What is Openness in Open Education??

In general, there seems to be a tendency towards openness in society.

In the sector of Information Technology, we see the Open Software movement, a movement in which people share knowledge, resources and products for free.

The Open Educational Resources movement strives to generate educational resources, which are shared for free (although often developed using subsidies of national governments and private institutions).

In the publishing sector, we see a discussion on Open Access; free access to scientific (subsidized) publication.

In industrial sectors, we see a discussion on Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2006, de Wit and Meyer, 2014); the idea that most knowledge will be developed outside the firm. New knowledge, necessary for innovations, has to be bought, sold or shared. (Information) Technology increases the possibilities for innovation on a small scale. Sharing of knowledge and resources is a major force behind the MakersMovement, in which small inventors design, prototype and -eventually- distribute their innovative products or services (also see Anderson, 2012).

Wiley (2014) – in his discussion on Moocs – defines openness in education as the transition of ‘open entry’ (in the sense of no entry demands from the Open Universities) towards ‘open licenses’, as in Open Educational Resources (OER), towards a possible  ‘open educational infrastructure’.

Open Universities over the world (generally) accept all kinds of students, independent of the level of former education. Yet, education in this case is not free; students have to pay fees, which can become a barrier despite the formal openness. So did a member of the Open University of the UK argue that it could be seen as a social obligation to set entry tests. Given that students have to pay certain fees, it would be unfair to let them make debts for a couple of years, after which the university concludes that they are not capable of finishing their study.Since the nineties of the last century, several organizations worked on the development and distribution of free educational objects. These objects were termed Open Educational Resources in 2001 by the Unesco (1st Global OER Forum in 2002). This openness is defined over five dimensions (the 5R activities, as defined by the Unesco (2012):

• Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the work (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
• Reuse – the right to use the work in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a web site, in a video)
• Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the work itself (e.g., translate it into another language)
• Remix – the right to combine the original or revised work with other open works to create something new (e.g., incorporate the work into a mash up)
• Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original work, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the work to someone else)

Another general model of openness is the 5-components model for open education (5COE) of Mulder and Janssen [2013, figure 2]. This model unbundles the different activities into three components on the supply side and two on the demand side.

On the supply side they distinguish:

1. Open educational resources (OER) 2. Open learning services (OLS): online and virtual activities which are available either free or for payment, including assessments, exams and communities; 3. Open teaching efforts (OTE): all supporting activities as teaching, ict-support and other roles in (distance) teaching; these activities will generally not be free.

On the demand side they describe the following two components:

4. Open to learners’ needs (OLN): open education should be free in the sense of time, space and tempo; however, it should also be affordable for everyone. 5. Open to employability & capabilities development (OEC): education should be open towards new and changing demands from society and the labour market, but also promote critical thinking, creativity and personal growth .

The unbundling of Janssen and Mulder (2013) had the aim to develop a potential earning model for HEI’s, combining paid activities with the supply of free resources. This was necessary because there was a feeling that the isolated development of open educational resources, as done by MIT (subsidized by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation), or Saylor.org (offering whole courses, subsidized by Michael Saylor ( MicroStrategy Inc.)) were too much dependent on the goodwill of a person or foundation.

Others are building on Andersons 2009) Freemium model ). For example, the Free Software Academy, which offers free courses and paid tutoring within accredited programs. The Moocs developed in recent years often use a similar business model.

With respect to the openness of this model two remarks have to be made:

1. there is a major division between several providers of resources, whether objects or full courses. All are open in the sense that using them to learn or teach is free (costless and no entry barriers), Yet, some do apply all the Unesco R’ s, some only part (both participating under different Creative Commons Copyrights), some are not reusable or adjustable at all. Especially Moocs are static in the sense that they cannot be changed or adjusted to new usage, sometimes new usage is actively discouraged. Furthermore, Most Moocs are only open for a certain period (often the period the same course is given in the original university).
2. as shown by economic theory, obtaining money for products or services requires the possibility to exclude others from using the service or product. Unbundling to design a business model for open education means to draw a line between activities and products which are open (exchanged for free, but not necessarily costless) and activities which are closed (exclusively available for paying participants). Janssen and Mulder (2013) did use their model to show the possibilities of traditional and open universities to participate in the OER movement. Yet, it can also be used to explain the initial enthusiasm of xxx-investors to participate in the American Mooc-platforms. The expectation was that by offering additional activities, the platforms would generate profits. To guarantee the required exclusivity, participating HEI’s had to sign contracts which restricted their freedom in usage of the material placed with the platform. Data, but also third party contracting (in-company trainings ect.) became the prerogative of the platform.

