OpenEd week 14 - Reflections on posts

I reviewed some posts today, and saw some interesting persectives. I am of for Thailand this week, so I try to finish off all assignments, 2do's etc before Wednesday.

Jennifer Maddrel has put some nice illustrations in an online video (@ voicethread.com so you can add voice and text comments). Still a draft, but worth looking at.

Jessie focuses on the Chinese education system and says:

I feel like it is too difficult to change the traditional system of higher education.

I feel that too, but rather than changing an existing system, I think in creating a new system, which might replace existing ones. Think about what you need for learning: materials, support & guidance, and a reason. I think at least part of the reason will be the future ability to get a job and earn money. With flexible employment mechanisms built in a new system of learning, people may be willing to put effort in that system in building up a reputation that can be used in order to get job opportunities.

Rather than expliciting these ideas in more depth, I rather focus on the opportunities for new forms of education created by the Internet: these are almost endless. If existing structures are too rigid and bureaucratic to surf new waves of learning and education, well... it's their problem right?

And for culture: I think that if a country has broadband and sufficient mobile coverage, the more successful new and open education initiatives will be copied instantly, with a little cultural twist so it fits in.

Karen talks about the opportunities of informal learning being increased (in quality and quantity) by OER. She says that even when

“formal” OER community (higher ed courseware projects, Hewlett funded projects, etc.) implode under their own weight, there are a number of other open efforts that cannot be stopped.

She refers to Wikipedia (and related projects), YouTube, TeacherTube, Facebook, etc. And then she asks a very valid and interesting question. Great question:

One question I have is whether all of these resources and the learning opportunities they present will at some point decrease the value of a traditional higher education degree? Especially as formal education gets even more removed from truly relevant content (critical thinking, collaborative skills, higher order thinking), will industry realize that a solid informal education and demonstration of real-world competencies outweighs a piece of paper from a university?

That really depends on the formal educational reform: will they reform fast enough, or not? I think that traditional universities, funded by government, such as the university where I study, will receive funds until the end of time, because of tradition, name, reputation, etc... Still, they feel the pressure of change. I talked to the university's Vice-Chancellor and Executive Board Vice President about open education last week, and one thing they mentioned is that we are only starting to see some of the benefits of IT. The need to keep on investing in IT related projects remains unabated in order to keep up with trends and technologies. They even mentioned new structures and processes for accreditation and evaluation, and explained a new division of labor at the university. So, my point is that some universities recognize not only the potential of IT, open education, informal structures, etc. but do indeed link that to organizational change. The way that change is brought about, and the speed, will determine the value of the university of tomorrow.

But, I must say that this question is one of the most important questions that need to be asked at universities. I have drafted a paper describing this new learning/working system, and might start developing it when I finish my thesis. Someone interested?

Another interesting issue is the following, which was not mentioned by David Wiley in his interesting future history of OER.

What an empowered Africa and Asia will contribute to the world will make MySpace and Wikipedia look like baby steps.

This implies also that one need to be able to learn from all those resources online. I think that we should not afraid of having not enough content online, but how to find your way? Anto refers to George Siemens' Connectivism Learning Theory, and whether it is a learning theory or a pedagogy, I think that Siemens provides a new and very interesting view on learning, which is more capable of handling the overload of information than current ones.

The Stupendous Man of Mystery aka Erik L. says that

I don’t think that OER will have that large of an effect in the next century, but in time I can see some of the things discussed in the readings coming to pass.

Clearly, OER alone will not have the impact that has been previsioned by David, but it will have the described impact in combination with other factors, such as social change and newer technology. OER might form the hubs around which some communities will come into existence, and different technologies will form the glue between people and content. New ecosystems will come into being, I suppose, and change, partly caused by OER, open source software, and their philosophies spreading into other corners of society, is eminent. Who says that you cannot make money from Open Source Software? Who says that you cannot make money from OER? Why not use this strong incentive to create better infrastructures, better education, and better content? I do see change happen at least partly because of these incentives.

OpenLearn 2007 - OLI: accelerated learning with @ CMU's OLI (day 2)

Candice Thille and Joel Smith from Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative, explained their very interesting findings on the OLI's impact on learning. They measured the effectiveness of OLI statistics course in accelerating learning, and interestingly: students learn faster and better! And they are able to articulate in their answers, not just calculate them in statistical terms. I have discussed OLI more from a sustainability perspective here, but the approach of impact on learning is very interesting. And the findings even more so! Very promising.

