Economic Models of Open Education

QUESTIONS: How can you build a sustainable business around giving away educational materials? How can you build a sustainable business model around giving away credentialed degrees? Should governments fund open education? (Do they already?)

I don't like the questions. The first one seems to assume that things are right the way they are, now how do we keep solvent? I don't think 'things are right the way they are.' We have seen a lot of different OER models emerge. The discussion in the readings compares different models. Each have varying degrees of funding support and end-product. But are any one of them the way of the future or sustainable into the future? Each brings to the table varying degrees of control over OER's. That control costs money and control implies that the commons cannot be entrusted with creating educational products. I am very much in the same court as Downes: "Scalability and sustainability happen more readily when people do things for themselves." We have much to learn from Wikipedia. We need to let go of the idea that only a few know better.

The funding that concerned and leading OER universities are getting should be going towards building the software for a truly open educational resource repository. It should look just like Wikipedia, with the same amount of employees. In other words, let the commons grow OER. It should be situated in cyberspace, not at a specific university. Let the commons regulate, create, add to, add on, subtract, what ever. Let go and let learn.

Along with this model goes the belief that students need to learn to be responsible for their own learning. Take the content and localize it. No one can know exactly what localization is but the student who is consuming. No, teachers cannot know it all.

If we continue to think that the only answer is lots of funding, OER is doomed. MIT gave us the gift of an idea, but they can't give us the gift of their funding.

As to the second question - How can you build a sustainable business model around giving away credentialed degrees? The Dominican Republic offers higher education for free and that in a sense is giving away credentialed degrees. Is that what you mean by this question? Public universities may as well be free? I fail to see how this question fits into the discussion of OER. It clouds the issue - going back to the dislike of the first question. Giving away credentialed degrees is not what OER is about, is it? I was thinking more in line of offering free courses, but if you want a degree, you must pay for it and that is how OER could be sustainable. Maybe I just take all of this a bit too seriously. Okay - give away credentialed degrees through the public universities. Let school be free to the student, it practically is already. See the following answer to the following question.

Last question - Should governments fund open education? (Do they already?) My question is whether or not the income derived from tuition (at a public university) actually pays for much of anything anyway. It seems that tuition is just a tiny drop in the bucket of cost per student. If that is true, why bother? Why not let whomever is interested in getting a degree, get one. It is enough that a person going to school has to support themselves. Why do they also have to come up with thousands of dollars to pay for it? Public universities offer grants (government money) to undergrads. If you qualify for those grants you are poor. This does look like the funding of open education.

But maybe that is not the question. Maybe the question refers to the changing of all schools (public universities) to look more like the Dominican Republic. I was shocked when first told that higher education was free there. I spent time talking to the teachers and walking around the public campuses. Classrooms were dark and dank, covered in graffiti where the walls were not punched out. Teachers did not have technology. Even though free, not everyone in the population could attend. You have to have the brains to attend and some way of supporting yourself while there. My thoughts took me to the future of that country. This was a government that was serious about its future and success.

Coming from a capitalist country I never thought about what it would be like to have a free education (higher education). Maybe we haven't to this point because of our industrial roots in education. For many years it was important for masses of people to be willing to work on factory floors and assembly lines. If we educated our populations, who would want to do that kind of work? But now that we are in a 'knowledge and service' era, maybe we need to educate the masses and open education is the answer. Maybe the time has come for free and accessible education for all. Think how different the world would be if the greatest majority was highly educated.

Ockham's Razor

QUESTIONS: Can you think of license options that CC is currently missing that would benefit the open education movement? As the CC and GFDL licenses are incompatible, how can OCW content be legally remixed with Wikipedia content? Some people claim that the Creative Commons ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. What do you think these people mean, are they right, and why? Is copyleft good for the open education movement? Why or why not?

Creative Commons ought to have a completely different section of works for OER or get out of the picture. Licensing OER should not be complicated or available on multiple levels. It is time for us to work together on this issue. If you are going to submit work to OER, submit it freely – knowing it will be modified, remixed and redistributed. The only limitation should be that your work cannot be copied by someone else. Modify it or don’t mess with it. Remix it or don’t mess with it. Redistribute it…………………you get the point. Back to my belief that localization has to happen for any class, you cannot simply copy someone else’s work for your own class anyway - if you know anything about teaching. I think this deals with the NC issue. Anyone who is going to use OER to create a commercially offered class better modify it and/or remix it in order to redistribute it. It’s about letting go of what you place in the OER domain. I see it like an offshoot of OSS. There is a certain hierarchy, global contribution that builds upon the original work, flaming when necessary, and the ability to create an income around the work. "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate.''

