Views from the Haystack

Institutional support for OER is gaining momentum but is still a long way to secure it as a viable alternative in learning environments. According to a recent poll, the majority of teachers in the UK still rely on textbooks, handouts and worksheets as the primary means of learning and thus the adoption of digital resources is below expectations. It does appear, even in the age where there is wide availability of quality resources, the use of digital materials and OER materials has not sustained steady growth. Quality of resources comes to mind and resistance to change is the heart of the barriers to adoption of OER materials. This is unlikely to abate, even though legislation is beginning to include OER materials as viable alternatives.

Freisen also reported similar findings in his paper on New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability, “Despite differences in priorities and emphasis, OER initiatives are in danger of running aground of the same sustainability challenges that have claimed numerous learning object collection or repository projects in the past”. Freisen goes on to cite three challenges to sustainability of OER resources; a) awareness b) communities and networking creators and users, and c) capacity development.  Each of these factors or a combination of over-arching factors set limitations of many OER initiatives. Funding, quality of resources, lack of knowledge, context and ease of use also contribute to sustainability of new open learning projects.

OER initiatives fail because of the “open” factor. In most cases there needs to sustainability, and this relies on an economic base. Without the economic base and community participation to continue the initiative, it is unlikely to be sustained. What we are seeing is the OER creates a disruption of systemic practice, where schools have long purchased proprietary content. Now that the content providers can take many forms including the free to share model, this is creating more pressure on decision makers for inclusion of OER n the thinking especially under funding constraints.  However, lack of knowledge and awareness of the existence of quality OER means a general continuance of the culture and practice in procuring fee-based resources.

The lack of awareness and understanding into the nature of the changing OER landscape at all levels in education was highlighted by one of my colleagues recently. In a discussion of Open Source textbooks and availability of materials, including understanding of the flipped classroom, he reported back to his department.  The minutes of the meeting made reference to concerns for ‘ teacher preparation’, ‘monitoring access’, ‘reading skills’ and ‘inclusion of lecture based presentations”. These are all important indicators of current culture, skill development, curricular management and the network as source of knowledge, as decelerators to change, however it also highlights the important first step… awareness.

Apple’s recent announcement is another disruption to the textbook publishing business model.  As we have seen there has been a decline in purchases of printed matter for several years and the growth of textbook sales have not taken off due the cost and inflexibility in reading panes. Recently, there has been greater demand for smaller ‘chapter sized’ digital packages of content that can be purchased. Apple’s model is restrictive to a platform; proprietary as to content rights and is proprietary as to distribution channels. Thus there will not be the same impact as we have seen with their disruption in the music and software business with the sale of apps.

Education does not work as expected as a business model.  I had the opportunity to converse with several publishers in recent weeks and they all agree that e-textbooks are not being adopted and that digital ‘chapters ‘ with potential for localization /adaptation are what is required.  The ability to exchange digital objects freely and customize to add your own value is one factor required. I do not intend to push the Apple model and support the commercialization of digital content. The majority of it is available for free and all that is required is curation and with Mentor Mob and others coming to the scene, publishing of more and more free content will eventually limit the impact of the Apple model.  Even at the quoted rate of less that 15 dollars this in fact an increase in cost vs the traditional textbook model on a comparative basis. Additionally the digital books cost more to make, and are only limited to a single platform. The only strength in this model is the link with Apple!

Karen’s memo clearly highlights the decline of the publishing business model with fees for access to intellectual property that has dominated the education vertical since the Gutenberg Press. Publishing companies have been the benefactors as suppliers of intellectual property or subject matter experts that have been protected by copyright. This includes the publishing of course packets created for institutional level courses, some of which maintain copyright.

As indicated in the article written by Karen, “the landscape with respect to copyright materials and their use has changed”. There are several reasons contributing to this. First, the emergence of OpenCourseWare (OCW) courses, containing OER materials and creative commons share-alike licensed objects threatens the business model upon which copyright protection has been built and this reduces the dependency upon courses that still utilize primary copyrighted materials for which there are more fees. Secondly, with open access to the Internet, the availability of free, open and in some cases cost-impacted materials is a feasible alternative to the bound edition of collected intellectual property that is likely out of date. Thirdly, the use of electronic media has decreased the value of closed content repositories such as journals, databases and book collections. In our own school where we have long maintained content repositories, the issue was made very clear in a recent survey where over 90 % considered Google their information primary resource, with very little use for content repositories.

