Paul Stacey


An Exploration of Open Licenses and Financial Remuneration
November 28, 2012, 5:04 pm
Filed under: Creative Commons, Digital Economy, Innovation, Open Educational Resources (OER) | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

October was an action packed month with the Creative Commons Canada Salon, Open Education Conference, and BCcampus OER Forum.

Some personal highlights:

The BC Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation, and Technology open textbook announcement. This initiative will support creation of open textbooks for the 40 most popular first and second-year courses in the province’s public post-secondary system. The open textbooks will be openly licensed and made available for free online, or at a low cost for printed versions, to approximately 200,000 students. I’m especially pleased that BCcampus will lead the implementation of this initiative engaging B.C. faculty, institutions, and publishers through an open request for proposals. Tony Bates’ excellent blog provides additional insight and I personally am hopeful that some coordination can happen between BC and California where, in late September, Governor Jerry Brown signed two bills that provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges.


Visual Notes of Honourable John Yap’s announcement at #opened12 (CC BY-NC-SA) by Giulia Forsythe

Giulia Forsythe’s graphic facilitation skills wonderfully captured the BCcampus OER Forum events too. See – BCcampus OER Forum Summary.

The Open Education Conference was fantastic this year. The jam-packed program had an amazing array of sessions organized around micro-themes including – world wide initiatives, business models, open textbooks, open assessment, alternate credentials, social media and OER, data and analysis, and open from a wide range of perspectives including legal, faculty, students and librarians. Open has clearly gone beyond content and is pervading the entire education sector. The conference web site program has presentation materials and audio streams from sessions. I encourage you to explore them and see for yourself how open education is evolving. A stand out highlight was the evening dinner boat cruise with an awesome OpenEd music jam featuring attendees plus Gardner Campbell and John Willinsky, two of the keynote presenters. A conference where the keynote speakers rock out – my kind of conference! Enjoy it yourself:



Special thanks to Novak Rogic for these awesome videos.

While there is a great deal to assimilate coming out of all these events, I find myself thinking about matters from the Creative Commons Canada Salon that took place in Vancouver 15-Oct-2012.

This event featured a panel of practicing artists sharing how and why they use Creative Commons licenses for their works. I found the remarks of documentary filmmaker Ian MacKenzie especially intriguing. Ian referenced the gift economy, alternative ideas on money and the public commons from the book Sacred Economics, and crowdfunding.

Here’s why this is occupying my thinking. There is a natural inclination to think that Creative Commons open licenses are in opposition to financial remuneration. The thinking goes like this: “If I license my creation in a way that gives others permission to freely access and use it I’m forgoing financial compensation associated with charging for access and use.”

As I consider this I am puzzled by what I see in education.

Lets say I’m an educator employed by a public educational institution. My salary is essentially paid for by public taxpayer dollars. Given the way the economy works – if you pay for a good you get that good, it’s natural to expect that works developed by the educator should be freely accessible for use by the public. Yet this is not the case. Course materials educators create during their publicly paid for employment are not freely available to the public that paid for them. Shouldn’t public funds result in a public good?

But, you might say, it takes money to make the course materials educators create available to the public. This is true, but digital changes the economics of doing so. With digital the cost of copying is close to $0. The cost of distributing digitally is close to $0 as was so eloquently laid out by David Wiley in his presentation at the BCcampus OER Forum. See David Wiley’s presentation in it’s entirety Why Open Education and OER, and their implications for higher education institutions.

Lets try a different example. Lets say I’m faculty engaged in research. I apply for research grants from the national government and use those grants to conduct my research. When I complete that research the results ought to be available to the public who paid for them. But, and this is what I find puzzling, public access to the results of research requires another payment of public money in the form of a journal subscription fee even when the journal is digital. Given that the peer-review process is also supported through public funds, the public ends up paying for something three times, as Dieter Stein outlined in his keynote “Open access: effects and consequences in the management of scientific discourse.” at the University of British Columbia’s Open Access Week. The public 1. pays the scientist, 2. pays to publish, and 3. pays to buy publication. Why does the public have to pay three times?

For more on this I highly encourage you to watch Open Access Explained? from PHD Comics.

See why I’m puzzled? The economics underlying public education are not in line with our expectations of how economies work and, even more puzzling, aren’t in the best interest of the public who is paying for it.

But let me come back to my earlier point. There is a natural inclination to think that Creative Commons open licenses are in opposition to financial remuneration. The thinking goes like this: “If I license my creation in a way that gives others permission to freely access and use it I’m forgoing financial compensation associated with charging for access and use.”

At least in the context of someone being paid by public funds an open license that gives others permission to freely access and use the work isn’t in opposition to financial remuneration. The financial remuneration took place. The Creative Commons license ensures the obligation to the public is fulfilled.

However, what if we look at this from the perspective of an artist, a writer, a musician, a filmmaker. I’d expect artists to be thinking, “I made this and if anyone is going to make money on it it’s going to be me.”

Is it possible to openly license your creative work and still make a living?

I keep coming back to this question as it seems fundamental and generalizable to everyone.
Special thanks to Martha Rans for ensuring it stays front and centre in my thinking.

And so with this question on my mind I paid special attention when Ian Mackenzie spoke at the Creative Commons Canada salon.


Ian Mackenzie speaking at the Creative Commons Canada salon.

My exploration of Ian’s remarks around the gift economy, alternative ideas on money, the public commons and crowd funding took me in interesting directions. Here’s a bit of what I found.

Sacred Economics is a radical rethink of societal values, the role of government, and the commodity we use as money. It envisions decentralized, self-organizing, emergent, peer-to-peer, ecologically integrated expressions of political will. Government becomes the trustee of the commons including “the surface of the earth, the minerals under the earth, the water on and under the ground, the richness of the soil, the electromagnetic spectrum, the planetary genome, the biota of local and global ecosystems, the atmosphere, the centuries-long accumulation of human knowledge and technology, and the artistic, musical, and literary treasures of our ancestors.”

Sacred Economics imagines an ecology of money with many complementary modes of circulation and exchange. In a sacred economy, money goes to those who “contribute to a more beautiful world – for community, for nature, and for the beautiful products of human culture.”

I’m not doing the Sacred Economics justice. There is much to admire and ponder in this work. For a more complete synopsis I encourage you to view Ian Mackenzies video on Sacred Economics.

I found the ideas on alternative forms of money intriguing and spent some time looking at Bit Coin see here and here.

I also ended up checking out a Policy Agenda for the Sharing Economy.

Ian has developed expertise with crowdfunding to the extent that he now offers consulting, strategy sessions and workshops on crowdfunding. His web site has a great list of crowdfunding resources and platforms. The crowdfunding platform listing is particularly interesting as it differentiates general crowdfunding platforms from specialized ones dealing with things like Business, Environmental, Scientific, Social Causes & Non-Profits and hey, even Education! Did you know that Scolaris crowdfunds personal scholarship fundraising?

