EDUCAUSE | OSS

The quest for sustainability in open courseware

pault — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 11:43:27 -0500

I've been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I'll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I've been formulating at Oxford.

Abelson took a broad view, inviting the audience to go back 25 years and defined programming as a "novel formal medium for expressing ideas." Against that, he got us to consider the aspirations and expectations that we might have had then, encapsulating this in 3 predictions for 25 years thence (i.e. today):

a global encyclopaedia
TCP/IP global
collaborative educational resources

It's the third that has yet to be properly delivered. Starting from consideration of why not, he then developed the rationale leading to the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative and the more recent Creative Commons Learn (ccLearn).

Abelson described OCW and ccLearn as means to building infrastructure for sharing academic pursuits, covering platforms and materials in Sakai, policy structure and media structure, designed in such a way as to protect academic values. The need to beware certain kinds of commercial activities was drilled into the audience: such concerns are, he argued, keen on monopolising and overcharging us. So, in the face of impending monopoly, it was argued that we need OCW, shared repositories etc, in order to be taken seriously at national and international levels. The IPR issue highlights a tension between the commercial and academic world. He urged everyone that we shouldn't leave it to the publishers to control, and by way of illustration mentioned that universities can have a policy on publication that insists on the right to retain rights and publishers should be sought that allow reasonable IPR.

Enter Creative Commons' ccLearn:

Our goal is to make material more "interoperable," to speed up the virtuous cycle of use, experimentation and reuse, to spread the word about the value of open educational content, and to change the culture of repositories to one focused on "helping build a usable network of content worldwide" rather than "helping build the stuff on our site.

It's new to me and one month on I've subsequently tried to find out more. I certainly haven't searched far, but ccLearn still seems largely hidden, with little information available: someone who hears about it might well type cclearn in Google and would find cclearn.com, the 'Center for Creative Learning,' which has also taken the domain cclearn.org. I found it difficult to come across much of substance regarding ccLearn - just a few snippets, e.g. a mention on Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. Of course, as it's a Creative Commons project, you could go to the creativecommons.org site, but when I entered cclearn site:creativecommons.org in Google only one match was returned! At least it informs us that they now have an Executive Director - Ahrash N. Bissell - congratulations to him :-)

The presentation itself flowed swiftly with ease until ... there was a big anticlimax at the end when the economic realities became evident - in Q&A at the end he admitted that the average cost of preparing an MIT course the OCW way is around $15,000-$20,000, mainly down to legal concerns apparently.

Indeed in a subsequent session, 'Open courseware, pedagogy , Social Practices and Tools,' which elaborated on OCW initiatives, major problems with the current OCW were identified:

too expensive to create OCW sites
little or no automation
no connection to CLE
only large institutional commitment can get OCW off the ground

OCW is a meritorious activity and undoubtedly makes a major contribution to making more visible the academic enterprise - the Webometrics 'World University Rankings' provide some indication of this with MIT sitting on top of the table (whereas Oxford lies many places beneath). It can be argued that these are very limited measures, but Web visibility really does count.

Given that it's worthwhile, but costly, how might there be economic sustainability? One might look for inspiration to open source software (OSS) generally and follow the example of seeking revenue from support, certification etc., but I expect this has already been covered. More specific to the educational context, the Open courseware session expressed the hope that the next generation of OCW, dubbed OCW2, will reduce cost by employing graduate students, trained to understand licensing, and enabling them to share in the academic sphere. To enable this, they are looking at incentive structures, trying to get early buy in. The graduate helpers are called Digital Scribes whose engagement can work positively to foster "co-creation" and "communities," but I think graduates may well swap and change how they earn enough to get by, so can't always be depended on. We also heard that from another point of view, OCW may be regarded as filling out the long tail of publishing (a phrase coined by Chris Anderson), as illustrated by Amazon, which is able to sell at least one copy of every book, no matter how obscure, thus offering a chance to support specialisms (J.R. Hartley would be pleased!) and I guess Lulu is another good illustration. However, overall, I'm not convinced this will be much better.

So what would this small person from a small island suggest as an alternative approach?

