Category Archives: Open Access, open ed, OER

Open and free

For week two of the Why Open? course I’m helping to facilitate, one of the things we asked participants to read and think about is similarities and differences between “open” and “free,” as these terms are currently used in discussions about openness. Of course, this just adds to the complexity, for now we have two terms that are used differently by different communities, and whose meanings are disputed.

One problem with the word “free” is that it can have many meanings (well, same problem with “open,” of course). Among them, there is “free” in the sense of no cost, or “gratis,” versus free in the sense of freedom, or “libre.”

 

Gratis with or without libre

Wifi Gratis, flickr photo shared by Daniel Lobo, licensed CC-BY.

An example of something that is “open” mostly in the sense of “gratis” is at least some ways of thinking of open access publishing of research articles and books. Most of what one hears about in terms of fighting for open access for scholarly research has to do with being able to read, download, and distribute articles and books without cost–hence the emphasis on “access.” Here’s a quick and clear overview of what “open access” means, that focuses only on access.

But there are also arguments for making open access works at least somewhat libre, in the sense of allowing derivatives to be made. See, for example, the Bethesda and Berlin statements on what counts as open access works (I found these from this overview of open access by Peter Suber). An editorial in PLoS Biology by Catriona J. MacCallum entitled “When is Open Access Not Open Access?” delineates between free access to scholarly articles (without cost) and open access (derivatives are allowed). Why would allowing derivative works be important for scholarly articles? At least to allow unrestricted translation into other languages without gaining permission, but also things like using diagrams and figures in other works.

There is also the “How open is it?” guide put out by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), PLoS (Public Library of Science) and OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), which describes a spectrum of open access for research in terms of reading rights, reuse rights, copyright, authors’ posting rights, and more. This combines gratis (free access to read) with some elements of libre (such as posting on other sites besides the journals’ website, allowing derivative works). So proponents of open access for research need not be focused on gratis only.

Libre with or without gratis

“Libre” often denotes an ability to reuse, modify, remix things: the four R’s in the definition of open content by David Wiley, for example, might count as a description of “libre.” Chris Sakkas describes a “libre” work as one that can be shared and adapted by anyone in the world, possibly subject to some limitations, such as attribution of the original source and copyleft, or share-alike provisions. The Free Software Foundation defines free software as having four freedoms that fit “libre” rather than “gratis” (note that the four freedoms of the FSF and of Wiley’s “open content” are very similar; it’s just that Wiley makes a separate category for “remix,” or putting content together with other content to make something new, and the FSF separates distribution of the original and of revised versions into two categories). The definition of free cultural works by freedomdefined.org is very similar to the FSF’s definition of free software, but applied to works other than software.

In these discussions of “libre,” there is no requirement that works be free as in “no cost.” Indeed, the FSF definition of free software explicitly states that free software must be allowed to be revised and the original and revision distributed, with or without charging a fee for such. The FSF has a page explicitly explaining that and why it’s okay to sell free software, and also explaining that software given away without cost may or may not be “free software,” depending on what freedoms users have once they have it. So “libre,” at least in some discussions of it, seems to have little to do with “gratis.”

Which is interesting, because in our survey of meanings of open for this course, quite a few people mentioned that openness has to do in part with accessibility without barriers, including cost barriers. And it seems to me that the ability to reuse, revise, redistribute something depends fundamentally on the ability to access it in the first place, so if something is libre but not gratis it may allow for quite a bit of freedom, but not for everyone (though, of course, the definition of free software says it must allow users to distribute the original or derivatives, gratis or for a cost, so gratis versions may be available…or not).  And even going beyond cost, there are of course other kinds of access barriers, such as technological ones, that make the “libre” freedoms unusable by some.

Some definitions of “free” and “open” and how they approach access

The FSF does address the issue of access to some degree in its definition of free software, by pointing out that

In order for freedoms 1 and 3 (the freedom to make changes and the freedom to publish the changed versions) to be meaningful, you must have access to the source code of the program. Therefore, accessibility of source code is a necessary condition for free software. Obfuscated “source code” is not real source code and does not count as source code.

Presentation: Free Content for a Free Societey! 7/12

“Presentation: Free Content for a Free Societey! 7/12” by Matthias Mehldau, licensed CC-BY

So even if a software program can be sold, the source code (if it is to count as free software) must be accessible. It’s not clear from the definition of free software page whether or not the source code must be accessible as in gratis, or if it can be accessible for a cost. I had to go searching a bit to find out. The last section of the article on why it’s okay to sell free software from the FSF says that nevertheless, there should be a limit on how much one can charge for the source code, or else one could say the source code is available in theory, but practically it may not be. So the GNU General Public License does include restrictions on how you can provide the source code (see section 6). This section of the GNU GPL FAQs was helpful too. From these documents I think the situation is this: for free software, at least for the GNU GPL license, you have to make the source code available to those to whom you distribute the software. So if they pay for the software, they get a copy of the source code along with that, for no extra cost. If you distribute it without cost, then you must also distribute the source code for no cost. So let’s say one person pays for a copy of the software and gets the source code. If they then distribute it for free on a network, they must also provide the source code in one of several possible ways, for free. So either way, the source code must be made available, without (extra) cost, to people who have a copy of the software.

This means that the four freedoms of free software may or may not be available without cost, because the source code may or may not be available without cost–that is, if I’m understanding all this correctly. Of course even if the source code costs nothing, some of the freedoms are still only available to some people–to those who can actually understand and edit the source code–but there will likely always be some restrictions in place in terms of use and adaption of “free” or “open” works.

The definition of free cultural works also includes something similar to availability of source code, for other kinds of works:

Availability of source data: Where a final work has been obtained through the compilation or processing of a source file or multiple source files, all underlying source data should be available alongside the work itself under the same conditions. This can be the score of a musical composition, the models used in a 3D scene, the data of a scientific publication, the source code of a computer application, or any other such information.

So according to the definition of free cultural works,  the sources used to create a free work must themselves be free/libre in the same way as the works themselves are required to be. There isn’t much clarity here on how this should work (unlike for free software and the GNU GPL license), but perhaps it means that works can be sold but still be free as in libre, and the source files and data must be given to the recipient along with the final work (similar to source code for software, above). So whether you pay for it or can access it without cost, you must have access to the source data as well (for an extra price okay? included in the price of the original work?).

Here, too, the question about accessibility due to price could be mitigated by the fact that free cultural works (like free software) can be distributed by anyone who has a copy, to anyone else, with or without charging a fee. So it’s possible that there will be a copy available somewhere that can be accessed without cost. Or maybe not.

The Open Knowledge Foundation has a definition of open data and open content that includes a focus on access and price:

The work shall be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The work must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.

While not quite gratis, this allows for distribution of works to recoup (reasonable) costs for that distribution, which could make sense in the case of physical copies such as on paper or on digital media like a thumb drive. It does raise the question whether it makes sense to charge people who download from the internet a fee for hosting information on a site (hosting data on a server does cost some money!).

A theoretical tension

Interestingly, this raises a bit of a potential paradox, as can be seen from this part of the Open Knowledge definition of open content:

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the work either on its own or as part of a package made from works from many different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale or distribution.

The point here is that while a work that counts as open under this definition must not have a fee attached greater than a “reasonable reproduction cost,” that work must also permit users to sell the work for their own monetary gain.

I don’t have a problem with this provision, it’s just that it raises the issue that Stephen Downes has talked about quite a bit (see, e.g., here and here): views of openness that allow the user wide freedom to do whatever they wish with the open artifact can lead to that artifact being enclosed and no longer open (or free) in the sense of widely accessible. Downes argues here that we can think of freedom from the perspective of what the person who already has a work is free to do with it, and from the perspective of the person trying to access a work, and works that cost money may be free in the former but not the latter sense (because there may be quite a lot of people who can’t afford to access the work). 

Of course, the counter to that is that the original must remain open and low- or no-cost (and other copies can be distributed for free too), so there should be at least one available without cost. Whether that one can be effectively hidden in internet searches through Search Engine Optimization practices, however, is an important question–which Scott Leslie addresses with an example, here.

What I want to emphasize here is the theoretical tension going on: the wide freedom of those who possess and use a work or program to do with it as they will could (theoretically, at least, though the degree to which it has or could happen in practice is debated) lead to fewer people being able to access the work, and wide freedom to access could limit freedoms of the user/possessor to do with a work what they want (e.g., by not allowing works to be sold for a profit, or by requiring they be in formats accessible by many, among other things).

I understand that the free software and free cultural works and other views of “libre” attempt to strike a balance by requiring that works be allowed to be distributed freely, with or without cost, but this may not ensure wide accessibility (e.g., if few distribute for free or if free copies are buried in search results). And I understand that proponents of requiring only “non-commercial” uses of works (such as Downes) attempt to strike a balance by restricting user freedoms in favour of wider accessibility (since, for those without access, user freedoms are moot).

Which balance is best? Is there a better balance to be struck than the ones we’ve come up with so far? I do think this is a difficult issue, which I’ve wrestled with before, when talking about CC licenses in particular. So far I’ve decided in favour of the balance that focuses on user freedoms, but I’m curious what others think of this issue.

I wanted to include another section of this post, talking about the language: “free” vs “open”–what are the benefits/drawbacks to using one or the other of these terms? But it’s late and I’m tired, and so that will have to wait for another post.

[Why Open?] What does “open” mean?

I made this animated GIF using a mobile phone and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program. 

 

For the next five weeks, I’m helping to facilitate an open online course at the School of Open called Why Open? The course starts today, and we’ve asked participants to start by writing a blog post on the following:

What do you think “openness” is? Focusing on your own field or context (if you wish), describe what it means to do work openly, or to make one’s activity or artifacts open. Alternatively, you could talk about what you think “openness” means generally, what sort of definition might fit all open activities or works.

I thought that after having read quite a few things about openness, and helping to put together this course, I’d have a clearer idea of what openness means. But instead, I recognize just how complicated the issues are surrounding openness, and so I have a hard time coming up with a clean, neat definition.

