Creative Commons, Open UBC

The Library & Open Education: Updates on Good Stuff at UBC

One of the trends at UBC that I’m excited about is the increasing support of the UBC Library for open education. I wanted to call attention to a couple of updates on the open front that are coming from the Library. First, the UBC Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office has posted new copyright guidelines for open courses and OER.  As the introduction to the guidelines state:

To create and preserve knowledge in a way that opens and facilitates the dissemination of knowledge to the world, UBC instructors are encouraged to utilize Creative Commons licenses, digital repositories and other open access channels to distribute their teaching materials broadly. These guidelines are intended to help instructors and course support teams make responsible use of third-party copyrighted materials in courses or in educational resources that will be shared openly on the Internet.

I think this is an important resource (disclosure: I was part of a group that helped review/draft the guidelines) as instructors are often worried that by embracing open pedagogies and open courses, they will run afoul of copyright laws. In my experience, the opposite is true, those instructors who are embracing open are often much more knowledgable and compliant about their copyright footprint than those behind firewalls. However, being able to point to a clear resource on how copyright works on the open Internet is a great first step to pre-empting copyright concerns for open education. Even better, the resource clearly states the Copyright Office’s commitment for providing direct support for navigating the various shades of copyright grey in teaching in the open.  Related, the Copyright Office has also published a general guide on Creative Commons.

Another update is from UBC’s institutional repository, cIRcle. In cIRcle, users already have the ability to select and attach a Creative Commons License to their work thus stipulating how others can share, remix, or reuse their work. However, the folks over at cIRcle recently released version 2.0 of their standard license that users grant to the repository for the purpose of archiving their content. For the first time, the license (pdf):

will provide re-use rights. The Re-use rights spell out the conditions under which people who find your work in cIRcle are allowed to re-use that work. This Creative Commons license is known as the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, or CC BY-NC-ND license.”

By baking in reuse rights directly into the new license, the folks at cIRcle are clearly highlighting the value of UBC’s intellectual output and underscoring how the institutional repository is also an OER repository.

Too often the conversation about open education is “why open?”, not “why not open?” The Library, though, is working to shift that outlook.
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Library Icon by Pieter J. Smits from the Noun Project; CC-BY-3.0

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BCopenEd, UBC Wiki

Why University Wikis Need Open Licenses

Unlike traditional scholarly publishing, a defining characteristic of the wiki model is a lack of barriers between the role of reader and that of editor; users are usually free to move back and forth between the roles at will. Due to this collaborative nature, the question of reuse of wiki content can be more complicated than it is for non-collaborative platforms. The author or creator of a work is generally considered to be the owner of that document’s copyright. However, the inherent ability for any wiki user to modify or expand upon another editor’s work makes it difficult to apply individual authorship or ownership to wiki-based content.

Content on collaborative wikis can thus be considered to be works of joint authorship of all the editors who collaboratively edited and compiled that page. The issue of joint authorship is particularly important around republishing; As Black et al state (pdf), republishing content becomes a community matter as one wiki editor cannot grant republishing or reuse permission without the express permission of the other editors (2007).

A community-based level of permission for reuse can be easily granted and expressed through the use of an open content license, such as a Creative Commons license, that allows for modification and reuse. Individual users would agree (such as through a terms of use), that any content they contribute is done so under the wiki’s open license thus allowing for basic wiki functionality of community editing and reuse. Black et al (2007) further state that for wikis where there is no explict copyright license:

It may be argued that due to the inherent nature of a wiki as a fully editable website that allows any user to read and add content to that state, a license that allows for these basic functions must be implied as a matter of necessity (p. 254).

An open content license thus should be seen as a best practice for the core functionality of university-based wikis: republishing jointly-authored works. Due to their collaborative nature and purpose, most educational and non-commercial wikis do specify an open documentation license that allows their wiki content to be republished, reused, and modified. For example, academic wikis which specify Creative Commons licenses include the Thompson Rivers University Wiki, the University of Calgary Wiki, the CUNY Academic Commons Wiki and many more.