How about Degreed? Degreed is crowdfunding to create the world’s first Digital Lifelong Diploma, which will ‘jailbreak’ the degree and enable learners to reflect everything they’ve learned, from any source, throughout their lives.

At Kickstarter there is a whole section devoted to artists who are seeking and getting remuneration for their Creative Commons licensed work. See http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/creativecommons.

As I consider larger world events around financial markets, bailouts, and countries massively in debt or bankrupt it makes we wonder whether indeed our current economic model and it’s underlying financial system is serving us well. Clearly a sharing economy, alternative forms of money, and crowdfunding are changing social norms. Whole new conventions around getting paid, raising money, and making an investment are emerging.

Creative Commons licenses are situated within this changing landscape. As I explore the financial remuneration opportunities associated with use of Creative Commons licenses it’s important to point out that Creative Commons license options specifically offer creators choices around licensing their work in ways that provide others with permissions that specify commercial or non-commercial use. An artist who openly licenses their creative work with a Creative Commons license can do so in a way that specifies that users can copy, adapt, modify, publish, display, publicly perform and communicate the work but only for non-commercial purposes. This ensures any financial remuneration coming from the work goes to the creator. On the other hand it encumbers the work with restrictions that may prevent users from using the work in innovative and entrepreneurial ways which the creator could benefit from downstream.

There are a great many differing opinions out there around the suitability of different Creative Commons licenses for different use cases. In fact this is a hotly debated topic right now. See:

I especially appreciated David Wiley’s observations on these discussions in a 27-Nov-2012 Oer-community post where he commented:

“Just as there is not One True License, there is not One True Perspective on this debate. A few examples:

  • Some people look at OER issues from the perspective of the content, and some see them from the perspective of the people who use the content. Content-p drives people to favor SA licenses, to insure that derivatives of the content always remain free. People-p drives people to reject SA, so that derivers always remain free to license their derivatives as they choose. Which is the One True Perspective?
  • In this thread we have already seen people who view NC from the perspective of the licensor and others who see NC from the perspective of the licensee. Licensor-p sees NC as enabling and facilitating commercialization. Licensee-p sees NC as forbidding commercialization. Which is the One True Perspective?
  • As we’re also seeing on this thread, we can look at OER from the perspective of Access to content (without which permissions granted by licenses are meaningless) and from the perspective of the permissions granted by Licenses. I recently discussed these two perspectives in more detail on my blog (http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2596). Which of these perspectives is most important? Which is the One True Perspective?
  • As a final example, some people look at “open” from the perspective of a Bright Line test, while others take a more Accepting perspective. Bright Line-p enables people to make clear distinctions between what is and what is not open. Accepting-p enables people to recognize and value movements toward becoming more open, without passing judgments on people who “aren’t there yet.” Which of these is the One True Perspective?

…LICENSING ARGUMENTS ARE ARGUMENTS OF PERSPECTIVE. When we argue that one particular way of licensing is better than others, we’re really arguing that one perspective is better or truer than others. In other words, whenever we make an argument that says “everyone should use a [free | NC | etc.] license,” we are making a _religious_ argument – an argument which dictates the perspective by which we think everyone else should be judged.

When we move licensing outside the realm of religion, we can recognize the … importance of perspective. We can also realize that, depending on the peculiarities of a specific context and the personal or organizational perspectives of a specific licensor, different licenses will be optimal under different circumstances.

It would be great if the world were simple enough that One License to Rule Them All could exist, but it doesn’t. I wish to Heaven we would stop arguing about it, and just respect individuals and organizations to understand their own contexts, goals, and perspectives sufficiently well to pick the license that best meets their needs.”

There clearly are two sides to the open licensing equation. On one side is the creator or licensor of the work. On the other side is the user or licensee of the work. Openly licensing creative works entails considerations of both. Personally I prefer a range of licenses that provide creators choice in specifying open permissions and limitations. One assertion I’d make is that the more open the license the greater the market participation and the greater the innovation opportunity.

As you can tell I’m very interested in understanding the business models associated with open licensing. There is so much more to explore but let me close this post with a couple of additional examples of how Canadian artists are using Creative Commons licenses.

OK, lets take fellow Canadian Brad Sucks latest album “Out of It”.

Brad sells direct from his own website. You can buy the CD & all the MP3s or just the MP3s as a whole album or individually. Brad recommends a price for each but Brad offers flexible pricing – you can type in whatever price you’re willing to pay or download all the MP3s for free. Brad licenses the whole thing with a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA) license and encourages you to copy and share with your friends.

In his blog about the album he says:

“The only reason I, a dude who made an album by himself in a country basement, has had any sort of success is because people took it upon themselves to share my music with their friends. They remixed it, they used it in their videos, they played it on their podcasts, they included it in software and games and it took on a life of its own.

To sabotage that would be a huge, retarded mistake. Instead I’ll be grateful if Out of It worms around the world in even close to the same freaky way I Don’t Know What I’m Doing did and continues to.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying I love you Internets. Thanks for all your support and I hope you like Out of It.”

Hmmm, interesting. One way artists are making this work is by going direct to fans via the web. The Internet and digital formats change the economics reducing the need for middle men publishers and distributors. Personally I’d prefer as much financial remuneration for artistic creative works as possible go directly to the artist so I’m thinking this is a positive direction overall. It’s also fascinating to see flexible pricing and encouragement of copying.

One final example. Celine Celines based in Montreal has started a new company of open fashion. Using open data and Creative Commons (CC-BY) licensed images from NASA Goddard Photo and Video’s Flickr photostream her first collection is a series of silk scarves. The Hubble images captured on silk are beautiful – see for yourself at her online boutique gallery. This is an interesting example of a user/licensee, Celine, making a creative work out of a creator/licensor NASA image in a way I expect NASA never imagined.


Large silk scarve (CC BY-NC) by Celine Celines

I’ve only just begun to explore the possibilities.
The range of business models and opportunities is vast and varied.
Lots more to come in future blog posts.

2 comments


Sips From An Open Firehose
October 9, 2012, 6:02 pm
Filed under: Creative Commons, Innovation, Open Educational Resources (OER) | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s great to be immersed in all things open at Creative Commons. My colleagues are very tapped in to open efforts around the world and a steady stream of news and developments flow across my screen every day. Actually steady stream is an understatement – it’s like drinking from a firehose. Let me share with you a few of those sips.

Open Textbooks

Open Textbooks are hot. At a time of economic and financial constraint with students are taking on more and more debt it’s worth seeking solutions that save governments and students money. There is an economic argument for open.

Earlier this year we saw OpenStax College release Physics, Sociology, Anatomy & Physiology, and Biology free open textbooks targeted for use with high enrolment undergraduate intro courses. See:
Rice University And OpenStax Announce First Open-Source Textbooks
Why Pay for Intro Textbooks?

Online Schools.org released a great info graphic Open Source (The Affordable Future of College Textbooks)

The Saylor Foundation’s Open Textbook Challenge Wave I Winners were announced. Saylor open textbooks are now available on their Saylor iTunes site and via sites like Good Semester.