I could write a blog post that links to a bunch of resources on openness and see what they have to say, then respond to that, but that would be jumping the gun at this point. We’re starting off giving our own views, so let me try to put together some of my various thoughts about openness, as they stand at the moment (recognizing that things will change by the end of this course experience!).

I’ll be focusing on openness in my profession, higher education and research (I teach Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver).

My earlier views on openness in education and research

A friend (Pat Lockley) recently did a survey of academics to find out their views of openness. The results, and a slideshow presentation on how he and a collaborator used these results, can be found in one of Pat’s blog posts. My response is #3 on this spreadsheet (I tried to copy and paste it here, but I don’t think I have permission to do that).

Summarizing that, my view on openness in the context of teaching and research, at least when I answered this survey, was:

  • One part of openness is allowing something to be freely viewed, such as open access research and publications–anyone can see these without having to pay for viewing. Putting up one’s teaching materials on a freely-accessible website would count here too.
  • But that’s only one small part of doing academic work openly; to be more “open,” one would make one’s materials and research not only available for free viewing, but also for use by others, and for revision–adding to, subtracting from, mixing with other things, etc. So, for example, I could not just put up a syllabus or lecture notes or teaching video for others to view, but would give these things a license that would allow for reuse, revision, remixing (e.g., a CC-BY license). The same could go for research articles–it would be nice if parts of these, such as tables, diagrams and graphs, could be reproduced in other places, altered and posted elsewhere, etc. But a license allowing such use is helpful, as copyright doesn’t allow it without getting express permission from the author.
  • Another important thing to think about is the format in which you’re posting your materials. For example, PDFs aren’t easily editable by most people, so putting things up in PDF form makes them freely available, but not easily accessible for revision and reuse. I don’t know much about video or audio formats, but it’s possible that some are better than others for this sort of thing as well.
  •  Courses are “open” not only if they are free to participate in (like MOOCs), but also if the materials are available for reuse, revision, repurposing. Some MOOCs don’t allow anyone to use their materials for other purposes. Here is a quote from Coursera’s Terms of Use, for example:

Permission to Use Materials

All content or other materials available on the Sites, including but not limited to code, images, text, layouts, arrangements, displays, illustrations, audio and video clips, HTML files and other content are the property of Coursera and/or its affiliates or licensors and are protected by copyright, patent and/or other proprietary intellectual property rights under the United States and foreign laws. In consideration for your agreement to the terms and conditions contained here, Coursera grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and use the Sites. You may download material from the Sites only for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may not otherwise copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish, commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material, nor may you modify or create derivatives works of the material.

Udacity’s Terms of Use have a similar provision, as do those of FutureLearn. By contrast, the license on P2PU materials is CC-BY-SA.

Also in that survey I started trying to think about openness in education more broadly, and began to feel my way towards that by saying that we could open up education further if we didn’t just think of it in terms of formal institutions and courses. Learning happens in many different ways, every day, and if we could come up with some way to recognize and value that (rather than only giving credit to what people have learned at formal institutions), that might be a way to make education more “open.”

I think that’s a good thing to pursue, though I’m not yet sure how I’d fit it into a defintion of openness. Perhaps ensuring that education is more open in the sense of being more available/accessible to more people? If we restrict credit for learning to formal institutions, then only those who can get into and pay for those can get credit.

What I’d add now

 What I’ve focused on above are things like free and easily-available access/viewing, licensing so as to allow revision and reuse/reposting, and allowing many people to be able to take courses, as well as get credit for learning in more informal ways. That latter is like access to some degree, so so far: access, reuse, revision.

Now I’d also add something about transparency, mostly of process, but perhaps of other things as well. So in education, the process used to reach students’ marks should be transparent, for example.

I’m not sure if this fits “transparency,” exactly, but I’m trying to be more open about my processes of research, in the sense of blogging about research as I go along, from my first thoughts about research questions and possible methods, to finalized research projects, to results. I do this because it’s a good way to get feedback from others who are interested in similar things, and, since I’ll be taking notes anyway and they might be useful to others, why not put them up in public?

Similarly, I’ve started blogging in the past few years about my teaching (that’s why I started this blog in the first place)–talking about what I’m planning, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and why. Again, I can get feedback from others, and my experiences can hopefully be useful to others as well.

I’m putting all of this sort of stuff under “transparency,” though perhaps there’s a better word for it.

Summary

So at this point, I’d say openness, at least in education and research, has to do with at least the following: free and easy access (including for reading/viewing/listening to works, as well as access in the sense of being able to attend courses or learn in other ways), ability to revise and reuse works created by others, and transparency (in the sense of letting others in on your process).

Now, I’m sure there are things I’ve left out here, and I’m also sure that this view will change. In addition, none of this is to say that these things are always beneficial, or that there are no potential problems associated with being open. We’ll discuss some of those later in the course!

I also want to point out that simply putting things online for free viewing and licensing them for revision and reuse doesn’t mean they are actually generally accessible. There are many people who do not have stable, fast internet access, and making materials available to them is not simply a matter of putting them on the internet. That’s an issue I haven’t looked into carefully enough. I too often think I’m being plenty open when I post things online and let others revise and reuse them. But it’s only a subset of people who can do so.

 

Let me know what you think…have I missed anything that you think is important about openness?

A short survey for a course called “Why Open?”

I haven’t been blogging recently, and that’s partly because I moved from Melbourne, Australia (where I was on sabbatical for a year) back to Vancouver, BC a couple of weeks ago, and have been settling back in.

It’s also because I’m in a bit of a mad rush, helping to organize and facilitate a new course at the School of Open at Peer to Peer University (https://p2pu.org/en/schools/school-of-open/). The course is called “Why Open?”, and it’s still in draft form for the next couple of days, but will be open for registration on Monday, August 22.

I’m writing this post in order to have a place to send people on Twitter and other social media to ask if they will help out with a short survey on the meaning of “open,” the results of which we’ll use in the course in part B.1. here.

We’re looking for people who have various backgrounds, expertise, professions, to give us their ideas on what “openness” means to them. Please see the text of an email I’ve posted to a couple of lists, below!

———————————————————————

Hi everyone:

I am one of the organizers/facilitators for a new course at the School of Open called “Why Open?”, which will start August 5. I’m writing to ask if you could fill out a very short survey (about 5 minutes) to help contribute some content to this course.

And/or, if you could forward this message to anyone you know whom you think would be willing to fill out the survey, we’d really appreciate it!

 

About the course and what we’re asking you to do

“Why Open?” is a 3-week long, facilitated course (meaning that participants and facilitators all go through it at the same time, rather than asynchronously) that is designed to help participants learn more about openness, recognize the benefits and challenges that can arise from opening up content or practices, and engage in some open practices themselves. It will run August 5-23, though participants will also complete a final project due around the end of August. You can see a draft of the course here: https://p2pu.org/en/courses/588/why-open/

In the first section of the course we ask participants to come with their own, preliminary understandings of what openness means. Then we will show them definitions by third parties and discuss the various meanings. We want to gather views from people with different expertise and backgrounds. One thing we will discuss is whether there are patterns in views of openness depending on profession or activity (e.g., do those in the sciences understand it differently than those in the technology fields, than those in arts or humanities, than those in business, etc.).

You can see the section in the draft course where these definitions will go, here: https://p2pu.org/en/courses/588/content/1143/

 

Survey

We have created a short survey (basically 2 questions, plus demographic info and request for links), and would love it if you could take a moment to fill it out. It should take you about five minutes.

The survey can be found here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rxV_sdlyejuQT2_iJ-b6A5MZT91o3_oYi2QM8FIoV5M/viewform

We would like your response by midnight on Sunday August 4 (N. America time) at the latest.

 

Thank you for considering this request, and we do hope you will take the time to contribute to this course!

 

Sincerely,

Pete Forsyth, Christina Hendricks, Jeannette Lee, Simeon Oriko, Jane Park (organizers for Why Open? course)

 

Evaluating a cMOOC using Downes’ four “process conditions”

This is the third in a series of posts on a research project I’m developing on evaluating cMOOCs. The first can be found here, and the second here. In this post I consider an article that uses Downes’ four “process conditions” for a knowledge-generating network to evaluate a cMOOC. In a later post I’ll consider another article that takes a somewhat critical look at these four conditions as applied to cMOOCs.

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). Retrieved from http://eprints.port.ac.uk/5605/

Connexion, Flickr photo by tangi_bertin, licensed CC-BY

In this article, Mackness et al. report findings from interviews of participants in the CCK08 MOOC (Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008; see here for a 2011 version of this course) insofar as these relate to Downes’ four process conditions for a knowledge-generating network: autonomy, diversity, openness, interactivity. In other words, they wanted to see if these conditions were met in CCK08, according to the participants. To best understand these results, if you’re not familiar with Downes’ work, it may be helpful to read an earlier post of mine that addresses and tries to explain these conditions.

Specifically, the researchers asked: “To what extent were autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness/interactivity a reality for participants in the CCK08 MOOC and how much they were affected by the course design?” (271). They concluded that, in this particular course at least, there were difficulties with all of these factors.

Data

Data for this study came from 22 responses by participants (including instructors) to email interview questions (out of 58 who had self-selected, on a previous survey sent to 301 participants, to be interviewed). Unfortunately, the interview questions are not provided in the paper, so it’s hard to tell what the respondents were responding to. I find it helpful to see the questions so as to better understand the responses given, and be able to undertake a critical review of the interpretation of those responses given in an article.

Results

Autonomy

The researchers note that most respondents valued autonomy in a learning environment: “Overall, 59% of interview respondents (13/22) rated the importance of learner autonomy at 9 or 10 on a scale of 1-10 (1 = low; 10 = high)” (269). Unfortunately, I can’t tell if this means they valued the kind of autonomy they experienced in that particular course, or whether they valued the general idea of learner autonomy in an abstract way (but how was it defined?). Here is one place, for example, where providing the question asked would help readers understand the results.

Mackness et al. then argue that nevertheless, some participants (but how many out of the 22?) found the experience of autonomy in CCK08 to be problematic. The researchers provided quotes from two participants stating that they would have preferred more structure and guidance, and one course instructor who reported that learner autonomy led to some frustration that what s/he was trying to say or do in the course was not always “resonating with participants” (269).