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BCopenEd, Open Badges

Digital Badges in Education: a quick overview

Note: about a year ago Zack, myself, and a few other colleagues were asked to write a short, basic internal summary about badges in higher education. I realized that none of us had ever put it online. So here it is.

What is a Badge?

A badge is a digital symbol that signifies concrete evidence of accomplishments, skills, qualities, or participation in experiences (Educause, 2012).  A digital badge typically consists of both a graphical icon and metadata about who earned the badge, the criteria for earning the badge, when it was issued, and who issued it. Thus a digital badge can provide a visual record of a learner’s achievement and development combined with the required proof (Glover, 2013).  Furthermore, instructors and instructional designers can use educational badges to influence engagement and learning through the provision of focused goals, tasks, and affirmation of performance (Abramovich, Schunn, & Mitsuo, 2013).

Once earned, the learner can display the badge to let others know of their skills mastery or learning accomplishments.  In an “open badge” framework, learners accomplish this by adding the badge they’ve earned from different issuers to a “backpack”, which Glover describes (PDF) as an ePortfolio-type space where learners have control over how their badges are displayed and to whom.  For example, learners can create custom groupings of their earned badges for sharing with different groups, such as different clusters for different employers related to the specific skills required or a different cluster for friends who share a particular hobby (2013).

The open educational badge movement is being lead by the Mozilla Foundation who is developing the interoperability technical and metadata standards needed to provide badge compatibility across different institutions, programs, and web platforms. Without a common badge infrastructure, badges would exist in silos, leaving little user control over how or where they may be issued and displayed. Instead, the Mozilla badge infrastructure enables learners to tie badges to their identity, to display their badges only to audiences they care about; to create meaningful collections of badges from different issuers, and to set privacy controls (Mozilla, 2012). The maturing of Mozilla’s open badge infrastructure in the last year has lead to the increased growth and interest in badges.

How Does It Work?

Badges in higher education can be used as a motivational tool as well as an alternative form of credentialing. Educause (2012) provides the following pathway as a basic model:

  • An instructor or instructional course designer creates specific criteria for earning a badge.
  • A learner fulfills the specific criteria to earn the badge by attending classes, passing an exam or review, or completing other activities.
  • A grantor verifies that the specifications have been met and awards the badge, maintaining a record of it with attendant metadata.
  • The learner pushes the badge into a “backpack,” a portfolio-style server account, where this award is stored alongside badges from other grantors.
  • The learner can keep their badges private or display some or all of them on selected websites, social media tools, platforms, or networks

Furthermore, Mozilla (2012) states that educational badges are meant to be created and issued at different levels.  For example, course level badges can be used for learner motivation, feedback, and gamification within a course and can be tied to learner behaviors or achievements.  These course-level badges can provide the core or entry-level framework for acquiring skills and may be required as pre-requisites to unlock higher level badges. Institutional-level badges can then be used for certification purposes, which may be endorsed at an institutional level with more rigorous or defined assessments.  Finally, multiple badges can be aggregated into higher-level “meta badges” that represent more complex literacies or competencies (Mozilla, 2012).

Who is Doing It?

Badges are a still an emerging pedagogical and technological tool for higher education. Purdue University recently created an open badge system called Passport, which is described as a “learning system that demonstrates academic achievement through customizable badges” (Purdue, N.A.).  In describing the system, Gerry McCartney, Vice President for Information Technology at Purdue stated:

“Students learn in many ways and in a variety of settings while attending a university such as Purdue. In addition to formal lectures and homework, there is also time spent in labs and doing field work; time spent in service projects or internships; and experiences they glean from student organizations. The Passport app will give interested faculty and advisers another way to recognize and validate those skills for students. Through their college careers, students gain knowledge and skills that may not be well-represented in their college degrees. A student may have learned practical skills such as knowing how to write HTML code, have earned a prestigious scholarship or served as an officer in a student organization” (Watson, 2012).

