.

But as I read various arguments against the policy (many of which are collated on the Faculty Association’s website, on a page devoted to Policy 81, and I’ve discussed them in some detail in my previous post), I definitely came to see the problems with the way the university has approached this issue, particularly by requiring an “opt out” procedure rather than an “opt in” one.

I can see some of the rationale behind the policy, and why it’s an “opt out” process, for things like the following examples:

1. An instructor is involved in creating teaching materials for a course for which the curriculum remains the same, or teaching materials are revised and reused several times over the years: the people who come in to teach the course later may not be able to legally use the previously-created materials without express permission were this policy not in place. Which is fine, if the original author can be contacted and give that permission, though they may not want to have to go through the hassle of doing this over and over (the author could, alternatively, give a kind of blanket permission to use the materials in any future iteration of the course, though not everyone may be comfortable with that, so a one-by-one permission-granting process may be required). Now, an opt-in type of teaching materials repository is an option, but  the author of the materials may not keep the particular materials (specific assignments, etc.) up to date in such a repository. S/he may put one version in, change it for another year, forget to put that one in, and then the later instructors need to track him/her down for express permission each time they want to use the updated materials. This can be fixed with later updating of the materials in the repository, of course, but it’s an extra hassle.

2. An example I used in my previous post: instructors in a team-taught course collaboratively come up with essay topics, and if one of those instructors is part of a later team of instructors for that course and the later group wants to use one or more of those essay topics again they should, officially, ask permission. But it may be that the original author(s) are unavailable, having retired and not being easily accessible. Or, to make things more complicated (and something I didn’t address in the previous post), if the essay topics were jointly created, does one need to get permission from all of the instructors in the previous group? Probably so, but that’s a bit of an administrative headache. Now, I don’t know if the policy would cover this situation exactly, because I’m not sure what “sharing” constitutes in the policy (one has to share one’s teaching materials before they fall under the policy). But perhaps sharing with one’s team members means one is “sharing,” and thus anyone else at UBC could use the materials without asking for express permission under the policy.

3. A faculty member shares an assignment or a syllabus or some other teaching document with me, and I ask permission to revise and reuse it: is oral permission enough? Shouldn’t I get it in writing just in case any challenge comes up later by that person or someone else? Sure, this is probably a VERY unlikely scenario, but in terms of intellectual property rights and following the rules, it’s probably best to get it in writing. And if I want to reuse the materials over and over, should I get written permission over and over for each course I teach for each time I teach it, or a blanket written statement saying I can use the materials in any future course I might teach? Policy 81 would simplify all that.

Now, none of this is to say that I think Policy 81 was a good idea; it’s rather that I’m trying to think through some reasonable reasons why something like this might make sense, though ultimately I think an opt-out policy does NOT make sense, partly due to intellectual property and copyright concerns (as discussed under “copyright law” in my previous post), but also because, as I noted in the previous post, what happens when people opt out of this policy is that the idea of sharing teaching materials openly takes a step backwards.

Policy 81 and open education, open sharing of teaching materials

 

Open Call for Women in Photography, Flickr photo shared by Jon Feinstein, licensed CC-BY

As noted in my previous post, a number of people have already signed up on the site where faculty members can register the courses for which they don’t want their teaching materials shared. There’s no way to tell how many others have started putting notices on their materials that they may not be revised and reused without express permission. Now, doing these things takes us back to the status quo, where the owners of the copyright on those materials must be asked permission before revising/reusing the materials. That’s not what I’m most concerned about because it’s not a change from before the Policy was passed.

What does concern me is that I fear those people may now be less willing to share their teaching materials outside of UBC, with something like Creative Commons licenses. Who knows…maybe they wouldn’t have done so anyway, but I worry that the negative hype around all of this, the fears about UBC wanting the teaching materials to make money on online courses (as noted in my previous post), the fears about that happening times ten in the wilds of the world, will lead people to just say no thank you to the idea of sharing with a CC license. And that saddens me.

A good thing about Policy 81, as pointed out by Will Engle in a conversation recently, is that it states explicitly that the university encourages open sharing of teaching materials beyond the university. In the preamble, the policy says:

UBC encourages the free and open distribution of teaching materials beyond the UBC community. To create and preserve knowledge in a way that opens and facilitates the dissemination of knowledge to the world, UBC Instructors are encouraged to utilize Creative Commons licenses, digital repositories and other open access channels to distribute their teaching materials broadly.

Of course, this isn’t required, just encouraged. But it’s a nice thing to see this encouragement enshrined in a policy–albeit, now, one which the faculty union has opted all of its members out of, as stated in my previous post.

