Taking OER beyond the OER community -- Online discussion forums hosted by UNESCO/COL

[Patricia Schlicht]

Hi everyone,

The Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO are hosting a series of three online discussion forums focusing on the them "Taking OER beyond the OER community".

Strategically (imho) -- this is the main challenge and strategic opportunity facing the OER movement today.

I think its important to join the conversation -- find out more here:

http://oerworkshop.weebly.com/--online-discussion-forums.html

Cheers,

Patricia
Learning4Content Coordinator

[Rudolph Daniel]

Strange as it may seem, I was throughly confused by the term "OER"  It sounds as if one needs a passport and a visa to get to OER.

:)

RD

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Rudi Daniel

danielcharles consulting
ICT4Dev & e Business and services
1-784 498 8277

http://csisvg.ning.com

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Rudolph,

We have UNESCO to blame for the choice of the concept "Open Education Resources" (OER).

Think of OER as open source learning materials or open content which we are free to share, modify and adapt for our own use.

Here is a little info to get you started on the journey ;-)

http://wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator_version_one/Introduction

Cheers
Wayne

Wayne Mackintosh, Ph.D.
Director OER Foundation
Director, International Centre for Open Education,
Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand.
Founder and elected Community Council Member, Wikieducator
Mobile +64 21 2436 380
Skype: WGMNZ1
Twitter: OERFoundation, Mackiwg

[Rudolph Daniel]

Some thoughts/Comments

The term itself is an attempt at modifying the traditional system of knowledge?

Education is more understood as the system we all grew up with.....school/college/uni/

all with .

To promote open learning, (open knowledge systems) seems more like the change we encountered when monasteries gave way to schools being brought into the community at large and so were made affordable to the masses at large.(?)

Now we have the ability to have access to knowledge and learning 24/7/365.....for the cost of a computer and Internet Access. However, we need to be digitally literate or at least take steps towards digital literacy in order to advance to OER..(?)

Copyright also defined accessibility and still does. So I am in favour of copyleft and creative commons....but some countries are still signing up to old copyright structures. (?) and not given to fully understand the difference between what we had in the past how OER pressures that system to adapt and change in a radical way. 

As an example, many developing countries cultures are oral in nature, but copyright gives advantages to well developed and mature societies.  OER has the ability to provide tools for the first time that can be used to document oral cultures ...so culture and heritage can become much more meaningful in a global social context. This suggests that we need to redefine the term "Copyright"

I recently made a wiki for an indigenous peoples foundation and I am still working hard to get them to feel comfortable with interacting with it.....so its about people feeling free to create and interact online....beyond facebook.

I would surely love to see wikiedu become as common as a facebook page.

RD

[Patricia Schlicht]

Hi Rudolph,

 

…not strange at all, to the contrary, Rudolph.

 

OER stands for Open Education Resources, materials that are developed through collaboration on an open platform in an open community, which WikiEducator is, consisting of about 15,600 educators from around the world. As to what open means, see also here:

 

http://wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_free_content

 

In addition, here are some reference sites on copyrights or “copyleft” and open access as we call it. See here:

.

http://wikieducator.org/Copyright_and_copyleft/open_access

 

and I just saw that Wayne has given you the link to the OER Handbook. This is a very good starting point if you are not familiar with Open Education as it will inform you about what all is involved.

 

Cheers,

Patricia

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Rudolph,

Responses in text below.

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Rudolph Daniel <rudi....@gmail.com> wrote:

Some thoughts/Comments

The term itself is an attempt at modifying the traditional system of knowledge?

Education is more understood as the system we all grew up with.....school/college/uni/

all with .

Yes -- our notions of education are constrained by what we grew up with. If you think about it - -there was life "before school" (ie the industrial revolution) and I suspect there will be life "after school" as well in
 

To promote open learning, (open knowledge systems) seems more like the change we encountered when monasteries gave way to schools being brought into the community at large and so were made affordable to the masses at large.(?)

I agree -- the open web is today's contemporary example of widening access to the masses. 

Now we have the ability to have access to knowledge and learning 24/7/365.....for the cost of a computer and Internet Access. However, we need to be digitally literate or at least take steps towards digital literacy in order to advance to OER..(?)