Likewise, the UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute (ASI) is currently developing a badge platform for validating experiential learning within formal institutional contexts at the undergraduate level. Various other universities, such as Carnegie Mellon and Duke, are also beginning to issue badges. A more comprehensive list is of educational badge projects can be found at http://www.hastac.org/digital-badges – projects.

What Does The Research Say?

Research into the use of digital badges in higher education is preliminary and still emerging.  In a large-scale study on the use of Badges in PeerWise, an online learning tool, Denny (2013) found that badges “can act as powerful motivators in educational contexts of this kind and may be integrated with little risk into similar environments.”  However, while Abramovich, Schunn, & Mitsuo (2013) found “evidence of improvements in interest and decrease in counter-productive motivational goals from a system using educational badges”, they also state that “the design specifics of educational badges in addition to the targeted students will be the main predictors of badge influence on learning motivation. The implication for instructional designers of badges is that they must consider the ability and motivations of learners when choosing what badges to include in their curricula.”

A comprehensive, annotated bibliography for educational badges can be found here:  http://www.hastac.org/digital-badges-bibliography

How Could Badges Be Used at UBC?

A priority of UBC’s flexible learning initiative is “the creation of a flexible continuum of learning between credit and non-credit” (UBC, 2013). UBC has long embraced online learning and with the recent attention to flexible and open pedagogies, interest and awareness in providing alternative methods of motivation and credentialing has also increased.  Open, digital badges are a pedagogical and assessment tool that may be used at UBC for both motivating learners and providing alternative, pedagogical pathways.

Three models of how badges may be used at UBC include:

  • As a student motivation tool within a course. For example, UBC’s Video Game Law course has proposed that issuing badges for specific course activities may increase student engagement.  WordPress (CMS, UBC Blogs), MediaWiki (UBC Wiki), and Blackboard (Connect), have tools that could allow for badges to be used in courses.
  • As a staff and faculty professional development tool, in which faculty and staff can earn badges for teaching and learning skills they have acquired at professional development events.
  • As a tool for creating a personalized learning pathways across UBC courses and open educational resources.  For example, professional programs may want to create badges that highlight competencies earned across courses.  Additionally, developers of open educational resources may use badges as a way for life long learners to engage with their content

References & Resources

Abramovich, S., Schunn, C., & Ross Mitsuo, H. (2013). Are badges useful in education?: it depends upon the type of badge and expertise of learner – Springer. Educational Technology Research and Development. doi:10.1007/s11423-013-9289-2

Antin, J., & Churchill, E. F. (2011). Badges in social media: A social psychological perspective. CHI 2011, 1–4. Retrieved from http://gamification-research.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/03-Antin-Churchill.pdf

Cheng, R., & Vassileva, J. (2006). Design and evaluation of an adaptive incentive mechanism for sustained educational online communities. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 16(3-4), 321–348. doi:10.1007/s11257-006-9013-6

Denny, P. (2013). The effect of virtual achievements on student engagement. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 763–772). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2470654.2470763

EDUCAUSE. (2012). ELI 7 Things you should know about badges.  Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-badges

Glover, I. (2013). Open Badges: A Visual Method of Recognising Achievement and Increasing Learner Motivation. Student Engagement and Experience Journal, 2(1). doi:10.7190/seej.v1i1.66

Goligoski, E. (2012). Motivating the Learner: Mozilla’s Open Badges Program. Access to Knowledge: A Course Journal, 4(1). Retrieved fromhttp://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/a2k/article/view/381

Grant, S. & Shawgo, K.E. (2013). Digital Badges: An Annotated Research Bibliography. Retrieved from http://hastac.org/digital-badges-bibliography

Halavais, A. M. C. (2012). A Genealogy of Badges. Information, Communication & Society,15(3), 354–373. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2011.641992

HASTAC. (2013).  Project Q&A With: The SA&FS Learner Driven Badges Project Retrieved from http://www.hastac.org/dml-badges/SA%2526FS-Learner-Driven-Badges-Project

Ledesma, P. (2011, July 10). Can Badges Offer Viable Alternatives to Standardized Tests for School Evaluation? Education Week – Leading From the Classroom. Retrieved August 14, 2013, fromhttp://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/leading_from_the_classroom/2011/07/can_badges_offer_viable_alternatives_to_standardized_tests_for_school_evaluation.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-FB

Montola, M., Nummenmaa, T., Lucero, A., Boberg, M., & Korhonen, H. (2009). Applying game achievement systems to enhance user experience in a photo sharing service. In Proceedings of the 13th International MindTrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era (pp. 94–97). New York, NY, USA: ACM.

