“Open Source and Open Standards,” the thirteenth installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on September 19th, 2007, by Rob Abel who serves as CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC), a non-profit member consortium that have been focused on developing specifications and standards for interoperability exclusively in the learning sector for now over eleven years. Thanks Rob for a great posting!

In his posting Rob starts by introducing his experience in open source software and open standards. He also references a recent study that he has been involved with about current and prospective use of OSS in higher education. Rob follows his introduction with 4 postulates that summarize some of what Rob has learned during the past few years. He provides a brief description and some examples for each of his postulates. The postulates serve as points of departure for further dialog.

• Postulate number one: Open source reference implementations are extremely critical in achieving adoption of open standards for software interoperability.
• Postulate number two: Standards organizations are pretty much the only way to get a level playing field when it comes to new open source applications for learning – however, that won’t happen unless the open source projects/communities are active participants.
• Postulate number three: Whether open source or proprietary, it’s all about the boundaries of customization.
• Postulate number four: Open source can be strategic to the goals of educational organizations but I currently only know of one case in which it is.

Rob completes his posting by reinforcing his and IMS’s commitment to addressing some of the larger issues associated with open standards and open source software for education.

Comments
The comments touched on each of Rob’s postulates at varying depth. It is obvious that standards development is important and complex. I believe that for most folks who use educational technologies there is a vague understanding that standards are important and open standards are better than ones that are closed. Perhaps more importantly, open standards development is not really understood by a vast majority of technology consumers and users at universities.

IMS has assumed a challenging task. I have heard quite positive comments about its role and potential and a number of detractors about execution and operation. While this posting and the ensuing dialog touched on a number of very interesting issues, connecting open standards, OSS, and education (which is exactly what we wanted); it did not really get to the options that a standards development organization has, its underpinning values and goals, and how it executes/operationalizes them. A future follow-up discussion might provide an opportunity to make the whole standards development process more “real” to teachers and administrators who make and influence technology decisions, but will probably not actually participate in standards development. An open dialog may also be a reflective exercise for other involved in the process.

Some comment highlights included:

• Richard Wyles pointed out the use of OSS in New Zealand, not only at the institutional level, but at the pan-institutional level in a manner that is coherent with Ministry of Education objectives.
• Along the lines of strategic use of OSS, Gavin Baker indicated the importance of being able to articulate FOSS use as directly relevant to the university’s mission. He asks who has done this well?
• Gavin provides an interesting observation about Rob’s second postulate, pointing out that although it can be hard to introduce a “homegrown” standard, it is possible, even if you are not the size of Google, if it does not compete with another existing standard and if it is a good standard.
• The role and model of IMS in open standards development.
• There was some discussion prompted by Pat Masson about OSS and Open standards in education, the impulse to customize, and the need to innovate rather than passively consume and adopt technologies. It was noted that educational technologies are applied in a very diverse and complex environment making it challenging to identify standard functionality to help guide standards development.

Thanks again to Rob, for his insightful post and excellent responses to all questions, and Richard, Gavin, Martin (RedSevenOne), and Pat, for making this a great exchange, and other folks who have been reading along. Please join in again on October 3rd when David Wiley posts on “Open Content as Infrastructure”. The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

I am going to take this occasion to rave a bit about OpenEd 2007 and the 3rd day of the meeting. This was one of the best meetings that I have attended in years. It was small enough for all of us to dine together (and for David Wyles to act as personal host to each guest), but was diverse and large enough to support spirited conversation from multiple perspectives. I hope that the Open Education meetings can maintain this balance as the Open Educational Resources and Libre Knowledge movement continues to grow.

It is worth mentioning that Open Education 2007 is supported on a conference resource site called 51 Weeks, which is still under development. It is a great tool that allows the activities occurring at the conference and the conference resources to be made available and put in some context. Each session has a description, chat area, and links to download resources. The application was being tweaked throughout the conference, so if you visit the support site and it is behaving oddly, you can report the behavior through 51 Weeks Feedback.

As mentioned in my postings on Days one and two, I was thoroughly engaged in each of the presentations that I attended. If you were not in attendance, it is worth checking out the presentation materials, audio files, and presentation videos where available. These materials are available on the Open Education 2007, 51 Weeks conference support site.