But by making Policy 81 an opt-out policy, and with the (justifiable) reaction from the faculty union and others encouraging faculty members to opt out, to put notices on their teaching materials saying they may not be revised and reused without express permission, with the fears that others are out to make money off their materials, I wonder if some people who might have been willing to consider open licensing of their materials might now refuse to do so. This is just a wonder at this point, though I plan to do a survey soon to find out more on this (see below).

I also worry that some people may be less likely to put their teaching materials on public websites, in case that might be considered “sharing” under the policy, and thus effectively make those materials open to revision and reuse by other faculty members at UBC. Now, since the faculty union has opted all of its members out of the policy for now (and who knows what will happen in the coming months, as the grievance they filed goes through the process of being dealt with), maybe fewer people will have this concern. But I’d hate to see more of our teaching materials get siloed behind closed LMS walls for some who might have considered public websites instead.

Why do I care about possibly having less openly shared teaching materials?

 

Good question. The first thing that comes to mind is that I have learned so much by reading materials posted by others on public websites, all around the world. When I’m teaching a new class, I search for syllabi that might help me think about good readings. I use others’ lecture notes to help me understand complicated texts and how others approach teaching them to undergraduates. I never actually copy or distribute their materials unless they are licensed in such a way as to allow it, but just being able to see them is valuable. The more our stuff is locked away behind closed LMS’s, the less this is possible. I don’t know if anyone will ever find my teaching materials useful, but that’s just the point–I can’t know ahead of time how they might be useful to others. And I want to give back, having gotten so much value from reading what others are doing.

There’s also the argument about public funding of what we do and how this might be a reason to make our work more accessible to the public. There are already numerous governmental grant requirements to make research open access if it’s publicly funded, and one could make a case that the same should go for teaching materials. Now, the thing with teaching is that it is sometimes only partially publicly funded. I’m not sure how much of the UBC budget comes from public funds, but I do know that it’s not 100%. There are numerous other sources of funds, certainly including tuition, which would suggest that closing off teaching materials only to those students who have paid could also make sense. I suppose one could figure out the percentages and make only a certain part of one’s teaching materials publicly viewable, but this seems pedantic to me. I have chosen to go more or less 100% to open access of teaching materials (and beyond them being just viewable…more on that below), though I can see someone choosing to go 100% to just allowing students who have registered to see them. There are numerous justifiable reasons why one might not want all (or any) of one’s teaching materials publicly viewable, and I respect that. But my own choice rests partly on the idea that the public is partly paying for what I do, so it makes sense to me to let them see what I’m doing.

But I have gone beyond just posting on public websites; I also use CC licenses on my materials. So far I’ve used CC-BY on all of them–anyone is free to revise, reuse, redistribute them for any purpose, so long as I am attributed. This means that I even allow commercial use of the materials, that someone could reuse them to make a profit. Why I chose to do this has some complicated reasons behind it; I’ve tried to collate my thoughts on this blog post and the discussion in comments underneath it. Again, I do see good and justifiable reasons why one might not want to allow commercial use of their teaching materials, and I very much respect the decision of others to use CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-SA (share-alike) on theirs (again, see here for a description of the licenses).

What I would not like to see is people using a CC license that does not allow derivatives (CC-BY-ND), because there isn’t really much value in allowing others to reuse your teaching materials if they can’t be revised in any way. How often is it the case that what works in one course, at one time, in one place, is going to work exactly as is in another course, in another time and place? Yet the way our faculty union has spoken about CC licenses here, they have made it sound like “no derivatives” is the way to go:

Are there other ways to mark my work to indicate whether or how others may use my work?

Creative commons provides guidance on this, and has prepared symbols to express your preference, as follows:

reative Commons LicenseIf you want to retain control: attribution-non commercial-no derivative (CC by-nc-nd)

reative Commons License If you are willing to relinquish control: attribution-share alike-non commercial (CC by-nc-sa)

 

The wording here suggest that with ND you somehow retain control, which sounds like a good thing to do, right? The only thing ND does that the other licenses don’t do, though, is to make sure no one can alter your teaching materials in any way (including by translating them into a different language), thereby effectively making most of them unable to be reused effectively. You don’t control exactly who uses them or how (though if you add the “non commercial” to the “no derivatives,” as suggested above, then you can make a stink if someone uses your materials for a commercial purpose). Reading the faculty union’s page on this issue, one would not even know there are other options besides these two licenses. The only links to licenses they give is to explanations of CC-BY-ND.