I have pondered over this mess for weeks, thinking of all kinds of ways to do it. But in the end it is just simple. The readings had me running to the pool of public domain. All of the other levels of protection were about selfishly holding on. OER is about giving something up for the betterment of all. That does not mean you have to give up all that you are and all that you have created, but if everyone just gave a little to OER, think how it would grow. It simply means contribute a little and let the global community build on it until it is a lot, until it is miraculous. The hard work of this global community is for free use – not for commercial use. I believe that income can be created around this copyleft mentality of mine, just like OSS has found a way. Pondering these questions from the perspective of the giver (the creator of content) and the taker (who would take and make money from) is what makes the questions difficult. If we think about OER from the perspective of the user – the person who wants to learn, the answer is simple: free to modify, remix, or redistribute. That is it.

Creative Commons vs Public Domain

Works that find their way into the public domain are available to everyone and no person or other legal entity can establish or maintain proprietary interests. It is for the common good and can be used or exploited for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Once a work is in the public domain it cannot be reestablished as for copyright (there have been exceptions). It is believed by many that without public domain progress would not occur because innovation is often the result of building upon previous innovations.

Others believe that innovators need to be assured that they can benefit, economically, from their innovations. If time, energy and money are spent to create something, the creator should be allowed a certain amount of time to recoup their investment. Both the public domain and copyright (as first written in the United States) created a balance between the public good and encouragement of innovation.

But copyright laws have changed dramatically over the last 200 years. The founding fathers did not make copyright a lifetime deal nor did they intend it to be renewed in a perpetual way. Yet that is what copyright law has come to. Also, one no longer needs to register a work for it to be copyrighted, and nothing inadvertently ends up in public domain. The balance has been lost and copyright seems to be more about perpetual profit than about the common good.

Society over the last two hundred years has also changed. In the present we have a digital world and an information/service economy which have contributed to the need for change.

Lawrence Lessig put together a non-profit business that is working toward allowing copyright laws to mirror the original intent of our forefathers with the benefit of reflecting the present digital works and information/service societies in which we are a part. Creative Commons offers insight, tools, and services as well as creative options to think about when you create something. You can reserve some rights, put your work in the public domain, or even replicate a copyright as it was first introduced (for 14 years with an option to re-register another 14 years). The most important function that I see regarding Creative Commons, is the education one receives about copyright and how the present law is creating more harm than good.

Not many people would voluntarily give up their work to the public domain and so society suffers. That suffering is quite evident with digital tools. Fair Use was meant to mitigate the imbalance between public domain and copyright but Fair Use is a subjective, ever changing law (which some people argue it needs be). The digital age has made creative works easily produced, reproduced, available and distributed. It has also accidentally trapped a creative work in a background for which copyright holders have held many innovators hostage (not to mention the common good).

Educational materials and the present society have intersected in such a way that re-evaluation of copyright and public domain is inevitable. Thank goodness for Creative Commons that allows for varying degrees of copyright.

There are educators all over the world that believe the barriers to education should come down. They are willing to share their work and make it available to the world. But should they put it in the public domain?

As an educator what is the incentive of putting your work in public domain? Once there, you have no rights to it and no one has to give attribution for the work. Anyone can take it and turn it into something they can copyright and keep behind the very barriers the educator was trying to tear down. The incentive appears to be good will with no selfishness attached. The one thing that is nice about the Creative Commons License and the GFDL is that the person who uses the work has to keep it in the same state and cannot make it proprietary. That ensures that the barrier the educator was attempting to tear down will not be built back up with his works by someone else. I can understand why an educator would choose a Creative Commons license over putting their works in pubic domain, but either one is better than a straight copyright. Putting work in the public domain just means less tracking, less work. If one were to force the issue and make OERs subject to having to be in the public domain I think you would lose the good work of educators who care.

Thoughts About Six "Open Education" Projects

What do these representative open education projects have in common?

All of these sites purport to be open. All but MIT required a login. They are primarily geared towards adult learners and offer things like statistics, RSS feeds, a way to rate courses, news items and how to donate. Most were easy to navigate through.

What differentiates them?

Rice - Their site is what I would call well thought out with features like: author profiles, computer checks, popularity ranking, statistics, RSS feeds, Tutorial on how to create content, learning journal, modules and courses, language options, a tech blog, and how to export files (to name just a few). They offer both modules and courses.

National Repository - I was a little disappointed in this site. It was linked out to so many places that I could get lost easily. Some classes seemed to be available, but there was mention of a cost between $3,000 and $25,000 per year that stopped me dead. The classes that I looked at had a ‘beautiful’ format but I felt I had stepped back in time to computerized lessons from the ancient past (1990’s?).