A primary goal of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon is to provide free access to high quality post-secondary courses (i.e., similar to those taught at Carnegie Mellon). Previous evaluations of the effectiveness of OLI courses have shown that our online courses teach students as effectively as existing instructor-led courses. Two such studies have found this result for the OLI-Statistics course. This report describes our current study of OLI-Statistics in which we are evaluating the accelerated learning hypothesis – that learners can learn a semester’s material in half the time, while still achieving the same or better learning outcomes.

The courses offered by CMU OLI are, as I have explained before, not ordinary open courseware materials. They mention the following about the learning material:

• based on learning theories
• use driven design
• transforming instruction, not transposing it
• scaffolded
• predict: immediate feedback through AI systems and cognitive tutors
• (expensive to make)

There are four feedback loops based on student learning data; science of learning, instructor activities, course design, student performance.. The initial assumption that the open courses would not be used at university appeared to be wrong: they were better than the normal courses, and quickly became a prototype to be used. The interesting thing is the research done on the learning outcome of students following the normal course, and students following the online course.

• Statistical literacy: The first research was set up between two groups of students: one group did the online version, and teachers were not allowed to guide them, only answering their questions once a week. The second group did the classroom version, and interacted in a classroom setting once or twice a week. One of the first outcomes was that there was not a statistical difference between the groups online and classroom learners.... but the application of the knowledge in real settings, or answering more applied questions was done better by the students doing the online version.
• Better and faster: The second research was done with a slight but important difference: the online students were allowed to interact in-depth with teachers twice a week. They would normally have prepared the questions, and had one or two hours of interacting with the teacher. Regarding the experience, both teacher (great! quality time with students!) and student (fantastic! I am learning!) were very contended. Concerning the outcomes, even better results were presented: the students were not only able to do it twice as fast, but their results on tests were significantly better as well.

OpenLearn 2007 - From Boot Camp to Holiday Camp? (day 2)

Patrick McAndrew had a nice presentation called: From Boot Camp to Holiday Camp? Some issues around openness, Web 2.0, and learning.

"Open Educational Resources were initially seen as a way to exchange and exploit content. For example, the MIT OCW material can be adapted as acurriculum plan and set of resources for use in another institution.

What has also emerged is that there is also direct use of the material by learners. OpenLearn has a configuration that more clearly reflects this by offering a ‘LearningSpace’ designed to allow users to pick units to work with and use them within their personalised learning environments and alongside other learners. However, these learners will not be part of any registered course, won’t be focused on compulsory assignments and will not get a qualification at the end of their work.

The ‘Boot Camp’ elements of education, where learners are organised and coerced into performing necessary learning practices, has therefore disappeared. So a question is whether these elements should be replaced with features that are more in line with a ‘Holiday Camp’, where learning is loosely structured and ‘fun’, but is still relevant and valuable. This talk will explore these metaphors as lenses that can help us to design for learning practices that share their landscape with huge-scale media-rich interaction and radical publishing in the context of open technologies and Web 2.0."

Patrick explained motivation using the metaphors of carrots and sticks. Carrots are teasers for students to perform better, such as grades and diplomas.. sticks are a metaphor for punishments to threaten students used for increasing their performance. These are the principle motivators for learning in schools today. With freely available learning materials, openness enables another learning driven by motivation and enjoyment. There is a transition going on from straightforward to open learning: abundant choice and driven by motivation and enjoyment.

We are all part of the web, which allows democratic and collaborative media creation, sharing and consumption. But how do we come from interest to learning? Patrick mentions Confucius, who said:

I hear and I forget,
I see and I remember
I do and I understand

a long time ago. The web allows to actually do (see keynote JSB). But in order to embrace it, we need to reconceptualize learning.

Formal education has the following motivation factors:

• Assignment deadlines
• Examinations
• Tutors who call
• Qualifications
• Progression
• Peer approval

Learning at OpenLearn is motivated by

• Professional development
• Interest
• Hobby
• Job progress
• Job change

We need to focus on supporting learning for fun, and Patrick mentions the rise of learning clubs. Tools are important for this, and the term ambient learning design is brought up, with examples of learning tools, such as digital dialogue games as the InterLoc tool. This brings in the issue of scaffolding, something that John Seely Brown should be approached with care, because kids nowadays want to create everything themselves. We need to find out from an anthropological angle to find out what is going on between the students in these dialogue tools as he raises the issue of World of Warcraft where he thinks a scaffolding tool would be laughed at. He says that we should be careful with building mental models or projectories.

