Monday, April 9, 2012

OpenEd Evangelist Badge Earned

With this entry I am claiming that I have earned the OPenEd Evangelist badge.  The blog post with my arguments is found here.

The blog post describing my experience speaking with a faculty is found here.

I express my deepest appreciation to Dr. Wiley and those who have participated in this open education course this spring.  I have learned a great deal and found myself considering how I might contribute in ways that will increase access to education for those who might not otherwise have such access in the future.

Conversation with a Faculty Member

In pursuit of the OpenEd Evangelist badge, I drafted an argument supporting the adoption of open education (see blog post of argument here).  I then had a conversation with a member of the faculty at an institution of higher education.

We had met regarding the development of some on-line instruction for the use of students on the campus.  As we talked, I discussed some of the issues outlined in my argument post (referenced earlier) and expressed my belief that the efforts of the faculty member could be a blessing far beyond the course and student population we were then discussing.

I mentioned the possible use of OER in the development of the content for the course we were discussing.  I also proposed that we actually develop some of the content we were planning to put on-line and that we openly license that content.  I suggested that we might want to consider only using content that was openly licensed and then licensing the course as OpenCourseWare and making it available on-line.

The faculty member was familiar with MIT OpenCourseWare and had been considering how curriculum might be offered that way from the institution.  In fact, this faculty member had designed a curriculum that progressed through several levels of instruction (foundation, upper division, graduate) for different topics in the field that was part of their curriculum.  We discussed how we might follow that map and develop a complete curriculum plan for each specific topic and make that available openly as well.

The last point that I emphasized was that we could make these courses part of the instructional strategy in the classrooms on campus.  These courses would be advertised as supplementary materials available 24x7 to matriculated students is support of their learning.  This would position the open courses in the strategies supporting on-campus students and justify expenditure of faculty time to develop the courses and department and institutional funding to develop and maintain them.

There was an agreement that we would proceed with the course we were then discussing in the format that was already proposed due to time constraints.  But we identified two general education level courses that we would commence a project in the near future to produce as OpenCourseWare.  I have prepared the budget and I am awaiting official project approvals (and developer assignments) to begin course design and production.

I was pleased to encounter a faculty member who was progressive in thinking about the sharing of knowledge and curriculum openly with learners around the world.  I am almost afraid to approach other faculty on campus because I don't believe that all of them will be as receptive.  But that will be an opportunity to assess just how persuasive my arguments are.

Why Open Education?

There are many reasons that educators, administrators and boards at educational institutions of all sorts, and government and other funding bodies should consider the promise of open educational resources in setting strategies for the future.  I have chosen to focus on five specific elements that support OER as a strategy that will expand the opportunities for education to more people while also controlling the cost and effort required to produce and disseminate educational materials.

One element that drives the consideration of OER is the expanded need for education.  Education is the greatest source of opportunity for men and women around the world.  The USAID Education Strategy for 2011-2015 makes the observation that
Education Strategy is premised on the development hypothesis that education is both foundational to human development and critically linked to broad­based economic growth and democratic governance. Research has demonstrated that education raises individual incomes and, in an enabling environ­ment, can contribute significantly to economic growth.
Education helps ensure that growth is broad­based and reaches the poorest. Through its impact on economic growth, education helps catalyze transitions to democracy and helps preserve robust democratic governance. Education also helps improve health outcomes. Access to education is a crucial precondition to educational impact, but what matters most thereafter is the quality of education. Because of these important links to other powerful drivers of development, educational investments should be understood as dynamic and transformational levers of change. (U.S. Agency for International Development, 2011)
While some developing countries are seeing demographic trends for citizens in the traditional higher education age group leveling off or even decreasing, this is not a trend in much of the world.  One author observed:
Half of the world’s population is under twenty years old; …over thirty million people are fully qualified to enter a university, but there is no place available. This number will grow to over 100 million during the next decade; To meet the staggering global demand for advanced education, a major university needs to be created every week; In most of the world, higher education is mired in a crisis of access, cost, and flexibility. The dominant forms of higher education in developed nations—campus based, high cost, limited use of technology—seem ill-suited to address global education needs of the billions of young people who will require it in the decades ahead. (Atkins, Brown, & Hammond, 2007)
This means that the goals of increasing opportunity for liberty, democracy, economic vitality for much of the world's population is closely linked to the ability to provide opportunities for education.  As Atkins points out, such opportunity will not be available if we seek to expand education in these areas in traditional ways.  Non-traditional teaching and learning channels will be required, as will non-traditional resources.