Christensen et al. (2014) uses a similar approach to forecast a more disruptive development with respect to the (American) educational sector. Distance education, the competence based approach, the existence of high quality, accredited open educational materials offers commercial firms the opportunity to enter the educational sector, aiming at low cost segments and non-consumers (of existing education). According to them, it is only a matter of time before the last bastion of the traditional mixture of academic research and education, the accreditation organizations, will fall.

So unbundling education at an organizational level could result in unbundling at a sectorial or national level and a new division between open en exclusive forms of education.

Wiley (2014) moves openness even one level higher. He sees open education as  an open education infrastructure. With this he means a “set of interconnected structural elements that provide the framework supporting education”.

He concentrates in this on competence-based education. Developing competence profiles and the accompanying programs, techniques and need is costly and complex. By offering open competence programs, more institutions can develop new experiments based on these programs, improve and change the programs, which will feed back in the education of the original developers. Such a process should improve quality and efficiency of CBE-programs and the educational infrastructure. The same applies to assessments. In a CBE-world, knowing the exams will not increase a student’s chances (a reason for secrecy in a the more traditional educational world) as the test are competence based, and will judge performance rather than reproduction. Again, opening up your assessments will improve them by increasing usage, localization and experimentation. Wiley (2014) adds open certification to his open educational structure as a logical step following the definition of competence oriented learning objectives, teaching and learning using open educational resources; being tested through open assessments and using open certificates to show for the acquired competences. Openness of this kind will increase the quality and efficiency of the national educational system.

There are two important distinctions between these approaches. First of all, we can make a distinction between free activities and free products. As Michael Saylor is quoted at the Saylor.org website: Education should be free. Yet, at the website, a lot of courses can be found, however if we define education as the combination of materials, teaching, assessments and feedback, it represents only part of the educational activities.

The same seems to apply to the open education of Wiley (2014). He writes about the exchange of CBE-profiles, open exchange of assessments and alike. However what will be done with these products is not discussed.

The second distinction touches this point. Mulder and Janssen (2013) distinguish between the supply and the demand side. The supply side of the educational system are the teachers and HEI’s offering education to students; competent employees to employers and engaged civilians to society; forming the demand side of the system.

Openness on the supply side seems to concentrate on educational resources, whether teaching materials, assignments or CBE-profiles. The aim of the resources is to support and improve teaching by making materials available, but also stimulating quality through discussion and improvement of existing materials.

Openness on the demand side is about the freedom to participate in education. This is about the removal of entrée barriers. These barriers can be formal (admission restrictions), financial (high fees, large additional costs) or otherwise. The OECD (2014) rapports on tuition fees . These range from non (eg. Austria, Greece, Finland) to € 1950 in the Netherlands. Outside of Europa, the average fees are higher: Canada (approx. 4,000 USD), UK and the USA (approx. 5,000 USD) .

Other barriers, however, may be even more important especially in later-in-life education, as the combination between education and work.

Open education is different from free education; yet in my opinion, openness should be about removing barriers for learners, not only on providing resources for teachers.

Literature

Anderson , C., (2009) Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Hyperion

Anderson , C., (2014) Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, Crown Business

Chesbrough, H. (2006) Open Business Models, Harvard

Christensen, C. M., M. B. Horn, L.Caldera, & L. Soares, (2011) Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2011/02/08/9034/disrupting-college  (accessed April 4 2013)

Mulder, F.,  B. Janssen (2013, in Dutch) Open (het) onderwijs, Surf Trendrapport, http://www.surf.nl/en/knowledge-and-innovation/knowledge-base/2013/trend-report-open-educational-resources-2013.html (accessed October 2014)

OECD (2014) Education at a Glance, http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/education/education-at-a-glance-2014_eag-2014-en#page1 accessed December 2014.

