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  

OER in Course Design

Open Educational Resources are very useful in course design. There are several advantages of using OER in (language) course design & teaching that I can think of:

• Cost effectiveness: textbooks or practice books are expensive; most OER language courses use PDF files instead of textbooks to help students reduce the cost. By taking classes online, students also save commuting time and money.
• Motivation (Games, Dynamic Flashcard, Mobile Learning): Compared to traditional classroom lecture, online courses provide more choices in technology use and resources, especially in second language course. Student can also receive course information via Mobile (smart phone). Teachers often combine vocabulary games, dynamic flashcards and videos in the courses to enhance students' learning motivation. Another common tool is online synchronous meeting with instructors and tutor to assist students with pronunciation or grammatical problems.
• Self-Paced Learning & Diversity choices: In my previous study, students indicated that they liked to use online learning resources because of the self-paced learning feature. Students can learn in their own speed instead of waiting for others to complete the assignment before they can move to the next chapter. For language teachers, the variety of online learning resources provide rich selection of course materials, for instance, videos of Chinese culture and news from the Open University in UK. However, instructors should be careful about the credibility issue and choose appropriate topics for students in different classes.
• Instant Assessment for learning outcomes & Self-review (Quiz): Many OER language courses provide online quizzes and instant feedback. Students can have access to the quizzes and their results.

There are different websites that we can find OER for courses, e.g., OER Commons (http://www.oercommons.org/), MERLOT (http://taste.merlot.org/), Free Learning (http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/search-oer-sites/), etc. Finding OER websites is easy, but the next step, finding appropriate OER for the course and students is more challenging. This will be a task for instructional designer or instructor to identify and filter information before embedding OER in the course. It would be helpful to have a general search engine among the OER sites.

Open Course Ware

How to distinguish Open CourseWare and Open Educational Resource? I see OCW as a reference which has a full structure of the course, including syllabus, readings, discussion topics, and writing assignment instructions; OER are elements that I can add into course design. They served different purpose and different needs in course design and teaching.

There are a number of Universities that offered OCW, for instance, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Utah State University, NJIT, and University of Michigan. When I looked into the open courses from these Universities, I noticed that some of them provide more detailed of the course materials and some have basic syllabus and instructions of assignments. Also, the range of courses is also very different.

In the video of MIT open course press conference, the president of MIT indicated the MIT “OCW is a natural marriage of American higher education and the capability of world wild web.” The open course is for sharing the in frustration of MIT courses, and the MIT open courses did get spread out to the world via Internet. For instance, the Open Courseware Consortium has members from different countries and the local OCW websites all have links to US Universities that provide OCW. In addition, MYOOPS (http://www.myoops.org/) in Taiwan have worked with MIT, Harvard, and Yale on translating the courses into Chinese for local students. The OCW is not only for students, but also for faculties who are interested in understanding course designs from MIT and other universities that open their courses.

Open Contents & License

 

(Image from Purin Phanichphant on Flickr)

Wiley (2011) referred open as "granting copyright permissions above and beyond those offered by standard copyright law", and open contents as “content that is licensed in a manner that provides users with the right to make more kinds of uses than those normally permitted under the law - at no cost to the user.” In another word, open license is the key of openness.

As a language instructor plus instructional designer, I noticed that there are tons of free language learning materials on internet. I called them free materials not “open” materials because most of them are not licensed. The idea of open contents and open license/creative commons license has not been spread widely into this area. Most language instructors are aware of copyright issue, but not open license usage. With creative commons license, those language instructional materials (Powerpoint presentations, digital stories, Flashcards, etc) can become open licensed and shared under the license.

Another idea under the open contents that I would like to share is the openness diagram (see above). When we browse through the 12 topics of the Introduction to Openness in Eucation, one question that we have among our group is how are they related to each other & how do we define them? Then I found the openness diagram on flickr, which I think is quite helpful to understand by sorting those terms into different categories and arrange them in a diagram from the aspect to the consciousness of openness. I made some changes in my own diagram of openness by simplifying the diagram (see below).

(image cretaed by Hui-Ya Chuang)  

Open Source Textbook

After viewing the videos and articles related to the topic of open source from Openness in Education site. I was thinking how to connect open source and course design together instead of thinking about the technical or software related usage, and I found some interesting articles about open source and instructional design.

The answer is: Open Source .. Textbook.  

Benefits
Why do we need open source textbooks instead of the traditional ones? An article about the migration of open source software from the Gbdirect site (http://ebusiness.gbdirect.co.uk/) listed several business benefits of open source software, which I believe can applied to open source textbook as well. Those benefits are:

• Stability
• Reliability
• Auditability
• Cost
• Flexibility and Freedom
• Support and Accountability

How?
There are several ways for teachers to design or choose open resource textbook. One good website is the Open Tax College (http://openstaxcollege.org/), the collections include College Physics/Introduction to Sociology/Biology/Concepts of Biology and Anatomy of Physiology. Teachers can register, and use the existing textbooks from Open Tax College website, edit the contents, and then publish as specific textbook for their courses. Students can download the textbook as PDF or read it online for free. Another example is the Apple iBook, which teachers can develop their digital textbooks from scratch.

Concerns
Among the benefits of open source textbooks, there are some concerns. The first one is the lack of supplementary features offered by publisher. Another one is the time that teachers need to spend to review the edit the new textbook and modify the course design if they have been using the same textbook for years. (Smith, 2012). But the usage of free textbook can certainly reduce the cost for students among other benefits Conclusion So, should we support and create open source textbooks? I think the decision should base on the course needs. However, using open source textbooks can be a marketing strategy to promote courses. When students are interested in a course and they can have access to view the actual textbook and knowing that the cost is lower, it can encourage students registering the course. The faculty edited textbook can also be shared as OER mateirals. It’s a win-win situation.

Resources:

• Benefits of Using Open Source Software (http://open-source.gbdirect.co.uk/migration/benefit.html) 
• Open Source Migration Guide. Godirect. Retrieved February 13, 2012. From http://open-source.gbdirect.co.uk/migration
• Smith, M. (2012, February 7). “Who pay for intro textbooks?” Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved February 14, 2012, from http://www.insidehighered.com

Globalized Creative Commons (Open Licensing)

The week our team joined the open course and read the first topic, open licensing, it happened along the wiki black out day and then Apple released the iBooks author feature. The Wiki and Apple iBook make me realize again the importance and impact of license of intellectual works. Hilton, Wiley, Stein, and Johnson (2010) listed the ‘R’s in OER: Reuse, Redistribute, Revise, and Remix, which are associated with the basic idea of Creative Commons license. It also explained why the CC license is an important element when we talk about Open Educational Resources.

In addition, the creative commons licensing idea has been globalized, the CC Affiliate Network includes teams from 85 countries (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Jurisdiction_Database); each affiliate has a creative commons website in local language. Theses websites are not simply translated from the original creative commons site, they also add creative ideas for promoting the concept of creative commons licensing. For instance, the creative commons Taiwan (http://creativecommons.tw/) used comics to show examples of how to use licensed materials and how to add license to your own works; the creative commons Australia produced a promotional animation, Creative Commons Mayer & Betle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3aZoe5VK-c) to explain the use of Creative Commons licensing.

These website and ideas are good examples of “think globally act locally”, and they tried to find best way to approach the target audience. As an instructional designer, the knowledge of creative commons license is definitely needed either when we adopt OER in the course or develop our own OER.


References:

• Hilton, J., Wiley, D., Stein, J., & Johnson, A. (2010). The four „R‟s of openness and ALMS analysis: frameworks for open educational resources. Open Learning, 25(1), 37-44.