A second consideration then is how we might replace the building of costly traditional institutions of higher education with delivery methods and channels that are more cost-effective and offer access at minimal costs to the learners, who often have limited means.  In 2001 MIT showed one possibility when they embarked on their OpenCourseWare initiative.  They determined that they would make all of their courses available online to anyone, at anytime, and anywhere.  This meant that the lectures, syllabi, documents, and other teaching artifacts that were part of the instruction in the MIT classroom would now be available, without cost to the user, to teachers, students, and lifelong learners around the world.  This is one response to expanding access in non-traditional ways.

A third consideration is the limited expense to offer educational resources, such as entire courses, textbooks, audio, video, simulations, and other learning artifacts through the internet.  It is true that the development of many of these resources is costly in their initial development.  The production of these resources is often covered by institutional budgets where wages are paid to faculty and supporting personnel to develop the resources.  This resource development is paid with funds from governmental and other sponsoring entities, foundations and other generous philanthropists, endowment funds, and student tuition, and other sources.  Generous support from these sources covers the cost of developing the resources, and once developed, the remaining costs for their use in education are those associated with their delivery.

In traditional settings, this cost includes the maintenance of facilities, the time of instructors, tutors, and support personnel.  The costs for people, buildings, infrastructure, and student services can be prohibitive on a per student basis when these traditional structures are used to deliver courses.  Universities cover these costs as part of their traditional operations.  Expanding the opportunity to access these resources becomes a marginal cost analysis.  If there are minimal marginal costs to extending access to the educational resources then there should be minimal reason to resist extending access to these resources.  MIT has blazed the way in applying this theory to their curriculum.  Other major institutions have followed (see OCW Consortium Members to see a list of institutions offering OpenCourseWare).

One element that is critical to consider when institutional funds and faculty creativity are used to develop these resources is ownership of the artifacts and objects created.  Ownership resides with the creator according to laws in most of the countries of the world.  The fourth consideration in creating greater access to education is the need to effectively deal with ownership of these resources.  Most of these resources will be covered by copyright.  Some by patent.  Rightsholders have always had the ability to license and authorize use of their creations to others.  The processes to grant individual authorizations and to draft legal documents protecting the rightsholders and the licensees is time consuming and costly.  Addressing this licensing issue is necessary if the marginal costs of sharing developed OER is to be kept to a minimum.

The free and open movements have grown in an attempt to address this issue.  These movements have their roots in the concept of crowdsourcing software (open software projects) and in the sharing of developed learning resources (open  content and open access).  These open movements developed multiple different licenses that allowed creators of resources to share them freely, or openly with others.  These licenses, and their derivations, proliferated during the early years of the 21st century.  The Creative Commons license has become the consolidation of these licenses into a standard, readily understood and available, and legally defensible licensing methodology allowing creators to make their works available to others at little to no cost to the user (see http://creativecommons.org/ for license information).

Projects like OpenCourseWare and other OER are developed and licensed under Creative Commons licenses.  Users can use, copy, remix, create derivatives, and if allowed, use these licensed products for commercial purposes.  All while giving the creator the ability to monitor and oversee their appropriate use.  The creator may give up some of his or her traditional benefits of ownership (royalties, exclusive license fees, etc.) that generate income, but the creator derives the benefits of increasing influence, reputation, and contributing to the expansion of learning around the world.

The fifth element that must be considered is the sustainability of the costs that are incurred as part of extending access.  MIT has experienced costs of approximately $4 million each year to maintain the availability of their OpenCourseWare.  The costs of developing the courses and the resources are absorbed by the institutional budgets as part of their normal operations.  But the costs to prepare the courses for electronic distribution, and the infrastructure to distribute the courses are the marginal costs of providing the open courses.