In late September California Governor Jerry Brown signed two bills that provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The textbooks developed will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) allowing others to use, distribute, and create derivative works based upon the digital material while still allowing the authors or creators to receive credit for their efforts.

20 Million Minds created a fascinating info graphic Embracing the Future: Free College Textbooks showing the benefits associated with this initiative.

Turning up the heat the Association of American Publishers put out a This Road to “Free” is Paved with Misinformation news release and AAP’s Roadmap to Misleading Infographics giving their analysis of the 20 Million Minds infographic. Leading to the PR Newswire story Publishers announce roadblocks to CA’s Open Road to Free College Textbooks where 20 Million Minds replies.

Clearly the publishing industry is in the midst of change similar to that of movies and music. I’m amazed that the publishing industry does not see open as an incredible business opportunity. The publishing industry’s historical role is to select expertise, support content creation which they then vet, edit and assemble into well designed, engaging formats, with high production values which they then market, sell and distribute. The publishing industry is being handed a gift – millions and millions of dollars of vetted high quality content available to them to freely use for business purposes. Sure this is a disintermediation of parts of the publishing industry supply chain. However, there is still a huge need for the curating, assembling, designing, creating engaging activities around content, and the assembly of content into formats that are then marketed, sold and distributed. I’d like to see the publishing industry stop bemoaning their fate and be less adversarial to these innovations. The publishing industry has a huge opportunity in front of them and ought to embrace the greater diversity of expertise being made available to them for free and innovate new forms of publishing that better support market needs.

In the K-12 space open textbooks are emerging in a slightly different context. In Sept 2012 the State Educational Technology Director’s Association (SEDTA) released Out of Print: Reimagining the K-12 Textbook in a Digital Age. This fascinating report describes how digital formats impact student learning and engagement and support personalized learning. Profiles of how different States are adopting digital policy and practices are outlined including initiatives that seek an approach that modular, flexible digital resources that don’t lock the entire class into a rigid sequential learning structure. In K-12 there is the potential, especially around Common Core curriculum to develop new digital resources that are used for subjects like Math and English Language Arts across many states.

And open textbooks aren’t just happening in the US other parts of the world are making similar initiatives. See Digital School program with open textbooks approved by Polish government! for a European example.

MOOC’s

This past summer has seen a flurry of activity around MOOC’s as new education initiatives like Coursera, EdX, Udacity and others seek to reach thousands of learners by providing free access to education. Consider this ambition for large class sizes against long traditions of strike action by teachers over class sizes and enrollment limiting practices – proximity, marks, and money.

For me MOOC’s are a form of open pedagogy and I found George Siemens’ MOOCs are really a platform of interest for the way it differentiated connectivist cMOOCs from the newly emerged xMOOCs. While both MOOC types provide free access cMOOCs emphasize creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning while xMOOCs emphasize a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. As George puts it “cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication”.

MOOC’s have generated a slew of analysis and critique related not just to pedagogy but to credentialing (here, here, and here for example), and completion rates (here and here for example).

In September 2012 Sir John Daniel, during his time as a Fellow at the Korea National Open University (KNOU), wrote a research paper Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility. In this paper Sir John examines the state of MOOCs today across a range of dimensions. Sir John makes a number of wonderfully provocative observations particularly around credentialing where he notes the MOOC dilemma that what decides whether or not a student can obtain a degree is determined not by their mastery of the courses, but by the admissions process to the university, which he calls “untenable nonsense”.

MIT Challenge

A little over a year ago Scott Young set himself a challenge. He committed to learn the entire 4-year MIT curriculum for computer science, without taking any classes. How is this possible? Well Scott tapped in to MIT’s OpenCourseware. You can see the rules he set for himself and his learning progress here.

On September 26, 2012 after 11 months and 26 days Scott finished the last project and exam for the MIT Challenge. Over that period of time he completed 33 courses including passing final exams and completing the programming projects. Check out The MIT Challenge is Complete to hear his summary of what he learned.

Given the discussion around the MOOC credentialing it is interesting to contemplate whether Scott should receive or even wants some certification/credential recognition from MIT.

When it comes to learners engaging in study using Open Educational Resources and formally receiving academic credit for their accomplishments the OERu and its growing list of academic partners are leading the way. I expect the OERu will be the first to solve this conundrum in a way that works for students around the world.

Year of Open Source

Scott Young’s story is an interesting example of someone pursuing personal and professional development through intensive immersion in open educational resources. Here’s another story of someone setting themselves a year long open challenge.

As described in his press release, Berlin-based filmmaker Sam Muirhead is abandoning all copyrighted products and switching to open source software, hardware, and services for one year, as the subject of his own series of online documentary videos. He aims to raise awareness of open source projects and methods, and get people from outside the tech world interested and involved in Open Source.

Over the course of his year of open source Muirhead will make his own Open Source shoes, jeans, toothbrush and furniture (and release the designs for others). He’ll be using Open Source educational methods to learn Turkish, avoiding food grown from copyrighted seed strains, and abandoning Apple software.

When asked what he hoped to achieve by only using Open Source solutions for everything in his life, Muirhead stated, “Open source is a fascinating way of collaborating, of creating, and working together for common goals, but it’s seen by most as something only relevant to software. By bringing it into ‘real life’ and adapting it to everyday purposes, I hope to get people thinking about how Open Source could work in their lives.”

Open Knowledge Festival

In September 2012 the first ever Open Knowledge Festival was held in Helsinki Finland. I didn’t attend but I found the topic streams of particular interest:

  • Open Democracy and Citizen Movements
  • Transparency and Accountability
  • Open Cities
  • Open Design, Hardware…
  • Open Cultural Heritage
  • Open Development
  • Open Research and Education
  • Open Geodata
  • Open Source Software
  • Data Journalism and Data Visualization
  • Gender and Diversity in Openness
  • Business and Open Data
  • Open Knowledge and Sustainability

I like this expansive and comprehensive list of the way open is manifesting itself and impacting so many dimensions of society and culture.

Open Policy Institute and School of Open

On October 3-5, 2012 Creative Commons hosted a convening of open experts from around the world on an Open Policy Institute and School of Open. I was fortunate enough to be a participant along with colleagues from a range of organizations such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, OECD, SPARC, FSF, OKFN, P2PU, OCWC, and others. Thought people might find these initiatives of interest so here’s a snippet about each.

Creative Commons developed an Open Policy Institute one page description that says:

“Open policy advocacy efforts are generally tied to specific institutions or bodies of government, and as a result are decentralized and disconnected from similar initiatives. Moreover, there is little emphasis on sharing knowledge between these entities, despite their common goals.

Institutions and governments around the world frequently reach out to Creative Commons, seeking assistance to develop strategies to increase the adoption of open policies. The need for support and leadership around open policies was amplified at Creative Commons’ 2011 Global Summit, when affiliates from 35 countries called for a central hub where open policies could be shared and discussed.