Although not well attended (it was the last session on the last day of the meeting), I found that Requel Xalabarer’s presentation titled Open Content, Universities and ISP Liability Exemptions, provided a refreshing perspective on the liability issues that institutions and OER projects might be considering. Her presentation reflected some of the complexity and confusion in the laws (particularly US and EU) that regulate and assign responsibility for transmission, cashing, and hosting of content. Although some of the presentation focused on copyright infringement, Requel also highlighted other types of non-copyright related issues such as rights to privacy, which I think are largely overlooked or at least have lower profile than “property” rights in our dialog.

I also would like to point to an interesting presentation by Amee Godwin and Leslie Rule that put a new perspective on “Localization” for me. Their presentation titled Placeholding: Location-Specific Metadata and Context for Open Content, pointed to the connection between physical location and context for educational experience. It seems to me that fusing geographic, and demographic information and educational content, activities, etc. with a graphical map-like presentation, could be a very powerful way of connecting learners, teachers, content designers, developers, and other stakeholders who want to take advantage of OER and who want to design and share OER that is internationalizable and localizable.

Once again, I am just highlighting some of the stuff that I found interesting. I will be taking advantage of the resources on 51 Weeks to “virtually” attend many of the other sessions that I was not able to physically attend during the meeting.

It was another great day here at Open Education 2007 in Logan Utah. In addition to some fantastic presentations there were a number of substantive announcements including:

• Establishment of the Open OpenCourseWare (OOCW) initiative, which will be a non-university based resource designed for individual faculty members who want to share their openly licensed course materials, and provides a low-barrier means for universities to launch their own open courseware effort without having to host and maintain their own OCW site.
• ccLearn is launching an Open Education Search project to enhance large-scale access to open education resources. They are still collecting links and feeds for resources.
• Establishment of an eduCommons development project. The eduCommons team is interested in engaging with institutions that are willing to commit programmer resources to contribute to the sustained development of eduCommons. Universidad de Alicante has already contributed a fulltime developer for the coming year!!
• The Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance was announced. This is an alliance composed of 7 colleges and universities in Utah that will share expertise and resources to develop open courseware and community.
• Utah State University has connected its OCW initiative to reduce financial barriers to earn credits at USU. Learners can use OCW to prepare for “testing out of courses” and earning credit at a fraction of the cost of registering and completing the course work for credit.

Note that the audio files of these announcements are available at the Opening Remarks, ccLearn and OER Custom Search, and Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance Launch presentation sites.

I find the last point about USU connecting OER with credit opportunities very interesting. We have some ideas about success factors in resident, distance, and online learning, but what about independent self-paced courses that are taken without traditional educational support services? Would it be in the interest of the OER movement to think a bit about how to support learners using OER to attain credit?

Although I have not been disappointed with any of the presentations that I have attended, I was very exited about the Keynote by Fred Mednick of Teachers Without Borders, who did a great job connecting OER and education development need. During his presentation he offered partnership opportunities to connect in real ways OER projects with Teachers Without Borders activities, providing opportunities to make the promise or OER real and to learn about how to make our efforts more impactful.

I also enjoyed Kim Tucker’s presentation on Libre Learning—OER and Equality during which he discussed a number of activities and challenges in southern Africa and pointed us to an interesting resource he just wrote titled Say “Libre” for Knowledge and Learning Resources, in which the differences between free/libre and Open are discussed.

Finally, I had the opportunity to learn a bit about an interesting analysis framework that tied motivation and ability (capacity) to innovation for OER in developing countries. The model treated NGOs, Governments, and Education and Education Service providers as groups and pointed to current and future influences that would impact effectiveness. This is the first application of research that I have seen in this area. Very exciting and worth following.

Hello. Rob Abel’s Posting, Open Source and Open Standards for the OER and OSS Impact on Education Series has been underway for a week and is still active. Please feel free to read Rob’s posting and contribute to the dialog. Although I do not normally make any posts while a guest is contributing to the OER and OSS Impact on Education Series, in this case I am going to make an exception.

I am participating in a very exciting meeting and want to provide a quick update of the first day of the OpenEd 2007 meeting and two of the points that I found very interesting that were raised during presentations. But first, if you are interested in learning about the meeting, check out the COSL web site, and if you really interested in following along, click on the Final Program link, that will take you to the conference support page on 51 Weeks.

