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.

Here are some ideas that I have been mulling over lately. They also follow on well from the recent contributions from Martin Weller around exploring new ways of being open and Cole Camplese on embedding student expectations.

Education is a process that generally involves learners, teachers and sets of educational resources that can be mediating artifacts in the educational process, arranged in some structured way (see Lane, 2008a). It is a purposeful human activity where education is the main purpose. Learning can also occur in non-educational settings when it is better described as a purposive activity where it is useful to describe it as educational even though that may not be the primary purpose of that activity (lifelong learning or the University of Life?). In the latter case there are learners but no obvious teachers or educational resources as the learners draw upon many different people and things in their social or working environments.

I set out these thumbnail sketches of systems for describing educational experiences to pose the question what are the main properties of the components of such 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?

Open education has got a lot of attention lately with the series of Open Education conferences, the Cape Town Declaration on open education and recent books such as one I have contributed to called Opening Up Education. Wikipedia defines open education as a collective term that refers to forms of education in which knowledge ideas or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure are shared over the internet. That seems to rather dismiss pre-internet activity and I go along with what I say in my chapter in the aforementioned book (Lane, 2008b) that openness has many dimensions but is about removing barriers to education.

Open learning has been a phrase used for some time as well with a Journal of Open and Distance Learning and the Open University in the UK basing its work on a supported open learning model. Again a significant aspect of open learning is about removing barriers to learners engaging with educational experiences and I have talked about that elsewhere (Lane, 2008c).

Open educational resources are even more topical and talked about starting with the definition given at a UNESCO workshop (UNESCO 2002) through to the large funding program from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where they also see OERs as being one way to help transform teaching and learning. A central feature of OERs is an open license that allows and encourages sharing, reuse and remixing (and probably influences the current Wikipedia entry for open education).

What has been less obvious is discussion about open teaching and that is what I want to focus on for the rest of this piece.

So what might constitute open teaching? Is it about creating teaching experiences that eliminate barriers to students taking part in those experiences or is it about (re)using OERs that are available to all? While we could have interesting debates about such definitions as with all aspects of openness, I think it more valuable to think about how openness changes the basic praxis of teaching from an essentially individual activity to a shared activity. Stereotypically most teachers work alone in constructing and delivering their teaching experiences.

They may draw upon others similar work in this process and they may involve their students in co-creation or delivery of the experiences, but fundamentally they alone decide on a chosen path or lay out a new route map of resources and activities that constitute the educational experience. However, the arrival of OERs has meant that both teachers and students are able to view in greater depth the teaching and learning experiences of others to inform their own praxis. They are also able to ‘teach’ more easily (and effectively?) around someone else’s resources and maybe activities. But even more than that, it is becoming possible to rework other people’s material and to even co-create such material with colleagues around the world.

The co-creation of educational resources and courses is a major feature of open and distance learning where teams of academics (supported by media professionals) develop and deliver the teaching and learning experiences, including our associate Lecturers who do ‘teach’ around the main, carefully crafted, proscribed educational materials. At the Open University there may be as many as a dozen academics writing for and commenting on other’s work in the same course team to develop these carefully crafted educational materials and associated activities.

This is team teaching that can seriously challenge your thinking and has encompassed some of the most heated academic discussions I have ever witnessed! But it does produce high quality materials, albeit at high cost and in a clear institutional framework. 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?

Of course there are many barriers to open teaching or any changes in teaching practice as well discussed around Cole’s contribution and also discussed by Diane Harley in the Opening Up Education book I mentioned earlier, not least the lack of recognition of teaching compared to research in promotion and tenure. Nevertheless, just as much research has steadily moved from individual to team efforts and still been accounted for largely through peer review by their community of practice, open, collective teaching can be accounted for in similar ways.

The openly published nature of the resources means that such scholarship is as evident as any research publication and the more open nature of the reviews of the resources and associated experiences means there is potentially more feedback than for most research and more ways to assess impact and contribution. In other words the very openness of teaching makes it more accountable than much research, it is just that we have to work out the ways that citation (e.g. numbers of reuse, numbers of reworking. etc), peer and user reviews can be factored into the rewards and recognition that academics receive (and of course eliminating the shameless self citation I did at the beginning of this piece!).