Allow me to start with a quote from one of last year's extraordinary debates on the governance of Oxford University. It comes from Donald Fraser, Professor of Earth Sciences, who as reported in proceedings from Congregation , 14 November, 2006 stated:

Dynamic knowledge-based businesses are moving away from large, centrally administered monoliths, towards small, self-organising entrepreneurial cells, flexibly connected and practically self determining—just look at the campus models of companies like 3M, Google and Apple.

What does that mean to me as someone who works in academic support? The message I read (and readily agree with) is that academics rather than administrators are the ones who, along with their colleagues and peers, are in the best position to determine what they should do with their academic activities - in terms of how it can help them, their department, their field of study and their students. In the context of the debate as a whole, he was arguing against the motion because it contained proposals that were seen as increasing central control over the academics in ways that would threaten their independence and autonomy. From this, I infer that essentially that academic endeavour starts internally and is facilitated by an inter-networking mode of operation. If you look at the origin and flow of ideas, it often starts wthin one individual, spreads to a group and then more widely. It's a fact not just of research, but of teaching and of any other activity. Institutions need to support this as best they can, particularly as individuals are becoming increasingly mobile, moving from one institution to another.

This view of academic freedom doesn't deny the institution and its overall mission, but it does ask for a light touch, in terms of how academic enterprise is directed and also in terms of general bureacracy, particularly the legal aspects. I guess this is one of the major issues of OCW and I wonder if OCW2 really lessens this. I think a basic lesson to take from the governance debate (I'm not sure I could grapple with many of the subtleties) is that we should seek first to clarify principles: the professor is the academic authority who should drive the decision-making subject to the authorisation of the institution. In order for this to work effectively, the authorisation should be devolved, which is actually the traditional way in which Oxford works. If it's not suitably devolved, then you get a lot of overhead, so that institutional approval becomes necessary for very small steps, making things very expensive.

Such a devolved view can then transfer much of the responsibility to individuals, requring them to focus especially on basically two main issues:

appropriate use of content that you haven't produced yourself
deciding on the rights you wish to grant to content you have produced

If these issues are addressed as early as possible in the course creation lifecycle - by determining what's needed in the way of permissions and what should be granted in the way of rights - then that should save a lot of resources later on. With the right training, by the time materials are published the first time in a course management system, the main licensing issues and policy should already be resolved so that when it comes to making available as open courseware, the main effort is technical. This is dependent, I think, on authorisation at the highest level established as early as possible, ideally at the outset, so that it is quickly devolved. The kinds of authorisation I have in mind is a policy document on the kinds of licensing that are permitted, how the University is identified with each publication, specifically giving academic members the rights to publish according to Creative Commons licenses subject to various terms and conditions. Gaining authorisation itself may not be easy, though, as the institution will likely require strong arguments as to the benefits of making content free to use and repurpose - ICT staff may already have had a taste of this in trying to persuade their institutions to let them release software under an open source license.

Assuming processes can be put in place, what does this mean for implementation?

The OCW presentations I've attended have conveyed the sense that OCW is a long way from just open educational content - I certainly got that impression from the Educause '06 presentation Open Sharing, Global Benefits - The OCW consortium where open educational resources - were defined in terms of digitised materials offered freely and openly to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research; whereas open courseware are specific kind of educational resource materials, which have to be organised around a course, though the duration is open. There's a lot of emphasis on process and, in particular, OCW requires that content must be IP-cleared: every contribution gets passed through and checked - sometimes it is removed or replaced where it is felt that copyright has not been granted on at least some content. When I stepped back to reflect on openness in open courseware, I could see quite a few severe hurdles to surmount, some of which seemed unnecessary. Such a heavyweight approach has led to some consideration of sustainability in terms of a few institutions managing the processes, hosting OCW content, and selling this as a service: Wolfgang Greller sees this is an opportunity for OpenLearn, the OU's version of OCW.

However, I have reservations about the hosting provision at such institutional level through third parties and, in any case, my view is that we are dealing essentially with another output, one that results from existing internal processes to which most resources have already been devoted. Rather, institutional ownership can be expressed naturally through their own LMS, which can provide many organisational benefits, not least a single point of access to all study resources for students and for external examiners. However, If we are to support academics individually as originators of content, then the LMS system needs to support personalisation, a flexible environment in which to organise and publish. Indeed, I feel that the way Oxford is run in a devolved and self-organising way points to more organic and sustainable means that make sense particularly with the host of Web2.0 technologies are available. Hence, I now feel more confident that an LMS can provide valid linkage between personalisation and open courseware, as intimated in my poster at last year's conference in Dallas.