Suddenly the phrase ‘the relevance of Access Copyright has diminished greatly”, is a statement of an outdated business model, which has been acknowledged by their price increase. It is well known that companies are required to maintain the bottom line, thus prices go up when volume is decreased and this appears to be the case here. This is an exact instance of the recent decline in the printed textbook market, whereby sales have been declining under the same pressures described. The move to e-textbooks is only a minor relief in that the price has remained high due to lack of adoption of the digital products in order to maintain copyright licensing fees revenue.

It was reported today that in the USA, student debt has exceeded the 1 trillion dollar mark.  What does this tell us? Students can no longer shoulder the increases in costs by publishing companies to maintain their market position, pushed by the increase in costs for protecting intellectual property. There is greater recognition of the use of OER and self-published materials and legislative bodies around the country. This is a signal of the shift in economic factors, recognition of OER alternatives, the declining impact on copyright and the basic value of curation. The greater change that is attributed to the emergence of OER improves significance of the movement.

The fact that BlackBoard swallowed up Moodle, an Open source competitor and signed a key person from another open source alternative, signifies a competitive market not really seen before. I hope the university had made the correct decision to eject Access Copyright from their ranks.

Redistribution is the key to continue supporting the creation of OER materials whether in the original form or with value-added components. The choice of posting to a particular platform, through a self-service entity like a school website, personal blog or an institutional portal (with open access) or via a third party service, the key is to re-post or share your material.  There are many options for self-publishing, for all types of media, Flickr for photos, YouTube for video, presentations on slideshare, links on delicious, an document repositories such as teacherspayteachers and docstoc, there is no shortage of sites for sharing.  In fact there is a growing trend for proprietary software makers, in addition to open hosting solutions, is to create their own repositories for sharing materials produced utilizing their own software. This serves the self-publishing model of open content and also serves the need for marketing of their proprietary solution

The critical factor is not in the options for uploading content, but bringing greater participation and collaboration for sharing content. There needs to be more emphasis on sharing for the collective good and in the many institutional frameworks the silos of information and protection, control of user-generated content (UGC) remains firmly implanted within the schools culture. Although there is a growing number of people who blog and share links with posted content, especially through twitter, their needs to be greater posting of content by all instructors.

Section 508 requires equal accessibility to people with disabilities. I think existing laws are sufficient in Canada as long as they are observed. I think there has been greater awareness to people with disabilities in many sectors in our society and this is an extension of the thinking. In fact, technology applications for people with disabilities can have a large impact and it is this sector where the largest gains have been made. There as been a real focus over the last several years to leverage appropriate technologies for special education and people with disability. In my own institution we provide individualized services for people that have greater challenges in our selective learning environment.

The biggest challenge relates to posting student work (I wrote about it here). In a world where anyone can publish in the comfort of their home, schools place many barriers to publishing to an authentic open audience. This restrictive stance promotes the production of work destined to meet the ends of the teacher and in many cases promotes a sub culture of publishing their views through open channels, out of school.  We need to bring greater awareness that promotes students intellectual property to a wider audience, make school a place to demonstrate success, and promote a culture of sharing and peer review to raise standards. If students learn to work with open licensed materials and original creative work, schools may be more open to publishing student work with parents permission and abiding to local school guidelines common in school policy.

Many teachers utilize affair amount of non-original content from outside sources. Some of these materials are copyrighted material for which the school has likely paid fees, but what about the use of free content. Additionally, what licensing attributes to we apply to student’s products?

The licensing of free content is more dependent upon the scope or uses, how it is intended to be used rather than be focused on the user. A good example is creative commons licensing (Table 1) attributes, which has six versions of licensing depending upon its intended use, remixing and redistribution.

	This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.
	This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
	This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
	This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
	This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
	This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Source: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Another example is MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which specifically prohibits taking their courses in their entirety, and using them in a model where a fee is collected but taking a portion of it and mixing it into an existing class may be permissible:

http://ocw.mit.edu/terms/#noncomm

” *Commercialization is prohibited.* Users may *not* directly sell or profit from OCW materials or from works derived from OCW materials.

