Wow.  It is not so often that you can point to truly enlightened legislation and national policy, but here is one such case.  Pat Masson, just posted some links on the Educause Openness Constituency Group to a fantastic little article titled Government promotes open source for public sector, whose content strikes me as remarkable.  The article provides a very cursory description of a UK government policy that promotes Open Source Software, Open Technology Standards, and Re-Use.  What could be smarter?  Very little, that’s what.

If you find that intriguing, you will certainly find it worthwhile to check out the government’s Action Plan on the Chief Information Officer Council web site.  The CIO Council Office has published a 10-item action plan that outlines everything from educational support and standards for re-use to international benchmarking services to help ensure that the UK policy is staying relevant.  Now, support of Open Source is not new to the UK government, who launched the Open Source Academy a few years ago, so perhaps I should not be so surprised, but still I am incredibly impressed with the CIO Council’s vision and resistance to taking a more reactive and “closed” approach to capacity sharing that seems increasingly endemic to government and in public higher education.

While reading the CIO Council Action Plan, I could not help wondering how likely it is that this type of policy outline will be read by policy makers and concerned citizens in other countries, who then localize, reuse, and open it to support good dialogue.  Beyond that, it also struck me that the type of policy and the action items could easily be applied more locally at many publically funded universities and colleges to great advantage.

Implementation and sustainability could also be facilitated with the types of central resources being planed to support the UK policy, addressing some of the most commonly voiced concerns about OSS at the institutional level.

Next step - try a mental “search and replace” on the term “Open Source” and replace with “Open Educational Resources” or “Open CourseWare” within the Policy document.  Would that make the policy more interesting to additional participants in higher education?  I think so.

• If you are interested in commenting on the Policy, the CIO Council has set up a site for Online Debate, in addition to providing a feedback from on the Action Plan site.
• If you are interested in commenting on the Educause Openness Constituency Group, signed up and use the list.
• Please also feel free to comment here, particularly on whether you think that a localized policy like the one developed by the CIO Council would be embraced at your university for OSS and/or OER.

It’s About Access, Right?
One of our goals at Penn State is to increase access to online courses, programs, and services for a broad spectrum of students, including students confronting barriers related to disabilities. In fact, as is the case with many distance education providers, access has historically been at the very center of the World Campus’s purpose and self-identify.  Online education may provide a perfect opportunity for students dealing with barriers related to mobility; however, for other kinds of disabilities, online learning may actually present barriers of other kinds. You may be surprised to discover that copyright considerations may complicate serving students with disabilities.

Accommodation is a Feature of Access
As we incorporate larger amounts and more diverse kinds of media in online courses, related considerations may include how to achieve the necessary accommodations when a student with a disability needs access to the course materials. Text is pretty easy, but online courses may utilize music, video, and graphic files offered in various file formats, including streaming media; textbooks (including e-texts) and online resources provided by publishers and others; and learning management systems, WIKIs, blogs, and software to support real-time interactions. A typical accommodation needed by a student with a disability may include one or more of the following:

• close-captioning of video,
• transcription of audio,
• accessible versions of course textbooks and other ancillary materials, and/or
• more time on timed items (such as quizzes or exams).

Are the media and tools you are hosting and/or linking to accessible? If not, can they be made accessible upon request?  What are the substantive barriers to quickly and effectively meeting the needs of learners who require accommodation?

Copyrights and Accommodations
Although there are numerous technical and financial challenges to making course content accessible, the implications of the restrictive copyright that comes along with the use of proprietary content may present challenges that are frequently overlooked.  Various forms of accommodation require the creation and distribution of derivative works, which is a restriction that comes along with the default copyright license.  On the up side, the materials in question may include intellectual property created and owned by the faculty member and/or educational organization offering the course, in which case you and the learner may be lucky, relatively speaking.  If you had the foresight to create accessible versions of all course media, you are home free. If not, your primary questions may be simply how to find the resources and tools to create accessible versions of these items in a timely fashion, which is a technical and financial issue.

However, a typical online course may also include third-party intellectual property, not owned by the institution offering the course, and potentially offered via media not controlled or supported by the offering institution. What special copyright considerations apply?

What About the TEACH Act?
The TEACH Act (TEACH Act Toolkit and PSU TEACH Act site) allows educational providers meeting certain criteria to host on their course Web sites some media in their entirety, and limited selections of other types of media, to enrolled students provided certain requirements are met. These requirements include limiting access to the material to registered students for the duration of a class session (defined by many as the entire semester of offering), providing appropriate notices and making available access to copyright resources, and making a good-faith effort to provide the material in a format that students cannot retain after the class has concluded.