Unesco (2012), Declaration of  Paris, http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/WPFD2009/English_Declaration.html, retrieved September 30, 2014

Wiley, D.,  (2014), The Open Education Infrastructure, and Why We Must Build It, July 15, 2014, http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3410, accessed December 18, 2014

Wiley, D., (2014), The MOOC Misstep and the Open Education Infrastructure,  July 15, 2014, http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3557 , accessed December 18, 2014

Wit, de B., R. Meyer (2014), an international perspective, 5th edition, Cengage Learning

 

The Crowd and Open Education: resilience and sustainability

Updated July 21 2014

 Update:

A relevant quotation I found in my notes:

Paul Stacey

Crowd learning

Crowd learning describes the process of learning from the expertise and opinions of others, shared through online social spaces, websites, and activities. Such learning is often informal and spontaneous, and may not be recognised by the participants as a learning activity. In this model virtually anybody can be a teacher or source of knowledge, learning occurs flexibly and sporadically, can be driven by chance or specific goals, and always has direct contextual relevance to the learner. It places responsibility on individual learners to find a path through sources of knowledge and to manage the objectives of their learning. Crowd learning encourages people to be active in setting personal objectives, seeking resources, and recording achievements. It can also develop the skills needed for lifelong learning, such as self-motivation and reflection on performance. The challenge is to provide learners with ways to manage their learning and offer valuable contributions to others.

 

Deloitte University Press published an infographic on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is defined as “an approach to harnessing the power of individuals to work to solve problems in a decentralized way”.

They distinguish five different kinds of crowd sourcing, using the crowd’s creativity and knowledge (competition, collaboration and voting), its funds (funding) or its labour power (labor). According to the writers, Rob Hamill, Emily Malina and Elizabeth Pal, each form of crowd sourcing is applicable in certain situations and will be contra-productive in other situations.

The table below gives an overview of the different ways of crowd sourcing, the video has some funny examples, starting with 1714 as start of one of the first crowd sourcing projects.

 

Form	Pro	Contra
Crowd CompetitionCrowd competition refers to the hosting of contests in which participants work individually or in groups to come up with a solution to a given problem. The outputs may include many viable ideas or solutions.	creating actional solutions developing prototypes Generating outside ideas	predetermined desired outcomes lack of resources to review submissions building community
Crowd Collaboration Crowd collaboration requests the input of decentralized individuals to develop, aggregate, and share knowledge and information across a pool of contributors, generally through a loosely controlled web-based platform. The typical outputs of a crowd collaboration effort are collective concepts with shared buy-in.	building and sharing knowledge responding to emergencies shared policies	User anonymity Small and inactive crowds Promoting individuality
Crowd Voting Crowd voting is the process of turning to the crowd to reach a decision. This practice typically involves inviting participants to help make a decision based on pre-defined options.	Decision making Rating and ranking Quality assurance	Strategic decision making Political sensitive issues
Crowd FundingCrowd funding is the process of funding projects through small contributions from a large group of participants. Crowdfunding activities are typically hosted through web-based platforms.	Fundraising Disaster relief Start-ups High transparency	Ongoing operations Loosely structured initiatives High short term expectations on returns
Crowd Labor Crowd labor refers to the engagement of a distributed labor pool to accelerate the completion of large-scale projects by splitting up a task into components that require little creativity or coordination but that cannot be automated.	Creating actionable solutions Data entry and validation Translation (eg language) Digital archiving	Unstructured tasks Subjective tasks High-level thinking

As I argued before, the sustainability (or resilience to use a new buzz word) of business models for Open Education will depend on the inclination of people and institutions to cooperate either on the input/production side as on the user/learner/consumer side of the business model. As crowd sourcing is a form of this kind of collaboration, it could generate knowledge on the the potential success factors by reversing this table and apply the pro’s and contra’s to different systems of Open Education.

Crow Labor is one of the most used forms of Crowd Sourcing in the development of Open Educational Resources. Organisations as the Saylor.org, Merlot.org rely heavily on materials of others. However, this kind of free labour has also some aspects of Crowd Collaboration because it is not necessarily about projects which “require little creativity or coordination”.