The Blog Readability Test... mm

I did the blog readability test. The Blog Readability Test. What level of education is required to understand your blog?

Maybe. I. Need. To. Write. More. Simple.
What. Do. You. Think?

How I would like to wake up one day...

I wake up at noon, because I had to finish this last-minute assignment for a regular client of mine late last night. He pays well for it, so the fact that I could not attend an interesting online seminar this morning on Web 3.0 technologies doesn't bother me so much. I will watch it back later online. I start up my computer, and go to my personal site on http://myopen.org, a website connecting communities of every interest and profession, where I have my friends, colleagues, employers, teachers, and peer-students, and where I am a friend, colleague, employer, teacher, and student. I see that there are some questions and remarks on an online article I just posted, and comment on them. My teacher status on this subject now increases, which may result in being employed. I post a text on my weblog about some problems I encountered during my last employment, hoping that some people read it and respond to it. Usually this takes no more than a day or two. Another employer has urged me to finish a certain job, and I tell her that I will most probably get the results of an essential research I delegated at the end of the week. I check my balance, and see that I made quite some money last week, which is also good for my credibility. People tend to have more trust in me now, when I have made some money, than before, when I just started living my life through this portal.

I sit back, take a sip of my coffee, and decide on what I want to learn today. A week ago, I really got stuck in a school project on e-government solutions for municipalities, so I type in the tags e-government, municipality, online voting, and corruption. Two communities, a dozen persons, and even more resources pop up. I see that a specific community is quite popular, has a high rating and quite some people involved, and I decide to enter. This is what I am looking for, I was thinking, when I browsed through their collection of free resources. I contact someone online, Susan, and tell her about the problems I encountered. She does not know the answers herself, she is new in the community, like me, but she directs me to George, someone who did a similar project and has a lot of experience. George says he is willing to talk to me for $45 an hour, which I think is reasonable considering his status. He also promises me an assignment, which, if I do it correctly, will earn me $120. In the end, George sells my results to his employer for $200 and earns $90 dollars for teaching me some very useful information. George was helpful, also in recommending me some free online courses and papers, so I make some comments on his public profile. I spend two hours learning from an expert on e-government and put this knowledge directly into practice, creating me a lot of understanding, practical and theoretical, and earning a little money ($30). Besides, it improves my online portfolio, increasing the trust it transfers to other people. Because of my specific knowledge gained in another field, which might be useful in this community, I decide to share this using freely available educational software.

OpenED: OLCOS Roadmap 2012

Open Educational Resources, past & future (2/3)
Three interesting papers about open educational resources are discussed this week in the course "Introduction to Open Education", given by David Wiley. These papers, although partly overlapping, show some interesting facts about OER, motivation, production, copyright, and all other related issues, as well as some compelling ideas and arguments about the future learning landscape in which OER have to prove themselves sustainable and useful. Since my thesis focuses on this future, trying to figure out how a sustainable OER environment will look like for Delft University of Technology, and possibly other technical universities, especially the reports that show a glimpse on the future addressed my interests most. Both the OLCOS report as the Atkins, Brown, and Hammond report had a strong focus on the future, where the OECD report mainly introduced OER, described different OER models, showed interesting projects, and included more facts about OER-related aspects. This post will discuss a report commissioned by the OECD, named "Giving Knowledge for Free, the Emergence of Open Educational Resources".

READINGS

• Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (OECD, 2007)
• Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 (OLCOS, 2007)
• A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities (Atkins, Brown, and Hammond, 2007)

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?

OLCOS report
The report that appealed to me most was the OLCOS roadmap 2012. Where the OECD report gave a nice overview of current issues with OER, and focused more on the educational resources themselves, and the insitutions and persons involved in creating and using them, the OLCOS report really focused on learning. The goals of the report are as follows:

• The OLCOS Roadmap has been produced to provide educational decision makers – politicians, directors of institutions, managers of educational networks, teacher organisations and other stakeholders – with orientation and recommendations to help them make informed decisions with respect to Open Educational Resources (OER);
• A tool for understanding the relevance of OER and identifying required actions;
• The Roadmap provides an overview of current and likely future developments in OER through presenting and assessing drivers/enablers and inhibitors for open educational practices and resources.The objective is to identify possible achievements in a time-horizon set for 2012, and to specify how the related challenges could be addressed (recommendations);
• Furthermore,the OLCOS Roadmap may help in de defining and prioritising some key areas on which activities should be focused (e.g. some major inhibitors), and in conceiving mechanisms.