Thus you may under the TEACH Act provide streamed movie clips, documents in PDF format with save features disabled, and graphics in a watermarked or reduced-quality format. Are these items accessible? If not, can they be made accessible upon request? And does the law allow you to provide the more accessible version (for example, a transcript of an audio or video segment) to all of the students in the course (who may also realize significant benefit from such items), or only to those students who can document a relevant disability need?

Access Accommodation & the “Web” of Content
Have you thought about the third-party materials that you may link to in a course, as well? If you link to a news article, an online film or music clip, or YouTube video, what will your strategy be for providing accessibility to students who need it? In some cases, ownership of the linked item may be unclear, and the rights surrounding its use even muddier. On the Web, some providers take care to make accessible versions of items available; sadly, most do not. So you may find yourself in the unenviable position of taking on responsibility for creating an accessible derivative work of an item you do not own and have previously chosen not to host within the course.

Another (perhaps better) option may be for your organization to skip the copyright quagmire and make the choice to use only open resources for which rights are clear and access does not need to be restricted. Such an approach may seem limiting in the short term, but in the long term (for example, when serving students confronting accessibility challenges, and muddling through questions of copyright and liability), you may be the one having the last laugh!

Proceed with Caution!
As with many copyright questions, the best answer to what is legal is: “whatever your organization’s lawyers are prepared to defend.” So, fellow online course providers: please consult your lawyers, and good luck in working through the legal and logistical considerations related to providing accessible versions of third-party materials – both those imbedded within and those linked-to within your online courses.

We’ve chosen in this posting to ask but not answer a number of questions related to access and accommodation. The last question that we would like to put on the table has to do with the potential for OER to simultaneously enhance access and reduce the need to proceed with caution. The reality is that in the online environment, we frequently learn about accommodation requests at the last minute, and in some courses the implications can be far-reaching.  What can we do to leverage the potential of OER to increase our agility while meeting the needs of learners and faculty?

“Systems for Supportive Open Teaching,” the 26th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on November 26, 2008, by Andy Lane. Andy has been at The Open University since 1983 and, in addition to serving as a Professor of Environmental Systems, has held various offices in the former Technology Faculty (now Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology) including being Head of the Systems Department and Dean of the Technology Faculty.

In 2006 he was appointed as Director of The Open University’s OpenLearn Initiative. He has authored or co-authored many teaching texts and research papers dealing with systems thinking and environmental management, the use of diagramming to aid systems thinking and study, and more recently the development and use of Open Educational Resources. Thanks, Andy, for a great posting!

Andy starts his posting by describing a number of educational opportunities that range from formal educational activities to quite informal learning. In some of the scenarios we might be able to identify a learner, but not a teacher or learning resources. He then poses questions about the main properties of a range of educational systems and the practices expected of people involved when we put “open” in front of them.

What do we mean by open education, open learning, open teaching and open educational resources?

Andy notes that open learning existed before the Internet, and likes to associate “open” with activities and products that reduce barriers to education. He then asks about what constitutes “open teaching,” and refers to the potential of open educational resources (OER) to help teachers reduce barriers to education. He also looks beyond some of the obvious benefits of reuse to the potential benefits of co-development of educational materials. The idea here is to expand the critical review process and other assets that professionals at places like the Open University enjoy to a larger and more distributed community of practitioners and scholars. This prompts Andy to pose the following question:

So, can such synchronous or even asynchronous collaboration and co-operation occur between institutions and across borders and will (open) teaching become more of a collective than an individual activity in future?

Andy then points to typical reward systems in higher education that tend to place the individual above the group, in which more value is assigned to individual efforts than to collaborative or group efforts. He indicates that some traditional research products would benefit from communal production and that with just a little creativity the university reward system could easily recognize the value of peer-oriented teaching and learning.

Andy concludes his posting by outlining what he feels are essential elements to open teaching:

• Pedagogic support as built into materials
• Personal support of the learner
• Peer support from fellow learners and
• Professional support provided by ‘teachers’ and that this element is most important most of the time.

He also conjectures that for these elements to exist, there has to be organizational commitment, and perhaps, if Open Teaching and Learning is going to be a serious phenomenon, rather than a niche concept, learning and prestigious institutions will have to serve as models.