The authors also provide a quote from a course participant who said they loved being able to work outside of assessment guidelines, but then comment on that statement by saying that “autonomy was equated with lack of assessment”–perhaps, but not necessarily (maybe they could get good feedback from peers, for example? Or maybe the instructors could still assess something outside of the guidelines? I don’t know, but the statement doesn’t seem to mesh, by itself, with the interpretation).  Plus, the respondent saw this as a positive thing, whereas the rhetorical aspects of the interpretation suggest it was a negative, a difficulty with autonomy. I’m not seeing that.

The researchers conclude that the degree of learner autonomy in the course was affected by the following:

levels of fluency in English, the ‘expertise divide’, assessment for credit participants, personal learning styles, personal sense of identity and the power exerted, either implicitly or explicitly, by instructors through their communications, status and reputation, or by participants themselves….” (271)

In addition, there were reports of some “trolling” behaviour on the forums, which led some participants to “retreat to their blogs, effectively reducing their autonomy” (271). The authors point out that some constraint on autonomy in the forums through discouraging or shutting down such behaviour may have actually promoted autonomy amongst more learners.

Diversity

The researchers note that learner diversity was certainly present in the course, including diversity in geography, language, age, and background. They give examples of diversity “reflected in the learning preferences, individual needs and choices expressed by interview respondents” (269).

However, diversity was also a problem in at least one respect, namely that not all learners had the “skills or disposition needed to learn successfully, or to become autonomous learners in a MOOC” (271). This is not so much of a problem if there is significant scaffolding, such as support for participants’ “wayfinding in large online networks,” but CCK08 was instead designed to have “minimal instructor intervention” (271). In addition, in order to promote sharing in a network like a cMOOC, there needs to be a certain amount of trust built up, the authors point out; and the more large and diverse the network, the more work may need to be done to help participants build that trust.

Openness

CCk08 was available, for free, to anyone who wanted to participate (without receiving any university or other credits), so long as they had a reliable web connection. The interview data suggests that participants interpreted “openness” differently: some felt they should (and did) share their work with others (thus interpreting openness as involving sharing one’s work), some worked mostly alone and did not do much or any sharing–thereby interpreting openness, the author suggest, merely as the idea that the course was open for anyone with a reliable web connection to participate in. The authors seem to be arguing here that these differing conceptions of openness are problematic because there was an “implicit assumption in the course was that participants would be willing or ready to give and receive information, knowledge, opinions and ideas; in other words to share freely” (270), but that not everyone got that message. They point to a low rate of active participation: only 14% of the total enrolled participants (270).

They also note that amongst participants there was no “common understanding of openness as a characteristic of connectivism” (270), implying that there should have been. But I wonder if conscious understanding of openness, and the ability to express that as a clear concept, is necessary for a successful connectivist course. This is just a question at this point–I haven’t thought it through carefully. I would at least have liked to have seen more on why that should be considered a problem, as well as whether the respondents were asked specifically for their views of openness. The responses given in this section of the paper don’t refer to openness at all, making me think perhaps the researchers interpreted understandings of openness from one or more of the other things respondents said. That’s not a problem by itself, of course, but one might have gotten different answers if one had asked them their views of openness directly, and answers that might have been therefore more relevant to concluding whether or not participants shared a common understanding of openness.

Finally, Mackness et al. argue that some of the barriers noted above also led to problems in regard to participants’ willingness to openly communicate and share work with others: this can be “compromised by lack of clarity about the purpose and nature of the course, lack of moderation in the discussion forums, which would be expected on a traditional course, and the constraints (already discussed in relation to autonomy and diversity) under which participants worked” (272).

Interactivity

 There were significant opportunities for interaction, for connecting with others, but the authors note that what is most important is not whether people did connect with others (and how much) as what these connections made possible. Respondents noted some important barriers to connecting as well as problems that meant some of the interactions did not yield useful benefits. As noted above, some participants pointed to “trolling” behaviour on the forums, and one said there were some “patronising” posts as well–which, the respondent said, likely led some participants to disengage from that mode of connection. Another respondent noted differences in expertise levels that led him/her to disengage when s/he could no longer “understand the issues being discussed” (271).

The researchers conclude that connectivity alone is not sufficient for effective interactivity–which of course makes sense–and that the degree of effective interactivity in CCK08 was not as great as it might have been with more moderation by instructors. However, the size of the course made this unfeasible (272).

One thing I would have liked to have seen in this analysis of “interactivity” is what Downes focuses on for this condition, namely the idea that the kind of interactivity needed is that which promotes emergent knowledge–knowledge that emerges from the interactions of the network as a whole, rather than from individual nodes (explained by Downes here and here, the first of which the authors themselves cite). This is partly because if they used Downes’ framework, it would make sense to evaluate the course with the specifics of what he means by “interactivity.” It’s also partly because I just really want to see how one might try to evaluate that form of interactivity.

Conclusion

Mackness et al. conclude that

some constraints and moderation exercised by instructors and/or learners may be necessary for effective learning in a course such as CCK08. These constraints might include light touch moderation to reduce confusion, or firm intervention to prevent negative behaviours which impede learning in the network, and explicit communication of what is unacceptable, to ensure the ‘safety’ of learners. (272)

Though, at the same time, they point to the small size of their sample, and the need for further studies of these sorts of courses to validate their findings.

That makes sense to me, from my unstudied perspective of someone who has participated in a few large and one small-ish open online courses, one of which seemed modeled to some degree along connectivist lines (ETMOOC). There was some significant scaffolding in ETMOOC, through starting off with discussions of connected learning and help with blogging and commenting on blogs. There wasn’t clear evidence of moderating discussions from the course collaborators (several people collaborated on each two-week topic, acting in the role of “instructors” for a brief time), except insofar as some of the course collaborators were very actively present on Twitter and in commenting on others’ blogs, being sure to tweet or retweet or bookmark to Diigo or post to Google+ especially helpful or thought-provoking things. We didn’t have any trolling behaviour that I was aware of, and we also didn’t have a discussion forum. But IF there were problems in the Google+ groups or in Twitter chats, I would have hoped one or more of the collaborators would have actively worked to address them (and I think they would have, though of course since it didn’t happen (to my knowledge) I can’t be certain).

Some further thoughts 

If one decides that Downes’ framework is the right one to use for evaluating an open online course like a cMOOC (which I haven’t decided yet; I still need to look more carefully at his arguments for it), it would make sense to unpack the four conditions more carefully and collect participants’ views on whether those specific ways of thinking about autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity were manifested in the course. The discussion of these four conditions is at times rather vague here. What, more specifically, does learner “autonomy” mean, for example? Even if they don’t want to use Downes’ own views of autonomy, it would be helpful to specify what conception of autonomy they’re working with. I’ve also noted a similar point about interactivity, about which the discussion in the paper is also somewhat vague–what sort of interactivity would have indicated success, exactly, beyond just participants communicating with each other on blogs or forums?

I find it interesting that in his most recent writing on the topic of evaluating cMOOCs (see the longer version attached to this post, and my discussion of this point here (and the helpful comments I’ve gotten on that post!)), Downes argues that it should be some kind of expert in cMOOCs or in one of the fields/topics they cover that evaluates their quality, while here the authors looked to the participants’ experiences. Interesting, because it makes sense to me to actually focus on the experiences of the participants rather than to ask someone who may or may not have taken the course. That is, if one wants to find out if the course was effective for participants.

Still, I can see how some aspects of these conditions might be measured without looking at what participants experienced, or at least in other ways in addition to gathering participants’ subjective evaluations. The degree to which the course is “open,” for example, might have some elements that could be measured beyond or in addition to what participants themselves thought. Insofar as openness involves the course being open to anyone with a reliable internet connection to participate, without cost, and the ability to move into and out of the course easily as participants choose, that could be partly a matter of looking at the design and platform of the course itself, as well as participants’ evaluations of how easy it was to get into and out of the course. If openness also involves the sharing of one’s work, one could look to see how much of that was actually done, as well as ask participants about what they shared, why, and how (and what they did not, and why).

I just find it puzzling that in that recent post Downes doesn’t talk about asking participants about their experiences in a cMOOC at all. I’m not sure why.

[I just read a recent comment on an earlier post, which I haven’t replied to yet, which discusses exactly this point–it makes no sense to leave out student experiences. Should have read and replied to that before finalizing this post!]

 

 

MOOC engagement and disengagement

Recently I contrasted ds106 with a course in statistics from Udacity, as part of my participation in a course on Open Education from the Open University. I got very frustrated writing that post because I felt constrained by the script, by the instructions. It wasn’t that I had other things to say that didn’t fit the script; it was more that following the explicit instructions seemed to keep me from thinking of other things to say. I was busy saying what I was supposed to, and therefore didn’t leave myself mental space to consider much of anything else.

Usually I only write blog posts when I have something I want to reflect on, to share with others, to get feedback about. It’s self-generated, and I care about what I’m doing. That hasn’t been the case for many of the posts I’ve done for the Open Education course, and it has just felt far too forced and unmeaningful.

I decided to stop.

Apparently the post was actually useful to some, as some Twitter conversations & retweets indicated, but it still felt dull to me because I wasn’t the one deciding what to write, or whether to write at all. Okay, yes, ultimately I was the one, of course, since I didn’t need to (a) do this particular activity for the course, or (b) do it in the scripted way, or (c) join the course at all in the first place. So yes, I decided. But my point is more subtle. And it affects how I approach face-to-face teaching as well. 

In my previous post, I listed some of the major differences between ETMOOC and the OU course, and talked a bit about why I preferred the former. Here I want to focus on one particular downside to the OU course.

The directed assignment

There is probably a better word or phrase for this–I just mean an assignment or activity in which one is told exactly what to do. This is what we had, each week, several times a week, in the OU course. It is not what we had in ETMOOC.