*Determination of commercial vs. non-commercial purpose is based on the use, not the user.*”

Khan Academy is an even more confusing case which encourages classrooms and schools to sign up but still insists that commercial is determined based on use and not the user. Since these materials are mostly online and are free use, as long as they are utilized without commercial value, the user is following licensed guidelines.

In the OECD report, ”Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources”, there is mention fo the motivators for sharing learning resources. We certainly are ware of the motivators that copyright intellectual property as attributed to large publishing companies, but what motivates users, institutions alike to promote the sharing culture. The author suggests four components; a) altruistic reasons –  sharing is the right thing to do b) personal non –monetary recognition or “egoboo”, which gets recognition and possible further considerations as a recognized contributor, c) commercial reasons – offering free resources now that lead to purchasing of a product later on and d) not worth applying  “copyright restrictions” to the artifact. The findings suggest that practical reasons outweigh other factors.

In the education sector there are few items where may be considered necessary to apply digital rights management, protecting ones intellectual property, although the licensing and ownership of learning artifact is gaining renewed scrutiny. If a teacher produces innovative material, who retains full intellectual property rights over that content, and who has rights to commercialize the material? What types of licensing should be applied to this material if it is to be shard among the institution or globally. Traditionally, the rights normally belong to the institution; however there seems to be a case for revisiting this model.

In our school, we take an active approach to bring greater awareness to our students, on the issues of licensing, intellectual property, original work, and copyright.  We have meetings to review publishing policies, use of creative commons licensed products (photos and videos), evaluate sources of creative commons licensed materials and have procured a licensing agreement to utilize indie music tracs in student projects. The result of embedding the thinking, and ensuring active monitoring brings greater awareness to the issues of copyright, free open source materials, intellectual property and appropriate use of these tools.  We now see students produce high quality products using their original work and free share-alike licensed material for which they have full intellectual property rights.  This is putting knowledge into practice.

The number of licensing schemes may confuse end users, but there is greater clarity between the use of copyrighted protected material and free open source attributed material, in products that will be shared to the public domain.

The viability and use of OER in open classrooms can take many shapes and forms; however, it is likely that there is no standard for successful integration of digital objects into learning situations. Although one may take the view of OER from the perspective of the learner or the educator, the educator’s view as one who generates the curricular material will normally set the standard in K-12 classrooms. This paper will focus on the educator’s perspective on the use of OER in K-12 classrooms.

Recent discussion around this topic has highlighted the fact that the use of OER materials, even though the goal is on presenting learners with new ways of constructing knowledge and new strategies to make connections in their learning, the focus still rests on the comfort of the teachers. The main variables limiting use of OER materials include; fit into the curriculum, quality, and flexibility to manipulate the digital object, and student’s ability to adjust their learning style.  Like many instances in technology adoption, the instructional leader sets the pace of adoption in learning and selection of resources.

From an educators perspective the main issue with OER materials is lack of quality and customization, or in many cases localization to a particular context. Teachers normally have their own set criteria for bringing in suitable learning content and strategies for acquisition of content knowledge. Using material that has not passed through their own filter is unfamiliar territory for many teachers.  Quality is often the first rationale offered, suggesting the teacher can create a better quality content by himself or herself. Secondly the fit into the curricular learning cycle is often cited so the teacher knows best of what to provide the students in their learning continuum thus they present material comfortable to them, that has likely been used previously and then continue the cycle. The third aspect often raise that limits the use of OER is the lack of customization of the digital object by the teacher to create the ‘fit’ they tend to achieve in their own instruction or integration into the curriculum.

Educators often search for more teaching resources and may not be totally familiar with OER materials and the large OER repository to search these archives. Additionally teachers may not have a standardized guideline to conduct a comparative as to the value of these resources in learning situations.  If additional resources are required, such as creating other materials or use of specialized software, this will further limit the use of OER materials in the classroom.

Although there is a rapid growth of creative commons, share-alike licensed material, the ability to contribute to this repository of teaching materials is growing rapidly, but the awareness of these vast rich resources has not kept pace among today’s educators.  We need to bring greater awareness for the use of OER versus the traditional publishing routes common in educational systems.