As I mentioned before, it appealed to me because it is critical and has a clear and realistic view of the future. The focus is on learning: it discusses OER from a perspective of how people learn, and what skills are necessary in a knowledge society, and what the implications are for education. Barriers for this future are clearly identified, but also the opportunities are described in detail. It has a similar view on OER as Atkins, Brown and Hammond (2007), who stress the importance to shift from a culture of sharing towards a culture of learning. It is obvious that OER alone will not be enough, will not be sustainable, but that institutions should embrace the wider open movement, and create environments where open educational resources will flourish. Educational repositories without tools to interact with other users, and to re-use, discuss, and add content will not be sustainable. Literature and research findings about the sustainability of online communities should be used to make communities of interest/practice around OER. MITOCW is a great resource, but their top-down configuration is old-fashioned, and adheres to educational practices that will soon be outdated. The only reason that this specific project will stay sustainable, is that MIT is a rich institution, with numerous sponsors that are willing to maintain the quality and production of their OER. Other institutions may not be very wise in copying this model, because, even thoughOLCOS mentions the trickiness of business models around OER, my opinion is that there are numerous opportunities for OER.

It is interesting that OLCOS mentions the skills needed in a information rich society. The opportunities to educate people differently have increased likewise. Learning should occur according to a competency - focused, collaborative paradigm of learning and knowledge acquisition. Providing OER as "canned products" is not sufficient, because the learning will not happen collaboratively. The emphasis should be on the learner, who should be able to discuss, make, and add resources within a learning community. In that way, the learner is behaving both collaboratively and competency-focused. His or her active participation will both increase personal learning as providing the learning community with an engaged learner (and possibly contributor). Learning communities and communities of practice,complemente with OER, also increase possibilities for lifelong learners.

Canned products, industrial, teacher centered, professional bureaucracy...
In the OLCOS report a strong argument is made that OER will not so much add value in learning environments that are centered around the teacher:

"In such a model teachers may download Web-accessible open teaching material to prepare classes, and students may use some content to prepare material for lessons, but this will remain a one-way channel of content provision, in which physical textbook or course content is replaced by digital material. Teachers and students will remain consumers of prefabricated content, not themselves becoming creative and collaborative, and they will not “pay back” with their own content. Hence, there will be no proliferation of value added content, i.e. content that contains results derived from learning processes such as enriched material, use cases, novel methods put into practice, lessons learned, etc. that other teachers and students may want to re-use and develop further."

This is exactly my critique on the educational system: IT DOES NOT TRIGGER THE STUDENT TO BE ACTIVE, SEARCHING, BEING INNOVATIVE. Next week I will post an evaluation on a wiki I implemented in a course as a student assistant, and you will be able to read that the students in class were, contrary to our expectations, very reluctant in using this "new" technology. I do not blame them, they are raised to be passive consumers of content, and now they need to make their own learning experience.

Value chains for open educational content
The OLCOS report therefore suggests an approach they call Open educational content value chains.

"Collaborative learning practices are most likely to allow for such value chains to emerge and progress, because the learning community will:

• use some existing digital content or courseware as a starting point;
• consult other available content from e-learning repositories or other relevant sources of information;
• document their own study process and results, such as use cases, experiences, lessons learned, guidelines, etc. (note: documentation also includesmetadata);
• make this enriched content available again to other learners, e.g. via repository and/or syndication services, and
• thereby share the results for re-use, and enrichment, by other learners."

Similar to this, is the proposition of Stephen Carson, who describes a blog-like manner of referencing OER, and in that way creating an educational blogosphere. That model does not depend on a number of highly flexible resources, but on a large number of resources that do not necessarily need to be flexible and serve, if adequate and of high quality, as reference teaching material for educators. This model is in between the rip-mix-burn model (flexible materials adapting to one’s own needs), and the wiki model (striving for consensus, collaborative editing)

Educators might have a problem with this approach, because of inexperience, pride, or other issues. The report mentions also that there exists little experience in grading or assessing students according this new approach. It reminds me of one of my favorite books. Somewhere in the phenomenal classic "Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", Robert Pirsig describes his experience of non-assessing (and later peer-assessing) students in his collaborative quest for defining quality. He questions the term quality, tracing it back until Plato, and explains how the two camps of ratio, science, and objective science versus the more artistic, subjective, rhetoric camp of imagination came into being. His book is a beautiful (true) story about a boy and his father, and a philosophical attempt to merge the two. It's been a while I read this book, but it possibly was that little piece of work that got me interested in education. It was a very interesting view on education, that probably had quite some influence on myself.