Such recognition and reward for teaching is practiced in the Open University for the same reasons that teaching success can be measured by peer review of the scholarship in authored materials and user reviews of its effectiveness and impact with learners and others. I have argued in Opening Up Education that successful supported open learning depend on the four Ps of support: pedagogic support as built into materials, personal support of the learner, peer support from fellow learners and the professional support provided by ‘teachers’ and that the latter is most important most of the time. But those professional teachers also need to feel, and actually be, supported if they are to make open education a mass rather than a niche phenomenon. The culture change that is needed lies mostly with institutional policies and practices, not teachers or learners. Perhaps, as with OERs, this needs to happen first in the most prestigious institutions or be recognised by the most prestigious learned societies to demonstrate to everyone else that teaching matters as much as research.

References

Lane, A.B. (2008a) Who puts the Education into Open Educational Content? In Richard N. Katz, ed., The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education and Information Technology Revisited, Boulder: EDUCAUSE, 2008.

Lane A.B. (2008b) Chapter 10 Widening Participation in Education through Open Educational Resources. pp 149-163. In Eds Ilyoshi, T. and Vijay Kumar, M.S., Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. MIT Press. 2008. ISBN 0-262-03371-2. Available at http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262033712chap10.pdf.

Lane, A.B. (2008c) Am I good enough? The mediated use of open educational resources to empower learners in excluded communities. 5 pp, In Proceedings of 5^th Pan Common Wealth Forum on Open and Distance Learning, London, 13-17 July 2008. Available at http://www.wikieducator.org/PCF5/Governance_and_social_justice.

UNESCO (2002) Forum on the Impact of Open CourseWare for Higher Education in Developing Countries, UNESCO, Paris, 1-3 July 2002: final report. Avaliable from http://unesco.unesco.org/images/0012/001285/12851e.pdf. Accessed 23 April 2007

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.

I hope that you’ll bear with me as I bring a slightly different approach to the posts here at Terra Incognita. My interests and passions fall directly in the argument for openness and transparency across all forms of teaching and learning. I am not going to write a case for opening learning or open courseware, but I will attempt to engage you in a discussion related to our overall willingness to change some of our fundamental models to empower those around us to participate.

I am curious of how we see the emergence of remix culture and where it fits into our domain — and I am really anxious to know if these notions resonate with the readers here. So if my post misses the mark I apologize in advance, but with that …

I have been making the argument lately that what is beginning to happen (in a more general sense) is that the web is finally starting to fulfill its promise as a platform to support and extend conversations. I know this isn’t news to those of us who have been ultra-connected for the last 10 years, but its emergence recently to a larger audience is very interesting in several ways.

The ability to instantly create and share is shattering the notions many institutions have built their teaching and learning models on. The emergence of the social web has jump started discussions around open learning, engaged communities of practice, Creative Commons, and so much more. This focus is bringing into question our reliance on closed tools to support teaching and learning practice. Faculty and students alike are interested in participating easily inside the academy just like they can outside in a place like Facebook. It is a frustrating world we live in and I am not sure we are paying close enough attention.

Lately I have been spending a lot of time talking to people in the newspaper industry to help them understand our students and what they mean to their continuously downward trending subscription rates. One thing is certain, they are afraid. They are obviously fighting for their lives in an industry where there seems to be few answers. I talk with them about how important it is to embrace new practices and models, to rethink the role of the traditional publication, and to look at trends across the social web that can be superimposed on their space. The announcement that The Christian Science Monitor will go to a totally online newspaper has brought new focus on the inevitable need to rethink existing practice and embrace a more open model of publication. Clearly circulation is plummeting for all sorts of reasons, but the short sighted lack of acceptance of the social web is a major factor in my mind.

At the same time, other media industries are actually starting to get it. For the longest time many of them have either ignored the power of the web or dismissed it as the land of the criminal. It appears that some of them are starting to see that there is huge potential for letting people participate. The lessons from a space like youtube.com has not only transformed the ease with which one can publish online, it has totally shattered the notions of presence, conversation, and ownership. The fact that I can easily, with a couple of clicks, publish video with a global audience that can be instantly mashed up, commented on, and embedded in any website on the planet is pretty staggering. The fact that big media has ignored this opportunity is, to me, even more astonishing.

My problem with this is that I believe higher education is further behind accepting these simple facts.