Purdue (n.a.) Passport: Show What You Know.  Retrieved from http://www.itap.purdue.edu/studio//passport/

The Mozilla Foundation , a Peer 2 Peer University, & The MacArthur Foundation. (2012 8–27). Open Badges for Lifelong Learning. Retrieved from https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:OpenBadges-Working-Paper_012312.pdf

The Mozilla Foundation. (2012).  Badges, FAQs. Retrieved from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/FAQs

UBC (2013).  Flexible Learning Priorities.  Retrieved from http://flexible.learning.ubc.ca/what-is-flexible-learning/flexible-learning-priorities/

Young, J. R. (2012, January 8). “Badges” Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

Shield Icon by Benni from the Noun Project

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BCopenEd, presentation, Student as Producer

Case Studies on the Student as Producer (Slides)

“In the end, an essay or an exam is an instance of busywork: usually written in haste; for one particular reader, the professor; and thereafter discarded.” – Jon Beasley-Murray, from Was introducing Wikipedia to the classroom an act of madness leading only to mayhem if not murder?

Novak and I recently had the opportunity to present at ETUG’s Fall Workshop on the topic of “Case Studies for Students as Producers.” In the Student as Producer model, as Derek Bruff has eloquently distilled from Mike Neary’s conceptualization: “students should move from being the object of the educational process to its subject. Students should not be merely consumers of knowledge but producers, engaged in meaningful, generative work alongside the university’s faculty”.

This idea of positioning student work as as a collaborative and valuable resource alongside that of faculty members is an important driver of uptake for some the tools and technologies, such as UBC Blogs and the UBC Wiki, that support open education initiatives. Here are a couple of the amazing open projects working using these tools to support students as producers:

  • Some instructors in the Arts One program are asking their students to critique or analyze readings and lectures on blogs. The use of blogs takes the writings out of a closed loop with only the instructor reading and responding to a student’s work. Instead, the students are sharing their critiques and thoughts openly on the internet, where they are contributing to the scholarly conversation of classic texts of the past two millennia. Furthermore, the student blog posts are syndicated via rss to the Arts One Open site, where the student content appears along side the instructor content, creating a rich and robust extension of the course. Clicking on any given tag, such as Borges, gives amazing and growing archive of online lectures, podcasts, essays, and critiques. Finally, since the students are blogging on their own personal blogs, they control their content, which they can delete, edit, or move to a new space at will.
  • Similarly, in LAW423B: Video Game Law, students can author directly on the public facing course website, allowing them to create and post content along side the instructor. This content is not just limited to the student and instructor, but is on an open website that is quickly becoming a highly trafficked and widely-read resource about a specific topic. Thus, students are sharing their work and being read by leaders in the video game law community.
  • Students in FNH200 are asked to author collaborative open wiki and video projects, thus students are not only sharing their work with instructor, each other, and, well, the world, but also future students who will take the course. This is important because, as it turns out, current and past students are setting the bar for the quality of future projects. The quality of the student work is being elevated as students are able to review and reference previous years projects, build upon them, and develop what is effectively an open knowledge base on food science (and their work is being incorporated into he course).

And here’s our slides for our presentation:

We broke pretty much every rule there is about using slides effectively in a presentation (bad design, low colour contrast, mismatched fonts on walls of text, etc) but I’m going to position that strategy as intentional effort to highlight the artistry of the projects we’ve been fortunate to witness and support in one way or another.

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