The Roadmap Briefs describe (both short as long-term) drivers and inhibitors in the areas described in the report. They can be used as starting points for discussing OER initiatives strategically. They concern the following levels:

• Policies, institutional frameworks and business models
• Open Access and Content repositories
• Laboratories of open educational practices and resources

The "not too visionary outlook" in the report mentions new roles of students and teachers, technologies that will enable the easier creation and licensing of resources, the larger role for popular Web 2.0 technologies aswikis and weblogs, and new standard OER processes implemented within universities. The last chapter is filled with interesting and valuable recommendations for

• educational policy makers and funding bodies;
• boards, directors and supervisors of educational institutions;
• teachers;
• students;
• educational repositories; and
• developers and implementers of e-learning tools and environments.

It is an extremely insightful and valuable report when you are involved in OER matters. I will certainly use it.

OpenED: Giving Knowledge for Free

Open Educational Resources, past & future (1/3)
Three interesting papers about open educational resources are discussed this week in the course "Introduction to Open Education", given by David Wiley. These papers, although partly overlapping, show some interesting facts about OER, motivation, production, copyright, and all other related issues, as well as some compelling ideas and arguments about the future learning landscape in which OER have to prove themselves sustainable and useful. Since my thesis focuses on this future, trying to figure out how a sustainable OER environment will look like for Delft University of Technology, and possibly other technical universities, especially the reports that show a glimpse on the future addressed my interests most. Both the OLCOS report as the Atkins, Brown, and Hammond report had a strong focus on the future, where the OECD report mainly introduced OER, described different OER models, showed interesting projects, and included more facts about OER-related aspects. This post will discuss a report commissioned by the OECD, named "Giving Knowledge for Free, the Emergence of Open Educational Resources".

READINGS

• Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (OECD, 2007)
• Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 (OLCOS, 2007)
• A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities (Atkins, Brown, and Hammond, 2007)

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?

OECD report
The OECD commissioned a report on Open Educational Resources, specifically mapping the worldwide OER landscape. Through a large survey amongst universities (and OER stakeholders), several workshops, and based on extensive literature research, the author (Jan Hýlen) and research group tried to answer the following questions:

• How can sustainable cost/benefit models for OER initiatives be developed?
• What are the intellectual property rights issues linked to OER initiatives?
• What are the incentives and barriers for universities and faculty staff to deliver their materials to OER initiatives?
• How can access and usefulness for the users of OER initiatives be improved?

The OECD report describes the context of its study, and a number of challenges that need to be addressed by educational institutions. It then intends to define open educational resources (OER), by explicating "open", "educational", and "resources". It continues with an overview of all institutions involved, and by explaining the varying setups or models adopted by institutions. Other important current issues that are discussed are the motivational factors of sharing OER, licensing OER, sustainability issues, and access and usefulness of OER. The report ends with a number of policy recommendations on different levels, ranging from international to institutional.

The context and challenges
Through globalization, also in the educational world, universities have to act both more collaboratively and are faced with more intense competition. Universities and educational institutions have been slow to adjust to the needs of lifelong learners, a group increasingly important in the knowledge economy. Technology has caused major economical and social changes, which both offer great opportunities for higher education, as well as pose numerous financial, technical, and qualitative challenges. A number of developments that can have a great impact concern the larger role of learning and games, the rapid growth of creative participation in developing digital content with web 2.0 tools that enable users to "contribute to developing, rating, collaborating and distributing Internet content and to develop and customise Internet applications. The rise of user-created content, or the so-called rise of the amateur creator, is a central pillar of the participative web and comprises various media and creative works (written, audio, visual and combined) created by Internet and technology users (including content from wireless devices such as photos)." This trend is seen by all discussed reports as one of the most important issues influencing the OER landscape.