In ETMOOC we had a few suggestions here and there for blog topics, things one could write about if one wanted. During some of the bimonthly topics there were lists of activities we might do if we wished, including reading/watching outside materials and writing about them. But there was a strong emphasis that one should choose one or just a few of these, or none at all (see, e.g., the post for the digital storytelling topic in ETMOOC). The activities were clearly suggestions, and participants could (and many did) blog about anything that caught their attention and interest in relation to the topics at hand, whether from the suggested activities, the presentations, the Twitter chats, or others’ blog posts.

My experience with the OU course was much different. The activities were written as directives rather than suggestions. Here, for example, is an activity about “connectivism” that I decided not to do (other examples of directions can be found by clicking on the #h817open tag to the right). I am going to blog about connectivism and how it informs the structure of cMOOCs, as it’s something I’m interested in, but that’s just the point. The way the activities in the course are written, one gets the strong message that directions should be followed. The rhetoric is clear. You may be interested in writing about something else, but then you’re not participating in the course.

Sometimes I followed the instructions; sometimes not. My choice, yes, but something else happens too.

Follow the path

Follow the path, CC-BY licensed flickr photo shared by Miguel Mendez

There could easily be, and for me at times there was, a strong enough feeling that I ought to follow directions that, well, I did. It’s just a sense that that’s what you do in a “course.” And the fact that this was an “open boundary” course–meaning it had students officially registered for credit as well as outside participants–probably contributed to it having a more traditional structure. But that structure suggested, implicitly, that one should do what the instructor says.

Incidentally, this was another difference from ETMOOC–in the OU course, there was clearly one instructor in the “expert” or “authority” role. In ETMOOC there were many people involved in both planning and facilitating, and unless they were giving one of the synchronous presentations, they acted just like every other participant in the course. The information about each week’s topic seemed to come from some anonymous source, without a clear authorial voice, even though it had a list of people at the end who were involved in working on that topic. It felt less hierarchical, more like a collective group of people learning together than a set of instructors vs. learners.

I’m not concerned about having specific, assigned readings, videos, or other materials; some of those for the OU course I found very helpful, and when one is faced with something unfamiliar, having a few common guideposts on the way is helpful when learning with others. What led me to disengage was being explicitly directed as to what to do with those materials, exactly what to write about. And even though I knew that was optional, the rhetorical  thrust of both the wording and the structure of the course indicated otherwise. 

I had a bit of a discussion with Inger-Marie Christensen in comments on one of her blog posts, here, about this issue. She rightly pointed out the danger of just skipping things in a MOOC that don’t seem immediately interesting to you, and I agree. I also see that by following directions I might end up finding new things that I’m interested in, engaged with, that I might not otherwise.

Still, I think that a balance can be struck: encouragement to at least engage with most or all of the topics, read or watch at least one or two things, and then choose from a variety of suggested topics to write about or activities to do (while also providing freedom to do something else related if one chooses). I think the value of greater engagement and more meaningful work by participants by offering such flexibility can outweigh the loss of perhaps missing some aspects of a topic.

Face-to-face courses

I felt this way earlier in the OU course, but continued on for awhile anyway:


And another implication struck me then, too:


But in Uni the students either just do what you ask or drop the course. And suddenly it’s hitting me that when I provide clear, detailed instructions on what to write for essays, my students may respond the way I did. How did I not see this before?

I often give very detailed essay assignments, saying exactly what should be written about. I have thought I’m doing students a favour by providing clear directives. And for some, that’s probably the case. But I’m also:

  • doing the hard work for them–wouldn’t it be better to ask them to find the important aspects of texts and arguments for themselves, based on what they want to talk about? 
  • leading their essays to be as rigid as my instructions, and so
  • likely preventing the excitement that comes when you really want to figure something out and work with a text (or something else) to do so, as well as
  • discouraging deep creativity in responding to the texts and issues we’re discussing.

Now, I actually do give students in third- and fourth-year courses more freedom, but I tend to be more directive in first- and second-year courses. And I’m wondering if I can strike more of a balance between specificity and flexibility. I realize that people new to philosophy can use clear guidance on how to write philosophy essays well, and sometimes that could mean telling them exactly what to write about. But does it have to? At the very least, I could make it clearer that the provided essay topics are suggestions rather than directives, and emphasize that there is room to experiment.

I could, thereby, open up students to the significant possibility of writing essays that are deeply problematic because I gave them the freedom to fail. But if I also give them detailed feedback and the chance to revise without penalty, then, well, that seems to me a good way to learn. And maybe they’ll be excited to do so in the process. Okay, at least some of them.

The bigger issue

But this doesn’t address the problem noted above: even if one says, explicitly, that directives are optional, one’s other words and course structure may indicate that, after all, they really should be followed. And/or, the learning experience for many has for so long been such that when the instructor gives suggestions for what to do, many students may do that rather than come up with something on their own, because after all, the instructor is in the position of authority/expertise.

Even in ETMOOC, I recall several participants expressing how they felt “behind,” and needed to “catch up”; some even said they dropped out because they felt so behind. The message of flexibility may not have gotten through.

So I am left with two problems for my face-to-face teaching:

1. How to balance promoting flexibility and creativity, and thereby hopefully greater engagement, with the danger of learners only focusing on what they want and not going beyond their comfort zones (hmmm…seems to me I’ve visited this issue before).

2. Once I solve problem number 1, how to communicate that flexibility really means…flexibility?

 

MOOCs I have known

So far in 2013, while on sabbatical, I’ve actively participated in two MOOCs (Massive, Open, Online Courses): the OU course on Open Education, and ETMOOC (Educational Technology and Media MOOC). The latter was one of the best educational and professional development experiences I have ever had. The former…well…was just okay. Not bad, but not transformative like ETMOOC was.

I want to use this blog post to try to figure out why this might have been the case, and in the next one I’ll focus in on one particular difference and discuss it in more depth. 

I don’t think it was just the most obvious difference, that the OU course was an “open boundary” course, meaning it was a face-to-face course that invited outside participants as well, and ETMOOC was not–though ultimately, this may have been an important part of why the two differed so much.

A heated discussion

A heated discussion, CC-BY licensed flickr photo shared by ktylerconk

1. Synchronous presentations/discussions

ETMOOC had 1-2 synchronous presentations weekly, some by the “co-conspirators” (the group that planned and facilitated the course), and some by people outside the course. These were mostly held on a platform that allowed interactivity between the presenter and participants, including a whiteboard that participants could write on synchronously, and a backchannel chat that presenters often watched and responded to.

Instead of synchronous presentations, the OU course had assigned readings and/or videos for each week. ETMOOC had no such assigned materials, just the synchronous sessions. These are somewhat similar, though of course the presentations get you a sense of being more connected to the presenter than does reading a static text or video from them. There is at least the chance of asking live questions.

The OU course had one synchronous presentation and two synchronous discussions–the last one a discussion of how the course went & thoughts for the future. I could only attend one of these because of time zone issues, and there was much less interactivity–the chat was much less active, e.g.

2. Twitter

ETMOOC had a weekly Twitter chat that was, most weeks, very lively. I met numerous people through these chats that I followed/got followers from, and I still interact with them after the course. The Twitter stream for the #etmooc hashtag was quite busy most of the time, and still has a good number of posts on it. The OU course had no synchronous Twitter chat, and most days saw maybe 2-3 tweets on the #h817open hashtag. Few participants used Twitter, and those that did, didn’t use it very much. Mostly they announced their own blog posts/activities for the course, though some shared some outside resources that were relevant.

3. Discussion boards vs. Google + groups

OU had discussion boards where, I imagine, much of the discussion took place (instead, e.g., of being on Twitter). ETMOOC had no discussion boards, only blogs, Twitter, and a Google+ group.

Iwent to the OU boards a couple of times, and remembered that I really don’t like discussion boards. I am still not sure why. Partly because they feel closed even if they are available for anyone to view, and partly because I don’t feel like I’m really connecting to people when all I’m getting are their discussion board posts. Unlike Twitter or Google+, I can’t look at their other posts, their other interests and concerns. I stopped looking at the boards after the first week or so.

Fortunately, some of the members of the OU group set up their own Google+ group, so I did most of my discussion on there (and on others’ blogs). There was a small group of active participants on G+ that frequently commented on each others’ blogs, much smaller than the ETMOOC Google + group.

Linked

Linked, CC-BY licensed flickr photo shared by cali4beach

4. Building connections

ETMOOC started off with some presentations and discussions on the sorts of activities needed to become a more connected learner (unsurprisingly, as this was a connectivist MOOC), such as introductions to Twitter, to social curation, and to blogging (one of the two blogging sessions stressed the importance of commenting on others’ blogs, how to do it well, etc.)  (see the archive of presentations here). Many of us are still connecting after the course has finished–through a blog reading group, through Twitter and G+, and through collaborative projects we developed later.

OU had no such introduction to things that might help us connect with each other–again, unsurprisingly, as it wasn’t really designed as a cMOOC, it seems. There was a blog hub, and there were suggestions in the weekly emails to read some of the blog posts and comment on them, but it wasn’t emphasized nearly as much as in ETMOOC.

I don’t see myself continuing to connect with any people from the OU course; or maybe I will with just a couple. I didn’t really feel linked to them, even though we read and commented on each others’ blogs a bit. I think the lack of synchronous sessions, including Twitter chats, contributed to this–even in the ETMOOC presentations we talked with each other over the backchannel chat. Of course, things might have been different if I had participated in the online discussion forums in the OU course; but I still think those are not a very good method for connecting with others, for reasons noted above.

5. Learning objectives

The OU course had explicit learning objectives/outcomes for the course as a whole, and for each topic in the course. ETMOOC, by contrast, explicitly did not–see this set of Tweets for a discussion about why. The quick answer is that ETMOOC was designed to be a space in which participants could formulate their own goals and do what they felt necessary to meet them.

6. Dipping vs. completing

ETMOOC had about five topics, each of which ran for two weeks. They were more or less separate in that you didn’t have to have gone through the earlier ones to participate in the later ones. There was an explicit message being given out by the co-conspirators, picked up and resent by participants, that it was perfectly fine to start anytime and drop out whenever one needed/wanted, coming back later if desired. There was no “getting behind” in ETMOOC–that was the message we kept hearing and telling to each other. And after awhile, it worked, at least for me; I missed a few synchronous sessions and didn’t feel pressure to go back and watch them. I just moved on to things I was more interested in.