Yesterday morning Manohar Bhattarai (HINT: click on the name to access audio podcasts and presentation materials) delivered the first keynote presentation, which was fantastic. One of the things that really stuck with me was his introduction of the idea expanding “OER” to “OERD” (Open Educational Resources for Development), which would shift the emphasis from academic resources to educational resources that more directly address development needs. During the presentation I was participating in a conference chat session and a short dialog developed about how this notion was quite coherent with the emphasis that some universities have on Extension services, Cooperative Education, and Outreach. Scott Leslie mentioned that although “Extension Services” is a U.S. term, that the same functionality exists in Canada, and I know it exists elsewhere under different names and is articulated through difference organizations. In any event, I feel (although this is unfounded) that the development, outreach, extension, cooperative education, etc. communities might take to OERD with even more enthusiasm than academic faculty and managers have in higher education.

Later in the day Chris Hoadley of Penn State presented an update on a fascinating project in India and Nepal that emphasized the importance of cultural coherence and relationships when designing appropriate educational technology for the developing world. Chris Geith of Michigan State University asked a follow-up question about video resources that were created during the project and how they are being made “open.” Chris’ reply was thought provoking. He indicated that in making them available through the Internet, accessible means will not make them available to the principal intended audience in India and Napal. The extent to which the materials are open should be determined by the communities creating the assets, within a context that makes sense. This raises interesting questions about the impact of creating context around culturally mediated and value-laden content that requires translation and other types of processing for wide distribution and use (internationalization).

Open source, open content, open technologies, open standards – is there any relationship between these things? Why or why not? About 18 months ago, in February of 2006 I was appointed the CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. IMS is a non-profit member consortium focused on developing open standards for interoperability in the domain of learning and education. My sense was that open source software was an important trend in this domain, especially in the higher education segment. I had some fairly recent exposure to higher ed open source in the U.S. having just completed a research study on current usage and prospective usage. In discussions with the IMS Board of Directors, which included at the time several providers of non-open source solutions (and still does, by the way) there was confirmation on the importance of including open source initiatives in the open standards discussion. Since then IMS has included open source and open technology program tracks in our annual conference and added a couple of open source leaders, Moodle (course management platform) and INFORMS (student and administrative system platform), in addition to some existing participation from the Sakai community, to our active participants.

I’ve also been involved in several invited presentations and panel discussions with some other very smart folks on the topic of open source and open technologies in both the higher ed and K-12 school segments. Through an accumulated experience of two years looking at open source and open standards and how they can, will, or might impact the learning technology segment, I have, at least initially, concluded a few things about open source, open standards and the relationship between them. Since we have a long way to go, I’m offering these as postulates that need to be proven. Here goes:

Postulate number one: Open source reference implementations are extremely critical in achieving adoption of open standards for software interoperability. I think the greatest proof point of this is probably Apache – the availability of an authoritative reference model while organizations are attempting to adopt new interoperability standards is invaluable in accelerating industry participation. In learning standards, our conundrum is conformance.

One of my favorite sayings of the month is, “learning technology interoperability standards – great for researchers or consultants, bad for interoperability.” The point being that pretty much all the specifications developed over the last ten years of progress are well, not very specific. Ethernet they are not. This, above all, in my opinion and in the opinion of many IMS members is the single largest reason that much very good work has been thwarted in terms of its potential for adoption.

As a result, IMS is doing a bunch of things under the name of “application profiling” to narrow down spec parameters for various communities – either by region or segment. We are also providing value to our members in bringing them together in various ways to support testing. But, while this is helpful, is there anything more efficient then the ability to build to an authoritative reference design?

Postulate number two: Standards organizations are pretty much the only way to get a level playing field when it comes to new open source applications for learning – however, that won’t happen unless the open source projects/communities are active participants. Some very successful open source initiatives leveraged existing investment in operating systems, web servers, etc. making the decision of what interfaces to implement pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, in end-user applications, and especially in education and learning, that prior investment doesn’t usually exist.

One of my very repeatable conversations with new open source project X begins with: “OK, Rob, just tell us what standards you have and then we can adopt them.” To which I reply, “well, if you want them to exist you need to help create them.” Let’s take course management systems as an example. Who defines the interoperability interface points between a course management system and other complementary components in what we like to call the “learning enterprise?” There is no obvious answer to that question.

If an open source initiative for learning wants to be on the cutting edge of defining that “enterprise architecture,” well, then it needs to be involved in the standards creation and evolution. Another very repeatable conversation with open source initiative X goes like this, “well, Rob, we are implementing open source interfaces and therefore we are creating open standards – therefore, we don’t need to participate in standards activities.” To which my reply is, “best of luck to you!”

The reality is that unless you are Google, or of a similar size and market share, you will have an extremely difficult time getting critical mass around your homegrown standard. And, typically a small open source project (they all start out small usually) has the exact problem of competing against larger competitors, like Google, who are much more likely to pull off that strategy than they are.