Early adopters of open policies have created knowledge resources that could be broadly useful, but because these resources are not widely disseminated, momentum for adoption in other locales is hindered. Open policy advocates and supporters are calling for centralized access to existing open policies, sample legislation, and action plans for how they were created and enacted.”

Input into the Open Policy from participants was wide and deep. While much work remains to be done it’s clear the Open Policy Institute will bring together best practices, policy models, effective strategies and resources to help governments, institutions and advocates make the case for why and how to implement open policies.

Two repositories of open policy already exist. The ROARMAP is a registry of open access policy and the Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy Registry, is a database of current and proposed open education policies from around the world.

It would be great if the Open Policy Institute develops/showcases policy for each of the following:

  • national government
  • state/provincial government
  • municipal/city government
  • school district policy
  • college/university/school policy
  • organizational policy (e.g.. libraries, museums, galleries, …)
  • technology/platform policy (eg. terms of use)

I’d even like to suggest there is policy that can be adopted at the individual level, but then your target audience starts to include everyone. However, there is a tendency to see policy as the responsibility of government only. By providing policy for a broad target audience we can empower all entities no matter what level to take some initiative around policy. This creates a scenario where policy is happening top down, bottom up, and diagonally at the same time.

My colleague Jane Park at Creative Commons is doing an awesome job of creating a School of Open in partnership with Peer2Peer University. Jane developed a one pager on the School of Open that says:

“The School of Open will provide online educational resources and professional development courses on the meaning and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and beyond. Individuals and organizations will learn how to use free technology and tools, such as Creative Commons licenses, to achieve their goals. Participants will also learn how to overcome barriers they run into everyday due to legal or technical restrictions.

Why?
Universal access to and participation in research, education, and culture is made possible by openness, but not enough people know what it means or how to take advantage of it. We hear about Open Source Software, Open Educational Resources, and Open Access… But what are these movements, who are their communities, and how do they work? Most importantly—how can they help me?

Learning about “open.”
The School of Open will offer courses on the meaning and application of “open” on the web and in offline environments. Courses will be powered by mentors and learners like you, and will be organized into study groups that leverage free and open resources and tools for collaboration. Artists, educators, learners, scientists, archivists, and other creators already improve their fields via the use of open tools and materials. So can you. A long-term objective for the School of Open is to offer certification on the skills learned, so that you can help others take full advantage of what the digital age has to offer. Current courses include Teach someone something with open content and Get CC Savvy.”

Big thanks need to go out to the international participants who all contributed great ideas for the future development and enhancement of the Open Policy Institute and the School of Open.

Creative Commons Canada Vancouver Salon

Before I left BCcampus to join Creative Commons I helped relaunch the Creative Commons Canada Affiliate. I’m thrilled to see the Creative Commons Canada web site launch and look forward to participating in the Creative Commons Salon Vancouver – October 15th featuring a panel of practicing artists who will share how and why they chose to use Creative Commons licenses for their works including a discussion on the changing landscape of creative practice, intellectual property and participatory culture.

This event if free and open to anyone interested in attending. Hope to see you there!

Open Education Conference

I’m super pumped for the 9th annual Open Education Conference taking place in Vancouver this year October 16-18, 2012. It has been a privilege this year to be part of the planning and program committee along with a bunch of people I admire. The theme this year is Beyond Content which is reflected in the program micro themes:

  • Alternative Credentials
  • Business Models
  • Data and Analysis
  • Developing and using OER
  • Institutional Adoption
  • Legal Aspects of OER
  • Librarians and OER
  • Open Assessment
  • Open Textbooks
  • Social Media & OER
  • Student Perspective
  • The Unexpected
  • Theoretical Underpinnings
  • Transformation, and
  • World Views

In addition to some outstanding keynotes this year we’re trying a couple of experiments – the Remixathon and the Pitchfest.

The Remixathon brings focus to a relatively untapped aspect of OER – the fact that open licenses allow for remixing and creation of derivative works. We thought it might be interesting in the spirit of hackathons to organize a remixathon. Conference attendees were asked to submit OER for the opportunity to be remixed. We got lots of great submissions so from October 12 through Oct 18 we’re hosting a remixathon in SCoPE. The remixathon kicks off with a Blackboard Collaborate webinar where each person who submitted OER describes the resource along with envisioned enhancements. The SCoPE discussion forums will allow face-to-face and virtual participants to discuss and share enhancements over the ensuing week. We’ll showcase the before and after OER on the last day of the conference.

The Pitchfest idea is similar to that of someone making a pitch to venture capitalists (think SharkTank or Dragon’s Den). The basic idea is that many people are looking for others to adopt, utilize or otherwise invest social or financial capital in their Open Education initiative. At 3:45pm on Tuesday October 16th at the Open Education conference people representing projects, companies and ideas will have 4-5 minutes a piece to make their best pitch to the audience. You can see a list of who is making a pitch and what their pitch is about here.

To cap it all off this years Open Education Conference is having an OpenEd12 Jamcamp on a special boat cruise we’ve organized. I’m expecting to shake a leg and maybe even sing or play. I’d love to be the brass section for this bunch – where is my old trumpet anyway?

BCcampus OER Forum

I’m proud to be facilitating the BCcampus OER Forum for senior BC post-secondary institution representatives in Vancouver on the afternoon of October 18, 2012. The objectives of the session are to develop a common understanding of what OER could mean for BC and build a shared vision of how to develop and use them. The session will also consider ways BC can take advantage of the promise of open educational resources and open textbooks.

Having worked on open initiatives at BCcampus from 2003-2012 prior to joining Creative Commons I really hope that this event builds out a strong interest and direction. We’ve organized a fantastic key speaker (David Wiley) and panel (Alan Davis, Cable Green, Brian Lamb) asking them all to suggest “action plans” for BC. The BCcampus OER Forum is a wonderful opportunity to put on the table real action plans for institutions, heads of teaching and learning centres, VP’s/Presidents, and government. Action can be small or big, policy or practice, cost or no-cost. Action can be something an institution pursues autonomously or done in collaboration with others across the BC system and globally. This event provides us with the opportunity to move BC forward so hearing action plan recommendations will be very helpful for the Ministry, for institutions, and for BCcampus. Can’t wait to see what emerges.

******

For me, across these events, open is a gathering force. Not just in education. I sense a greater strength in breadth of impact across cities, design, culture, research, democracy, journalism, and business. Perhaps not a fire hose, a rising tide?

4 comments


What I didn’t see at the Open Education Conference – using negative space to outline the future of OER
December 3, 2010, 9:06 am
Filed under: Open Educational Resources (OER) | Tags: , ,

My participation in the recent Open Education Conference in Barcelona and follow on readings of posts like that of Scott Leslie and Brian Lamb and the numerous papers from presenters now available at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya’s institutional repository have led me to engage in a lot of deeper thinking about the whole field of Open Education Resources (OER). It wasn’t so much that the conference was a stellar event full of stimulating innovative sessions. To be frank it wasn’t. But sometimes it’s the things that aren’t there that make you see whats missing and think more deeply.