Crowd Competition is seen in situations in which organisations as the EU, Hewlett foundation or the American government ask for proposals which will be subsidized. On an individual level, these calls will be passed on towards teachers and other educational developers to come up with the creative solutions to win the funds.

It can also be used as an instrument to start-up a new data-base or website on educational resources and programs. By setting a suitable reward, the system can generate a certain minimal critical mass, above which it will be interesting for other partners to participate.

Crowd Voting is often used to give an indication of the quality of the resources or programs. For a ranking to be functioning, there have to be enough votes and the voting public has to be something of an “in-crowd” of experts.

The remaining form of Crowd Sourcing is the financial form, Crowd Funding. According to the authors, this instrument is unsuitable for ongoing operations and loosely structured initiatives. Yet, I have the impression that several non-commercial projects depend on one large fixed subsidizer and a fringe of minor short-term donors.

Concluding, the examples of Open Educational Resources and Open Education show that the forms of Crowd Sourcing as described by Hamill, Malina and Pal is not complete; there are other situations which can only partially described by this taxonomy. Especially the voluntary participation in high-knowledge projects does not fit either the Crowd Collaboration nor the Crowd Labor definitions.

Still, the research in Crowd Sourcing should generate a further understanding of these kinds of collaboration: the free contribution and exchange of educational materials between individuals and organisations. A better understanding of these phenomena will enhance the changes of success of the Open Education movement.

 

ODL, the social contract and the economic crisis.

Suddenly a social contract appears in the blogs I am reading. In “The Perfect Storm for Universities“, Popenici writes about the fact that more education does not necessary means a higher income or more change of a steady job. Bonnie Stewart states that the social contract can no longer fulfill its promises. Adding “Of course” to this sentence. Prinsloo lists the assumptions and links between Bildung, graduation and employment which are replaced by other forms of curriculum development, assessment and accreditation, as one of the major changes of 2012. 

Respecting the differences between the blogs, they all blame education for the break down of this relationship. Either the appearance of Moocs and the Internet flow of information (Stewart, Prinsloo) or the student loans, a business attitude of university administration and faculty and the arrogance of universities in general (Popenici). Or taking a quote of Christine Teelken: It seems that universities are no longer viewed as ivory towers of intellectual pursuits and truthful thoughts, but rather as enterprises driven by arrogant individuals out or capture as much money and influence as possible.

However, a contract is a two-sided agreement, depending on certain conditions. This social contract states that if the individual does his best to get explicit grades and diploma’ s, society will take care of his or her employment. One of the conditions attacked is the state of education, which is either bad or treated by ODL‘s as Moocs. Neither of them talks about the other conditions. In Europe as in the USA, there are only a few jobs available. Because of the credit- and the euro-crisis, because of the decline in competitiveness, the social contract has been broken, not necessary because of the rise in alternative sources of information and education.

If online distance learning (ODL) is not the source of the problem, perhaps they can be (part of) the solution? ODL’s, whether open educational resources aimed at teachers (reusable, remix and redistribution) or open online courses aimed at learners (and massive if successful).

In a world where income and employment decline, the access of education is limited as the example of Greece shows. Free resources and courses could help to overcome the scarcity of materials and teachers.

As one of the reasons to be involved in the production of open educational resources, the Unesco reports on the Russian Federation and China state the availability of good quality materials in distance parts of the countries, in Brazil availability over income groups is also mentioned.

Another reason for introducing ODL in a large scale in traditional education is given by Stephan Ruth. Combining different models of ODL (Mooc’s, course redesign using e-learning, virtual campus, the $10,000 degree), he concludes that e-learning can greatly decrease the costs of education. He therefore comes to a combination of models, the Export Import Model, in which the excellent universities offer open online courses and resources. Because of the restricted supply, each ODL becomes a Mooc, used by not-so excellent universities, who organize the tutoring, the discussions and exams. The not-so excellent universities pay the excellent universities a fee for the use of the materials and get an income from the students who want to get tutored, take exams and so forth.