What are OER and who produce/use them?
So what are open educational resources? The report shows that defining OER is very difficult, but adopt the most commonly used definition of “digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research”. Open educational resources are offered online on websites, mostly in English, and the OECD identified over 3000 Open Courseware sites worldwide in 2007. This is not even a complete picture, because there are numerous sites that do not offer courseware, but freely available educational resources that are not considered courseware. The focus on courseware is that the origins of this worldwide movement can be found at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), with their ground-breaking Open Courseware (OCW) initiative in 2001. This initiative adopted quite a top-down approach of creating resources, pre-reviews all materials before publicizing it on their website. Many OCW initiatives that followed copied this approach, but some took another turn. The Connexions project for example, which even predates the MIT OCW initiative, enables users of OER to produce or improve OER through easy-to-use tools, addressing the user-generated content culture in a better way. The OECD report shows the different categories of producers of OER, making a distinction in the scale of operation and the type of provider. This last factor is the most interesting; it shows that there are several initiatives, such as MIT OCW and other OCW initiatives, follow a centralized "institution" provider model, whereas others, such as Connexions and MERLOT depend on a community of producers who collaborate "wiki-style" to create content.

The important issues for providers of OER
There are numerous reasons for institutions and individuals to use, share and create open educational resources. Because my task is to develop a plan for the OER project at my university (and possibly other technical universities), the results of the research findings interested me very much. For example, the respondents indicate that barriers for producing and using OER in their own educational setting are little support from management & no reward system, lack of time & skills, and little interest in pedagogical innovation. A lack of business model for open content, something pointed out as an important challenge in the OLCOS report, has a negative influence in the production of OER as well. An important finding is that for individuals altruistic reasons are not as important as more personal practical considerations. After a few interviews with participating teachers at my university that certainly holds true. On the other hand, (possible) financial gain is considered by respondents as the least important factor for sharing and contributing resources. More than 60% percent of the respondents found the following issues very important in the production of OER (in order of importance):

• Be acknowledged as the creator, also when resource is changed/adapted;
• Have a quality review of the resource;
• Know the changes made to the resource;
• Know how the resource is used and by whom;
• Be rewarded personally for contributions (not financial).

The motivation for institutions to be involved in this "open" movement comes forth from both positive altruistic, financial and marketing effects, and from threats and negative effects of not being involved. The drivers for involvement are the same as mentioned in other reports, such as better access, better hardware (including cameras, mobile technologies, media equipment) and software (i.e. Web 2.0 tools) that empower users to develop and improve online content. The following table gives a nice overview of the drivers, inhibitors and motivations for developing and sharing open educational resources.

Governments	Institutions	Individuals
Widening participation in higher education	Altruistic reasons	Altruistic or community supportive reasons
Bridge the gap between non-formal, informal and formal learning	Leverage on taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse between institutions	Personal non-monetary gain
Promote lifelong learning	“What you give, you receive back improved”	Commercial reasons
	Good public relations and showcase to attract new students	It is not worth the effort to keep the resource closed
	Growing competition – new cost recovery models are needed
	Stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse

Underlying drivers	Underlying inhibitors
Technical: Increased broadband availability; increased hard drive capacity and processing speed; new and improved technologies to create, distribute and share content; simpler software for creating, editing and remixing.	Technical: Lack of broadband and other technical innovations
Economic: Lower costs for broadband, hardware and software; new economic models built around free content for recovering costs.	Economic: Lack of resources to invest in broadband, hardware and software. Difficulties to cover costs for developing OER or sustaining an OER project in the long run.
Social: Increased use of broadband, the desire for interactivity, increased skills and willingness to share, contribute and create online communities.	Social: Absence of technical skills, unwillingness to share or use resources produced by someone else.
Legal: New licensing regimes facilitating sharing of free content.	Legal: Prohibition to use copyrighted materials without consent.

Copyright issues
Copyright plays a central role in sharing open content. On my university, the content management system (Blackboard:(...) is stuffed with copyrighted material. This does not create a problem, because it is a closed resource. Teachers use large amounts of copyrighted materials, which is much more difficult when you want to "open up" to the rest of the world. Fortunately, open licensing of content happens more often, and the tools to do that are becoming better usable. I am not so much interested in the clearing of copyright within open educational resources, but more so in the licensing of "new" open educational resources. Creative Commons is a license that seems very clear and useful within the OER landscape. It is the most commonly used license as well, and is being adopted by my university as well. Producers of OER can say whether they want to attributed, if content can be used commercially, if the content should be shared with the same license, and if derivatives can be made of the work. The value of these licenses, and its future impact is being questioned by many, such as Our Worship Dr. Wiley :), who argues that the Share-Alike option can create problems. He therefore drafted his own license , specifically for Open Education, to overcome these problems. It seems that it will have to compete with the Creative Commons Learn division, but we'll discuss this later.

