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?

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.

There is something quite significant happening, which is flowing from much of the good thinking and dialog surrounding the emergence of Free and Open Educational Resources and Software. In mid-September, 2007 a relatively small group of individuals crafted a brief statement (declaration) that represents a watershed of thinking, which points us from free and open resources to the larger agenda of open education. The Declaration is being circulated, discussed, and refined, and a project site supporting the Cape Town Open Education Declaration Initiative has been established. In all likelihood this Declaration and project will be one of the seminal efforts that shapes our thinking and hopefully practice in the coming decades.

It is my feeling that the Cape Town initiative is at a near perfect state of development to help inform practitioners (teachers, learners, learning designers, administrators, etc.) who are interested in Open Education and in engaging their institutions in the dialog.

Meaningful engagement has the potential of putting their organizations on an exciting and meaningful trajectory relative to Free and Open Education and Educational Resources. Widespread involvement of a diverse community or practitioners will help not only strengthen the Declaration Initiative, but has potential to bridge many gaps within the larger education community (colleges, universities, schools, governments, NGOs, governments, foundations, etc.) and among stakeholders within education organizations.

To learn more about the Cape Town Open Education Declaration Initiative, please visit the resource site where there is an opportunity to provide feedback. Please also feel free to comment here on Terra Incognita. It is worth noting that our most recent post by Leigh Blackall, Educational Development at Otago Polytechnic, describes the efforts of the Otago polytechnic in creating institutional OER policy related very practically to the practice implied by the Cape Town Open Education Declaration Initiative.

While some educational software companies have recently earned a “wag of the finger” for their less than open spirit, ANGEL deserves a “Tip of the Hat” for its contribution of code to extend TiddlyWiki and for releasing the code on Eduforge.org. Earlier this week ANGEL announced its adoption of TiddlyWiki as part of the ANGEL LMS and outlined its rationale for contributing to and adopting an OSS product.

“Open Access Journal Literature is an Open Educational Resource,” the 12th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on September 5th, 2007, by Gavin Baker who serves as an IT and public policy consultant. Currently he is developing a student outreach campaign for SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, on the subject of open access to academic journal literature. Thanks Gavin for a great posting!

In his posting, Gavin starts by drawing some connection between OA, FLOSS, and OER, providing a link to his blog with a very nice more detailed treatment of the connections. Gavin then moves on to provide more in-depth background for OA referring to the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing as touch points for a OA definition. He also introduces the open archiving and open access journals, providing a high level “state of affairs.” In the final section of the post, Gavin asks why free education needs free scholarship. He outlines and describes four reasons why advocates of OERs should support OA journal literature:

1. As direct learning content in tertiary education
2. As “outside-the-classroom” learning content
3. As learning content for self-learners
4. As “raw materials” for re-use in free learning content

Comments
The comments spanned a few areas including:

• The impact of OA on individuals in need of information trying to solve problems (outside of the academy and formal educational institutions);
• Institutional interest in OA Journals and Archives;
• Potential business models that enhance sustainability and preserve integrity;
• Features of university culture including tenure and promotion and its impact on publishing in OA journals;
• Archiving, conference materials, licensing, and author permissions; and
• Who is supporting OA and who benefits, which led us to think about issues around technology access and inclusion.

Thanks again to Gavin, for his insightful post and excellent responses to all questions, and Graham, Martin (RedSevenOne), ossguy, and Steve, for making this a great exchange, and other folks who have been reading along. Please join in again on September 19 when Rob Able posts on OSS and Open and open standards. The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

I normally would not be posting a call for papers here, but I thought it might be of interest to the folks who I hope are attracted to this site and the stuff that is being posted. The paper submission deadline has been extended to April 13 for the 2007 Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning. Of particular interest, I think, is the new track on “Leadership and Societal Change,” which is described in the Call for Papers Brochure as follows:

Online learning is transforming all aspects of the institutions and systems of higher education including teaching, student services, and finance and administration. Institutions and institutional leaders are correspondingly evolving and designing new structures to deal with the opportunities and challenges online learning affords. Papers submitted to this track should address such changes and their effects at the institutional level. Papers in this track might consider, for example: changing technologies and their impacts relative to student demographics (e.g. digital natives v. digital immigrants, the digital divide, race and gender issues, etc.), how systems of institutions are evolving and sharing resources; how institutions deploy their own brand in their local environment while employing blended learning; emerging accreditation, policy, program planning and funding issues with blended and/or online learning; creative partnership programs with corporations, unions or agencies; global and international learning; and institutional collaborations or other ways for higher education to promote greater access, scalability, quality improvements, and student success.