The OU course seemed more a “course” in the sense of suggesting, implicitly, through its structure, that it was something one should “complete–one should start at the beginning and go through all the sections, in order. Some of the later activities built directly on the earlier ones. Now, clearly, this makes sense in the context of having a set of course objectives that are the same for all–participants can’t meet those if there isn’t a series of things to read/watch/do to get to the point where they can fulfill them.

 

So, clearly, two very different MOOCs, doing different things, for different purposes. Obviously, for some people in some contexts and for some purposes, each one is going to have upsides and downsides. In the next post I focus on one particular downside, for me, of the OU course (though, as you can tell from my tone in the above list, I found ETMOOC more engaging). I also appreciated the flexibility, which the next post addresses.

 

 

Contrasting the xMOOC and the … ds106 (#h817open, Activity 14)

For week four of the Open University course on Open Education, we were asked to compare MOOC models: either ds106 or the Change MOOC with something from Coursera or Udacity, focusing on “technology, pedagogy, and general approach and philosophy.”

I decided to go ahead and do this activity (though I’m not doing all of them for the course) because I really want to get a better sense of ds106. Plus, though I’ve explored Coursera a fair bit, and even signed up for one of their courses to see what it’s like being a participant, I haven’t looked at Udacity at all. While I kind of don’t care if I look at Udacity, this activity is a good excuse to look at ds106, which I do care about, and, well, I’ll at least know a bit more about Udacity in case that ever comes in handy.

ds106

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photoshared by Michael Branson Smith

“DS” stands for digital storytelling, and this course began in 2010, started by Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington. It still has students registered officially at UMW, and there are sections at other campuses as well (see “other Spring 2013 courses” at the top of the ds106 site). In addition, it has, well, I have no idea how many other online participants who are participating in parts or all of the course. (There are over 150 blogs listed in the “open online participants” section, but that may not be the same as the number of people who are actually participating. And that doesn’t count the on-campus students.)

One thing that stands out about ds106, among many others, is that while it’s a course that has specific beginning and end times for on-campus participants, it explicitly invites anyone to drop in anytime they like and stay for as long (or as short) as they like. Some people may be participating in a fairly in-depth way, by setting up blogs that are syndicated on the site, while others may just do a few assignments here and there (thus, the near-impossibility of figuring out how many people are actually “participating” at any given time).

Ways of participating in ds106 (for open online participants)

1. “The daily create“: a low-key, low-commitment, super fun way to participate. Every day there is a new suggestion to create something, and anyone can do one or more of these and add them to the collection. The daily create site explains:

The daily create provides a space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity through challenges published every day. Each assignment should take no more than 15-20 minutes. There are no registrations, no prizes, just a community of people producing art daily.

For example, today’s daily create (April 21, 2013) is: “Take a photograph of something you must see everyday. Make it look like something else!” Once it’s done you simply upload it to Flickr with some specific tags, and voilà, they show up on the daily create site (well, barring some technical hiccups and such). You can also search Flickr for the specific tag for today and find all the creations. Utterly cool.

I decided to do the Daily Creates for April 21 and 22, and had much fun with them. You can see my photos here and here. (I’ve got a lot of work to do on the “creative” end of things.)

2. Do some assignments from the “open assignment bank.” According to the “about” page for the assignments, they are all created by ds106 students. Those who are taking the course in a formal sense on a campus don’t need to do all the same assignments–they can pick and choose in order to put together those that will equal a certain number of “points” for a topic in the course. And anyone can do any one or more of the assignments, anytime they like. One can either do them on one’s blog and register it with the blog aggregator, or upload it to the site directly.

3. Don’t just do the assignments, write about them in a blog. Tell a story about why you chose that assignment, the context of what you created, and how you did it so others can see the process. Then, connect your blog to the ds106 hub so it shows up here. Further, read some posts from others’ blogs and comment. Build community.

4. Follow along with an on-campus course. You could look at the posts from a particular on-campus course (see top menu of ds106 site) and do similar topics as they are, and comment on their blogs/assignments.

This is all in addition to following ds106 on Twitter through the #ds106 hashtag.

And really, what other “course” has its own radio station? The most amazing thing about it is that it’s open to anyone to broadcast on, so far as I can tell. Well, anyone who can figure out how to do it. Find out what’s on by following @ds106radio or the #ds106radio hashtag on Twitter.

And there’s a “tv” station too, though I’m not sure how it works. I just know I got a tweet about an upcoming presentation, and when I clicked on the tv station site I could watch the presentation. Seems to be an option for live chat, too. You can follow @ds106tv or the #ds106tv hashtag on Twitter.

Udacity: “Elementary Statistics”

At some point I need to learn some statistics for my work in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. So I decided to take a look at Udacity’s “Elementary Statistics” course, for possibly doing it later. 

Image Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram, flickr photo licensed CC-BY, shared by Arenamontanus

General observations

Starting off with the main Udacity “How it works” page, I find something suspicious:

The lecture is dead
Bite-sized videos make learning fun

My experience with Coursera was that the traditional, hour-or-so-long lecture format seemed to just be cut up into shorter pieces, with a talking head talking for, if I remember correctly, 10-15 minutes at a time, interspersed by quizzes or other activities. We were still supposed to watch all the pieces. That’s not what I’d call killing the lecture: a lecture is still a lecture, no matter how short it is. This point has been made countless times before (here is just one example, from the excellent “More or Less Bunk” blog by Jonathan Rees). The lecture is dead. Long live the (mini) lecture. So I’m right away wondering whether Udacity is going to be any different on this point.

And I really, really don’t like the “branding” they do: they call us “Udacians” (Coursera calls participants “Courserians”), and they have their own new word–see, e.g., here. Yuck. It really puts me off. I don’t mind the sense of identity I got through doing ETMOOC, a sense of community, of belonging to something. I think it’s because the latter was developed over time, rather than foisted upon people when they start; with Udacity I feel like I’m being told I’m part of a community in order to put me into a feeling of caring about the company, rather than letting that feeling develop over time (if at all).

About the course front page: I hate the fact that I have to actually enroll to see how the course works (unlike ds106, in which all elements are out there for anyone to see and start doing). No wonder these kinds of MOOCs have such large enrollment numbers. You have to enroll just to see the thing in the first place.

Why do they require a registration before you can get a real sense of a course? At the very least, they can keep track of people that way to send them marketing materials. And they can gather a bunch of data about participants–all one’s courses, all one’s work inside those courses, can be tracked if they can attach work in the course to specific people. Which makes me wonder: what is that data being used for, exactly? The privacy policy doesn’t answer that question fully:

We use the Personally Identifiable Information that we collect from you when you participate in an online course through the Website for managing and processing purposes, including but not limited to tracking attendance, progress and completion of an online course.

But what do they do with the information about progress in courses, besides store it so you can go back to the course later and see how much you’ve done, or use it to issue certificates? Well, here’s one answer: it’s being used to make money. Udacity and similar companies can identify students who might be good matches for employers, and the employers can pay for the service.

But I wonder if any of this data could be used to provide useful information on online teaching and learning. Maybe, maybe not, but we may never know unless researchers can get access to the data. (Mike Caulfield explains here that institutions that are partnered with Coursera can get at least some data, but I don’t know what Udacity’s policies are in this regard.)

Nor do I expect that I, as a participant, will have detailed access to my data, because I don’t own it; they do–a problem discussed by Audrey Watters, here (and in a great presentation for ETMOOC, linked here).

I decide to register for an account and take a deeper look at the course–because really, I want to see how they killed the lecture.

Starting the course

The course goes right away into a short (>2 min) introductory video, and I pretty quickly get the hang of how this course works: very short videos (0-2 mins, some 30-45 secs long) followed by quick quiz questions (multiple-choice, fill in the blank, that sort of machine-gradable thing), back and forth for each “lesson” (though some video segments don’t have quiz questions attached). At the end of each lesson there is a problem set. And so it goes, for 12 lessons.

One nice thing is that there is a link to forum questions connected to each of the short videos, because if you go to the main forum page, you just get a bunch of discussions that aren’t clearly organized by topic or lesson. You can organize them by tags, but you have to know what the tags are to do a search on them. Another nice thing is that for each video you can click on the “ask a question” button, and it automatically adds the right tags for you for that particular video segment.

I skipped ahead to the first problem set and tried to do some of them, just to see what they’re like. All multiple choice, and like the “quizzes” in the lessons, you are told right away if your answer is right or wrong. In the quizzes you can just skip ahead to the answer if you can’t figure it out; not so in the problem sets. You have to keep trying until you get it right (a process of elimination, in may cases) or just skip the question. Or, you can always take a look at the discussion forums, where I found that sometimes someone had helpfully posted the answers.

Apparently there will be a final exam, but it won’t be ready online until May (not all the lessons are ready yet, either).

Is the lecture dead?

Yes and no.

The course does a great job of mixing lecture with participant activities, such as short quizzes to apply what’s just been said, or sending you to third-party sites to do activities there. In the first lesson, they sent us to do a face memory test from the BBC, and then asked us to put our scores into a Google form. Much of the rest of the first lesson referred back to this test and how one might think about the data generated by it. That’s a nice way to use an example for a stats lesson.

I didn’t make it all the way to the end of the first lesson, but if I had, I might see what they are actually doing with the data generated by student participants who take the test and upload their scores into the Google form. What’s it being used for? I think it’s uploaded anonymously, but I’m not sure because you access the form through the course interface itself. Hmmmmm.

[And if my BBC face test data was connected to my personally identifiable information, then I should have had to fill out a consent form for it to be used, right? Might they have gotten ethics approval to collect such data? Or maybe they don’t need to? The important thing here is that none of these questions are answered, even the question of whether my Google form data had identifiable information on it. I just don’t know.]