Sustainability of OER
This is the most relevant part for me, because my thesis concerns the sustainability of the OER project at my university. Obviously, I will not focus on just economical, or just social sustainability. An ICT environment needs both financial support as social and institutional acceptance, making it a complex, intertwined issue. In designing viable alternatives for sustaining OER I will address the different aspects relating to this concept, such as costs and benefits, technical compatibility, social and institutional acceptance, and social gains. Sustainability, or the continuous ability to meet the goals set by the organization, is not purely a financial issue, but motivation, usefulness and quality of materials, and other issues are important as well.

Wiley (2006) explains that there are two important challenges concerning sustainability in an open education program. The first challenge is meeting the costs for creating and redistributing the educational resources. The second challenge is to create resources that will be used and reused, i.e. valuable resources! The creation of OER requires individuals to put time and effort in developing them, digitize material, checking for copyrights, and provide quality assurance. Costs that are made for providing bandwidth or other costs for the dissemination and sharing of resources need to be taken into the sustainability account as well. The second challenge, providing usable resources, has to do mainly with the format of materials, and consequently the ability to reuse the materials. Reusability of materials, explained in more detail later, concerns the ability to contextualize, translate, adapt, and use educational resources. This is important, because the effectiveness of education depends not so much on the information itself as on the way the information is brought to students. There is a trade-off to be made here. Although reusability is an important objective in open education programs, many resources are published in formats that do not allow easy formatting and localization. As explained by d'Oliviera , in many cases it involves much less knowledge and costs to produce materials formats less easy to adapt or localize, than in more flexible formats as XML. The reusability issue and the costs to transform materials into more flexible formats, such as costs for training, technology, and mechanisms, are part important when discussing sustainability, because they both addresses social acceptance as the economical viability. The illustration below gives a nice overview of the main sustainability challenges.

Reflecting sustainability, or the "ongoing ability to meet the goals of a project", on the above, it means the the ability to produce, share, localize, and learn from open educational resources. This does not imply that solutions are always to be sought in the financial domain. Benkler (2005) explains the peer production of Open Educational Resources as a way to achieve sustainability. Open source software may provide with technical tools without substantive investments. Wiley (2006) claims that sustainability can be reached through the reduction of friction and decentralization, capturing intrinsic motivation of individuals to contribute without financial recompensation. He literally states that decentralization means the active involvement of students. This decentralization happens through the peer production of open resources and sharing them in P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. In a blogpost, he posits it very clearly:

"It seems to me that sustainability and scalability are problematic only when people rely on others to do things for them. Scalability and sustainability happen more readily when people do things for themselves. Centralizing open educational services is less scalable/sustainable. Decentralising them is more scalable/sustainable. Wikipedia has two employees and well over a million articles in multiple languages. We need to learn this lesson if open education is really going to reach out and bless the lives of people."

Downes (2007) follows the same argument, saying that the centralized model (MIT) uses more resources, and is likely to cost more, but offers more control over quality and content. The distributed model (Connexions), which assumes co-production of resources and decentralized management, may involve numerous partnerships, and rely on volunteer contributors. These approaches are much cheaper, but there is less control over quality and content. The table below shows a number of initiatives that are involved in the production of information, but following apparently opposing models. The examples of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Brittanica are added on purpose, to show that a distributed control and management does not necessarily means lower quality. The quality review process and maintenance, as well as the production of information resources, is opened to a much larger group of people.

Low Control & Costs	High Control & Costs
Wikipedia	Encyclopedia Brittanica
Connexions	MIT OCW
LabSpace	LearningSpace

The OECD report sums up a number of possible revenue models that can be adopted to make a program more sustainable. The revenue or funding model is an important aspect that should be addressed, but there are more. First of all, it should be clear what objectives the institution has with the OER initiative. The following factors are always seen in the context of a project's goals, since sustainability is described as the ongoing ability to meet the goals of a project.