Much of the expense associated with the delivery of open courses and other open resources involves scrubbing the materials for copyrighted materials.  Moving away from the use of copyrighted will reduce this cost.  As the OER movement gains steam, the assembly of courses, texts, and other materials to be licensed openly will be best performed through the use of other open resources in their assembly.  If these elements of the OER are either created when the resource is assembled, or selected from openly-licensed materials already available, then the need for scrubbing and obtaining permissions is reduced or eliminated.  This approach will reduce the cost of the OER to the provider.

Reducing these costs enhances the sustainability of OER efforts.  Aligning these OER efforts with the normal instruction occurring at the institution is another important consideration for sustainability.  If the full-fare paying students are benefitting from the OER in their classroom instruction and research, then the OER becomes a part of the institutional strategies and the sustaining of the efforts becomes an institutional priority.

Sustainability is also enhanced when one considers the benefits that accrue to creators when they make the materials freely available to others (see Johansen & Wiley, 2010Hilton & Wiley, 2010, and Hilton, 2010)

In conclusion, David Wiley's research (cited by Cable Green in this video) showed that the costs to deliver a textbook as OER is well below one cent per text when it is made available on-line (using cloud storage and access estimates). These same texts can be printed on demand at costs a fraction of the cost of acquiring textbooks in the marketplace.  Using the internet to deliver OER is a miniscule marginal cost.  Using the internet makes the delivery of knowledge (a non-rivalrous resource) and objects (non-rivalrous as well, since electronic copies are always available) is a way of sharing knowledge and teaching at minimal additional cost.  It is the logical route to satisfying the huge demand for education in the developing world without facing the limitations of the costs of traditional educational opportunities.  Faculty and institutions can expand opportunity and influence around the world at minimal marginal cost.

References:

Atkins, D. E., J. S. Brown & A. L. Hammond. A Review of the Open Educational Resources
Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities. A Report to the Hewlett Foundation,
2007. Available online at http://www.hewlett.org/NR/rdonlyres/5D2E3386-3974-4314-8F67-
5C2F22EC4F9B/0/AReviewoftheOpenEducationalResourcesOERMovement_BlogLink.pdf.

U.S.Agency for International Development. U.S.Agency for International Development, (2011). Education opportunity through learning: Usaid education strategy 2011­-2015. Retrieved from website: http://www.eric.ed.gov.erl.lib.byu.edu/PDFS/ED517377.pdf

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Novice Badge Earned

Earlier in the semester I created a blog post where I started linking all of my topic posts as required to earn the badge.  This link will take you to that post which will link to all of my topic entries.  I believe this shows that I have earned the novice badge.

Open Policy

Two years ago I participated in a class here at BYU that reviewed policy related to OER and discussed how these open resources were making education less expensive.  Our class was divided into two groups one of which researched policies related to OER in general, and the other to institutional policies at colleges and universities in the U.S. related to the development and support of OCW in particular.

Dr. Wiley made a post to his openness blog earlier this year about the focus that we make on OER as a low cost option to increase access to learning and reduce the costs incurred by institutions and students through OER adoption.  The post to which I am referring was published soon after the announcement by Apple about the textbooks that were being made available at minimal cost (at least relative to regular textbooks) through the iBooks store.  Dr. Wiley pointed out that the proposition that OER is all about cost and that is where development should be focused puts the future of OER on unstable ground.  He argued that we need to develop OER that is every bit as well-produced and interactive as that which will be made available by traditional text publishers if OER is to continue to provide equivalent educational experiences.

Dr. Cable Green is very persuasive in the materials we reviewed under this topic regarding the money that can be saved by governments, institutions, and students when OER is given sufficient priority in funding decisions.  He cited the numbers reported by Dr. Wiley and others of the costs to produce open textbooks compared to the cost to purchase them from traditional publishers.  Dr. Green argues for the implementation of government policies that will advocate the development and maintenance of quality OER by providing funding for these efforts in lieu of having the same funds used to buy traditional texts and other resources ate much higher unit costs to the students and the taxpayers.