Postulate number three: Whether open source or proprietary, it’s all about the boundaries of customization. That may seem like an odd statement but it became apparent to me when discussing open source and student systems with an audience at a presentation of mine at the JA-SIG conference in 2006. What I mean is that at the end of the day, both open source and proprietary solutions are challenged to come up with the right designs in the education segment with respect to what is customizable and what is not.

Those that want open source solutions include in the key factors control and customization. However, if control and customization comes at the price of “forking” in the open source world, there is a big problem. You then lose the key benefit of the shared investment in upgrades, evolution, etc. that is so important. So, customization must be done judiciously and most importantly, designed into the core platform for forward and backward compatibility. This is exactly what seems to be the key challenge of many proprietary solutions in the education space. That is, is there enough customization afforded in the right ways so that the institution can differentiate itself, innovate, and so forth?

Postulate number four: Open source can be strategic to the goals of educational organizations but I currently only know of one case in which it is. Wow! Maybe I finally wrote something controversial. Maybe this qualifies as a blog now! It is very sad to me, but also an opportunity for those that wish to lead, that “the technologies of learning” are not strategic in our education institutions. What I mean by “strategic” is that the executive leadership understands that investment in technology to support learning is a key priority – not just to further the educational mission of the institution but also to further society’s progress in the use of technology for learning.

I kind of wrote a whole article on this topic earlier this year for Educause Review. For the purposes of this discussion, I want to point out that the same seems to be true of open source learning applications. The only exception I know of (there may be others I have not yet been exposed to) is the Open University in the U.K. and their evolving adoption of Moodle.

Open U. sees participation in an open source community as a way to leverage investment and innovation. As such, Open U. has stepped up to a key leadership role in that community and sees this as an ongoing core investment. Again, the difference between this strategy and others I am aware of is that it is not an IT department strategy. It is an institutional strategy that goes hand in hand with the philosophy and strategy of Open U.

I realize that this sort of thing is not easy to pull off in higher education institutions, especially the elite institutions with many diverse and largely independent schools, divisions, departments, etc. And, as I already mentioned, this may be more of an issue with technologies for learning in general versus open source versions of that technology. It will be interesting to see if other institutions can follow suit and which ones will emerge as the leaders in learning technology, open source, or both. The relationship to standards should be obvious – institutional buy-in to learning technology standards will help move the market to the great benefits of standards adoption.

OK, so that’s about all I think I might have learned. I’m very interested in your reflections on the topic. We have been very active in transforming IMS Global Learning Consortium into a venue where these sort of bigger picture ideas are discussed, in order to help inform the global learning segment. You may find our annual report on trends in learning, technology, and standards of interest or might be interested in joining our online community.

I want to welcome Rob Abel and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. His post is scheduled to appear on September 19, 2007 (eastern U.S.). In this posting, Rob will relay a few thoughts on the relationship between open source software that supports teaching and learning and open standards for data and application interoperability in the same space. It is a brief synopsis of “possible lessons learned so far” based on two years of experience. Rob reserves the right to evolve or change these lessons based on future experience.

Already a veteran Silicon Valley high tech entrepreneur, Rob Abel entered the world of educational technology in 1999 by joining Collegis (now SunGard Higher Education), the leading provider of information, academic, and online technology services in the U.S. higher education market. Prior to joining Collegis, he was responsible for development of products and services for online learning at Oracle. In 2004 Rob founded the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC) to conduct research on best practices in the use of technology in education. One study conducted near the end of 2005 looked specifically at the level and types of adoption of open source in the U.S. higher education market, sponsored by Sun, SCT, and Unicon. The report on this unique study is available online at the A-HEC Open Source Software Research site. In February 2006 Rob was appointed as the CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC), a non-profit member consortium that have been focused on developing specifications and standards for interoperability exclusively in the learning sector for now over eleven years. Participation in IMS GLC includes an annual report on Learning Impact: Trends in Learning, Technology, and Standards. This report was inspired by the need to “connect the dots” between new and innovative learning technologies and the key global challenges of education leaders across sectors. IMS GLC has featured tracks on open technologies in its annual conference each of the last two years.

I am very much looking forward to Rob’s posting, which promises to build on the great dialog that was generated during the past months on the Series. Although open standards have been mentioned in a number of posts, we have not dedicated much time to specifically discussing their impact on OSS and OER relating to education. In addition, the standards development process is one of much interest. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.