The videos still contain lectures, but they are so short as to hardly seem such; often there is a quiz every 30 secs to 1 minute (sometimes longer, but not much). So there is a good deal of participant activity going on as well (one might even call it a form of “active learning”). And the videos for this course are (mostly) not face shots of instructors talking, but rather some kind of digital whiteboard with text and diagrams.

One could say these aren’t like lectures because they are so interspersed with participants having to do something. But the pedagogical approach that underpins lecturing is still in evidence, namely the knowledge/information transmission approach (more on this, below). So in some sense, there are still lectures here; they are just very, very short.

I tend to think there’s nothing wrong with having some lecturing going on here and there, though I’m also rather drawn to Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which can be read as suggesting that one ought not to act an expert and engage in explaining things to learners at all (see, e.g., the section on “Emancipatory Method” here, and the nice summary by my colleague Jon Beasley-Murray here, along with a critique I have to think about further).

I expect Udacity means that “the hour-long lecture, without  participant activities to break it up” is dead (which, of course, it’s not, but that’s another matter). But the “expert” as transmitter of knowledge to be grasped, and the “learner” as taking on that knowledge in exactly the same way as the expert, is not.

Technology

The most striking difference in terms of technology is this. For the Udacity course, there is some pretty heavy technological investment going into the production of the course. The videos are not just recordings of professors talking, but often of a digital board that one of the instructors writes on with a stylus, in different colours. The video switches fairly seamlessly into a quiz: the quiz looks just like what was last seen on the video, but when you move to it suddenly click boxes appear, and suddenly you’re in interactive mode. The technological structure of the course may not be terribly complicated (what do I know about such things? pretty much nothing), but my point is that the main technological investment is happening at the “course” side.

What’s different about ds106 is that the participants themselves create things with technology, with software and applications, rather than being consumers of such products produced by those in charge of the course. Instead of just passively interacting with things made by others, ds106 participants learn how to use technology to create their own artifacts. Just a quick glance at the Assignment Bank or The Daily Create shows that course participation is heavily focused on making things rather than (only) taking in knowledge from others. As does the fact that all the assignments (and at least some, or many, of The Daily Creates) are created by course participants.

Pedagogy and philosophy

Making and replicating

The above point about different uses of technology in the Udacity course vs. ds106 reminds me of some things George Siemens said about the difference between “xMOOCs,” like those from Udacity and Coursera, and “cMOOCs,” or connectivist MOOCs, like ETMOOC and Change 11 (I discuss some of the differences in an earlier blog post). He states here that

Our MOOC model [cMOOC] emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning. The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. Put another way, cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication.

Is ds106 a cMOOC? It does have the focus on creating over duplication. Alan Levine argues that it’s not a MOOC at all:

To me, all other MOOCs, be they x or c type, sis [sic] to create the same content/curriculum for everyone in the course- they all do the same tasks. And to be honest, the framing points are actually weekly lectures, be they videos spawned out of xMOOCs or webinars. The instruction in these modes are teacher centric (even if people can banter in chat boxes).

Should we say that’s the definitive answer to the question? I don’t know, and really, it doesn’t matter in the end. But Levine has a point about other open online courses being more focused on weekly presentations (ETMOOC was like this) and having the same general topics for all each week, even if there aren’t always common assignments given to everyone (there weren’t in ETMOOC). ETMOOC was also more of a set “event” happening at a certain time (though, thankfully, many of us are continuing to think and discuss and work together afterwards on a “blog reading group”). ds106 is even less structured than that, being something one can participate in anytime, an ongoing community more than a course–except for those who are taking it as part of an official educational program, that is.

The Udacity course on statistics definitely holds to a model of knowledge duplication, in which participants learn things from experts and duplicate that knowledge on quizzes and problem sets. This is not surprising, given the topic, and not really a problem, given the topic. I found it more problematic when looking at a Coursera course on critical thinking and argumentation.

For all that, though, the Udacity course doesn’t encourage passivity in participants; one is continually doing things with the information being presented, instead of mainly watching or listening. It’s just that one isn’t really making or creating new artifacts, new knowledge in these activities, things to be contributed back to the community of learners. Except, of course, on the discussion forums, which are not really integral to the course. You can go to them if you have a question, or want to see answers to others’ questions, or want to answer others’ questions, but I think you can do the whole course without ever going to the forums.

Philosophy

I’m not familiar enough with educational theories to be able to say much of anything scholarly here, so I’ll just make a couple of quick observations that risk being so general as to caricature the approaches in these two online experiences.

In the Udacity course, the philosophical approach has already been stated above: a kind of expert-transmission model. The instructors are experts who should explain the topics in a way that will work for the most participants possible. There can be no adjustment in the instruction for different participants, as it must necessarily be the same for all in the main presentations and quizzes (though it can be altered over time, if evidence suggests a need for it). The assumption has to be that there can be a way to reach at least a good portion of a mass audience of learners, through clarity of presentation and testing of understanding along the way. If this doesn’t work for some people, they can hopefully get help through the forums (which have contributions from both participants and, at times, the instructors).

The learning experience is, from what I experienced in the first lesson and problem set, entirely instructor-directed, with the participants going through an already-set and -structured path through the course. It is possible to earn a certificate for a course, according to the FAQ page, if you complete a certain number of “mastery questions” correctly and thus achieve at least a certain “mastery level.” In this case, “mastery” means being able to replicate the knowledge one has ingested.

ds106, by contrast, (at least for open, online participants) is participant-directed rather than instructor-directed. Participants decide what they want to do, and when. There is no indication that one ought to follow a pre-set path through the course, nor that one should try to work through most or all of the topics.

The instructors in ds106 are not acting as “experts” for the open participants. There is nothing in the way of information being given to participants that they must somehow return back in the same form. There is only the ds106 handbook, which provides advice and tips for using digital tools as well for blogging about one’s artifacts, but participants then create their own artifacts and knowledge with those tools. Indeed, the “experts” in ds106 are not the instructors, at least for the open participants–it’s really the other students. They are the ones producing the artifacts, creating the assignments, and commenting on each others’ work and blogs.

Better?

It’s no secret on this blog that I prefer the “cMOOC” structure to the xMOOC one. Generally I prefer providing students with more freedom to investigate things they find to be engaging and valuable than to tell them exactly what they should do in order to “learn.” (Though my reservations about rhizomatic learning are also relevant here).

So it would probably seem that I’d prefer ds106 to the Udacity course. Which I do. I really appreciate that the “course” is about what participants can create rather than about what experts have to tell them.

But there just are some things that lend themselves okay well to the expert, knowledge-dissemination model, like basic statistics. That’s not to say that I don’t think participants can add important critical and creative knowledge to the field of stats, but at the start, one has to just grasp some of the basic concepts in order to understand the field well enough to do so. Or at least, to talk to others in the field about one’s ideas. And Udacity does a fairly good job of that, from what I’ve seen.

I expect I’d have a different response to a Udacity-type course in philosophy, however.

 

CC-What? Part 2: No SA (#h817open, Activity 9)

In the previous post I discussed why I don’t use a CC-BY-NC license for my blog, and won’t do so for any open educational resources I create. In this one I do the same for CC-BY-SA.

Share alike

Some of the blogs connected to the OU Open Education course have opted for a share alike clause for their CC licenses–see, e.g., this post by Inger-Marie Christensen, this one by Guy Cowley, and this one by Gitte Bailey Hass. These express a desire to allow continued sharing of the work into the future, so that someone else couldn’t, for example, put an NC or ND clause onto the work later (well, they could, but, you know…).

The point of using a CC-BY-SA license seems to be to keep things free in the sense of “libre”: the work can continue to be not only reused, but also revised, remixed, redistributed (the four R’s, given by David Wiley). The idea behind CC-BY-SA is similar to the idea of “copyleft,” which is explained on the GNU site in terms of software: “Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom.”

Charging money

Now, initially one might think that this means the work would have to remain free (in the sense of gratis) in perpetuity; after all, if one put a CC-BY-SA license on a work, then any changes and redistribution would have to also have a CC-BY-SA license, so it would be available for free (no cost), right? Not necessarily–one can still charge money for something with a CC-BY-SA license. What is not allowed is restricting others’ ability to use and revise and remix and redistribute the work themselves. The legal code of the CC-BY-SA license says: “You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that restrict the terms of this License or the ability of the recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.”

Whether or not you can charge money for such a work is a separate issue. It’s related, of course, in that making money is easier if you can stop others from distributing a work as well, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to charge for it. One way this might work is with software: someone could create a new program based on some code that has a copyleft license, and the new code has to also have a copyleft license. But the program could still be sold, even though the code is openly available for anyone to use, change, redistribute. But there are many people who can’t do anything with the code, can’t figure out how to install the program on their machines, etc., so they might be willing to pay for the software. The GNU site has a good article on how copyleft doesn’t prohibit making money from software: “Selling Free Software.”

Commercial enclosure

Some argue that one can use SA to prevent the sort of commercial enclosure discussed in my previous post, and that it would be a better tool for doing so than NC. For example, a booklet arguing against CC-BY-NC by Paul Klimpel explains (on pp. 12-13) that any work that uses something licensed CC-BY-SA, even when added to or mixed with things not so licensed, has to be released, as a whole, with a CC-BY-SA license as well–“and that is one thing most companies, especially larger ones, are not willing to do,” Klimpel’s translated text reads.

Charles Lowe explains further in “Considerations for Creative Commons Licensing of Open Educational Resources: The Value of Copyleft“:

… if I produce a derivative work of a Share Alike licensed open textbook on my own, one that is significantly enhanced over previous versions, I can sell it, even though I must license it as Share Alike. As a result of the license, any person who buys it—for whatever price I set—can post it to the Internet and give it away for free. From that point on, the potential market value for selling the book has disappeared.

“Pallas cat,” cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by suvodeb

So perhaps CC-BY-SA would cover the concerns about commercial enclosure that Stephen Downes raises (see my previous blog post), and I share, though about which I am not worried for my own work? Downes would not agree; he argues here and here that charging money to access a work means it is no longer free, and here he states that copyleft licenses like CC-BY-SA embody a contradiction: 

They are saying “‘you shall not block anyone from using this content’ and ‘you may block some people from using this content.'” [by charging money for it]

Downes then goes on to reiterate the argument that even if copyleft licenses supposedly leave the free (as in gratis) versions available, it doesn’t end up working that way because the free versions will be enclosed.