I have an interest in art and when I was learning to draw we were encouraged to see negative space. When you draw negative space you focus on capturing the spaces around and between a subject rather than the subject itself. Amazingly when you set out to draw the negative space the end result is that you also capture something that looks very much like the subject you wished to draw. So this post will largely be about the negative space around open educational resources.

OER are still largely invisible in the academy. Despite having been around for almost 10 years OER are still not as widely known by faculty and students as those of us immersed in the field might like to think.

Using data from Joseph Hardin’s presentation on Faculty and Students Attitudes Toward Open Access and Open Courseware 50% of faculty have never even heard of open courseware and a further third have heard of it but never been to an open courseware site. Yikes. OER are still not on the radar of most faculty.

The most widely known OER initiative is MIT’s OpenCourseWare. While MIT’s OCW initiative is laudatory as an early example of OER advocacy, in my view it falls way short of being a stellar example of OER for teaching and learning use. How unfortunate then that when faculty or students do become aware of OER and go to MIT’s site for a look they simply see lecture recordings and course notes online. I expect they must be a bit disappointed and ask themselves “Is this what everyone’s been making a fuss about?”

According to Brandon Muramatsu who presented on MIT’s Project Greenfield MIT has only recently formed three committees – one for distance learning, one for 3+2 programs (3 years undergrad+2 years grad), and a third to consider e-learning for MIT students to enhance student learning experience. Holy rummoli! The leading example of OER is only now starting to consider e-learning!

Lets be perfectly clear – for MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a form of digital publishing. As you can see in Brandon’s presentation OCW is not an MIT education, OCW does not grant degrees or certificates, and OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty. This outline of all the things MIT’s OCW is not is an example of what I mean about negative space. Imagine if all the things that it is not were actually reversed into things that it is. OER is used for education, OER are used in a way that grants degrees and certificates, and OER provide access to faculty. Are these missing elements the very ingredients needed to establish OER’s impact and sustainability?

Barcelona is part of Catalunya which has a long history of open thinking and activism including extensive explorations of anarchism, socialism, democracy, and communism. When the dictator Franco came to power after the Spanish civil war Catalan political and cultural autonomy was suppressed. Publication of books and discussion in open meetings on the ism’s mentioned above were forbidden and use of the Catalan language banned. How apropos then that there was an ideological undercurrent around OER at this conference.

Mike Neary and Joss Winn subjected OER to a Marxist critique through their talk Opening Education Beyond the Property Relation: From Commons to Communism the University of Utopia. As they see it “while Open Education claims to liberate intellectual work from the constrains of intellectual property law, it does nothing about liberating the intellectual worker from the constraints of the academic labour process.”

Richard Hall and Joss Winn explored the extent to which open education might enable learners to engage with uncertainty through social action. This was one of several sessions that suggested higher education in its current form needs to change and called for a form of higher education that is more resilient to economic, environmental and energy-related disruption. It raised ideological issues around the current model of education being based on consumption, commodification, and growth – a model which is unsustainable. As Hall and Winn pointed out OER sharing doesn’t require funding it requires a shift in values, a shift some described as commonism where sharing as a revolutionary act becomes a recognition of what is common.

Is education, as Neary and Winn critique it, simply a market where indebted students enter into a contract around learning content and accreditation? Is OER simply feeding an educational regime where the value of the content is, both in its form and substance, standardised so all customers receive the same quality of product and delivered with efficiency so as to reproduce it at low cost? Are OER a new form of content production that can be absorbed into business as usual practices of education? Are OER the start of users and communities reclaiming education in their specific social context as a means of engaging in an uncertain world? While questions like these tug at ideological tensions underlying OER they have yet to fully surface and be answered.

I had to smile when, later that night while walking through the streets of Barcelona and thinking about these things, I came across a store window with an alternative view of Marxism.

I met quite a few OER skeptics at this conference who were there looking to be convinced that if they make their distance learning open it won’t eat into enrollments/tuition. Many of them expressed ideological beliefs which hold that as an educator using someone else’s stuff reduces your professional status. For the skeptics OER are risky and cause fear. These concerns were voiced in the hall but for the most part absent and unaddressed in the proceedings.

For every skeptic there were numerous advocates who see OER as a transformative agent with the potential to have a huge impact on education and forever change the way that teaching and learning are done. Those advocating OER as transformative agent see OER as an educational embodiment of the culture of sharing and openness that has permeated the web in popular culture but also as exemplified by open source software, open access research publishing, government open data initiatives, and open tools like wikis and blogs. Brian Lamb, Scott Leslie and Novak Rogic showed this expanded view of “open” in action with their presentation “Never Mind the Edupunks: Open Platforms, Open Content, Open Collaboration”.

And here’s a few quick sketch outlines of negative space elements from the Open Education Conference that hint at OER’s future but have yet to fully emerge:

  • OER are for some an individual act that embodies a larger belief in the value of open sharing. How does this play out in education environments where not everyone feels the same way? How does choice fit into the picture and how does the value of open sharing scale?
  • There is a huge need for institutional and government education ministry representatives to step forward and show how OER are an important educational strategy that they are endorsing through policy and action plans. At this stage there is widespread support for the notion that public funding should create public resources
  • OER need to move from an individual or institutional initiative, as they exist in their current form, to system wide initiatives involving all institutions, faculty and students
  • While there were suggestions that education in its current form needs to dramatically change there weren’t a lot of examples of what a new form of OER based education might look like. (With the exception of DeLaina Tonks’ fantastic presentation on the Utah Open High School)
  • OER have long been based on the four tenets of review, revise, remix and redistribute. However, actual examples of how OER have been revised and remixed are few and far between. Where are the examples of OER that have been significantly improved to such an extent that the original author is now using the improved one in their own work?
  • One of David Wiley’s sessions asked people to identify concrete pedagogical benefits from OER. What strategies are available to a teacher/learner with an OER that are not available otherwise? Surprisingly the audience was unable to articulate many. Where are the innovative pedagogical models with OER generating deeper learning?
  • The SmartHistory presenters were surprised at the absence of librarians and museum staff at Open Ed. Where are the OER collections around disciplines? Why haven’t communities of mluti-institutional professional peers, all collectively working on OER, emerged in the same way they have in the open source software field?
  • The cost benefits of OER are first being realized in the open textbook arena. Where are the stellar examples of OER open textbooks being brought together with open OER courses?
  • We know that the primary users of existing OER are students and those engaged in self study. However, the voice and perspective of students is currently absent from the discussion. What do students think about OER? Will students end up being the primary improvers of OER through revision and remix?

My own presentation comparing Foundation funded OER initiatives with publicly funded OER initiatives led to some fruitful discussions especially with those responsible for foundation OER initiatives. Thanks to Hewlett Foundation’s Barbara Chow and Kathy Nicholson for using BCcampus as an examplar of a publicly funded OER in their Dec. 1st, 2010 presentation at the Taking Open Educational Resources (OER) beyond the OER Community, Policy and Capacity UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning OER forum in Paris.