Dr. Green advocates mandates by governments and institutions requiring open publishing and funding for OER.  Mandates are generally reserved for instances where there is a constituency that is unwilling to adopt changes.  There is a train of thought that mandates are required when the benefits of change do not stand on their own merit and must be supported with coercion.  But in this case, the mandate may be required because of the disconnect between decision-makers and the impact of their decisions.  Instructors and faculty are often unconcerned about the motivations of students when it comes to selection of texts.

Because the government continues to increase the funds available to students in financial aid, there is little incentive for text publishers and universities to exercise pricing restraint.  There is almost a conspiratorial waltz where the government must provide more money to assist students because the cost of education is rising so rapidly.  As more money is available, those who provide the education and resources see that they can charge more because the students now have access to more funding, which in turns leads to the cost of education increasing, resulting in calls to the government to increase funds available for education, and so on . . .

There is a need for the government to be more concerned about value for the funds that they are making available for education.  Mandating access to government funded research is one way of executing policy that will provide educational benefit and reduce the costs of education.  Another is the mandating of the development and use of OER to replace more expensive resources where the marketplace is not price responsive.  The approach of mandating through policy is dictating to the marketplace a pricing mechanism that they would have been driven to consider themselves if the access to government funding would have included more consideration of expectations for pricing and competition rather than just priming the flow of funds that is always inflationary.

Dr. Green concludes his comments stating the following:
We have to think bigger and make smarter decisions collectively. Abraham Lincoln in a message to congress on December 1, 1862 said 'The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so must we act anew. And think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and we shall save our country.'
Our goal is that open policies be adopted by all nations, all states, all national agencies, all systems of education, institutions, departments, and individual creators when they are using public funds. The moral and the political imperative would overwhelm any opposition.
Earlier in his presentation talked about a feeding machine that would allow us to feed all of the people in the world at minimal cost just be turning it on.  He went on to say in his presentation that:
We do not have a feeding machine . . . We do have a learning machine, we simply need to turn that machine on. We have a moral and an ethical responsibility to act. If we are smart. If we share. Everybody in the world can learn.
That is a worthy objective of policy makers if they can establish policies to incorporate OER in a way that requires all stakeholders to have an investment in its effective use.  While appeals to egalitarian motives will work with many people, the funding that has been thrown into education without real accountability has resulted in non-competitive marketplaces, with little incentives to control pricing, and political chits that can be earned just by asking for more investment in order to show that you are "for education and our kids."  There is much money and power that has been accumulated as the government funding flows in education have become monolithic and monopolistic.  Mandates will be required to change this industry that has sprung up to access these funds in unaccountable and undisciplined ways.  Authors, faculty, editors, and publishers will rarely relinquish their prized place in this industry willingly.  Unfortunately, policies will be required to force change.

The $2 billion funded in 2011 to help Community Colleges and consortiums develop OER for use by their students is one policy that is being advanced in education.  Others include the open access policies that are being implemented in association with government grants.  These policies are good starts.  Conversations about policies that will consider how the savings from these open policies will affect the education market are important to maximize the impact of these access and publication policies.

Do we find ways to increase competition by mandating faculty and institutional acceptance of education credits that might be obtained in non-traditional ways through open learning.  This will introduce more competition in the education marketplace by giving value to low-cost alternatives to achieve educational competency.

I heard a caller to a financial advice radio program talk about the fact that she had just received her Ph.D. and was excited about an interview that she had with a university for a teaching position.  She was concerned about a decision she needed to make about moving and the kind of housing that she would be required to obtain.  She knew that the advisor was a proponent of buying rather than renting but she was not in a position to buy.  He was incredulous that having just completed her education, and having a job virtually in hand, that she would not be in a position to buy a home.  Her response was that she had student loans that needed attention first.  He asked the amount that she would be paid for the new position and was told the salary would be $50,000.  He asked about the student loan and was told the balance was well over six figures.  He was amazed that she had been able to accumulate that much debt.  Were she to attempt to borrow that money for any other need, the bankers who had saddled her with that debt would be considered immoral.