K12 Open Ed

There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere this week about the use of a Flickr image posted under a Creative Commons license in a Virgin Australia advertisement. (The parents of the child in the photo, who had not given permission for its use, are suing Virgin, the photographer, and Creative Commons.)

The salient point in this case is that the photographer and Virgin did not have a model release. Anyone who has worked in commercial publishing for more than a week should know that you must have a model release for images with people in them.

There are certainly other issues that this case begs, related to non-commercial use, the millions of Flickr photos with people in them, etc. (see Larry Lessig’s thoughts on this, though he can’t comment on the legal case for obvious reasons), but the main point of this case has nothing to do with Creative Commons or the digital world. If the photographer had taken this photo with a non-digital camera (remember film?), copyrighted it, and sold it to Virgin, the same problem of the lack of a model release would exist.

[Image credit: public domain courtesy of Kimmo Palosaari, from OpenPhoto.net…. interesting sidenote that you won’t find open-licensed photos with people in them on this site]

Recent readings in the Open Ed course all discussed metadata and its importance to the usability of OER.

The OECD report pointed about some of the challenges: “Adding metadata to a resource is time-consuming and faces the same problem software programmers do – the person adding metadata does not know the circumstances under which people will use the resource, i.e. the search for the resource may be done from a perspective totally different from what the person adding the metadata expected, so that it will be difficult or impossible to find the resource.”

The Hewlett report talked more about metadata, including the Sematic Web, RDFs, and folksonomies.

For those looking for a more information on this in an extremely readable format, I’d suggest the book Everything in Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. He covers the whole gamut of traditional indexing strategies and their problems all the way up to the semantic web and folksonomies.

Before reading this book, my thoughts about metadata for OER mostly centered on the very large task of tagging resources by the many dimensions of learning, such as subject area, content standards (many millions, I’d guess), language, readability level, learning style, etc. I had the idea that if everything was tagged this way, a learner could use some kind of system to subscribe to RSS feeds of content that would be ideally suited to their individual needs. Differentiated learning at its finest.

After reading the book, I wonder if this would all be a waste of time. There are so many ways to tag and so many uses of materials (intended and unintended) that designers can’t begin to anticipate them all. Maybe using on-the-fly folksonomies in which everyone tags as they go for their own purposes is the simplest and most elegant solution.

The KISS principle (Keep it simple, stupid) is often a good design guideline.

In the Week 4 readings for the Open Ed course, there was much discussion of sustainability and business models. Each report discussed these issues and concluded that they are “tricky.” :) These are critical points though, particularly as many of the efforts in OER to date have been funded by foundations. Grants are a big double-edge sword, in part because they do not provide a source of on-going funding.

The OECD report summarized the issues nicely, elaborating on a continuum with co-production model (mass collaboration) and a producer-consumer structure at the two extremes. Most of the current higher ed resources have been developed with under a producer-consumer model. This has the advantage of having built-in quality control, but the potential disadvantages of not being economically sustainable and not being driven from the bottom up by learning community needs.

The mass collaboration model, while being inordinately successful at Wikipedia and in Open Source software development, but has not had much success in education, though it is certainly too early to say that it couldn’t be successful in the future. Two attempts at this have been Wikibooks and Curriki. To date, Wikibooks has experienced low participation on both the creation and the use end. (If you haven’t been there, check it out! It’s a great resource, and the more people who participate, the better it will be.) Curriki is very new, but so far, it seems to suffer from a lack of quality control. It appears to have a substantial quantity of content, but a large percentage of it of insufficient quality (e.g. not actually open licensed, mere web links, etc.).

I think that the mass collaboration model has great potential, particularly in primary and secondary education, in which most teachers have a lot of materials and are willing to share. Clearly, though, there is a long way to go.

Another model that has been suggested is a semi-commercial model (commercial partnerships, conversion models, etc.). Despite (or perhaps because of) over 20 years of experience in commercial for-profit educational ventures, I am skeptical of this model.