UNESCO - This is a great site for people who primarily want to deal with problems in the developing countries. I thought it was interesting that many of the courses I looked at were developed by Microsoft.

MIT - Provides the model and the foundation for OER. Their site is a peek into the syllabus/coursework with no login required. Books must be purchased and you sometimes get the feeling that important content is missing. The courses do give you a general idea of what MIT offers.

OpenEd – Had many great features including some mash-ups for fun (i.e. Google maps to see who was online at the moment). They seemed to have built a good path to sustainability in that they offered employee training, degrees, jobs, career planning – a few things that translate to income.

Carnegie Mellon – also has a very nice site, with lots of great courses made available. They have instituted some nice present day features like cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments and simulations. They seem dedicated to doing research on every aspect of their courses, which will benefit us all in the future.

In the context of open education projects, what does “quality” mean?

This is a loaded question. Reading some of the comments made by my classmates leads me to believe they also felt the same about this question. The answer depends on many things. What MIT would consider quality is not what would work for UNESCO. Some of the sites were easy to navigate, one in particular was atrocious. Open is important, but each had a different idea of what that meant (for instance MIT is open but not all there and the National Repository charges). A few sites offered detailed tutorials, some did not. I think the tutorials add to the quality, but maybe it is the gatekeepers that have that say in the end.

More ramblings.....

In this last year three different reports have addressed the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. They each discuss the main facets such as who is involved, why people have become involved, the recent developments that have made it possible, what the inhibitors of further success are and recommendations for the future. OER is the basis for each report and although they discuss many of the same issues, each brings to the table a different emphasis.

One of the reports speaks to these issues as they relate to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that has backed the movement financially, creating the infrastructure needed for the movement to take hold. The authors take a look back and a look forward, making recommendations for further successes.

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) report represents the perspective of 30 democratic governments concerned about issues relating to globalization and the information society with its technological developments that are creating an opportunity for change in the teaching and learning environments. Those unfamiliar with the OER movement can learn much about its facets by reading this report first. It will also help those who are trying to further the cause in that it maps out the movement and helps one understand what the many motivations have been to become involved.

The Open e-Learning Content Observatory (OLCOS) is a European e-Learning Program that fosters OER in Europe and beyond. This was one of my favorite pieces to read. They seem to have a depth of understanding about the future of teaching. E-Learning once had such promise when it began. But the F2F mentality, the industrial classroom proponents soon turned it into a huge financial burden (buying expensive equipment and brick and mortar buildings to house it in). It soon became all but an abandoned ship wreck (or a steam engine that is out of steam). OLCOS reminds us that the product-centric view of the past is a barrier. We have the tools, we have the digital students, we now need innovation. We need to follow the philosophy of open content to transform our classrooms into open practices. But we can’t expect to do this if we don’t invest in teacher training and support.

I could take up a lot of space talking about various pieces of OER. But the one I wish to discuss here is localization, with a twist.

Attempting to localize content is an exercise for teacher-centered domains. We can see, although it is like looking through dense fog, that OER is about changing the way we teach, letting go and letting the student learn. The localization of content needs to rest upon the shoulders of the end-user, the student and not the teacher. Nothing can be culturally neutral. Content is content and it must be good, but localization cannot be created in the content. Who can know what all the many components of localization can be? No one here on earth, that is for sure. So it becomes a matter of training a student to be a master student who can recognize when change is needed and know how to implement it to make the content relevant.

Now for the twist. I learned, as a child, to localize content. Every school book and every classroom treated me as though I were invisible. Everything was written to boys, about boys and for boys and everything they were interested in. Recently I sat in a lecture given by a ‘main player’ in the OER movement. All of the visual examples of teachers that this person presented in his powerpoint were exclusively of men. I had to localize content. I had to make a shift and tell myself that women are also among those in the teaching profession.

And then an interesting thing happened while I was reading about the opensource movement a few months ago. Many believe that the opensource movement is one of the contributing forces behind OER. Without it, the Hewlett Foundation would not have a reason to build the infrastructure. In one of the books I read, Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, edited by Joseph Feller, the author of chapter 2, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, presented the results of a survey from the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) project that involved over 2,700 respondents. Almost all (98.9%) of the respondents who claimed to be opensource developers were male. This survey was compared with two other surveys that claimed the same kind of results: WIDI survey (6,000 respondents – 98.6% male) and the BCG survey of which 98% male (pp 30-31). That made me curious about what the figures were for who was contributing to the OER projects. I know they are very different projects, different kinds of players, but I still couldn’t help but wonder what the numbers looked like. At USU I found that out of 68 courses on the OCW website, four were represented as being created by women. That means that roughly 94% of the contributions were from males.