A survey I’m planning

 

Mostly my fears at this point are just fears–I don’t know what people are doing or thinking beyond the few I’ve talked to. I don’t know if people are less willing to use CC licenses, or to post their teaching materials publicly, than they were before or not. I’m also very much interested in the reasons why people might choose to do these things or not. And now that all Policy 81 has brought a lot of these issues to the forefront, I think this could be a good time to survey faculty members about their views. I’ve also put in a conference proposal to talk about this policy and what faculty attitudes towards it and towards open sharing of teaching materials are generally, and so if it gets accepted I’ll report the results there. Which means I’ll need to get ethics board approval for the survey first!

I’m thinking of asking faculty members something like the following questions:

1. Are you familiar with Policy 81? If so, describe briefly what it requires. [I want to see if there is any misunderstanding about the policy out there,]

2. Do you think Policy 81 is a good idea, or do you find it problematic? Explain why in either case. [I want to find out what the main reasons are people have for opposing it. I don’t expect many people will be in agreement with it, but who knows.]

3. Would you be willing to put some or all of your teaching materials on a public website? Why or why not?

4. Are you familiar with Creative Commons or other “open” licenses? If so, explain briefly what one or more of these allows. If not, … [I hope to have a “fork” of the survey going to a page that explains the various CC licenses]…

5. Would you be willing to allow the revision and reuse of your teaching materials by others, outside of UBC, by posting them publicly and using one of the Creative Commons licenses or another open license? Explain why or why not.

 

These are just my first, preliminary thoughts on what I might ask. Any suggestions welcome, as well as any comments on my concerns above!

 

 

How Not to Encourage Open Sharing of Teaching Materials (UBC’s Policy 81)

How To Share, Flickr photo shared by janelleorsi, licensed CC-BY

 

In February of 2014, the Board of Governors of the University of British Columbia passed Policy 81: Use of Teaching Materials in UBC Credit Courses.  Note, April 2015: since it looks like the policy will change (see this blog post), I’m attaching the original version of the policy here because the link might go to the new policy eventually. If the link goes to the policy as passed in 2015, then please see here for the 2014 version: Policy 81, as passed in 2014 (PDF)

I am writing a couple of posts about this because it has had some problematic ramifications for open sharing of teaching materials at UBC, and seems to be a step backwards in terms of promoting open education. In this first post I’ll discuss the policy, what has happened since it was passed, and the problems with the policy. In the next post I’ll talk about my main concerns with it vis-à-vis open education, and a survey I hope to do about faculty attitudes towards open sharing of teaching materials.

 

The policy

 

Ostensibly, Policy 81 was designed in order to clarify how teaching materials shared between faculty members can be used, given intellectual property concerns (e.g., if one is teaching a course for which someone else designed some of the materials in the past, can one use and modify those materials to use in one’s own course? Does one have to get express permission to do so?). Section 1.2 of the policy states the following (if this link goes to the policy passed in 2015, please see the PDF given above, just below the image).

In order to facilitate collaboration with colleagues and enable Departments to support outstanding teaching, if a UBC Instructor makes his/her Teaching Materials available for use by others, unless that UBC Instructor places restrictions up on the Teaching Materials that he/she shares in accordance with Section 2, UBC may, through its Faculties, Departments and individual Instructors, use, revise, and allow other UBC Instructors to use and revise the Teaching Materials to facilitate ongoing offerings of Credit Courses. The contribution of all UBC Instructors to the development of such Teaching Materials will be acknowledged in accordance with accepted scholarly standards unless the UBC Instructors advice UBC, at any time, that they do not wish such acknowledgement.

One might think of this as something like a CC-BY license, but only within one institution–if you share your teaching materials, you are understood to be doing so in a way that allows anyone else in the University to use and revise them so long as they give proper attribution.

On the face of it, this seems fairly reasonable. If I share my syllabus, or an essay assignment, or lecture notes with another faculty member, they don’t have to track me down to get written permission to revise and reuse. Sharing means it’s understood that you can do that within the UBC community (but not beyond). Just as an extreme example, I teach in a team-taught program, and some years we will basically re-use (maybe with some revision) essay questions that others have written in years past. No one questions that that is permissible; no one says, hey, shouldn’t we ask so-and-so if we can re-use their essay question (and what if so-and-so retired several years ago and we can’t get a hold of him or her?). Though technically, it may be that permission should be sought and granted before re-using and revision teaching materials in this way, just like we have to get permission to re-use images on websites if they aren’t openly licensed (here at UBC, we faculty own copyright in our teaching materials). I have used a “late essay form” that was shared with me from another faculty member, with attribution, for many years now; but I never asked that faculty member if I could. I probably should have. This policy says we don’t have to ask permission, which streamlines such activities.