I think we should try to envision how it would work for an academic. I imagine a Professor accessing a LMS and going straight to their personal area, in which they have inter alia options to create, review and share content. For Oxford users it means using MyWebLearn, which makes available all the tools necessary to author a course. Sharing the material can be carried out literally in a few steps:

Log in.
Go to the resource you wish to make public
Click on the link 'View Access' at the bottom of the page.
In the following page go to the pull-down menu 'Allow..' and select 'Public' to 'look at' this page.
Click on the [Add] button to enact.

This simple mechanism has already been used to some extent in WebLearn, evident in Google with a few thousand resources (pages) indexed compared with fewer than a hundred pages from another institutional VLE with the same name! However, this process only enables the materials to be put in the open. From the academic's perspective, there needs to be added to this the means for specifying the licensing. Assuming a suitable policy and process were in place, then options could easily be added. Overall it needs to be very easy to use, ideally as easy as contributing to a blog.

On the other side of the coin, materials published this way as courses need to satisfy certain organisational and structural requirements - the content should be sourced from departmental areas, which need to be planned and designed into the system. Also, to be discoverable they need to be indexed with suitable metadata; and interfaces need to be provided that pull together all the relevant information in a meaningful way. We can achieve this by mapping to institutional structures, e.g. the LMS can automatically insert meta data about department, so that subsequently presenting the courses on offer as a whole, can be achieved by aggregation, say. Here I think we can learn from Warwick blogs, an institutional blog hosting service in which staff and students are able to write freely and connect with others. However, they have linked in with their institutional NDS LDAP directory, so that you can browse blogs based on department and even module of study. WebLearn already uses the institutional map in that it is hierarchical in structure, with the top two levels controlled centrally as far as departments and colleges. However, once at that level, areas are managed locally, i.e. content creation has been decrentralised, allowing natural growth.

The issue of quality control should already be handled in the processes of preparing the courses at the institution; what is being provided is largely a snapshot of the materials that were used in live courses. Whatever the processes, I think it is important that the decisions about releasing such content are devolved as much as possible and that the mechanisms for effecting it are as easy as the illustration above. I understand that for OCW(2) processes are being developed for Sakai to make publication a smoother process, so perhaps the production of Creative Commons licensed content may be an option in future, though I wonder how devolved it is and whether it revolves around MyWorkspace. Also, until Sakai has hierarchy, in comparison the technicalities of generating such materials appear far easier in Bodington (and I suspect developing pipeline processes to go with them might be easier also).

If another editorial layer is needed, then that can emerge from peer networks. A number of years ago I came across the Hippias search engine, a service (now merged with Noesis) that as I recall had an editorial board of experts in Philosophy whose members each maintained their own Web sites. These sites contained links to other sites and the Hippias search engine would index all the pages at the end of these links, thereby building a trusted indexed collection. I think it's a very apposite illustration of how you can combine devolved human quality control with automation.

This is obviously work in progress and much is still open to debate, but from the view I've described above, I think the focus should very much be with the academics, devolving much of the decision-making and supporting them as appropriate. Technically, this means Web2.0-like approaches should be incorporated and so I expect many elements of ccLearn could play a major role in facilitating institution-oriented OCW.

I hope to talk more about personalisation and Web 2.0 in future posts...

Sakai in Amsterdam

catherine — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:43:39 -0500

Very quiet in the office this week... Almost all the developers, and a good chunk of everybody else, are away at the 7th Sakai Conference in the Netherlands.

From the conference homepage, I found a nice use of Sakai Confluence, to help conference attendees do travel planning and find out where to spend their free time (when they're not attending BOF sessions :-) )

New Patents Page Posted at EDUCAUSE Connect

cluckett — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:13:14 -0500

EDUCAUSE has posted a new Patents resource page. The page features resources such as information about copyright lobby groups, government policy surrounding open source software, and working with patents in the higher education arena.