The best example of big media getting it I can point to is the emergence of hulu.com as a real player in the online TV distribution world. Not only can I do almost all of my TV watching online for free, but I am now able to do something that I never thought I’d see from the likes of NBC — embed real TV content on my own site legally. Not only do they give you the simplicity of the embed tags, but they even let one embed custom versions of the content. If I only want to point to 30 seconds of a Saturday Night Live piece, I can do that. With this simple affordance, the future of personalized media just took another step forward. Where are the tools for education that take advantage and promote these ideas?

Imagine what that does to student expectations? If a student can control NBC, why in their mind can’t a faculty member respond to email on her terms? The future is happening right in front of us. I think it creates some interesting questions for our course and learning management systems, our policies, and our responsibility to promote open access to content. With the rise of blogs, with easily embedable media, and the explosion of point and click user-generated content what should the new tools look like for teaching and learning?

I have, for the most part, abandoned the notion of the walled garden as the assignment dumping ground via CMS drop boxes and have instead fully embraced the concepts of student centered creation. As we attempt to drive more students towards portfolio thinking via open platforms, what will it look like to turn an assignment in? Should we be rethinking a model built around aggregation that allows content to be “owned” by the creator and more easily shared to the faculty and the learning community? What does it mean for life long learning and an ability to connect with a broad community? How is moving towards a distributed set of resources that are easily reused going to challenge our control over curriculum? These are just some of the questions I am asking my administration and staff. People wonder if the print media folks are listening … I am more concerned if we are paying attention as well.

I’d love to hear thoughts.

I want to welcome Cole and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Cole will be looking at how the Web is finally starting to fulfill its promise as a platform to support and extend conversations. Faculty and students are engaging in the use of social media to participate in unprecedented ways — creating, mashing, and embedding content from all over the Internet is the becoming the new norm. What should we be doing inside the academy to understand and embrace this new form of literacy? In this post we’ll attempt to investigate the changing role of the web as a platform and ask some critical questions about our own future.

Cole W. Camplese 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. He guides teams in the appropriate uses of technologies in the contexts of teaching and learning. His primary area of focus is the integration of emerging technologies into learning spaces. At Penn State, the overwhelming challenge is providing scalable solutions that the nearly 90,000 students and 5,000 faculty can successfully use to enhance their teaching and learning environments.

Camplese has recently worked to integrate several new emerging technologies into curricular activities at Penn State to support digital expression. He and his team have lead the creation of the Blogs at Penn State, Podcasts at Penn State, and the Digital Commons. Camplese oversees the annual Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology, several community development events, and numerous other initiatives designed to support the adoption of technology for teaching and learning.

I have now had the opportunity to work directly with Cole for longer than 2 years at Penn State, and have always found it enjoyable. I am very excited about having Cole contribute to the Impact series and look forward to some active participation and development of dialog. Cole’s post is scheduled for November 5, 2008. Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

“Exploring new ways of being open,” the 24th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on October 14, 2008, by Martin Weller. Martin Weller serves as Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. He chaired the OU’s first major online course with 15,000 students, was the VLE Project Director and is now Director of the SocialLearn project. His interests are in elearning, web 2.0 and the implications of new technologies for higher education. He blogs at edtechie.net. Thanks, Martin, for a great posting!

Martin starts by framing the term “Open” as it is being applied in education and how the Open University UK is addressing the openness agenda. He points to three projects, at the OU including their adoption of Moodle, the OpenLearn project, and Social Learn, which Martin is directing. Martin first indicates that SocialLearn will serve not only as a way to loosely couple applications thorough an open API to form a Personal Learning Environment (PLE), but also as a platform with the potential for supporting learner derived open curriculum. SocialLearn has the potential to sit significantly enough outside of traditional educational infrastructure and pedagogy, to serve as one of the ways that the OU can influence and accommodate the changing needs and economic models of higher education.

Finally, Martin points to the phenomena of disaggregation in higher education, leaving out there the question of its prudence.

Comments
The dominant theme of the comments had to do with the potential of open learning and the impact of projects like SocialLearn. Responsive Online Learning Environments (ROLE) was introduced, which support not only personal learning, but provide for inter-institutional flexibility, enhancing access. Our fixation with technology was also raised along with questions about what we have done (and not done) with what we already have available and the organizational challenges of openness that we have not yet embraced.