What will actually happen is an empirical matter that I don’t have the facts to try to predict, and it’s quite complicated, as this post by Downes and this reply by Wiley suggest. And, as I’m ultimately rejecting both NC and SA, I won’t try to go further into this issue here.

Sharing in perpetuity

There is also a deeper, philosophical argument that can be advanced in support of copyleft principles. J.M. Pedersen argues here that copyleft licenses allow for “reciprocity in perpetuity,” in the sense that they allow one to take resources from a “commons” but also require that anything new done to them be returned back to that commons for anyone else to use.

The GPL [GNU General Public License–a copyleft license] ensures that everyone is able to access the Free Software commons, and also that everyone will act in ways that ensure its continuity (and in fact, growth) into the future. Reciprocity in perpetuity refers to an attitude of responsibility and responsiveness that is necessary in order for the commons to remain perpetually there.

Pedersen also explains that copyleft therefore creates a kind of community of people who agree to reciprocally share their work. This community is, in principle, open to anyone, but of course they have to be willing to engage in this kind of reciprocity: enjoying freedoms to use, to redistribute, and to improve works only if one is willing to allow others to do the same with anything one creates on the basis of them.

This idea of “reciprocity in perpetuity” expresses the desire that free works (in the sense of libre) remain free far into the future. CC-BY and CC0, for example, couldn’t guarantee that–they allow others to use the works in any way they wish, including revising them extensively and releasing the new works under copyright.

I respect this desire, and efforts to keep things libre into the future. It seems that in regards to CC-BY vs. CC-BY-SA, the choice comes down to giving others complete freedom to do what they want with your work vs. ensuring that more people, down the road, have freedom to use, revise, remix, and redistribute your work. There is one restriction that SA imposes that BY alone does not: one has to release whatever one creates from the SA-licensed work under an SA-type license as well. That’s not too much to ask for continued freedom of persons to use the material into the future, right? After all, one could say that the only restriction SA provides is restriction against further restrictions, as Rob Myers points out in this succinct post: “it does not stop you doing anything, it only stops you stopping others.”

But there are costs with SA, of course, as with any choice of license. And looking at those shows that SA does stop others doing some things.

Costs

Mixed Boulder Detail, by Field Outdoor Spaces. Licensed CC-BY

The most direct cost, though some might not think of it as such, is that one’s work is not available for revision, remixing and redistribution by those who do not want to use a CC-BY-SA license. I, for example, don’t even look at any works that are licensed as SA when I am looking for images for my blog, and I am not likely to for OER either, since I plan to use CC-BY for my OER as well. I just completely skip over things with NC or SA licenses (or ND, even though I could use ND images since I use them whole…I just go straight for the CC-BY stuff because it’s the safest).

David Wiley has explained the license compatibility issue arising from SA here, as has Leigh Blackall, here. The issue is that material licensed with SA (or another copyleft license) often cannot be combined with other material that also has a type of SA license into a remix (e.g., one can’t combine material with a CC-BY-SA license with material that has a CC-BY-NC-SA license, because both require that the remix would have to be released under a compatible license as each one). See this chart on the Wikieducator site, which explains license compatibility quite clearly.

Further, of course, the SA designation restricts the sort of license that can be put on the remix, so those who do not wish to use an SA license will simply not use such materials. Which means that, again, releasing one’s work under an SA-type license restricts the number of uses it can be put to, and therefore likely the number of people using it.

Now, this may not matter to some; they may rather want to enter into the reciprocity community Pedersen discusses (as noted above) and only release their work to others who will also share it with others in the same way. But in so doing they are restricting their work to fewer uses (which they may not care about). By using CC-BY (or especially if I choose to move to CC0), my work can be used by more people, which is something I do care about. I put it out there to be used, if anyone finds it of use.

I recognize that this could mean it may be used by more people initially, but then closed off. And that does still bug me–which is why, as noted in my previous post, I’d still like to have some other kind of instrument that would allow for commercial use but not total commercial (or other) enclosure, such that no free versions can be had. This may be impossible, but that’s what I’d like. But again, that ultimately seems unlikely for the stuff I do.

As with most things, the choice between CC-BY and CC-BY-SA comes down to which costs one is most willing to bear. I find SA much less problematic than NC, after all this research, and I very much understand the desire to try to keep works libre in perpetuity through the use of SA.

But ultimately, I think of it this way: I give away my work to be used by others, as many others as want to, and they create something new with it (and maybe with other stuff too). Then it’s no longer just mine; I’m not willing to require that they share it with others in a certain way. My stuff is still available for others to use as they wish; whatever new stuff is created may or may not be, for various reasons that I can’t even imagine at the moment. 

I come back to the idea of giving my stuff away as a gift. Here, you can have it, and that means you can do what you will with it. Maybe you can do wonderful things I couldn’t imagine, and that wouldn’t be possible if I put more restrictions on it. Or maybe you’ll try to enclose it and not allow others to use it. But since I think the latter is less likely with my work than the former, I’m going with CC-BY.

Or possibly CC0.

 

CC-What? Part 1: No NC (#h817open, activity 9)

For week three of the Open Education course at the Open University that I am participating in (though we are now in week 5), one of the activities is to choose a Creative Commons license for “your blog content and other material you produce.” Of course, the latter is so vague that it might be difficult for some to say what license they might use for all of it, as they might end up using different licenses for different things. I am likely to just use one, but I may be in the minority.

I have already gone through some soul-searching on this very issue, but in a direction I haven’t seen in any of the other blogs I’ve looked at for this course: in an earlier post I asked why even use CC-BY instead of, say, CC0, which is more like putting one’s work into the public domain. I’m still undecided, but at this point (as you can tell from this site) am still using CC-BY for my blog.

But what I haven’t done is try to explain why I use CC-BY instead of CC-BY-NC (non commercial) or SA (share alike) on my blog, and why I would probably use CC-BY on any OER I might create (unless I decide to use CC0 instead). Generally, I use CC-BY  because I want to leave my work free for anyone to use however they like. But the issues involved are really quite complicated.

I’m only going to discuss NC and SA and SA in this and the next post, because I can’t imagine asking people not to make derivatives of what I create–it just seems part of sharing freely, to me, that people can revise and remix my work. This post is about why I don’t use CC-BY-NC, and the next is about why I don’t use CC-BY-SA.

[Thanks to David Kernohan, Pat Lockley, Brian Lamb, Rob Myers and Joss Winn for providing some links and ideas on Twitter that I’ve used in this and the next post.]

Commercial use

I’ve read several blog posts in the OU Open Education course that opt for CC-BY-NC  (such as this one by Nick Hood, this one by David (I can’t find a last name) , this one by Daniela Signor and this one by Sukaina Walji.) Some express the sentiment that if they are giving away things for free, then they don’t want others to be making money off of them. I have to say that I kind of get this sentiment, but also not. I guess the idea is that if any money is to be made from what is produced, then the producer should be the one to benefit rather than someone who has just taken the content for free. This sentiment seems to make sense in a market economy, where many people feel that their work should be compensated monetarily if someone else is making money from it; alternatively, some may think it wrong for others to make money from something they have either not worked on or not paid for.

Of course, this sort of thinking should lead people to support open access publishing, since, increasingly, there is not much that publishers do that justifies them closing off access to publications and charging a fee…but that’s an argument for another day (and more complex than I’m making it out here, yes).

Bye Bye Ship by Paulo Ordoveza. Licensed CC-BY

Gifts

I get the idea that if money is being made from something, it seems fair to give some money to those who created the item in the first place. But it seems to me that once you decide to give your work away to be used, altered and remixed by others, it might be better thought of as a gift than a market commodity. And when you give something away as a gift, you might be said to be allowing the recipient(s) to do whatever they like with it. Sure, some people might be a bit upset if they gave a gift that another person decided to sell–but would they be upset because the other person made money off of something that they got for free and therefore didn’t have the right to make money from? To me, that doesn’t really make sense; if you give it away, it becomes someone else’s to do with as they wish.

When I give my stuff away, I’m saying goodbye to control over what happens to it afterwards, because it’s no longer just mine.

I realize that one of the benefits of CC licenses, though, is to allow people flexibility in the degree to which they want to think of their creations as gifts. And some people won’t accept that way of thinking. So here are some other thoughts.

  • If I have chosen not to try to make money off my work, why get upset if someone else does? After all, I could have tried to do so myself, but decided (for whatever reasons) not to. I gave up that option when I didn’t need to. I don’t really understand the sentiment that, if I am not going to make money off my work then no one else can either. Just because I chose to give up getting a financial reward, why must everyone else do so? If it’s because they didn’t work on it or pay for it, consider:
  • If someone is going to be able to make money off of something I created, they are going to have to do some work that I chose not to do, such as marketing it. After all, if I already put it out for free for others to reuse, change, remix, then there is probably going to have to be some kind of value added to it in order for others to be willing to pay. Such as, at least, making it well-known through publicity efforts.

Costs

An argument for using NC could alternatively be made as follows. A person might use NC on their work so that IF someone else thinks they could make money from what the first person has created, then in order for that to happen the other party must contact and discuss this with the creator, and the creator could set terms that require payment to him/herself. I see that, but even then one is not likely to get much (how much do we get in royalties for academic books, say? A pittance, usually), and to me, especially thinking about my own work, this overvalues the remote possibility of a significant financial gain while ignoring some much more likely costs.

Some of these costs are addressed in article by Erik Möller that has been put into a wiki page. I won’t go through them here because they are pretty well explained on that page. And here’s a nice post by Kathi Fletcher focusing on problems with NC for OERs. Finally, this booklet by Paul Klimpel points out (on pp. 14-15) that the NC clause may actually end up prohibiting use of items by organizations and projects that endorse and promote “open” work, while not stopping large commercial companies from using them against the NC license (because they can absorb the cost of a lawsuit if it should ever come). (The booklet as a whole provides many useful arguments against using NC licenses.)