Yip -- digital literacy is important and why we provide free training to any teacher who wants to learn how to do this through the Learning4Content project. Feel free to spread the word among your networks. See: http://wikieducator.org/L4C -- Next course starts 22 September. 

However - -we must not forget that in many developing regions of the world - universal Internet connectivity is still a long way off, hence our work in building wiki ==> print technologies. This way we can still share OER offline but leverage the benefits of collaborative content development in the wiki.
 

Copyright also defined accessibility and still does. So I am in favour of copyleft and creative commons....but some countries are still signing up to old copyright structures. (?) and not given to fully understand the difference between what we had in the past how OER pressures that system to adapt and change in a radical way. 

WikiEducator also favours copyleft and creative commons -- see: http://wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_free_content
 

As an example, many developing countries cultures are oral in nature, but copyright gives advantages to well developed and mature societies.  OER has the ability to provide tools for the first time that can be used to document oral cultures ...so culture and heritage can become much more meaningful in a global social context. This suggests that we need to redefine the term "Copyright"

Thinking about the ownership of indigenous knowledge is very important and we need to engage communities in discussing their needs in a digital world. Copyright is a western concept and not necessarily a good fit for local communities. That said -- open content licensing is opening doors which are more aligned with the oral culture of many communities. 

I recently made a wiki for an indigenous peoples foundation and I am still working hard to get them to feel comfortable with interacting with it.....so its about people feeling free to create and interact online....beyond facebook.

Feel free to make us of WikiEducators free training workshops. 

I would surely love to see wikiedu become as common as a facebook page.

me too :-)

Cheers
Wayne
 

[Jacky]

At the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
(CCCOER), we consider any open-licensed materials to be OER. This
includes public domain, Creative Commons, various open software
licenses (e.g., Gnu), and custom licenses.

Open licensing is based on copyrights; it is not anti-copyright.

Open materials are not necessarily modifiable. Many are licensed as ND
= No Derivatives.

Open materials are not necessarily crowd-sourced. The highest quality
individual materials (single photograph, lesson, assessment, video)
are typically created by a single individual or a small group. CCCOER
honors creators.

The most substantial OER (e.g., textbooks, courses) are the work of a
large team of authors, editors, photographers, illustrators,
designers, technologists, indexers, etc. A textbook can cost between
U.S. $500,000 and US $2M to produce. A course is even more expensive.

There is no particular reason to focus on 'educational' materials. An
online art gallery can be one person's education, another's
entertainment, and a third person's career.

Regards,
Jacky Hood
Director, CCCOER
oerconsortium.org

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Jacky,

You're right -- there a raft of licenses that can be considered open, but these are not necessarily free (libre). 

The WikiEducator community subscribes to free cultural works licensing (http://wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_free_content) which we believe will be more sustainable and efficient in the long run for the distribution of digital knowledge and information -- particularly downstream usage. Their is a significant difference between open and free.  Fortunately there are a growing number of OER projects which subscribe to free cultural works licensing, for example all the Wikimedia Foundation projects, the OER Foundation projects, Connexions etc. I suspect in the near future the vast majority of OER will be licensed under Free (libre) licenses --- its far more efficient and has a greater likelihood to scale.

I think it is a misconception to assume that quality is necessarily a function of the number of people who contribute.  I'm not sure that this assertion necessarily holds true:

"The highest quality individual materials (single photograph, lesson, assessment, video)  are typically created by a single individual or a small group"

I can think of numerous examples both in nature and society where quality and effeciency increases in proportion to the number of contributors.  I would think that all projects committed to free and open education honour and respect their creators -- like CCCOER we also respect our creators :-) - -In fact we legally bound to do so.
 
You are right, the free culture extends to many facets of society, open governance, open philanthropy, open research -- in fact open everything. WikiEducator is an educational project and our focus is on learning and education -- in this way we avoid mission drift yet foster networks and ecosystems with the different nodes in the free culture. For example,  the WikiEducator project runs entirely on free software.

Thanks for your post.

Cheers
Wayne

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[Jacky]

Hi Wayne,

Rudolph asks for a definition of OER, not of 'free'.

However, since you brought up the subject...