Blackboard Patent Reexamination: Response from the Sakai Foundation

catherine — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:34:18 -0600

To update my post on the Blackboard patent, here is some more detail on the requested reexamination of the patent claim and the Sakai Foundation's response.

As Paul Erickson notes (thanks, Paul!), the news initially started bubbling up when the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced that it has formally asked the Patent Office to reexamine and ultimately cancel all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent on e-learning systems.

The request has demonstrated the very real sense of unity and common purpose among the educational open source software community. It was filed on behalf of the Sakai Foundation (sakaiproject.org), the Moodle Community (moodle.org), and the ATutor Community (atutor.ca).

In their press release, the Sakai Foundation refers to the "the surrounding fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) being spread by Blackboard", and states: "We, the Sakai Foundation, consider the Blackboard patent to be a prime example of a bad patent in the area of educational software. It is a threat to open source developers, providers and users of educational software."

Joseph Hardin, Sakai Foundation Board Chairman, comments: "Blackboard would have done well to heed the recent recommendations of the Educause Board by placing the patent in the public domain and dropping all litigation. Since Blackboard has refused to follow these recommendations, we have taken steps to render this patent toothless."

Blackboard Patent Claim Rejected? [Update: Re-examined, Not Rejected]

catherine — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:51:41 -0600

...Or so says the grapevine. I've just heard via John Norman, Director of CARET and Chair of the Sakai Board, that the patent claim filed by Blackboard (#6,988,138: Alcorn et al, Internet-based education support system and methods) has been rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

[Update 26/01/07: Apologies to John, who I've misquoted here. He confirms the patent has not been rejected, but the USPTO has accepted the SFLC request for a reexam. See my subsequent post for further details].

Why is there no clear leader among CMS / LMS / VLEs?

catherine — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 09:35:26 -0500

OSS Watch, the UK's non-partisan advice service on open-source software and open standards, have just published a survey report last week about software use in UK higher education.

The survey, carried out in February-March 2006, reports on the take-up of open-source software (OSS) in UK Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) institutions. By default, it also gives a picture of the NON-takeup of open-source solutions. The survey is based on data collected from nearly 1 in 5 UK institutions (18%), making it a useful information baseline from which to extract trends and make future predictions.

There's a lot of good reading in the report, but the thing that interests me most is that it shows that there is currently no clear leader amongst Content Management Systems (CMS) in UK HE. Why is this?

Stuart and Paul will probably have opinions about this :-) What follows is my 2p worth. (NB: Stuart responded before I could upload the rest of my post -- however I think we agree on many points).

One argument for diversity in e-learning systems and services for higher education is that instutions are themselves diverse, and have specific needs – particularly in relation to pedagogy. But is this really true? Are the needs of HEIs actually that diverse? If we look at the range of software in use within HE, we see that within particular domains, a handful of commercial providers dominates the landscape: such as Oracle’s PeopleSoft within administrative services; or Microsoft’s Windows Explorer for staff/student web access. Indeed, the OSS survey report shows that Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer are deployed by all institutions on most desktops. And this software is not necessarily restricted to administrative functions: for example, web browsers and email applications are commonly used within teaching and research practice, too.

Given this perspective, the diversity of LMS software in use starts to look less like a result of the actual needs of HEIs, and more like a function of the “early stage” marketplace – with commercial vendors offering a range of competing “enterprise solutions”. Where LMS and their ilk are concerned, there is no killer app. Yet. From the above discussion, that would seem to point to the need for an approach to software design that attempts to create “permeable” software; by which I mean, flexible software, that is adaptable by users to their needs.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible that we just don’t yet know what a killer LMS would look like. Are our LMS too structured; too hierarchical; too, well, “enterprisey”? That may be, in part, a legacy of the tendency to use LMS to manage administration-related tasks. More importantly, it may also be that, at present, we don’t really know how to reflect pedagogical aims and needs accurately within educational software design.

Significantly, the OSS survey shows that Moodle is now in use as a VLE within 56% of UK Further Education institutions. Moodle’s much-praised flexibility and ease of use have always weighed in its favour within the FE sector– HE developers, please take note!