I think too, that much of the dialog around the digital divide, lowering barriers to education, OSS, and Open Educational Resources, fit right into this track. You will note too, if you read the call for papers, that there are a number of other interesting tracks.

I’m concerned. I am not sure how deeply yet, but none the less, something does not feel right about H.R. 412, The Independent Study of Distant Education Act of 2007, sponsored by Representative Vernon Ehlers of Michigan. The Act mandates the National Academy of Sciences to study the differences between distance education programs and similar on-campus offerings.

On one hand, the questions being proposed for study are the types of questions that we ask ourselves all the time:

1. What is the nature of content quality?
2. What is the level of interactivity we are able to provide our learners at a distance?
3. What are our learner outcomes?
4. How does distance education support the mission of our institutions and higher education more generally?

We want to know the effectiveness of our programs relative to job placement, graduation, and professional degree attainment. In addition, the bill calls for study about access to higher education, and identifying the characteristics of learners who engage in distance education pointing to:

1. Who most benefit from distance education programs?
2. Who most benefit from campus-based education programs?
3. Who do not benefit from distance education programs?

These questions strike at the heart of why a public land grant university would become involved with distance and online learning. Although the bill does suggest an approach that compares campus-based with distance education programs, we can hardly suggest that Ehlers is the only person who thinks or has thought the comparison is important. I think that many of us who have been involved with distance and online education for a while understand the limitations and perhaps intellectual poverty of this type of comparison in seriously advancing practice and policy, but interest in this type of comparison is at least understandable. Perhaps Ehlers need only be pointed to the work already done in the area and the rationale for moving beyond the obvious models in front of us.

So, when looking inside the bill, I have suggestions for improvement. After all, Ehlers is talking about using public funds to study something in my profession about topics on which I have opinions. I am not, however, so concerned with the content of the bill. That said, the bill was originally brought to my attention in an email that pointed me to a January 16th posting on H.R. 412 in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus. Andrea L. Foster starts out by describing Ehlers as “ever the critic of distance education.” I would like to learn more about Ehlers’ public record on distance education, but I am having trouble tracking down much in the way of quotes or statements. A record of Ehlers’ public comments on distance education might provide some insight on what is behind the bill. Is this bill part of a larger and more politically charged or personal agenda of Ehlers’? If so, how might that affect the quality of the study and the use of the findings?

Perhaps we can gain insight into the bill by examining Ehlers’ rationale for drafting H.R. 412, which is partially articulated in the Extention of Remarks for the bill. Ehlers claims that he has proposed the bill as a form of consumer protection from diploma mills and that the federal government should understand the effectiveness and quality of distance education programs before investing federal financial aid dollars into them.

I guess that my discomfort is due in part to a certain lack of cohesion in the underlying rationale for the bill, which might indicate mixed motives. Okay … consumer protection and quality assurance are important, but there is a well-recognized quality control mechanism for academic institutions and programs. It is called accreditation and its expressed goal is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality. In addition, each state has a licensure process that has a consumer protection role. In any event, there are robust systems that are currently in place to ensure academic quality. Although there are accrediting bodies specific to distance learning providers, the following regional bodies accredit residence as well as distance learning education:

• Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Higher Education
• New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Commission on Institutions of Higher Education
• North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, The Higher Learning Commission
• Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities
• Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Colleges
• Western Association of Schools and Colleges, Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges
• Western Association of Schools and Colleges, Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities

So, as long at the institution is accredited by one of these bodies, the prospective learner can feel pretty confident that they are not attending a diploma mill and that the distance programs offered reach the same standards as the programs in residence.

The second part of Ehlder’s rationale for the bill was to ensure that the resources used in the Federal Financial Aid system were being wisely invested in legitimate programs. Although this is a good objective and part of his charge as a custodian of public assets and interest, I think this objective is already addressed through a published and publicly available list of “accrediting agencies whose accreditation enables the institutions they accredit to establish eligibility to participate in the Federal student financial assistance programs administered by the Department under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 as amended.” So, if the learner is attending a distance education institution or program that is not on the list, the learner will not be eligible for federal assistance.