Comments
Dr. Lane did a great job responding thoroughly to the questions and comments made following his posting. Please feel free to refer to the thread following the Systems for Supportive Open Teaching, post. Many of the questions focused on the connections between OER and pedagogy, the challenges around peer production and reuse of OER, and his observations and experiences while leading the OpenLearn initiative.

Thanks again to Andy for his interesting and insightful post and his responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to eLearnSpace, Beth Harris, and other folks who have been reading along.

Once again, special thanks to our recent contributors, Martin Weller, Cole Camplese, and Andy Lane. I will ask a few more guests to participate in the OER and OSS series in the coming months. If you have any recommendations, please let me know. I am constantly trying to identify individuals with unique perspectives, practical experiences, and interesting insights. So, if you have any suggestions or would like to volunteer, please feel free to send me an email at keu10@psu.edu.

The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

I want to welcome Andy Lane and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. In his posting Andy will be referring to Open Learning and Open Educational Resources activities and projects at The UK Open University, while asking some critical questions about what it means to talk about Open Teaching, whether using OERs or not, and how might that teaching be organized so that it is supportive of informal and/or formal learning?

Professor Andy Lane has a BSc in Plant Sciences and a PhD in Pest Management from the University of London. He has been at The Open University since 1983 and held various offices in the former Technology Faculty (now Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology) including being Head of the Systems Department and Dean of the Technology Faculty. Promoted to Professor of Environmental Systems in 2005, he was appointed as Director of The Open University’s OpenLearn Initiative in 2006. He has authored or co-authored many teaching texts and research papers dealing with systems thinking and environmental management, the use of diagramming to aid systems thinking and study, and more recently the development and use of Open Educational Resources.

I have been actively following Andy’s work with Open Educational Resources through the OpenLearn project for a number of years. I also met him twice at Utah State University during the COSL OpenEd meetings and the most recent OCWC meeting. Each time we have meet I have learned something interesting and gained a better appreciation for the leadership that Andy has provided to the groundbreaking work that the OpenLearn initiative represents. Andy’s post is scheduled for November 26, 2008. Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

“Embedding Student Expectations,” the 25th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on November 5, 2008, by Cole Camplese. Cole serves as the Director of Education Technology Services at the Pennsylvania State University. As Director, it is his responsibility to oversee University-wide initiatives with a focus on impacting teaching and learning with technology. In reality Cole makes fantastic use of his role, serving as a prime mover and advocate for creativity within (and far beyond) the educational technology community at Penn State. Thanks Cole for a great posting!

Cole starts by asserting his passion for openness and transparency across all forms of teaching and learning, and then builds a foundation for dialogue about the impact of the remix culture and all that goes along with it in our domain (teaching and learning). Cole sets the table by pointing to a relatively complex web of phenomena that is resulting in “extended conversations.” In essence, The Web is finally starting to fulfill some of its promise as a platform for community and that “Openness” is a principal catalyst. The subtext of Cole’s message is that Openness provides the context that allows for the tools and media to breath life into rich community-oriented teaching and learning, with all of the benefits of emergent knowledge.

Cole then points to how other media industries are starting to pay more attention to the impact of extended conversation and the rapidly evolving openness culture than we do in education. As an example, Cole turns to the ways that we design tools and manage content that enable emergent learning experiences. He points to our lack of tool use that allows for fluidity and transparency in content exchange, sharing, and remixing. In contrast he cites recent examples of other information and media rich industries that are “getting it.”

The take home assertion in Cole’s post is that the social use of media and development of extended conversations is creating expectations within the community of learners who we serve. He wonders if we are paying attention.

Comments
There were a number of themes that emerged in the comments. As I am always reluctant to take too many liberties with the input that commenters make, I will leave it to you to read the thread. That said, I do believe that on the whole, many of the comments re-focused us on the nature of the University and the challenges new media, remixing, extended conversation, and a culture of openness places on our self-concepts, reward systems, and the economics of education, which help define the ecosystem in which we operate. In addition, some comments highlighted the similarities and differences among education and other traditional media intensive activities/industries.

Thanks again to Cole for his interesting and insightful post and responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to pwhitfield, drs18, pbach, April Sheninger (aprilsheninger), Brett Bixler (brettbixler), pzb4, and Andrea Gregg for adding to the post, and other folks who have been reading along.

On November 26th, Andy Lane will be making a post to the Series. In addition to serving as a Professor, Department Head, and Dean, Andy is the Director of The Open University’s OpenLearn Initiative. In his post Andy will be addressing a number of interesting and critical questions about degrees of openness in OER, learning, teaching, and informal and formal learning. I have had the opportunity to follow Andy’s work for a number of years now and to meet him twice at Utah State University during the COSL OpenEd meetings and the most recent OCWC meeting. I am looking forward to what will surly be a very interesting and insightful post!

