Open Education Policy

(Video from Blinktower, Winner of the 2012 Why Open Education Matters Video Contest)

What I have learned from Dr. Cable Green’s Presentation:

As Dr. Cable proposed, the basic principles of Education Policy are:

1. Efficient use of national/state tax dollars
2. Saving students money
3. Increasing access to education

The Dream of Open Education is that everyone in the world can obtain all the education that they desire. FREE in Open Education does not mean as free cost, but as the freedom to use the resources and modify them as needed. Policy Makers need to understand the tools and needs of 21^st century education. With the school budget cut, library resources/journal subscriptions are becoming more limited as well. That’s another reason for promoting Open Education. According to the data, the top 100 courses in most universities are same courses, so why not sure share our resources to make it better? Even translate into other languages?

Why focus on Open Policy – this is where the money is. Money is spent to buy textbooks and create courseware. If we switch to open license and public can have access to it and it can reduce costs. Use public fund to build/maintain open resources. As Tax payers, we have right to access what we paid for – and all the education resources are built with government (public) funding.

Dr. Cable’s idea is consistent with the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which stated that “Governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources”. – Cape Town Open Education Declaration (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration)

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration also indicated that “Open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologist that facilitates collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues.” In the other words, to make the course better (for students).

 I also want to point out that from the Survey Results of Faculty and Online Education conducted by InsideHigherEd.com, it showed that certain percentages of faculty members believed that their institution is pushing too much instruction online and they have more fear than excitement on the growth of online education. The reason for mentioning this survey data is because most open education course are online and when we are thinking about promoting Open Education and OER, we also need to consider how to reduce the negative thoughts/reactions of online education among faculty members.

Open Business Model

   

In the Open Business Modules topic, there are two sub topics: OCW and Open Textbook  

Open Courseware

The MIT Open Course Ware has become a model for universities that are interested in promoting their courses online. In the A Sustainable Model for Open Courseware Development (Johansen & Wiley, 2010) article, the authored described the question for offering OCW in BYU and I think these questions can be adopted by all institutes that are thinking about offering OCW. The questions are: How much is the cost, How will it affect paid enrollment, and How to continue the OCW initiative. Although the study from BYU provides encouraging evidence that OpenCourseWare programs can be conducted in a financially self-sustaining manner. There are still questions on the dropout rate and how students are encouraged by the OCW before they enrolled.

There are different universities providing their courses online as OCW for sharing and promoting reasons. MIT stated that when they first designed the OCW, the target audience was faculty members but they found out that there are more students than faculty members visiting the site. That’s the reason they released MITx, which is more students oriented. Therefore, when designing the college based OCW, we need to think about who the audience are. If we want to focus on students, one element we need to add is the assessment piece. When I was browsing MIT OCW as a student, I found myself wanting to find assessments and quizzes to measure what I have learned but was not able to.  

Online Textbook

Flat World Knowledge is one of the biggest online textbook publishers in US. Hilton and Wiley’s (2010) article “A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story” has detailed descriptions and comparisons between the Flat World Knowledge and Textbook Media’s pricing policy and copyright authority. When reading articles from Wiley and other blogs on Digital Textbooks, we can identify two biggest advantages of digital textbook: 1. Making reading more cost efficient and mobile friendly, 2. Making printing & publication easier.  

Making reading more cost efficient and mobile

With the growth of digital readers (iPad, Kindle, etc.) the Digital Textbook Sale in US grew from 1% (2010) to 5.5% (2012), and it’s predicted to grow to 18.8% by 2014 (http://www.dclab.com/blog/2012/03/digital-textbooks-whats-stopping-us/). And over 70% students are eager to stop using printed textbook and move to digital ones for cost and convenience (e.g., textbooks are heavy to carry, you can’t study if you forgot to bring the textbooks, etc.) factors (http://www.schools.com/visuals/digital-textbooks.html).
When we talked about Open Education, digital textbook is one of the topics that fall among with it and there are universities that have been trying digital textbooks. Indiana University and Pearson are working together to reduce the costs of digital textbooks for students on all IU campuses. IU's eTexts initiative enables faculty to optionally choose these digital textbooks and online exercises at reduced prices for students. Many universities have international program, which students oversea are taking classes from US universities. Digital textbooks are especially useful in international program, when oversea students need to purchase foreign textbooks; the price goes up even higher because of the shipping fee. Using digital textbook became a much better option in this case.  