Special thanks to Gaudi and Salvador Dali for their oddly beautiful and frequently bizarre architectural and artistic creations which inspired me to think differently and which I’ve featured throughout this post and to Carlos Ruiz Zafón whose amazing book The Shadow of the Wind imbued Barcelona with a sense of eerie mystery in advance of my visit.

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Foundation Funded OER vs. Tax Payer Funded OER – A Tale of Two Mandates
October 26, 2010, 8:22 am
Filed under: Open Educational Resources (OER) | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This post is an expanded version of a paper I’m formally giving at the Open Education Conference in Barcelona November 2-4, 2010. Since submitting the paper back in September there have been several new announcements related to Foundation support for OER that I’ve included here in the blog but are not in the original paper. The conference paper has a prescribed word count so the original abbreviated version of this paper will be published in the conference proceedings. This is a hybrid paper in that I’ve kept the APA style references of the original paper but  also created links that allow for further exploration when read online. I plan to use this blog post to support the actual presentation at the Open Education Conference so I’ve added visuals for that purpose.

I’m publishing it early with the aim of getting some feedback and suggestions that I can incorporate into the actual conference presentation. If you are planning on attending the conference I hope this sneak preview stimulates your interest and makes you want to attend my session. Attendees at the session are invited to use their laptop to follow along and explore the many links provided while I’m presenting. If you aren’t attending the conference let me know your thoughts by posting comments and I’ll incorporate them into the presentation.

Introduction

Most well known OER initiatives such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare or Rice University’s Connexions have been funded by foundations such as Hewlett, Mellon, and Gates. Foundation funding has been an essential component of establishing the OER field. However, foundation funding cannot be relied on for ongoing development and operations. Many OER initiatives are struggling to establish and transition to a future independent of foundation funding. A common and critical challenge is planning for and ensuring sustainability. (Baraniuk, 2008)

OER have now been in development and use since 2002. On the technology adoption lifecycle curve (Rogers, 1983) we’d say OER have come through the innovation phase, are striving for adoption, and aspire to cross into early majority.


(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle)

To the extent that OER are a disruptive innovation we can also consider Geoffrey Moore’s variation of this model that depicts a chasm between the early adoption and early majority phase. Many disruptive technology innovations do not successfully cross the chasm and simply disappear (Moore, 1991).

Will this be the fate of OER?

OER need sustainable business models and most importantly sustaining funding. One way to think about OER funding is to map it to a traditional start-up financing cycle of investment.


(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_funding)

The cycle of investment starts with seed funding provided by what the field refers to as friends, family and fools (FFF). Seed funding is usually a small amount required to kick start the effort. In the context of OER seed funding is the money put up by the institutions and organizations starting OER initiatives. As the development progresses a second round of funding is often sought in the form of angel investment. Angel investors typically invest their own capital to finance a ventures need. Angel investment is high risk. A large percentage of angel investments are lost completely when early stage ventures fail in the “valley of death”. Foundations have played the angel investment role for OER. Angel investment is high risk and short term. Angel capital fills the gap between friends and family and third stage funding where venture capital, banks, or initial public offering kick in.

Venture capital, bank, or IPO private investments are unlikely options for OER but the sustained funding need is real. A variety of funding models for OER have been proposed including:

  • endowment
  • membership
  • donations
  • conversion
  • contributor-pay
  • sponsorship
  • institutional
  • governmental
  • partnerships and exchanges
    (Downes, 2007)

In a public post secondary institution context traditional sources of funding are:

  • public grant funding from taxes
  • individual donations
  • organizational donations
  • advertising
  • fees for products or services
    (Lane, 2008)

One strategy for sustaining OER developments as they transition from early innovation to mainstream is for government and tax-payer public funding to take over from the early stage funding foundations have provided.

This paper examines some of the factors affecting the growth and sustainability of OER. It compares and contrasts foundation and government publicly funded OER initiatives in terms of global vs. local goals, licensing options, use cases, and outcomes. Emerging from this comparison are strategies and tactics that position OER for public funding, ongoing adoption, and a long-term sustainable future.

Foundation Funded OER

The OER movement has been dominated by foundation funding. The Hewlett Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and more recently the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been priming the OER pump with grants.

These foundations each have distinct identities and philanthropic mandates that shape the programs and conditions by which OER funding is provided. Funding awards are not provided in a no-strings-attached fashion. Foundation grants are awarded to initiatives that support the goals of the foundation.

If OER are going to transition to public funding its worth looking at foundation mandates and goals and thinking about the extent to which they match up with public funder mandates and goals.

Hewlett Foundation

The Hewlett Foundation based in Menlo Park CA makes grants to solve social and environmental problems in the US and around the world. The Hewlett Foundation, along with the Mellon Foundation, was the first to support OER, has provided large grants on an ongoing basis, and continues to play an active role. Of all foundations Hewlett is by far the most influential and largest investor in the OER field.

Hewlett has funded most of the major, well-known OER initiatives including:


The Hewlett Foundation’s OER goal is to:
“Equalize access to knowledge for teachers and students around the globe through Open Educational Resources.”
(Hewlett, 2010).

Mellon Foundation

The Mellon Foundation’s mandate and goals are largely around supporting higher education and the humanities including research libraries, centres for advanced study, art museums and art conservation, and the performing arts. (Mellon, 2004 pp. 9)

The Mellon Foundation’s role in open education has primarily been through awarding grants for initiatives that benefit teaching and learning through the collaborative development of open-source software. In the larger educational context that includes software such as uPortal, Kuali and Sakai. From an OER perspective Mellon’s focus has been on mass digitization of content in libraries and building archives and sharing content across institutions rather than supporting initiatives to develop open course content. But Mellon has partnered with other foundations to co-invest in large OER initiatives such as MIT’s OCW.

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation’s goals are to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. (Ford, 2010) The Ford Foundation has supported OER as part of the Partnership of Higher Education in Africa and IKSME’s OER ArtsCollab which is engaging teachers, learners, and practitioners in the collaborative development and use of OER in the arts and social justice.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation makes grants in global development, global health and the United States. The Gates Foundation is supporting OER as a disruptive innovation. The Foundation’s Technology in Post Secondary Success background paper states; “We will make investments to test whether community-developed and openly distributed course materials, platforms and technologies can effectively disrupt traditional teaching methods and increase student engagement.” (Gates, 2010a)

In Oct. 2009 Gates made a $5.3 million investment in the Washington State Student Completion Initiative. (Gates, 2010b) Of that total $1.8 million is going to the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges for an Open Course Library initiative developing 81 high enrolment courses as OER.

In Oct. 2010 the Gates Foundation announced plans to spend up to $20 million on the first phase of a Next Generation Learning program that could become as much as $80 million over the next four years. Open courseware is one of four areas being targeted for the first wave of grants. Open courseware for high-enrollment introductory classes like math, science, and English, which often have low rates of student success is of particular interest.