• Organization: The configuration or model for the project. Is the centralized MIT model preferred, the decentralized Connexions model, or something in between?
• Non-monetary incentives: Another interesting topic regarding sustainability is finding non-monetary incentives of participants, so that they can be utilized to build communities, and to sustain activities within the environment. How can you engage volunteers in production, support, and management?
• Resource types: The types of resources that will be offered, and the media formats in which these resources will be shared are important considerations, because there are many instances when a certain format inhibits the reuse (for example videolectures, PDF, etc.).
• End-user reuse: What kinds of reuse will be best contribute to the project goals? How will support be offered to the end user in case of reuse of content? Will this be done centralized, or decentralized in a network of volunteers?
• Ways to reduce costs: How can the costs of a project be reduced, while still meeting project goals?
• Funding model: How will the project be funded, now and in the future? (funding models will be explained a little later)

What about access and usefulness?
An important challenge is the ability to find OER that are relevant and of high quality. Metadata (data that describes resources or data) addresses this problem, but it can be a laborous task to add metadata to resources. And the fact "Everything is Miscellaneous" (David Weinberger), which means that descriptions of data and resources depend on the context in which they are used, and on person (or technology) using them, adds another dimension of difficulty to the matter. Like the matter on reviewing materials (i.e. pre-publication versus post-publication), there is the matter of adding metadata before and after publicizing materials. This metadata can also be about the quality of content, and the report offers an overview of the different possibilities in managing quality.

• Peer reviewing is one of the most used quality assurance processes in academia. MERLOT has adopted this type of quality assurance process: after publication, materials can be peer reviewed. The process of peer reviewing is expensive and time-consuming, and for the greater part the resources linked to on the MERLOT site are not reviewed.
• MIT, and many other OCW initiatives, rather closed enterprises use internal quality checks to make sure the content put online is of a certain quality.
• A more decentralized way of managing quality is letting quality emerge from the use of contribution by users. Users can comment or rate materials, and usage of materials can be logged and made public. This way addresses the importance of the relation between context and quality. A very interesting example can be found in the "lenses" concept of Connexions.
• Word of mouth, or recommendation systems are another way of managing quality.

Furthermore, the report questions the usefulness of higher education that offers a specified curriculum, delivered to a large group of students, and to be completed at a predetermined pace. By describing emerging technologies affecting the OER movement, it refers to the OLCOS research, which will be discussed a bit later.

So what does this all mean?
The OECD describes a number of implications on international, national, and institutional level. On an international level, as argued by Atkins, Brown, and Hammond (2007), technological and legal interoperability should be fostered. OECD also mention a higher awareness and the development of a sound knowledge base on the production and use of OER. On a lower level, it is recommended that nations take a holistic approach to all kinds of digital learning resources and their impact on lifelong learning. The possibility for personalized learning increases with the availability of resources. Besides open learning resources, open source software and open licensing should gain considerable attention and promotion. On an institutional level, OER can have deep impact on the processes and protocols, affecting pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. As mentioned before, universities both have more opportunities for collaboration and face more international competition. New generations of students will expect certain educational practices that fit their lifestyles. Their use of technologies should be reflected in education, so a well-reasoned IT strategy that includes e-learning should be implemented in each higher education institution. The report does not describe in detail the implications for learning, which is more elaborately discussed in OLCOS (2007).

Extra resources (not linked)

• Benkler, Y. (2005), "Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials" @ http://www.benkler.org/
• Downes, S. (2007) "Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources" Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge & Learning Object, 3, 29-44

OLCOS Roadmap 2012 - Skills

In this authorative report on Open Educational Resources, education, and other related issues, skills for knowledge workers are discussed (amongst other things). Professional skills needed in a knowledge economy are acquired by using interactive, collaborative, and constructive tools as weblogs and wikis. The reason I am now blogging, and more or less used to it, is because of a course given by David Wiley (http://opencontent.org). Not because of my university, where not a single course mandated or suggested any of these technologies. (BTW. I assisted in setting up a wiki for a course, which was one of the first wikis to be used for a course on the uni :: evaluation on my blog next week)

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If students have their own Weblog they engage in a self-directed, constructive practice. As authors of postings they must make their minds up about a topic, gather, evaluate and interpret information, take a position, come up with convincing arguments and evidence, and find the right means and style of expression. And this practice is inherently social and conversational, because the students themselves experience being part of a distributed community of interest and refer to ideas and writings of others. The same is true if students work collaboratively on a thematic Wiki, where each of them can add information, edit and rework texts of others, etc. They engage in collaborative knowledge creation, which will include discussing certain assumptions, statements, information sources, etc.