One of the goals of OER, as pointed out in all three reports, is the breaking down of barriers so that all humans can benefit from education. But unless we are very careful, this new “learning culture” may become a myopic product with all of its attendant tribulations. We have sadly learned in recent decades that the absence of attention to gender issues is actually a type of oppression, an inequality in itself. “Men often deny bias because they fail to recognize it. They usually don’t need to; it does not significantly affect their lives. As with race, part of the privilege of dominance is the privilege of accepting without noticing the benefit” (Rhode, 1997, p.3).

There may be many reasons why women are not contributing to OER in numbers commensurate with their numbers in the educational professions. It has been suggested that they are more likely to be technophobic or lack the same amount of time that males have (because of their other, unpaid jobs or because they are involved in too many committees). Whatever the reason, I think it is worth investigating. One of the reports talked about the concern that most of the OER available is in English and from the United States. More people, of all genders, races and cultures need to be brought into the OER movement. Those of us who are part of the movement need to be very diligent about inviting a wide spectrum of contributors to OER, from the contacts we make around the world.

Educating the World

QUESTIONS: In your opinion, is the "right to education" a basic human right? Why or why not? In your opinion, is open "access" to free, high-quality educational opportunity sufficient, or is it necessary to "mandate" education through a certain age or level?

Is the right to education a basic human right? I do not believe that there is a simple answer to this. First of all, what are human rights? And then I have to question the concept of education and what it could mean when used in the same sentence with human rights.

Tomasevski assumes that we all know what human rights are, as if there should be no question about the definition. Having been raised in the United States, but also having lived in various other countries, the definition is not so obvious to me. The rights I have come to expect as a human in my own country cannot be assumed when I travel into a different country. Even the human rights I have come to expect in my own country have not, and still do not, extend to all of its citizens. So I ask, how can there be human rights defined and expected across the world when we cannot even recognize or secure them in our own country? But even more, one countries definition of human rights may defile the cultural and social expectations of another country. Who has the right to define others rights?

In the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are these words: “...recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…” What struck me, as I read the last few words, and peace in the world, was the feeling that if we were all the same there would be peace. The entire declaration seems to be about making everyone comply to sameness, or a general rule. But the world is made up of so many different cultures, so many different ways of life that I feel it is wrong to seek compliance in this way.

Which brings me to the word education as a human right. I have given much thought to the design of courses and how to make them culturally sensitive to the audience. One cannot strip culture from a course. The person designing it is immersed in culture, to the point of blindness. And the designer cannot be expected to know or understand every culture that it might reach and thus design accordingly. I am aware of the prejudices and cruelties laced in teaching that Tomasevski speaks about. We react in horror to hear how people are maligned in a language course, or that a math class can also teach genocide. Education has been used to indoctrinate or beat students into submission. I abhor any such use of teaching. But I have reservations about a general definition of education that is not sensitive to the culture. Too often our need to help is not help at all, but pushing our own beliefs into places where they don’t belong.

Tomesevski uses emotionally provoking words that on the surface I can buy into: Education unlocks the key to other human rights; you cannot have the right to education without also having rights within education; parents do not hold their children’s rights or recognize that children are the subject of the right to education.

I am not against the ideas that claim education as a human right but I can’t help but have reservations. Mandating anything, even primary education, or arbitrarily assigning a certain level or age does not address individual needs. Each country and each family must have the right to choose what is best for them, otherwise human rights are violated for the sake of human rights. The powerful need to reserve judgment, be cautious, and recognize when enforcement steps across cultural boundaries.

Access. Access to education. Access to education that is free and of a high quality. I am all there. How to carry it out is another thing. Mandating anything like this cannot work unless there is support. But there are problems. If there is support it seems to end up being used for meetings and overhead that do not spiral down to the intended. Or it is used to build buildings which then require furniture and security, again, to the neglect of the intended. If access is created, for instance internet in small villages, destruction or theft is possible. According to Tomesevski, cost is usually not even the reason for denying access. The denied are excluded because of gender, or lack of identity papers. They might be refugees or from nomadic cultures. How do we then create access? I hope this class will be enlightening. There is still so much that needs to be done. And how do we create education that is of a high quality AND usable in all the many different places that it might end up? Maybe it is done case by case, maybe someone has figured this out – but I think it is still in the hopper, awaiting a solution.

Does Everyone Have a Right to an Education?

We shall consider these things..................