So, I think that the question then really comes down to the value and reliability of accreditation, which is not at all addressed in H.R. 412.

I think that the resources that the US Department of Education has already made available address the stated objectives of Ehlers’ bill, suggesting to me that the resources used to implement H.R. 412 could be better spent on other pursuits. Now turning to the question about the “research” questions proposed for the study, it would seem that one might question the appropriateness of mandating the National Academy of Sciences to conduct an investigation of distance learning this early in the process. According to their web site, The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is an honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. A search on the terms “distance education” on their web site produces one document titled, Moving From Analysis to Action, published in 1998. I just do not see a lot of expertise in distance learning at the NAS. Perhaps I am nitpicking, but if I am, it reflects concern about the inconsistencies that I see behind the stated rationale for drafting the bill and the content of the bill. It leaves me asking about what really lies behind H.R. 412.

Is H.R. 412 a political trojan horse or a legitimate research program? I guess then, that I am a bit concerned about what lies behind the bill and hope that Mr. Ehlers’ colleagues serving on the Committee on Education and Labor in the House will be too. By following a few links at the Committee site, you can ask your Representative about the status of H.R. 412 and their thoughts on it.

I am having a little trouble finding the status of the Act. All insights are welcome.

I’ve had the pleasure this week to attend the 2006 Council for Adult & Experiential Learning (CAEL) International Conference in Boston. CAEL is a national, nonprofit organization whose mission is to expand learning opportunities for adults by working to remove policy and organizational barriers. I enjoy attending the annual CAEL conference because there are so many colleges and universities around the world doing exciting work with adult learners, and the folks I met this year were no exception.

One particular session really resonated with me. The presenter for “Narrating Lives: From Silence to Civic Engagement” was Dr. Barbara Vacarr, associate professor and director of the Learning Community Bachelor’s Program at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Vacarr also interviews Holocaust survivors and collects their stories on video for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

Vacarr is an avid proponent of transformative learning theory, which was pioneered by Dr. Jack Mezirow and essentially refers to the learning that takes place when an adult becomes aware of the life events that have shaped who they are and what assumptions they make (both consciously and unconsciously). These life events are our “stories”; transformative theory suggests that true learning can only happen when we assess and reflect on the consequences of our lifelong assumptions and investigate alternative ways of thinking.

Adult learners bring their stories to the classroom—there are some they might share (e.g., marital status, number of kids, profession), but it’s the “silent” stories that are often the ones that fuel adults creatively and shape who they are. The inequities we have experienced in life—whether economic, political, generational, historical, etc.—as well as the privileges—will impact the way we learn.

Vacarr shared with us the story of one of her students. Beth (not her real name), who came from a privileged upbringing, registered for one of Vacarr’s Holocaust studies courses, which included a weekend trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Vacarr informed all of her students that they should dress casually, in jeans and sneakers, to ensure comfort on the trip. Which everyone did—except Beth. Beth arrived at the bus freshly manicured and pedicured, looking (as Vacarr described it) as if she had just walked out of a top fashion magazine. Other students kept their distance. At the end of the weekend, Vacarr wasn’t sure the experience had any impact on Beth. Everyone parted ways.

Some months later, Beth stopped by Vacarr’s office with a story to tell. She had been in a local grocery store when she overheard a woman asking the store manager where the baby formula was kept. “I’ll get it for you,” the manager said. “We keep it locked up.” If it had happened a year prior, Beth said, she would have gone about her business thinking nothing of the exchange. But something about the woman’s question snapped Beth back to Vacarr’s class—back to the Holocaust Museum and her role as bystander to unthinkable oppression. She found herself walking over to the store manager and asking why the baby formula was kept locked away.

“Because there are indigent people who come in and steal it,” he replied.

Beth was stunned. “There are people in Cambridge who steal?” she thought. Then she thought, “there are people who actually steal baby formula?” And finally she realized, if there are people stealing baby formula, people must really need it. Therein laid Beth’s “disorienting dilemma”—a situation that didn’t fit the assumptions created by her life of privilege and was the necessary catalyst for transformative learning.

Beth left the store, went home, contacted the Enfamil company, and a few months later was running a successful baby formula program out of the basement of her church.

“My personal environment had prevented me from understanding there were people in real need,” Beth explained.

What are the silent stories you’re carrying with you? How can World Campus help you examine them and, perhaps, transform them into new ways of thinking?