Thinking about this, I am not sure that anyone has yet shown the real economic benefits that OER offers.

In the US alone, over $4 billion is spent on K-12 textbooks (1). (That doesn’t include supplemental materials, educational software, or any post-secondary materials.) Much of this expenditure is duplicative with different editions being produced for different states and many versions of the essentially the same content being published by different publishers. There is a whole industrial complex built around the procurement of expensive textbooks that many schools don’t even use because they are not suitable to their students’ diverse needs. (One of the schools I work with reported that after they spent thousands of dollars on new textbooks, most teachers didn’t use them at all “except to look at the pictures” at the beginning of each unit, because the materials were not accessible to their students. This is not uncommon.)

OER could not only reduce this expense, but could greatly improve learning by expanding opportunities to differentiate instruction. In my opinion, differentiated learning is a key to turning around the current state of failure in much of K-12 education in the US. This sounds obvious, yet it is not being done, in part because of the current unsuitability of textbooks. (There are many other reasons as well.)

So this sounds like a no brainer — what is needed to make it happen? Advocacy, so that educators and more importantly, decision makers, can see the advantages of OER. Getting decision makers to share this view is probably the hardest part to accomplish. The textbook industry is very entrenched and very politically influential. And while I appreciate the perspective of those who suggest skirting the establishment and doing this through back channels, government-funded core instructional materials purchasing decisions drive mainstream education.

A more optimistic view can be had by looking at the situation in the developing world. For the most part, these countries have no established publishing industry or really even any textbooks to speak of. As in other areas, like technology infrastructure building, they can leapfrog over the legacy problems we have here. For them, OER offers what may be the only cost effective way to build the capacity they need to achieve universal education.

(1) AAP http://www.aapschool.org/vp_funding.html, and EMR Research http://www.ed-market.com/r_c_archives/display_article.php?article_id=101.

And the final question: “Based on where the field is now, and these initial ideas about where it might go, what part of the open education movement is most interesting to you? Why? ”

In Week 1, we debated the merits of education as a human right. While we disagreed about many points, such as whether it should be compulsory and what comprises “quality education,” we all agreed that basic education should be universal for those who want it. In today’s world, though, there is a huge gap in reaching that ideal. There are 130 million children who don’t attend school. There are about 1 billion people in the world who are illiterate. There are almost that many who are “food insecure”. (1)

Most of the work in OER to date has been at the higher ed level. Most of that has taken place in “developed” countries with highly-educated learners and teachers. However, to me, the most sweeping need for the benefits that OER offers is in primary education in the less-developed parts of the world. That is where my personal interests lie.

Reading all of these reports about the potential of OER reinforces that even more. Thinking about the current state of OER makes me know that we have a lot of work to do and the time to start is now.

(1) United Nations, http://www.fao.org/english/newsroom/news/2002/12280-en.html

Here are the questions for Week 4 of the Open Ed course:

QUESTIONS: What do these overviews of the field have in common? What do they emphasize differently? What are the aims of the authors of each report? Do you see a bias toward or against any ideas, organizations, or approaches in any of the reports? Which report spoke the most clearly to you, and why do you think it did? Based on where the field is now, and these initial ideas about where it might go, what part of the open education movement is most interesting to you? Why?

The first reading, Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provided a good basic introduction to the field of OER. The objective of this report was to explore the issues of sustainability, IP, incentives and barriers, and areas for improvement in OER. This report did a relatively comprehensive job of concisely summarizing the relevant information. (It didn’t provide a lot of new information for me personally though, since I’ve done a fair amount of reading in this area prior to this course.)

Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012, the second reading, was put out by OLCOS, a consortium funded by the European Union’s eLearning Programme. The stated objective of this report is to provide an overview of “current and likely future developments in OER and recommendations on how various challenges in OER could be addressed.” In reading this report, I found myself several times looking back at the title and table of contents to try to remind myself what the focus or unifying theme was. The report seemed to digress into many topics that were tangential to OER, and I found the lack of continuity to detract from the overall usefulness.