So far, so good, one might think. The policy reiterates that UBC faculty own copyright in their Teaching Materials and that nothing in the policy changes that:

1.5 Sharing materials does not imply any transfer in the ownership of copyright by UBC Instructors. Nothing in this policy transfers the ownership of any Teaching Materials to UBC.

 

The response so far

 

There was an email from our faculty union telling us the dangers of this policy, and how to put notices on our teaching materials that they may not be revised and reused by anyone without permission. That’s one way to opt out. Another way is to  exempt all materials from particular classes from the policy by registering each class at this website: https://policy81.learning.ubc.ca/ (UBC faculty and staff can log in and see all the courses on the registry, so they can know whether they will need to ask permission for the materials they would like to revise/reuse).

Anecdotally, I’ve heard from a number of people who are very upset by this policy and who making sure to exempt their teaching materials from being reused. As of today, there are approximately 81 faculty members who have registered their courses on https://policy81.learning.ubc.ca/, though I had to count by hand and some people registered different courses at different times and showed up at different places on the list therefore, so some may have been counted twice. That’s a fairly small number of the over 5000 faculty members between the two campuses of UBC (Vancouver and Okanagan). But there’s no way to tell how many people are putting notices on their individual teaching materials saying they may not be reused without permission.

On March 17, 2014 the UBC Faculty Association (our faculty union) filed a grievance with UBC’s Vice Provost and Vice President Academic. The letter is currently posted online here: http://www.facultyassociation.ubc.ca/docs/news/policy81_FAgrievance.pdf  Among other things, the grievance states that the policy restrains faculty from fully exercising their rights under copyright law and that it infringes on academic freedom. On April 15, 2014, UBC denied the grievance, and from what I can tell, the issue is now going to arbitration.

On April 23, 2014, the UBC Faculty Association sent an email to its members (currently available on the front page of their website, but it will likely be replaced sometime soon) saying that they had issued a blanket “opt out” of the policy for all its members.

We heard loudly from large numbers of you that you did not agree with having to individually opt out of that policy to protect your teaching materials – and that you also objected to the administrative burden this policy has created. In response to the clear message we have received from our members, including a request for a blanket opt-out direction, we have issued such a blanket opt out on your behalf with this letter.  Consequently, your teaching materials are now protected from being appropriated by the University for its own purposes, unless you indicate clearly that your materials are to be shared.

The Faculty Association’s blanket opt out letter can be read here. It’s currently also posted online here: http://www.facultyassociation.ubc.ca/docs/news/policy81_blanketoptout.pdf

The policy has also been brought to the attention of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which I think is an association of various faculty unions at institutions of higher education in Canada. CAUT sent a letter to the UBC President in February 2014, criticizing the policy and saying they may have to censure the UBC administration if the policy is not suspended. The university president’s response argued that CAUT’s criticisms were unjustified, and CAUT responded in May by saying that censure will be imposed on UBC in November if parts of the policy are not withdrawn by then.

 

What went wrong

 

A lot, really. The following are the problems noted by the Faculty Association in various letters and emails about Policy 81. In the next post I’ll add my own concerns, specific to worries about what this policy may have done to efforts to promote open education.

Procedural problem

This is an important concern, but not one I’ll spend a lot of time on because I don’t understand it fully. The faculty union argues that the proper negotiating process was not followed in passing the policy; I THINK the problem is that the policy concerns intellectual property, and the union is arguing that, based on a precedent set in a previous arbitration case, such matters must be handled through the collective bargaining process (I’m getting this from this letter by the Faculty Association, but I could be quite wrong!).

Opt-out

As a friend of mine said on Twitter, no policy that requires opt-out is likely to be popular. This was one of the major complaints against the proposed policy before it was passed, I think. Many faculty members are happy to share teaching materials–indeed, a number of us (including me) make an effort to put CC licenses on most or all of them. But to mandate that once you share your teaching materials in some way (and what it means to “share” is vague…see below) you are sharing with the entire UBC community unless you opt out angered many people.

Vagueness

The policy states that once one “shares” teaching materials, those materials can be revised and reused by anyone in the UBC community. But what does it mean to “share”? Given the policy’s ostensible purpose, I think one thing it means is that if I give a syllabus or a set of essay topics to someone, they can give it to someone else at UBC who can then revise and reuse the materials. That is what has happened with the example of essay topics being revised and reused in a team taught course for example, as I discussed earlier. A set of essay topics was shared within a teaching team, and a member of that teaching team kept the essay topics and later shared it with another teaching team, who revised one or more of them and reused them. So the policy would mean that this sort of practice is acceptable, whereas officially it probably wouldn’t have been if we didn’t get express permission.