Most LMS are designed either to be “pedagogically neutral” (hence, designers / vendors hope that their product will reach a maximum of customers) or else to conform to a specific and/or fashionable pedagogical perspective (e.g. Moodle is designed to reflect principles of constructivist learning). We can argue over which of these approaches is the correct one, but the fundamental issue to my mind is that pedagogy is, by its nature, difficult to define, and thus is difficult to capture. Pedagogy is culturally embedded within institutions; it is “situated action”; for even the most reflective practitioners (including students, as well as staff) it functions tacitly, as well as explicitly. Our current methods for requirements analysis and systems specifications require precise articulation. Inevitably, they are a form of translation, which is another way of saying, a form of approximation. “Stuff” always gets lost in the process, and that “stuff” may well be crucial. We need a system for the specification of e-learning systems that can work in a more intuitive, or more tacit, way – or, more radically, that could enable users to specify their own system.

VIA Project: Digital Video-Based Research Methods

catherine — Tue, 02 May 2006 07:02:52 -0500

This weekend, I was in Manchester for the second workshop of the Live Sociology research methods course. I met Jen Patashnick from the VIA Project, who travelled over from Boston to give a talk about her experience using video-based research methods.

VIA is a fascinating research project based at Boston Children's Hospital. Founded by Dr Michael Rich, the project uses digital video and a participative research design to investigate patients' experiences of living with chronic illness. Jen has been working on VIA for eight years now, and has overseen the transformation of its analytic methods from using paper-based forms, through to computer-assisted qualitative analysis using Visual Basic macros and NVivo, through to using the open-source software Transana.

CARET has also used Transana for video-based education research projects, so I was really interested to hear from Jen how the VIA project has evolved its particular methodology over time. We agreed that one of the main benefits of using OSS is the possibility for direct dialogue with developers. Research in healthcare and education can be a slow process, in terms of research design and data collection, but research methods can develop very quickly and the software used needs to be responsive to that. I'd be really interested to hear from any other learning technologists or education / social researchers using Transana.

Thoughts on screencasting ...

mpasiewicz — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 14:40:00 -0500

ELI recently came out with a new rendition of their "Seven Things" series. This one is on screencasting. I love screencasting and have learned a lot from some of the screencasts that I've consumed. The article mentioned above has an instructional technology slant to it, but the area that interests me most about the potential for the technology is for demonstrating the features and functionality of open source software.

Just recently, I used a screencast to get a preview of some new, open source functionality that some people in the drupal community are working on ... http://www.zacker.org/node/30

If you take a peek at it, you can clearly see that these are things that just don't translate well into text or audio only, and this seems like a really rich model for demonstrating open source products that can't provide sales teams to go out and hock their wares. Furthermore, it is one thing to provide demos and community rankings of open source software like the great site over at OpenSource CMS or to provide really rich profiles of software that aid in decision support -- like what's been done over at EduTools, but I think it is another to provide guided tours of key features of software products. I think screencasts can provide a really nice intermediary by enabling folks to get a feel for a product with out having to invest a lot of time blindly learning from a base install of software.

Can screencasts compete with a sales team that can meet with you one-on-one? Well, yes, in many ways, you bet it can. Name one sales person that is going to show me a demonstration of their software at 4AM. Now, multiply that condition by a whole host of people that could spread awareness of a screencast via word-of-mouth. Well, okay, I need to get off my soap box here as I haven't taken the time to do many myself ... just one. Still, I remain hopeful that an organiztion and/or groups of "small pieces loosely joined" will take great strides towards taking up this banner and creating a series of well produced pieces that we can all learn from. That might not have been entirely coherent, but hopefully it made sense.

What do you think? I'd be interested in your thoughts ... does anyone have any ideas about why we haven't seen more of these?

"Open Source: Community, Collaboration, Commitment"

gsteele — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:49:00 -0600

This is the podcast of the third general session of EDUCAUSE's 2006 Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference. This session was recorded on Thursday, January 12, 2006. The session featured panelists Patty Gertz, Carl W. Jacobson and Tony Stanco and was moderated by H. David Lambert. Below is a brief synopsis.

"The higher education software marketplace is undergoing rapid change. Understanding the role of open source software in this volatile market is crucial. Panelists will bring the perspectives of higher education and the government sector as they discuss the pros and cons of open source licensing and collaborative, community development."