Making printing & publication easier

Nowadays printing and publishing is much easier than ancient time, here is a link about how Chinese created type http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/chinese-invented-movable-type-600-years-before-gutenberg/. But printing and publication can be even much easier via digital books. In Hilton & Wiley’s (2010) article “Free: Why authors are giving books away on the internet”, the interview results showed that authors who using free digital distribution of their books believe offering free books online actually stimulate the print sales, because free distribution increase exposure and visibility of their works and extend the long tail of their books. Also, more people will read their books. There are multiple ways for authors to make money besides sell books, with the increase of exposure, chances like new books or advertisement can come along. Therefore, offering free digital books is a win-win situation.

Open Assessment - Badges & Karma

(Badge for Digital Learning)

I like the idea from the Badges for Lifelong Learning video which is “students can take digital citizenship course and earn the digital citizenship course badge to unlock all kind of privileges in the school settings”. We had a group discussion last week about how to prepare students & instructors for online courses, especially when some people assume that online courses are easier than traditional courses but it is actually the opposite. One idea we proposed was students need to take a 2 credits course or a seminar on digital literacy before they take any online courses to prepare themselves. Or students can earn a Digital Learning badge after attending and completing the workshop to demonstrate that they have the basic knowledge and compliance of online learning before taking any courses.

More Info about Mozilla Badges Project (http://openmatt.org/2012/01/05/badges-competition/)

The first time I saw badges is on Plurk, which is a social media like Twitter. They offered different badges like 1000 profile views, 1000 responses, responded over 1000 times for encouragement and fun. Another interesting Plurk has is Karma. Your Karma number will go higher if you have more friends, post on Plurk daily, and update your profile pictures. The more you plurk and more responses you get, the higher Karma you will have. Some people really care about their Karma and feel bad to see the number go down. If we applied the Karma idea in open course: the more you post and more you response, the higher Karma you get. It could be a way to encourage student engagement in discussion board. However, the instructors need to make sure the quality of posts in the meantime.

Open Teaching

In the video, Wisley described the Then vs Now in Education:

• Analog vs Digital
• Tethered vs Mobile
• Isolated vs Connected
• Generic vs Personal
• Consumption vs Creating
• Closed vs Open

He also indicated that E-Learning is not open teaching. The difference between E-Learning and Open Teaching course like MOOC is: E-Learning is Digital, Mobile, but Isolated, Generic, Consumption, and Closed. MOOC is built based on social learning & networking. It’s open, so everyone can take the course and decide how they are going to participant and contribute to the course. It is very different from the traditional course settings.

The Success in a MOOC video below provides some answers to my questions when I was thinking how I can prepare myself and what to expect in a MOOC course. And most importantly, how I can measure my achievement in a MOOC course.



The video talked about five steps to success in MOOC: Orient, Declare, Network, Cluster, and Focus. I am facing two issues in this Openness in Education course: 1. Not able to show my post on the first page; 2. Nobody comments on my post. I thought the second issue was related to the first one, but maybe I need to leave a comment when I visited other participants’ blogs. I did visit a few good blogs but never left comments. I need to transfer myself into a more open and more aggressive status and plan my own personal learning network (PLN).

Open Data

An important concept I learned from this topic is: It’s not just open data and share raw data, data will be more useful if it’s “linked data”. A good example is from the following video: After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, an open data was created and people added real time information about local hospital stations and refugee camps for rescuing and supporting purposes.

 

Open data, especially government data, can be very useful resources for business and education, like the 2010 U.S. Immigration map (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/10/us/20090310-immigration-explorer.html). We used this map in a Spanish language course for students to explore the Spanish immigration and the possible use of Spanish. Another useful open data site is the Open StreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/), which is a wiki map. After getting used to Google map, it is interesting to see a map that you can edit and update information on it. We can review the local maps and add useful information on it. However, it will be even more useful if we “linked” other data base with it. Then we don’t have to jump around 3 different maps to find out how the water system is running in our city and what is in the neighborhood when we are looking for apartment rental or housing information.