But does it also mean that if I make teaching materials available on a public website, where students and others can view them, that is deemed to be “sharing” such that now anyone from the UBC community can revise and reuse them? The policy is not clear on that question, but if it does mean that I fear that it could cause some people to stop posting teaching materials on public sites and go back into the closed LMS environment. But then again, the policy isn’t clear on whether posting teaching materials to the closed LMS system here at the university constitutes “sharing.” I would argue that it shouldn’t, because it’s kind of like handing out paper materials in the classroom, only allowing for the saving of paper if students don’t mind reading things online. And I don’t imagine that giving out syllabi and assignments in the classroom constitutes the type of sharing that the policy is referring to.

Copyright law

The policy states that faculty members retain copyright on their teaching materials. Thus, unless we have expressly put a license on them stating they may be used in certain ways without getting explicit permission, then anyone who wants to revise and reuse them has to get that explicit permission. That’s how copyright works in Canada.

I was trying to think of whether there’s an analogous situation to help think through this particular issue, some situation in which one gives someone else a license to use one’s copyrightable materials without them having to ask permission each time. And of course I came up with social media sites like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter; I also thought of MOOC companies like Coursera. For such sites, the terms of use include the provision that by using the site one is granting the company a license to use the things you post (in part, so that they can post them at all, but sometimes also for other purposes, like allowing others to re-post what you post). Twitter’s terms of service say, for example:

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

Coursera’s terms of service are similar:

With respect to User Content you submit or otherwise make available in connection with your use of the Site, and subject to the Privacy Policy,you grant Coursera and the Participating Institutions a fully transferable, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, sublicense, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such User Content.

Could we think of Policy 81 analogously in any way? By sharing your teaching materials (okay, we need to figure out just what “sharing” means), you grant anyone at UBC a license to modify, use, redistribute them, just like by using Coursera one agrees to allow Coursera (and the participating institutions) to modify, use, redistribute what one posts? I suppose so, but here’s the downside: people can just choose to not use Coursera, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. if they don’t like these terms, and the analogous situation is that people can just opt out of sharing teaching materials at all. Which is not a good outcome (and is what is starting to happen).

Use of teaching materials for flexible learning initiative

UBC has an initiative at the moment to encourage faculty to engage in “flexible learning,” which seems to mean using things like “blended” courses (both face-to-face and online), “flipped classrooms,” and other ways to be more flexible about teaching, learning, and credentialing (e.g., badges). In an email to members, the President of the Faculty Association warned that one of the reasons behind Policy 81 may be for UBC to be able to use teaching materials to generate additional revenue by implementing them in online courses that the university charges money for.

Academic freedom

The grievance filed by the Faculty Association states, as its first point, that Policy 81 violates faculty members’ academic freedom. I am not actually sure what the argument here is; I’d love to hear in the comments if anyone knows!

 

In the next post, I discuss what impact this policy could have on efforts to increase open education at UBC.

 

 

Tweets about my OpenEd13 presentation

I gave a presentation at the Open Education Conference 2013 in Park City, Utah on Nov. 8, 2013. See my previous post for video, slides and bibliography.

I also wanted to see what people were saying about it during the presentation, in case there were some ideas there that are useful for my continuing research into this issue (and there were!). So I made a Storify story. Here’s the link to it on Storify if you’d rather see it there.


Open Education Conference 2013 Presentation

Difficulties Evaluating cMOOCs: Navigating Autonomy and Participation

 

Given Nov. 8, 2013, at the Open Education Conference 2013 at Park City, Utah.

Here is the video recording. I had only 25 minutes to present, and I was late starting because I was messing with my computer, trying to get it to show me “presenter mode” while it showed the slides on the screen so I could see my notes. Then I tried to see my notes on my phone. Then I gave up on my notes and just winged it! (I was using Keynote rather than PowerPoint, and I’ve never tried to use presenter mode before…the problem was that I couldn’t print out my notes because the printer in the “business centre” of the hotel was out of order!)


Here are the slides, which are licensed CC-BY so you can use any part of them if you want. Again, these were in Apple Keynote, and when I exported to PowerPoint some of the colours, fonts and alignments got messed up a bit.

 

When I get a free half a day (probably in December) I’ll write up a post in which I explain my argument in this presentation, including the slides at the end I didn’t get to!