Having some experience in developing distance education myself, I think the cost reduction is strongly depending on the amount of students. Designing and making good distance education is much more expensive than designing and giving face-to-face education. When the initial development costs are spread over more students, there will be a point after which ODL is cheaper than f2f education. However, as tutoring can not be up-scaled indefinitely, there can be an upper bending point after which the efficiency of tutoring declines and the cost reduction declines too.

Another drawback of Ruth’s approach is the division between developing and exploiting institutes, between high paying students studying on site at the excellent universities and other students studying at the not-so excellent universities. What such at division means for the social contract even when the economical crisis disappears, is not clear to me.

Mondon and Hoffstaeder give yet another view on such a division, however along the line of humanities versus natural sciences. They are afraid that online learning is in favour of hard sciences, which in their view can bet assessed by single answer questions, whereas humanities require other skills as good essay writing.

Secondly, they are afraid that students will not study humanities as the job prospects are limited; thirdly humanities are more dependent on student numbers and government grants as they find it harder to find private partners for funding their research.

Partly these worries are mirrored by the research of Teelken and the translation of this by Prinsloo, Stewart and Popenici, especially the dependency of education on market forces and efficiency, as stressed by Ruth. However, ODL, OER and Mooc’s are not the monsters depicted by Mondon and Hoffstaeder. Assessing essays, papers and other kinds of assessments are available and under construction. The fact that students in the present situation take their future job opportunities in account by choosing a curriculum is not strange given the economic situation, whereas the relation between ODL and research funding is a strange one.

When the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, closes his home to go There and Back Again, he didn’t realize what lay ahead of him. Also it is the question if modern multimedia techniques can beat 35 years of imagination. Will free ODL’s change the world is an open question but hopefully there will be a Back Again.

Data – Information – Knowledge Or the future of universities

Discussing the possibilities of OER with some visiting colleagues of UNISA, we started to speculate on the threats and opportunities of universities, given the rise in Moocs and OER. For example, Popenici writes: ”Many universities slowly implode nowadays without even knowing it. Going ahead in denial with a lethal combination of old models and practices, decrepit ideas, illusory solutions and their self-confirming coteries, many universities are still playing around a stubborn refusal to change”.

Being all business economists of a kind, the question asked was what the unique offering of universities in the educational spectrum is.

If all information is freely available whether on websites, blogs or wiki’s of individuals, or of educational institutions, could learners not learn by browsing? If all important higher educational institutes provide free education through open educational resources or massive online open courses, why pay some institution to provide the same or even worse education? Some even argue that universities like Stanford and MIT damage their traditional business model by providing Moocs.

So providing data and information is not anymore the prerogative of the universities, although academic research will add to the available knowledge. However, private and semi-public research institutes also do research even when the results are less publicly available. So again, what are the unique offering, the competitive advantage of universities compared to the other suppliers of education, data and information?

One of the answers is that universities, next to research, are best equipped to help the students to process the data and the information which are freely available into knowledge. This can be done by providing a context which gives a meaning to all loosely connected data, or stimulate the student to look for such context themselves. Roughly speaking is education the capability to transfer data into knowledge, which can be translated into actions.

The second activity in which most universities are unique, either through regulations or because of their capabilities, is the possibility to take formal assessments leading to a formal certificate or degree. Most employers still see the formal degree as the proof of competences of the potential employee. This means that the majority of adolescent students and more than one third of adult long life learners see the formal degree as the main object of studying.

Another activity, which I think is unjustly ignored, is the validation of data. In the traditional definitions, data, information and knowledge are distinguished by the level of abstraction being considered (source of the next part is Wikipedia). Data is the lowest level of abstraction, information is the next level, and finally, knowledge is the highest level among all three. Data on its own carries no meaning. For data to become information, it must be interpreted and take on a meaning. Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. It is people who collect data and impose patterns on it. The interpretation of the patterns as true and reoccurring, basing your behavior on these patterns can be described as knowledge (not going into the discussion when knowledge becomes wisdom).

So although undoubtedly much data is available, both the traditional degree framework and the fact that people have to make an assessment if the information provided is valid, there will always be a place for educational institutes.