Open Science - the long road to openness

I found Kirn and Bissell’s article of OER and Open Science really helpful when I was trying to distinguish the difference between Open Science and Open Data. According to Kirn and Bissell (2011), “Open science is a catch-all term that generally refers to the democratization of the capacity of anyone to do science as well as the elimination of the barriers to accessing the outputs of scientific research (e.g., research paper, datasets, etc). Open data is a narrower term which overlaps with the open science.” They also raised a very important question: What is the role of expertise in open science and/or open education? Which is related to the ethical judgment issue on how to decide the usage of science data and to prevent the data been used in a wrong way.

Obviously the concerns/issues under the open science topic are somehow different from other open topics. When we are discussing questions like: For whom is this an issue; Who is responsible for resolving the issue; Why is it important, and Who suffers if it fails, we also need to keep in mind about how the open science can mean to the world as how OER can bring benefits to students & instructors. Yes, it is true that there are many concerns (ethical, contents related and technical) in open science, and we realized that most people like to “get” then “give” from open contents database; since we already know the possible issues, we can think more thoroughly when planning our own open project and how to share certain data under proper creative commons licenses instead of being skeptical and reject the idea of openness.

Open Access (Journals & Copyright)

 “Open Access is FREE, UNRESTRICTED, ONLINE ACCESS.” - Open Access 101 (Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/6973160)

I would like to cheer on the idea of Open Access Journals. When I was working on my dissertation and collecting literature review documents; half of the documents that I needed were not available via my college library database. Sometimes I could request them via inter library loan, which took about 1 week to 2 weeks; other times I would just hope that I did not miss something important when I couldn’t request the articles/books that I needed. It was really frustrating.

The most important topic of OA is copyright. How can authors obtain the copyright when they publish in the OA Journal? Suber (2011) stated that *Fair Use + Public Domain are not enough for Open Access when providing full-text works, therefore, the permission of copyright holder will be needed. Who’s the copyright author of OA materials? According to SPARC: (http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml)

• The author is the copyright holder. As the author of a work you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement.
• Assigning your rights matters. Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work. An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
• The copyright holder controls the work. Decisions concerning use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions belong to the copyright holder. Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.
• Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others. This is the compromise that the SPARC Author Addendum helps you to achieve.

Suber (2011) mentioned different kinds of OA, and I tried to find out what they mean. Different kind of OA: (http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22617/)  

Gratis OA vs. Libre OA: Gratis OA is free online access to refereed journal articles. Libre OA is free online access to refereed journal articles plus certain further re-use and re-publication rights. (Gratis – free to read; Gratis – free to use)  
Green OA vs. Gold OA: Green OA is Gratis OA to the author's final refereed drafts of all refereed journal articles, provided through author self-archiving of all refereed journal articles. Gold OA is (2b) Gratis or Libre OA to articles published in OA journals.

Also see the Table of OA from Peter Suber (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/08/greengold-oa-and-gratislibre-oa.html) I wanted to shared the summary that I gathered because as a person who did not have prior knowledge of OA and the OA copyright, it helped me understanding the important OA terminologies and how we can use them.

*Fair use is the right of the public to make reasonable use of copyrighted material in special circumstances without the Copyright Owner's Permission. The United States Copyright Act recognizes that fair use of a copyrighted work may be used "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research."
Factors to be considered include (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is for a commercial purpose or is for non-profit educational purposes; (2) what kind of work is the copyrighted work (for instance, is it creative or factual); (3) the amount and importance of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential commercial market for or value of the copyrighted work. Whether or not a fair use has been made of a copyrighted work is not always easy to determine and there have been many lawsuits to determine whether or not a use is "fair." Where there is doubt about whether something qualifies for the fair use exception, you should request a License from the Copyright Holder. (http://www.copyrightkids.org/definitions.html#fairuse)  

*Public Domain: Works that are in the public domain belong to everyone and can be freely used without compensating the authors. There are many reasons why a work may be in the public domain. For example, works consisting entirely of information that is commonly available and that contain no original authorship are in the public domain. Works that previously were entitled to copyright protection enter the public domain when the Term of the copyright has expired. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, if a work was published without a Copyright Notice, protection was lost and the work entered the public domain when it was first Published. (http://www.copyrightkids.org/definitions.html#publicdomain)


References:

• Suber, P. (2011). Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #159 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-11.htm