Update Feb. 2015: Well, obviously I never wrote this up. Which is too bad, because now it’s been quite awhile and it would take me a long time to try to do so. I do plan to return to this research at some point (perhaps in the Summer of 2015), and see what else has been published in the meantime. And who knows what kind of open online course models there will be by then?!

 

 

Bibliography

Things either cited on the slides or quoted from in the presentation (at least, the original version as I wrote it, not the shortened one given in the video!)

 

Ahn, J., Weng, C., & Butler, B. S. (2013). The Dynamics of Open, Peer-to-Peer Learning: What Factors Influence Participation in the P2P University? (pp. 3098–3107). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2013.515

 

Cormier, D. (2010a). Knowledge in a MOOC – YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWKdhzSAAG0

 

Cormier, D., & Siemens, G. (2010b). Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement. Educause Review, 45(4), 30–39. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/through-open-door-open-courses-research-learning-and-engagement

 

Downes, S. (2007, February 3). What Connectivism Is. Half an Hour. Retrieved from http://halfanhour.blogspot.com.au/2007/02/what-connectivism-is.html

 

Downes, S. (2009, February 24). Connectivist Dynamics in Communities. Half an Hour. Retrieved from http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/connectivist-dynamics-in-communities.html

 

Downes, S. (2013a). Supporting a Distributed Online Course ~ Stephen’s Web. Presented at the Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training ITHET 2013, Antalya, Turkey. Retrieved from http://www.downes.ca/presentation/327

 

Downes, S. (2013b). The Quality of Massive Open Online Courses. MOOC Quality Project. Retrieved from http://mooc.efquel.org/week-2-the-quality-of-massive-open-online-courses-by-stephen-downes/  A longer version of this post can be found here: http://cdn.efquel.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/7/files/2013/05/week2-The-quality-of-massive-open-online-courses-StephenDownes.pdf

 

Fournier, H., Kop, R., & Sitlia, H. (2011). The Value of Learning Analytics to Networked Learning on a Personal Learning Environment. Presented at the 1st International Conference Learning Analytics and Knowledge, Banff, Alberta. Retrieved from http://nparc.cisti.nrc.ca/npsi/ctrl?action=shwart&index=an&req=18150452&lang=en

 

Kop, R. (2011). The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a massive open online course. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(3), 19–38. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/882

 

Kop, R., Fournier, H., & Mak, J. S. F. (2011). A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support on massive open online courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(7), 74–93. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1041

 

Lane, L. M. (2013). An Open, Online Class to Prepare Faculty to Teach Online. Journal of Educators Online, 10(1), n1. Retrieved from http://www.thejeo.com/Archives/Volume10Number1/Lane.pdf

 

Mackness, J., Mak, S., & Williams, R. (2010). The ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning 2010 (pp. 266–275). University of Lancaster. Retrieved from http://eprints.port.ac.uk/5605/

 

McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G., & Cormier, D. (2010). The MOOC model for digital practice. SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant on the Digital Economy. Retrieved from http://www.edukwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/MOOC_Final.pdf

 

Milligan, C., Littlejohn, A., & Margaryan, A. (2013). Patterns of Engagement in Connectivist MOOCs. Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 9(2). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no2/milligan_0613.htm

 

Siemens, G. (2006, November 12). Connectivism: Learning Theory or Pastime for the Self-Amused? elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism_self-amused.htm

 

Siemens, G. (2008, August 6). What is the unique idea in Connectivism? « Connectivism. Connectivism. Retrieved from http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=116

 

Siemens, G. (2012, June 3). What is the theory that underpins our moocs? elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/06/03/what-is-the-theory-that-underpins-our-moocs/

 

Waite, M., Mackness, J., Roberts, G., & Lovegrove, E. (2013). Liminal Participants and Skilled Orienteers: Learner Participation in a MOOC for New Lecturers. Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 9(2). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no2/waite_0613.htm

 

Williams, R., Karousou, R., & Mackness, J. (2011). Emergent learning and learning ecologies in Web 2.0. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(3), 39–59. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/883

 

Williams, R. T., Mackness, J., & Gumtau, S. (2012). Footprints of emergence. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 13(4), 49–90. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1267

A troubling result from publishing open access articles with CC-BY

For week four of the Why Open? course, we are looking at potential benefits of openness, as well as potential problems with it. There are many, many interesting stories and case studies listed on that part of the course, and I’m still working through looking at them (I’m interested in them all!).

For this post, I decided to add in another story that has recently come to my attention, and that hits home for me as an academic.