I’ll just add that this post by Daniel Clark, for the OU Open Education course, nicely addresses the point about the ambiguity of “commercial” in the NC licenses. These comments by David Wiley do too (on a discussion of NC licenses for OER, hosted by UNESCO). And having a license with ambiguous terms is not just a philosophical problem; it can mean that fewer people will use your work because they may be unsure whether their use falls under the vague “commercial” terms.

I have sometimes wondered whether this blog counts as “non commercial,” even, given that it is hosted and supported by the University of British Columbia, which, after all, charges money for its courses and thus “makes money” in some sense. It is syndicated on UBC’s “A Place of Mind” site, and thereby acts as part of the university’s publicity strategy in some (very small) sense. To the extent that my blog might help attract students (hmmm, not sure about that one) or donors (ditto), one might say it’s part of the university’s revenue stream. I realize that’s quite a stretch, but that it could even make sense to consider it shows that “non commercial” is unclear.

And this post by David Wiley shows that I am not alone in asking this sort of question (though the question there is slightly different: it’s about whether a textbook licensed NC could be used for a course that students have to pay for, and Wiley answers yes). I don’t ever use images for this blog that have an NC license, even though I am pretty sure I could. Who knows; maybe someday I’ll move this blog over to a platform on which I actually try to make some money through ads (highly unlikely but…). I refuse to go through and change images from the past were such a thing ever to occur.

Commercial enclosure

There is, however, a more pressing argument for the use of NC, given by Stephen Downes (an example can be found here, in the UNESCO discussion noted above). One part of this is that without the NC clause, commercial ventures can take what is freely available and work hard to “enclose” it completely by closing off access to its free versions. Here’s another iteration of this argument, this time focused on the real-world example of Flat World Textbooks at first publishing free textbooks and then beginning to charge for them. This is a harder point to argue against, for it is clear that those who have a vested interest in profit-making from educational resources will be motivated to find ways to enclose any free versions that might exist (though David Wiley does provide a rebuttal to such arguments, in the UNESCO discussion). Downes defines “commercial use” as “the act of restricting access,” in the UNESCO discussion, which makes sense to me, and I can see the point of trying to use NC to keep access open.

Unlocked x2, by Darwin Bell. Licensed CC-BY

After all, in my “gift” image provided above, what could happen is that I could give something away to anyone and everyone who wanted it (because it’s not just one thing, but reusable, revisable, remixable by anyone), but then one of those recipients could decide they want to make sure no one else can have that gift as a gift. That goes against the spirit of what I tried to do in the first place.

Gratis and libre

So really, the issue seems to come to this (as I’m understanding it): using something like CC-BY only (or CC0) is freeing it in the sense of making it “libre” but could lead to it not being free in the sense of “gratis” (see Wikipedia on libre and gratis). But if you use an NC license, then you might be (if Downes is right) protecting the freedom of that work in terms of it being “gratis,” but it’s not “libre” in the sense of it being available for anyone to do anything they like with it. You’re restricting it to only some kinds of uses.

Downes addresses this distinction somewhat differently, here. He argues that we can look at freedom from the perspective of either the people who already have access to some work or those who do not yet have such access. For the former, freedom in the sense of libre means they can do whatever they wish with the work they already have. For the latter, allowing work to be behind a paywall means many can’t access it at all, much less do anything further with it. The second perspective, he argues, is as important as the first (and for those who can’t access works at all it is more important).

No NC for me

Thus, it depends on which sort of freedom you want to promote, I suppose. I think that the idea of letting people do what they wish with what I create (at least much of it; don’t know yet if all) is more important to me, mostly because of

(a) the ambiguity of “commercial”

(b) I don’t expect to be producing anything that will likely be enclosed by a commercial interest

(c) if someone can add value to my stuff and make some money, that’s fine with me b/c I gave it away by choice rather than trying to do so myself.

I still think of it like a gift, and because of (b) I am not terribly concerned about it becoming enclosed so that others can’t access it freely. I agree rather with Mike Seyfang here, that what I’m most concerned about is people finding and using my work. That’s pretty cool. But unlike what he says in that post, I kind of don’t care about people recognizing it as my work.

What is really needed, I think, is a less blunt instrument to do what Downes wants to do. “Noncommercial” is not only too vague, but too broad a term. I don’t mind if someone uses my stuff to make money for themselves and I don’t care if they ask me first because I don’t feel a need to have a share. But what I don’t want is for them to lock out access for anyone else to have my stuff that I’ve given away for free. Is there some other way to keep that from happening? Downes himself notes a need for such a thing, here:

…we want, I think, something like a ‘free content declaration’, a statement we can link to that identifies our desire, as providers of open content, to ensure that it remains open.

And CC-licenses won’t do this for us, Downes argues. But he uses NC in the meantime, which I have decided not to do, for reasons noted above.

There is, though, an argument that the “share alike” CC license (CC-BY-SA) could prevent commercial enclosure, which I’ll consider in the next post.

 

Does searching for OERs have to be so hard?

In my previous post I described an experiment of trying to find open educational resources on a particular topic in philosophy. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but that may not be the fault of the repositories themselves; I’m not sure such OERs have been put into the repositories I searched. And apparently there are many, many OER repositories. In this post I’ll briefly discuss some of the things that would make searching such repositories easier, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know much about OER but is looking for things to use for a course.

Too many repositories

I didn’t realize just how many there were, until I looked at the blog post referred to above, which lists 73 (and counting). A number of these are focused on particular subject areas, such as mathematics or STEM disciplines.  I can see the value of having such subject-oriented repositories–after all, I probably won’t be searching biology resources, e.g., when looking for Kant (though actually, many philosophers’ work crosses boundaries of humanities, social sciences, and the sciences, so…hmmmm…).

Perhaps even more useful are interdisciplinary collections, because one may actually find something relevant in what is, ostensibly, linked to another discipline. And there are so many different interdisciplinary repositories that it’s very time-consuming to do anything like a thorough search. I am guessing this might be due in part to funding situations: different groups get funding for different OER projects, and the result is that there are numerous different repositories. I honestly don’t know how this issue might be resolved, so really, I’m just pointing out the difficulty experienced by the user without having a clue how to fix it.

Perhaps it’s utopian to imagine that there could be a single portal that allows one to search most of these repositories at once? I expect one problem is that different parts of the world haven’t yet come to agreement on things like metadata, formatting of resources, and more, but this is mostly a guess.

“About” pages

Some of the repositories I searched in my previous post have extensive information telling me about the repository itself, where the resources come from, how they are uploaded into the repository, and more. MERLOT is a good example–there is a lot of info in these multiple “about” pages, and it is written in a way that is understandable for  those, like me, who don’t know much about how OERs and OER repositories and metadata (and more) work. I want to know the source of the resources, whether there is any review of them before they are put into the repository, whether the repository has a general policy on accepting resources that are licensed in a certain way, and more. Perhaps I’m an anomaly, but I find this information useful. On some sites it’s hard to find (e.g., Ariadne, MIT Open Coursware), and on others it’s hard for laypersons to read (e.g., Ariadne, Xpert).

Searching

Some repositories had good “advanced search” options, including allowing one to search by a phrase, all words, none of some words, and more (e.g., MIT Opencourseware). Apparently Xpert allows you to do this in the search bar by using Google search syntax, but they don’t tell you this (perhaps I should have just known? But why not make it clear for those of us who aren’t up on such things?). Some sites allowed you to limit your search to things such as type of resource, language, subject, license, which can be useful, though sometimes I may not know in advance what kinds of resources I want to search (lecture notes? presentations? full courses?). I particularly like how Ariadne allows you to narrow your search results after the search is done, by clicking on one or more limiters on the side of the page (you can have several limiters on your search results at once, and can take them off by just clicking on them a second time).

One thing that would make a big difference from the perspective of someone searching for resources is to have enough information in the “results” list to be able to judge the relevance of the material in terms of what the person is looking for. Having only titles and authors (e.g., Jorum), or title, URL and a text passage from the resource itself (MIT Open Courseware, OU’s Open Learn), or title plus passage from the resource and keywords (Ariadne) are not enough. Xpert comes close to being good in this respect, giving titles, authors, descriptions, license information, and related content, but what’s still missing is “type” of resource (full course? lecture notes? presentation? etc.).

Apparently, according to a comment by Pat Lockley on my previous post, part of the issue here is that repositories may be reliant on the metadata provided by the multiple individuals and institutions who create and upload OERs. That makes sense, and honestly, I don’t know how to solve such problems since I have zero experience on the “other side” of the OER repository situation. I expect there are probably serious reasons why such things can’t be standardized, or at least not easily. But it sure would be helpful from a users’ standpoint.

Open?

I was struck by the fact that some of these repositories have content that is not, actually, open. The Open University’s Open Learn site, for example, has some copyrighted works (as does Xpert I think; haven’t looked carefully at the others). That’s fine, I guess, but it doesn’t really count as “open,” so I don’t see how this is an OER repository, or open learning. And if I’m searching for things I can reuse in my own courses, or remix, then copyrighted materials, or those that are CC-BY-ND (no derivatives) are useless to me. I want to only see OER repositories that have only work that is at least Creative Commons licensed, and excluding things that are licensed as “no derivatives.” I’d rather see only CC-BY or public domain (insofar as that is possible–see an earlier post on this), but that’s another post. Connexions has only CC-BY materials, for example. Of course, some sites with copyrighted or otherwise not-open works often let you restrict your search to only CC-licensed materials (such as Xpert), but still, why have that in an open educational resources repository?

Of course, this assumes there is an agreed-upon definition for what “open” means, does not appear to be the case. Here’s one possibility, but clearly it’s not the one used by everyone calling their work “open.”

Perhaps it does have to be so hard

I would really like to hear from those who know about these sorts of things, what the reasons are for the problems I’ve outlined above–does it have to be this difficult? What lies behind such difficulties? Are there things that could be done to address some of them, and if so, are they difficult to do?