This group has a very strong orientation toward a specific pedagogical approach, constructivism, and much of the report had more to do with that than with OER. The linkage in their minds is that “If the prevailing practice of teacher-centred knowledge transfer remains intact, then OER will have little effect on making a difference in teaching and learning.” They then go on to say that “OLCOS’ approach is different in that it does not primarily emphasise open educational resources but open educational practices.”

While many seem to tie this pedagogy to OER (among them the OLPC project), I don’t see the connection as being necessarily essential. In many cases, I think that tying extremely progressive pedadogy to educational technology/ICT has hindered technology’s widespread adoption in schools worldwide and thereby constrained its potential benefits. I’m very supportive of constructivism, but I don’t think ed tech should be tied to it as a condition for success. (I have a very personal perspective on this having spent several years of my life developing a very progressive technology-integrated curriculum, which was in the end not adopted widely as a result of the pedagogical approach. Ed tech blogs, like those heralded in the OLCOS report, echo this story bemoaning the state of education in which these wonderful progressive approaches are not adopted by the majority. Perhaps there is more to be gained in the long run by starting at a point closer to most people’s comfort zones.)

While Web 2.0 technologies (which were covered superficially by this report — The Hewlett report, I thought, did a much better job of talking about Web 2.0 participatory learning and its relation to OER without immersing itself in controversial educational philosophy issues.) do enhance an inquiry-based constructivist approach, they are also extremely useful tools for other approaches to learning. The same is perhaps even more true for OER, which has as much to offer for traditional instruction as it does for inquiry-based learning. Free high-quality content enriched by interactivity can make a real difference in revolutionizing all types of learning. In my mind, tools not content are the center piece of the constructivist learning environment. There are a plethora of great free tools; however, in the content realm, there is a paucity.

[Sidenote: I wonder if the debate of content vs. knowledge is in part related to this. “Content” is often viewed as an anti-constructivist notion. In actuality, it certainly needn’t be. The world would be better served if people just built useful “stuff” (whatever you want to call it) and then let the learning communities decide how they want to use it.]

At any rate, this report seemed to be more concerned with the authors’ preferred pedagogy than about OER, and for that reason, I think it was not as strong of a piece for the purposes of this course.

Finally, the third reading A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities is a report commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation to serve as an overview of the OER movement. As such, it is focused on and colored by looking primarily at Hewlett projects and interests. Despite this, however, this report addressed many important issues in OER, including sustainability, object definition and format issues, IP issues, and others in a straightforward and understandable manner. Because of this content and the clear writing, this report spoke most clearly to me. (This report had many interesting points that merit further thought and discussion, and I cannot begin to cover them here in this already-too-long post. I will save some of them for future writing.)

One strength of the Hewlett report was its attention to the international opportunity for OER, which was not emphasized in the other reports. While much of the OER activity to date has been in the developed world, clearly the opportunity to make the most substantive difference in achieving goals such as expanding universal education is in the developing world. The Hewlett report was the only one of these readings that bridged the gap between our first week discussions of education as a human right and current OER initiatives like OCW. The report concluded that not enough is being done in the developing world, but at least it acknowledged it as a priority.

One thing that all three of these reports had in common was a focus on higher ed. In fact, this is not just true of these reports, but of the OER movement as a whole. Most of the activity is at the post-secondary level. (I’ll come back to this when I talk about my own interests in answer to the final question this week.)

One contrast I found interesting across these three readings was how they licensed their own reports and how “open” their approach and methods seemed to be. The OECD report was issued under a traditional copyright. Their process did not seem to be very open either, as their methodology included “meetings, small in size and by invitation only.” I felt better about the OLCOS roadmap, which was licensed under a Creative Commons license. The third report was also licensed under Creative Commons, probably in part because it was developed with Hewlett funding. I think that reports like these should be licensed under open licenses and that funding agencies (including governmental groups) should require that.

I’m going to answer the last part of the question for this week in a separate post.