The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

This is what happens when thoughtful people start seriously exploring a concept. I recently came across Pat Masson’s Mastering Openness Project, which serves not only as a brilliant play on words, but as a combination journal, portfolio, workspace, and open collaboratory for his entire Masters program. Incidentally, his program focus is on the topic of Openness and his study is online at Empire State College. He outlines why he is mastering openness where he provides a little of his rationale for opening his studies and some background information. Note that everything that goes up is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Honestly, for me, this reinforces my faith in what many of us have been writing and reading about. Not only will Pat’s approach to his studies provide insights into online learning, generate open content, and potentially illustrate the value of open learning, but it really signals a new way of articulating educational processes. Oh yeah, he is also helping to define a new academic discipline – “Openness Studies.” This development leaves me excited because it is much more than OER, it is about open creation and points to something akin to Generative Open Education.

So as this unfolds, I see this as a great learning opportunity. I already find myself asking all sorts of questions.

• What if we consciously developed program curricula and designed courses around the assumption of “Openness?”
• How would we prepare faculty, students, and learning designers to facilitate “Generative Open Education?”
• If even 1 of every 1000 learners Opened their studies in this manner, what would that mean for our communal stock of OER and would it increase the value of the OER that is already available?

Feel free to share what you think. You will note too when you visit Pat’s Opening My Masters site, there are all sorts of opportunities to contribute, which I take to be an open invitation.

Well I am back at Utah State University for the OpenEd meeting and this year, for the first time, I am also attending the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) meeting. Among a number of very interesting announcements, I pulled out something that I found particularly interesting – even though it might seem a bit mundane on the surface. As part of the “Welcome and Overview,” Steve Carson mentioned that the OCWC Board discussed membership options. Apparently there is the possibility of eventually extending OCWC membership to individuals. The OCWC current membership types are institutionally focused.

Personally, I think that individual memberships make a lot of sense, after all, I would guess that a vast majority of course materials are produced by individuals who cannot serve as an officer of the institution able to authorize use of the institution name, which is necessary for current forms of membership. I would suggest that institutional membership is critical for OCWC. I believe that having some institutions step forward in rather public ways in support of OCW creates some healthy interest in other organizations that might otherwise be passive or even dismissive.

There are clearly some things that are best done under the banner of the institution. Quite to the point here is the formation of institutional consortia. Consortia require institutional identity. This is important for the OCWC because while individual institutional OCWC membership growth is slowing, institutional consortia membership is growth is quickening. So … I think that institutional membership is a critical part of OCWC growth, serving principally as the building blocks of consortia.

Individual membership is just plain smart and I think most coherent with what I believe will ultimately be part of virtually any sustainable effort of OCW/OER and as an extension OSS. Much design and development happens on the individual level, and I bet that many individual faculty members or learners or administrators would be much more willing to contribute open content to an open community on their own rather than as part of an institutional effort. Now that said, individual contributions could cause significant consternation and frustration at the University level around “ownership,” copyright, and licensing of course materials. This is, of course, particularly likely when the university invests significant financial resources into the design and development of course materials.

OCWC has an opportunity to take real leadership in understanding the complexities of university culture and faculty motivation relating to OER, property, and community. With an eye turned toward creating conditions in which contribution, use, remixing, reuse, and sharing of educational content is optimized, what should the OCWC and other OER projects such as WikiEducator, Connexions, Creative Commons, OER Commons, etc. be thinking about in terms of individual and institutional focus?

“Evolution to Education 3.0,” the 23rd installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on June 1, 2008, by Derek Keats. Derek is a marine biologist with strong interests in using technology to improve teaching-and-learning, to enable higher education to create Education 3.0, and to promote sustainable development. Derek’s research interests include e-Collaboration and lessons for international collaboration from Free Software (open source) and related initiatives; next-generation e-learning systems and Education 3.0; Free and Open Source Software and Free/Open content in higher education. He has developed a number of initiatives in the fields of educational and environmental informatics, Free Software, Free and Open Resources of Education (FORE, often called OER) and has published around 80 research papers in biology and in the application of technology. Thanks Derek for a great posting!

In his posting, Derek starts with the assertion that:

Higher education institutions exist as a result of the need to aggregate resources that are scarce (professors, books, journals, laboratories).