Rosie Redfield, Professor in the department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, recently blogged about an issue that a colleague had experienced with an open access publication: after publishing in an open access journal (PLOS One), which puts a CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution) license on published articles, she discovered that her research paper had been included in a collection of papers published by Apple Academic Press, for which the publisher was charging over $100 Canadian.

CC-BY logo, downloaded from the Creative Commons downloads page

Now, this may not seem so bad, because, after all, the CC-BY license allows this. It allows others to do anything they want with one’s work, so long as one is cited as the original author. So it would seem not to be the case that the publisher is doing anything wrong (that’s what I thought at first), and what’s really at issue here is authors not knowing that this sort of thing could happen. Thus it would seem that education about what CC-BY allows is all that is really needed (that’s also what I thought at first).

And even if the publisher is charging a lot of money for a book with open access articles in it, those articles still remain open access to be viewed by anyone, so no harm done, right?

Wrong. As I started reading more of Redfield’s posts on this issue, and when I read the results of a survey she did of researchers, I started to see some of the complications of the situation. Then when I met with her in person last week, I came to realize the nuances of what is happening and the potential problems that can result, both for researchers and for the public.

What’s the problem?

This is not simply a matter of authors being upset that someone else is making money off of their work (though as the survey results show, some do have that concern)–there are other problems as well. These are not listed in any particular order, but rather the order in which they’re coming to mind for me.

1. One might argue, as some of the authors in the survey did, that a publisher is making a profit off an open access work becomes more of a concern when authors have to pay a fee to publish in many open access journals (or to publish an article as open access in non-open access journals). Here’s a pretty thorough list of scholarly journal publishers and their “article processing charges” (APC’s). I was once asked if I wanted to pay over $2000 to have a 2-3 page book review published as open access in an otherwise closed journal. I decided the book review just wasn’t that good. 

The point is, it’s not just that some people are upset that others are making money off their work, but rather that they had to pay to publish their work open access, and they did this because they wanted the work available for others to view for free. Well, of course, it isn’t always individuals paying these APC’s–people can use grants to do so, and/or they can get funding to do so from their institution, just to name a couple of other sources of the money.

A rebuttal could be: well, the articles are still available to view for free, on the journal’s website, and likely other places around the web as well. This brings up the next problem.

 

2. Just because the articles are available for free elsewhere doesn’t mean the people who see the book in which they’ve been republished, and which is selling for a good chunk of money, are able to find that out easily. The problem with this particular book that Redfield talks about in her blog is that there was no indication at all that these were open access articles, and that they are available for free on the web. Of course not–that would mean no one would buy the book. Several authors in Redfield’s survey mention that they think such books should have to list the original source of the publication.

So people looking for scientific research may see the book and think they need to buy it to get access to the research. I find this quite troubling, as for me, the point of open access publishing is to allow people access to research without having to pay. That people are ending up getting duped into paying is a problem, in my view.

And it’s not just individuals, libraries may be buying such books (and using public funds to do so), as suggested in a comment on one of Redfield’s blog posts on this issue (the comment also mentions some other important downsides as well). When I met with her, Redfield told me she had spoken to a librarian at the University of British Columbia libraries, who said that they had about 50 of Apple Academic Press’s titles. Redfield was in the process of getting these titles to find out whether any of them are republications of open access articles.

Redfield notes in a blog post that actually, according to the terms of PLOS One, anyone who redistributes an article for that journal must also “make clear the license terms under which the work was published.”  The same is true for the license terms of BioMed Central. Upon looking into the legal code of the CC-BY 3.0 unported license, it seems to me that this sort of thing is required by the CC-BY license itself. It says, in section 4(a), here, that “You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform.” I had forgotten this, but of course I include a link to the CC license for any CC-licensed image I use on this blog, for example, precisely for that reason.

The PLOS One license terms also say that the redistribution of articles from PLOS journals must include citation not only of the author, but also of the original source. So do the Wiley Online Open terms (which allow you to publish an open-access article in an otherwise non-open access journal). And Taylor and Francis and Routledge Open too. I’m not going to do an exhaustive search of all open journals, or journals that allow open-access content, to see what their terms are. The point is that such terms do exist, and at least in the case where the article from PLOS One was republished without citing the original source and license, such terms were violated.

 

3. The articles in the book Redfield talks about were edited to some degree from how they appeared in the original publications (I’m not sure how much, exactly). Of course, the CC-BY license allows others to “adapt” the work, so this is not a problem in itself. The problem comes in when one thinks about what might be possible, such as book editors making fairly significant changes to an article that, even by accident, end up making the argument weaker or suggest claims that the author would not have made him/herself.