Nothing of value is free of cost. The 'free' software that
Wikieducator uses cost somebody's knowledge, skill, talent, time, and
effort. Either the creators donated the software or they were paid by
donors, foundations, or taxpayers. The software must be installed,
implemented, expanded, enhanced, maintained, and supported.

My comments about the importance of single and small-group creators
was in reaction to part of the definition that Patricia posted

"materials that are developed through collaboration on an open

platform in an open community". This definition implies resources
produced by individuals or small groups cannot be called OER.

Yes, some quality products are crowd-sourced. The original Oxford
English Dictionary comes to mind as does some open source software. I
stick with saying 'most' quality products are not crowd-sourced, even
most OER. As an example, College Open Textbooks has located more than
500 open textbooks appropriate for the first two years of college. Of
these only 55 (11%) are crowd-sourced.

Regards,
Jacky

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Jacky,

With respect -- I made no reference to cost in my post -- I referred to free (as in libre) in my post.

Our community is rooted in the essential freedoms as in "freedom of speech" -- I merely pointed to our community values associated around our interpretation of OER.  You are free to support and promote your interpretations of free and open education resources and have the whole internet to do so.

I believe it took Encyclopedia Britannica more than a decade to produce their first edition. Wikipedia (a crowd-sourced project) succeeded in creating the largest encyclopedia in the history of human kind within three years.

I'm backing the open collaborative model to ensure sustainable education futures. All OER projects are free to choose more closed models, if they like  :-)

W  

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[Jacky]

Wayne,

Yes there is a difference between freedom and free-of-cost and between
price and cost. If you say the French word libre means 'freedom', I
will accept that. It's been a while since I was in France.

Even freedom has a cost -- in blood, sweat, tears, and vigilance.

CCOER is not advocating semi-open licences. Our favorite license is CC
BY. There is a difference between defining and advocating. Defining
OER as only the most open licenses will really slow the development
and delivery of open resources.

Yes, crowd-sourcing can sometimes be speedier, though the original OED
took decades. Recently a group of professors were unhappy that a
publisher said three years to produce a nano-tech textbook. So the
professors created one in a few months.

I would not like to have Mahler's Songs of the Earth or Michelangelo's
David to have been produced quickly by a crowd.

Jacky

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Jacky,

Agreed -- the English language can be confusing ;-)  and as you point out the adjective "free" refers to no cost but also liberty (as in freedom of speech).

The Wikieducator community is rooted in the values associated with the essential freedoms (see for example: http://wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_free_content) -- and our interpretation is informed by these freedoms.

There is a distinct difference between open access and Free (libre) and Open Resources for Education (FORE). Derek Keats (Deputy Vice Chancellor Deputy of Knowledge and Information Management at the University of the Witwatersrand) illustrates the difference rather well when he says: "To be free it must be open, but it can be open without being free"  (see: http://cnx.org/content/m19865/latest/).

You are absolutely right -- the cost of freedom can be high (especially when speaking to those who have lost their freedom -- think of slavery, apartheid, colonisation, gender inequality etc.)  For this reason, I think its important in fields like OER to define what we mean by freedom, particularly in the context of Free and Open Resources for Education. These values define what a given community stands for and is a powerful strategic filter in helping us to take core business decisions. That is, deciding  on which projects to spend time and energy. Defining these values helps to mitigate against mission drift and loss of focus.

We are strategy innovators -- in other words working to build sustainable OER futures rather than responding to changes in the environment -- this requires foresight and a clear mission of what we are aiming to achieve and how we are going to get there. The development of sustainable OER ecosystems must be nurtured through a process of proactive design. Sure -- developing hiqh quality OER is not cheap -- however, if we split the cost among many, build in strategies for revenue generation etc -- we will achieve our collective objectives.

The open model is not about dictating that everything is crowd-sourced -- many individual OER projects only have a few contributors. The open model results in a more efficient and creative system and avoids redundancy. For example, a closed development approach means the wider network cannot see what others are doing -- hence the risk for duplication is higher. Self-organising systems reduce administrative overhead because they're transparent - that is we collectively share administrative overhead and infrastructure.

Sure, we need to respect individual choices around licenses -- however, for us in WikiEducator, this is easier for us because we focus our energies on free cultural works approved licenses, which in the long run will be more sustainable.

Good discussion unpacking the issues.

Cheers
Wayne

Jacky

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