He then moves forward suggesting that a combination of advances in distributed and open educational resources and technologies have significantly reduced (or at least hold the promise of reducing) some of the problems of associated scarcity. So, where does that leave the University and higher education in general? Well, Derek points to Personal Learning Environments (PLE) and, connecting the dots, points us to some work that he and Philipp Schmidt have done on Education 3.0, which is one potential future along a path of reduced scarcity through open educational resources, distributed educational technologies, and social networked learning. He introduced a few other related thoughts about the importance of inter-institutional networking, the recognition of prior-learning, and the notion/challenge of “quality assurance.”

Finally, Derek asks us:

If he is describing a desirable world? Is it a world that we will see in our lifetimes? Or is it the ranting of a digitally-disturbed, hyperlinked lunatic referring to himself)?

Apparently they are good questions, because they lead into a log of commenting and exchange. Upon reflection though… the last question was never answered!

Comments
There was certainly a lot flowing from Derek’s posting. In fact, there is enough here, so I am a little reluctant to provide a “Summary” because it will likely become a transcript of the comments. That said, I do think, though, it is worth mentioning that the comments ran the gamut from:

• Review and accreditation of materials relative to quality assurance (institutional v. materials),
• The impact of licensing and license terms on OER,
• Convergence of technology and behavior of individuals,
• Factors that impact sustainability and speedy progress of OSS, OER, and Education 3.0,
• Informal and self-directed learning – reduction of barriers, knowledge credentialing, portability, and assessment of prior learning, and
• The ecology or OER, reuse, and sharing.

while also maintaining some nice internal flow.

Thanks again to Derek for his interesting and insightful post and responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to Pat Masson, Dave Cormier, Wayne Mackintosh, Leigh Blackall, Christine Geith, Richard Wyles, and Keith Lynip for adding to the post, and other folks who have been reading along. Thanks too for so many great links to additional resources!

I hope to start the Series up again in September, and am starting to actively solicit new contributors. If you have somebody that you would like to recommend, please do email me directly at keu10@psu.edu. If you have made recommendations before and I did not follow up, please make them again. I am sure that it was just a matter of being a little overloaded at the time. I appreciate all of your support with the Series. The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

It is great to see something work as it should. You know the whole thing about “walking the talk,” “eating your own dog food,” etc. With this in mind, I want to point you to Learning4Content, which I think is an interesting (and brilliant) project that speaks directly to the notion of an “OER ecosystem” needed for sustainability, which is occasionally mentioned in this and other forums.

Through this project, WikiEducator offers a free series of online and face-to-face workshops on wiki skills. The workshops are made available to teachers, learning designers, students, educators, etc. (which is pretty cool), but the best part is that during the workshops participants develop and donate one free content resource back to the WikiEducator community (which is pretty brilliant).

The next online workshop starts on June 23, 2008. If you are interested, check out the L4C Registration page. There is a learning contract and some expectations for participants to engage in OER community. You can Learn about the expectations, funding, and L4C schedule at the project site on WikiEducator.

I want to welcome Joel Thierstein and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Joel will be sharing some of his experiences and writing on the topic of “The Role Of University Faculty In The OER World,” which will provide the opportunity to open a conversation on the critical role of faculty in the ecosystem that supports the creation, distribution, use, and reuse of OER.

Dr. Joel Thierstein serves as the Associate Provost for Innovative Scholarly Communication at Rice University and Executive Director of Connexions. Prior to coming to Rice, Joel served as an Associate Professor and Director of New Media Communications at Oregon State University. He also served as a professor at Baylor University, Purdue University Calumet, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Dr. Thierstein has also served as a visiting professor of Communications Law at Syracuse University.

Writing extensively in telecommunications, Joel’s books include Birds In Flight: Satellites In The New Millennium, 3rd ed. and Religion, Law and Freedom: A Global Perspective. In addition, to Joel’s obvious commitment to open and sustainable education, he also has served as a Board member of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center since 2000 and Board Chair since 2003, and has worked extensively with the Conservation Centers for Species Survival.

Although I was aware of Joel’s work through Connexions, I did not have the opportunity to meet him until a meeting that Wayne Mackintosh called in Vancouver about a year ago, during which we discussed the use of wikis to support development, management, and presentation of educational content. Incidentally I also first met Christine Geith and Leigh Blackall at this meeting, who have also contributed to this our Series. Unfortunately at the time, I did not have the opportunity to really speak with Joel during the meeting, so here is an opportunity for all of us to take advantage of sharing ideas about the critical topic that Joel will be outline for us. In any event, please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.