Thanks again to Martin for his interesting and insightful post and responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to plefrere, Andreas Meiszner, and David Mcquillan for adding to the post, and other folks who have been reading along. On November 5th, Cole Camplese will be making a post to the Series. Cole serves as the Director of Education Technology Services at the Pennsylvania State University, and in his post he will investigate the changing role of the web as a platform and he will ask some critical questions about our own future. I have had the opportunity now to work in the same organization with Cole for over two years and always find his conversation, line of questions, and various shenanigans, stimulating. I am looking forward to what will surly be a thought provoking and entertaining post!
The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

When the Open University (OU) in the UK was founded in 1969, ‘open’ had a rather specific meaning in education. It meant open access, and this was realised through part time study and open entry. In choosing the term ‘Open’ the university’s founders chose wisely as it is a term which has, if anything, gained in currency. When we think of openness in education now we probably think of open source software, open educational resources, open APIs, open journals, etc. In this post I want to highlight how the OU is embracing these different forms of openness, and to make the argument that it is doing so through technology projects. In this sense, openness is not just a technical or pedagogic decision even, but rather a fundamental mindset, and one which we need to continually reinterpret in the light of changing technology and society.

I will concentrate on the project I am currently directing, SocialLearn, which aims to build a social network for learning. This project comes on the back of two other major OU ventures, namely the OU adoption of the open source platform Moodle as its learning management system, and the OU’s Hewlett Foundation funded open educational resource initiative, OpenLearn. My colleague Andy Lane will talk about the latter in detail in his post, which will be posted on this blog soon after mine. The adoption of Moodle was significant for the OU for two main reasons: firstly, it signaled to the education community that we believed open source was a robust and sensible option; secondly, it gave out a strong message that the OU was still current and willing to take risks. In this sense it was as much a political decision as a technical one.

SocialLearn is the latest in these types of initiatives. Its aim is to develop a social network for learners, which is based around an open API, thus allowing any application to write to it. In this sense it could be one form of the almost mythical ‘eduglu’ that binds together a range of third party applications to create a Personal Learning Environment. What is perhaps more intriguing, though, is what will happen when we can mine the social graph data to help structure a learner’s experience. When a learner creates a goal, similar goals, relevant resources, and potential third party offerings (eg mentorship, tuition, formal courses) can all be assembled. The system, in effect, can do much of the filtering process that is currently performed by an educator (although it does not seek to provide the support or expertise of the educator, filtering is only one function). The potential of this is that the currently top-down, restricted curriculum is democratised. People learn about whatever is of interest to them - in effect we have an open curriculum.

Currently the project is under development, with a beta launch planned for early 2009. As well as the technical development, which is being informed by pedagogic theory, the project is also developing new business models, on the assumption that truly open education will need to find sustainable models, if the conventional funding from governments does not apply. The project is seeking to understand how socially data driven learning can be used to support alumni, informal (or leisure) learners, and those seeking career development. The current support and accreditation practices we have in higher education will need to be rethought to meet the needs of these groups in society at large and SocialLearn can be viewed as the OU’s means of understanding, and influencing, these changes.

In undertaking all three of these projects the OU is seeking to remain relevant in a rapidly changing society. The projects are both a means of developing a new profile, but also of understanding how learners behave and what their needs are in a digital society. But they can also be seen as a means of reinterpreting what open means - from Moodle we have come to understand how to operate in a large open source community and from OpenLearn we have investigated what an open approach to content means, both for the institution and learners. From SocialLearn we hope to understand what openness means in terms of subject area, technology and business models.

I’ve presented these endeavours as a positive action, but they are not without risks or significant issues. Is a university the best place to create a social network site? Does this type of activity lead to the commercialisation of education, or is it a response to it? Can learners really learn effectively in this manner? Does it mean learners are challenged less during the learning process?

In thinking about the issues, my general view is that higher education needs to adapt to remain relevant to a society which is changing rapidly. I want to avoid accusations of technological determinism by suggesting that digital technologies themselves are changing society, but they are facilitating new types of behaviour and communication. As Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody, ‘when we change the way we communicate, we change society.’ But, I do have a concern that if we begin to disaggregate higher education, we will lose some of the subtle benefits the existing model provides to learners, educators and society itself. Although I feel that the OU, and other educators around the world are right to pursue these new models, occasionally the words of British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg come to mind: “The temptation to take the precious things we have apart, to see how they work, must be resisted, for they never fit together again.”