In the OER context foundations like Hewlett, Mellon, Ford and Gates are angel investors supporting OER initiatives at a scale and with a volume of financing significantly beyond the start-up seed funding of OER initiators. Most foundations have global and humanitarian mandates and goals.

Foundation Funded OER Initiative Goals

We’ve looked at the goals of foundations lets now look at specific foundation funded OER initiatives and see to what extent their goals match those of their funding foundation.

MIT OCW Goals

Advance education around the world by publishing MIT courses as a public good for the benefit of all. (Hockfield, 2010)

Rice University Connexions

Connexions has two primary goals:

  1. to convey the interconnected nature of knowledge across disciplines, courses, and curricula
  2. to move away from solitary authoring, publishing, and learning process to one based on connecting people into global learning communities that share knowledge.

(Baraniuk, 2008, pp. 233)

UK Open University’s OpenLearn


To make some of The Open University’s distance learning materials freely accessible in an international web-based open content environment and, in so doing, to advance open content delivery method technologies by:

  • deploying leading-edge learning management tools for learner support
  • encouraging the creation of non-formal collaborative learning communities
  • enhance international research-based knowledge about modern pedagogies for higher education

(Lane, 2008, pp. 156)

Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative


The OLI initiative is a research-based approach to OER. The fundamental goal of OLI is to develop Web-based learning environments that are the complete enactment of instruction. This includes developing better resources and practices, cycles of evaluation and improvement, and advancing fundamental understanding of learning. (Thille, 2008, pp. 167)

A second major goal of the OLI is to provide access to high quality postsecondary courses (similar to those taught at Carnegie Mellon) to learners who cannot attend such institutions. (Thille, 2008 pp. 175) To support this OLI’s website provides free online courses and course materials that enact instruction for an entire course.

Open Yale Courses

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to recorded lectures of a selection of introductory courses taught by faculty at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn. Registration is not required and no course credit is available.
(Yale, 2010)

Goals like “advance education around the world”, “publish courses as a public good” “connect people into global learning communities” and “expand access for all who wish to learn” align well with Foundation goals. But do they align well with government publicly funded education goals?

Publicly Funded OER

Government public funding of OER has not been as widely featured in the OER field as foundation funded OER initiatives. The authors own BCcampus initiative in Canada is one example, but a quick scan of the most highly cited OER initiatives shows just how dominating foundation OER have been. During the drafting of this paper the author contacted several leaders in the OER field and asked them to identify OER initiatives that are funded by public taxpayer dollars at the state, province or national level. The initiatives that emerged in response are:

For apples to apples comparative purposes the author has chosen initiatives focused on higher education open content as opposed to open educational practices, open source software, or other aspects of the field.

Lets look at the goals of publicly funded OER initiatives.

BCcampus OER

Funded through an annual Online Program Development Fund provided by the Ministry of Advanced Education the BCcampus OER goals are to increase credential opportunities available to students throughout the province by funding multi-institutional partnerships for the development of shared credit-based post-secondary online courses, programs, and resources.

BCcampus OER goals translate into three metrics:

  • partnerships
  • credentials
  • sharing & reuse

(BCcampus, 2010)

Southern Regional Education Board SCORE

Funded by the Southern Regional Education Board the goals of SCORE are to improve teaching and learning and achieve cost savings through a multistate K-12 and higher education initiative to share digital learning course content among colleges, universities and schools in SREB states. SCORE:

  • establishes school and college relationships to create, license and provide high-quality content
  • provides cost-effective learning resources for K-20 by sharing development costs among states and commercial companies
  • reduces duplication of effort
  • increases faculty and student productivity
  • adheres to e-learning standards

(SREB, 2010)

AEShareNet & edna

AEShareNet is a collaborative system in Australia established by the Australian Ministers of Education and Training to streamline the licensing of intellectual property so that Australian learning materials are developed, shared, and adapted efficiently. It plays an intermediary role between developers and users and in particular facilitates the transfer of educational resources between educational institutions. Its goal is to provide a process and online system that is streamlined, avoids duplication and increases efficiency. (OECD CERI, 2006 pp. 3-4) AEShareNet and other licensed educational resources are distributed through edna’s repository.

OERNZ

Funded by the Tertiary Education Commission, the objective of the New Zealand Open Educational Resources project is to develop courseware that will be freely available to all tertiary education institutions in New Zealand. Reduction in the duplication of investment is a primary goal, but without risking the pluralism of ideas and innovation that underpin a vibrant education sector. (New Zealand OER, 2010)

JISC JORUM & JISC OER

The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded the JORUM initiative which put in place a repository for content UK higher education institutions wished to share. More recently JISC launched an OER content initiative to support the open release of existing learning resources for free use and repurposing worldwide. JISC OER will use JORUM as one of the vehicles for sharing.

The goals of JORUM are to enable the sharing, reuse and repurposing of learning and teaching resources through an online, repository service that supports policy, practice and productivity in learning and teaching in the UK and beyond. (JORUM, 2010)

The goals of JISC’s OER program are to explore the sustainability of long-term open resources release via the adoption of appropriate business models. Supporting actions may include modifications to institutional policies and processes, with the aim of making open resources release an expected part of the educational resources creation cycle. JISC’s OER program is expected to build the capacity of the sector for sustainable OER release, generate better understanding of OER reuse, and make OER easier to find and use. (JISC OER, 2010)

Wikiwijs

The Netherlands wikiwijs OER initiative goals include:

  • stimulating development and use of OER
  • creating options for specialized and customized education
  • increasing quality of education through more flexible and up-to-date materials
  • improving access to both open and ‘closed’ digital learning materials
  • reducing time to find and find resources that are quality and fit curriculum
  • increasing teacher involvement in development and use of OER

(Schuwer, 2010)

Goals like “increasing credential opportunities available to students throughout the province“, “establish school and college relationships” “develop courseware freely available to tertiary institutions in New Zealand” and “expand access to both open and closed digital learning resources” align well with government public funding goals.

Government publicly funded OER have local goals that serve citizen education access and credential needs.

OER Licensing

One way OER goals are being achieved is through use of licenses. The diagram below shows an OER licensing continuum. At the far left of the continuum is full copyright all rights reserved. At the far right end of the continuum is public domain no rights reserved. Licensing options are increasingly open as you move from left to right along the continuum.

Foundation funded OER do not involve license options. Instead a single Creative Commons license is used with the majority of initiatives going with Attribution or Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike.

In contrast publicly funded OER often involve license options along an open continuum. The authors own BCcampus OER initiative gives developers of OER a choice between local sharing within the province of BC through a BC Commons license or global sharing using Creative Commons. JISC’s JORUM initiative has followed a similar path and Australia’s AEShareNet uses an even more refined approach.

Recent publicly funded OER initiatives such as JISC’s OER and Netherlands Wikiwijs are being more explicit about dictating use of Creative Commons. But they still reference and acknowledge a need to support more closed resources. Lack of knowledge and fears around intellectual property, copyright infringement, quality and competitive advantage are still barriers to mainstream adoption and use of Creative Commons only.

It’s interesting to note that no OER initiatives are fully open. None are placing resources directly into the public domain.