Then, what comes into the picture is potential harm for the author, from people thinking they’ve said things they haven’t, and wouldn’t, say (if those things put the author in a bad light because they make the argument worse, or the data analysis worse, etc.). A number of the authors in Redfield’s survey said they would be worried about possible misrepresentation of the authors’ interpretations of results. Other authors worried that others might think they had self-plagiarized–published the same thing twice, without citing their earlier publication.

It might seem on the surface that the CC-BY license allows such things to happen, but as Redfield points out in one of her blog posts, CC-BY (and all CC licenses that have “attribution” as one of their requirements) have a “no endorsement” clause: those who use a work licensed CC-BY and alter it in some way, must not indicate that the original author endorses the revision of the work. The legal code of the CC-BY license makes this even clearer–see section 4(b)(iv) here. 

Since the publisher of the work Redfield discusses listed the authors as “contributors,” and did not state that the articles had been previously published elsewhere and edited for publication in the book, one could make the case that the way they’ve presented the articles suggests “endorsement” by the authors. Redfield argues for this point here.

But since the authors in this case were not told that their articles were going to be published in the book, they did not have a chance to give an endorsement or not. Nor does CC-BY require that original creators of works with a CC-BY license be informed that their works are being reused and adapted.

 

What should be done?

My first thought, upon seeing the first one or two of Redfield’s blog posts, was that this problem could be solved by simply educating authors about the various CC licenses, and about what is allowed under CC-BY, so they can decide whether they want to use CC-BY or some other license. I thought that those who wanted to avoid the problems noted above could choose a different license, like perhaps CC-BY-SA (share-alike)–which would require that any use of the work have an equivalent license on it, possibly reducing incentives to republish collections of such works–or CC-BY-ND (no derivatives)–which would not allow anything to be changed. There are several problems with this response.

 

1. It may not be the case that authors have a choice of licenses when publishing in an open access journal, or when publishing an open access article in an otherwise non-open access journal. PLOS One, for example, does not give you a choice–you have to use CC-BY or not publish there. So do BioMedCentral and PeerJ and  Sage Open. Some publishers do allow a choice, such as Wiley (you can choose a license for your open access article in an otherwise non-open access journal), and Taylor and Francis.

But those who are worried about reuse of CC-BY articles might just choose not to publish in the OA journals that require CC-BY (this does not apply to researchers who are mandated to publish open access as CC-BY, of course). Unless some other things change. Like possibly the following.

 

2. As noted above, the republishing of open access articles without citing the original publications and licenses under which they were published may be in violation of the license terms of the original articles. If so, then it seems logical that legal action should be taken against the publishers who violate those terms. This is what Redfield suggests in a blog post.

I agree, but who should take such legal action? It’s too much to ask for individual authors to take legal action, unless they can find legal counsel who will take on the case without charging anything, or very much. Who among us has enough money to pay attorneys and other fees to sue a publisher?

Redfield suggests perhaps the journal publishers should take on the duty of suing such book publishers, which seems to me to make sense because the book publishers are violating the terms of the journal publishers’ own licenses. But this raises other issues, as discussed in the comments to that post (authors are the ones with legal standing to sue because they hold copyright, journals may have to raise article processing fees to cover such activities).

One might also ask: what motivation do journals have to go after publishers who are redistributing content that the journal is not making money from each time it is accessed anyway? They have made money through other means than subscriptions or fee for access, so would they be motivated to try to stop such republication? Perhaps, if enough authors shy away from publishing open access articles because of fears of this sort of thing happening.

 

Conclusion

The bigger point here is the following. Even if you don’t think this is a big deal (and many don’t, as evidenced by comments on Redfield’s blog posts about this issue), it appears that there are a good number of authors who do, and who may then choose not to publish in open access journals because of it. This is ignoring the point, of course, that many researchers are now being mandated to do so; there are still quite a few who are not…though this may change soon.

Even if a journal allows a choice of licenses, authors may wonder if, were it to be the case that the license was violated, they or someone else would be able to take action to do something about it. And if no one is doing anything about it, then what’s to stop this sort of thing from spreading further, if it’s lucrative? 

Whether it is a profit-making business, whether significant numbers of individuals and libraries are buying such books, remains to be seen. And the more that authors are required to publish open access works, the more this sort of thing might become lucrative, if it isn’t already. But I think this is an issue worth paying attention to and trying to figure out what can and should be done about the violation of open access licenses in open access journals, even if one doesn’t think that has happened in this particular case.