OER Use Cases & Outcomes

Foundation OER initiatives mentioned in this paper primarily see OER as an act of publishing content and a form of public philanthropy. Use cases include:

  • marketing promotion of the institutions formal for-credit offerings (Wiley, 2010)
  • informal non-credit autonomous self-paced study (Lerman, 2008 p. 216)
  • academic planning for students enrolled at institution (Lerman, 2008 p. 222)
  • international distribution and translation, especially in developing countries (Lerman, 2008 pp 215 & 224)
  • assembly of OER into print-on-demand textbooks (Baraniuk, 2009, p. 2)

Foundation funded OER are typically housed on a destination web site or use custom built software resulting in controlled access and use. Most resources are not optimized for online delivery independent of the OER site. Despite the OER license used by many of these initiatives downloads are often not editable or modifiable given their fixed file formats such as .pdf.

Foundation funded OER initiatives are often more oriented to informal non-credit learning for students than to teachers. MIT is explicit in stating OCW, is not an MIT education, does not grant degrees or certificates, and does not provide access to MIT faculty. Initiatives like Carnegie Mellon’s OLI require instructors to ask permission for an account and even then use of the OLI OER must be done through Carnegie Mellon’s OLI technology rather than the instructor’s own institutions applications. As part of its sustainability strategy Carnegie Mellon’s OLI use by instructors even has fees.

The primary use case of publicly funded OER is for formal credit-based academic offerings rather than informal study by students. Publicly funded OER are often a form of curriculum development providing faculty with resources to use in their courses or in development of new for-credit offerings.

Publicly funded OER are typically housed in a repository which provides an access and distribution role but not usually a creation or course delivery role. OER are uploaded, searched for, and previewed on the repository but usually downloaded for use independent of the repository through an institutions own learning management system or other educational technology.

Conclusion

Comparing and contrasting foundation with government publicly funded OER initiatives reveals commonalities, differences, and a diversity of approaches.

OER goals/mandates, licenses, and use cases can be strategically situated within an overarching OER framework (Stacey 2006)

This framework can be used to define and refine strategy and tactics associated with any OER initiative. It can also be used as a basis for comparing and contrasting OER initiatives. As an example the following table highlights differences between the BCcampus OER initiative and MIT’s OCW initiative.

As shown in this table the publicly funded BCcampus OER initiative has focused on developing new online learning resources through system partnerships and collaboration. The content produced is primarily intended for faculty use in formal for-credit education offerings delivered via their institutions learning management system. The primary mandate for open sharing within the jurisdiction of the public funder is enabled through a BC Commons open license and global participation supported as a choice of the developer through a Creative Commons license.

In contrast the foundation funded MIT OCW OER initiative has focused on publishing a single prestigious institution’s existing lectures, course notes, and learning activities associated with campus-based classroom activity. These resources are freely provided as a public good for use primarily in informal non-credit learning. The foundation funded OER meets global philanthropic goals by mandating a single Creative Commons license but requires users to access the OER through MIT’s technologies.

Emerging from the comparisons made in this paper the following strategies and tactics position OER for public funding, ongoing adoption, and a long-term sustainable future:

  • ensure OER initiative goals fulfil public funder education access and credential needs first before serving global needs
  • establish OER development initiatives as multi-institutional partnerships with each institution using the developed resource in for-credit offerings right from the start
  • use OER development as a means of generating collaborations between institutions
  • incentivize use of OER from initiatives around the world in OER development and for-credit offerings of institutions
  • offer a range of OER licensing options along the open continuum
  • provide cost efficiencies and reduction of duplication by aggregating and distributing quality OER as a service
  • ensure OER have a form factor that is modifiable
  • support download and autonomous use of OER by institutions using their own technology especially learning management systems
  • look for ways to make OER creation and use part of regular operational academic practice

References

Baraniuk, Richard G. (2008). Challenges and Opportunities for the Open Education Movement: A Connexions Case Study. In T. Iiyoshi and M. S. V. Kumar (Eds.)
Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, pp. 232. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Baraniuk, R. G. (2009). How Open is Open Education? In Domus, March 2009. Retrieved August 31, 2009 from http://dsp.rice.edu/~richb/OER-IP-Domus-mar09.pdf

BCcampus OER (2010). Online Program Development Fund. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://www.bccampus.ca/online-program-development-fund-opdf-/

Downes, S. (2007). Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects. Volume 3, pp. 29-44.

Ford (2010). Ford Foundation Mission. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://www.fordfoundation.org/about-us/mission

Gates (2010a). Technology in Postsecondary Success Background Paper. Retrieved August 18, 2010 from http://www.gatesfoundation.org/united-states/Pages/united-states-education-strategy.aspx

Gates (2010b). Washington State Community and Technical Colleges Launch the Washington State Student Completion Initiative Press Release. Retrieved August 18, 2010 from http://www.gatesfoundation.org/press-releases/Pages/grant-to-launch-washington-state-student-completion-initiative-091014.aspx

Hewlett (2010). Hewlett Foundation Education Program Goals. Retrieved August 6, 2010 from http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education-program

Hockfield, S. (2010). OCW President’s Message. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://ocw.mit.edu/about/presidents-message/

JORUM (2010). Jorum Purpose. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://www.jorum.ac.uk/termsofservice.html

JISC OER (2010). Open Educational Resources Programme. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer

Lane, A. (2008). Reflections on sustaining Open Educational Resources: an institutional case study. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media16677.pdf.

Lane, Andrew (2008). Widening participation in education through open educational resources. In T. Iiyoshi and M. S. V. Kumar (Eds.)
Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge pp. 149–164. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lerman S., S. Miyagawa, A. H. Marguiles. (2008). Open Courseware: Building a Culture of Sharing. In T. Iiyoshi and M. S. V. Kumar (Eds.)
Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, pp. 213-227. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mellon (2004). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 2004 Annual Report. Retrieved August 13, 2010 from http://www.mellon.org/news_publications/annual-reports-essays/annual-reports

Moore, Geoffrey A. (1991). Crossing the Chasm. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

New Zealand OER (2010). New Zealand Open Educational Resources Project. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://www.repository.ac.nz/.

OECD CERI (2006). AESharenet, Australia. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/61/21/37648060.pdf

Rogers, Everett M. (1983). Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press.

Schuwer, R. (2010). Wikiwijs A Nation Wide Initiative in The Netherlands. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://wikiwijsinhetonderwijs.nl/over-wikiwijs/english/

SREB (2010). Digital Content SCORE Goals. Retrieved August 10, 2010 from http://www.sreb.org/page/1160/digital_contentscore.html

Stacey, P., R. Rominger (2006). A Dialogue on Open Educational Resources and Social Authoring Models. In Open Education 2006 Conference Proceedings pp. 107-115, Utah State University.

Wiley, D. (2010). Research on OER Sustainability and Impact. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1596

Yale (2010). Open Yale Courses Aim. Retrieved August 31, 2010 from http://oyc.yale.edu/

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