Open planning, OERu digital history and lesson learned

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Everyone,

Being distinctively open, the OERu spends considerable effort in maintaining a public record of all our meetings and decisions including video recordings of the web-stream of our international partner meetings. It is insightful, for example, to revisit:

• Sir John Daniel's advice at the inaugural meeting where the concept of the OERu was proposed to the world in February 2011 (pre dating the inception of Coursera, EdX or FutureLearn during 2012) ; or
• The founding anchor partner statements at the 1st meeting of OERu partners in November 2011.
• The inspiring blessing of the OERu from Elder Estella Patrick Moller at the formal launch event in November 2012. 

I was curious to find out if our efforts in producing open minutes are of use to the community. Collectively, our minutes of OERu partner meetings have generated 50,000 page views which suggests that they are being read more widely than the attendees at our meetings or the OERu network. Potentially, our open digital history would provide valuable data for postgraduate researchers and I hope that we will see analytical studies on the development of the OERu in the near future. 

In preparing for the November 2014 meetings and my work over the next few weeks to assemble the draft OERu Strategic Plan 2015 - 2017 drawing on our open consultation process, I was reviewing the meeting minutes of partner meetings and noted the message "Sorry, this show has been removed from Blip" displayed on the embedded videos of our meetings.

In 2013, Blip (formerly BlipTV) changed their fremium video hosting business model to focus on content producers "dedicated to their craft" of producing premium video shows after many years of being an "open" platform.  In the early years, Blip was a unique video hosting service which would automatically convert video files into open file formats posting a copy of the video file to the Internet Archive.  Over the years their business model has changed, resulting in our free videos being deleted from the service without corresponding copies being posted on the Internet Archive. 

Fortunately, I kept local copies of the source video files from all our meetings and I have spent a few hours this weekend uploading copies to a pro-vimeo account we maintain (We don't use Youtube as we have no way we can restrict embedded advertising which many WikiEducators find problematic.).  Nonetheless, this is an important lesson for institutions producing OER to recognise the risks of utilising freemium hosting services from corporate providers as business models change. 

It's rewarding to know that new OERu partners can easily trace the history of our decisions over the years.

Wayne  

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Wayne Mackintosh, Ph.D.
Director OER Foundation
UNESCO, COL and ICDE Chair in OER, Otago Polytechnic & OER Foundation

Skype: WGMNZ1
Twitter: Mackiwg

[Don]

Thanks Wayne, as always insightful, and forward looking.

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[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Irwin,

Indeed, freemium models do not have a philosophical or policy commitment to open.  

That's not to say that libre/open collaborations are guaranteed to generate sufficient funding in the future to support their technical infrastructure. However the OER Foundation (OERF) and WikiEducator have a policy commitment to maintain the "essential freedoms of the project resources, and making these available on the Internet in perpetuity." 

Hypothetically, in the unfortunate (but unlikely) scenario where, for example, the Foundation were not able to generate sufficient revenue to support our shared infrastructure, we would post a copy of the full database of the content on the open web and given that anyone could replicate the open source technology we use, in theory the open model reduces the risks associated with contributors losing their content if the money runs out.

Thankfully, we have been able to maintain the WikiEducator infrastructure for almost 9 years now, recognising the funding support of international agencies, the international donor community and a few talented folk who know how to contain cost and operate on a shoestring budget. At the same time, we have gained valuable experience in how to keep the lights on. 

A key feature of the OERF strategy has been to design for fiscal sustainability without reliance on 3rd party donor funding. The OERu collaboration and its contributing partners are a significant component in achieving a fiscally self-sustaining OER project. 

So here's a shout-out to all the OERu partners  who contribute a nominal membership fee to widen access to more affordable education futures for those learners who will be excluded from the privilege of a tertiary education.  

The OERu is on the threshold of achieving a fiscally self-sustaining collaboration without reliance on 3rd party donor funding. Its a smart model because recurrent costs for summative assessment services are guaranteed. We only need to recruit 15 more partners to achieve the break-even threshold! If we achieve this, we will be one of only a handful of organisations that have succeeded in achieving a self-sustaining, international OER collaboration. At this point, the OERu model becomes rather interesting because as a non-profit organisation we are required to reinvest surplus revenue into charitable activities, for example commissioning the paid development of OERu courses. I'd like to see how the commercial operations can compete against the cost efficiencies of the OERu model ;-).

I'm relieved that the OERu collaboration does not need to figure out how to pay back +$60 million of venture capital like some of our xMOOC providers. By the end of this fiscal year, the OERF assuming we achieve our targets, should have no accumulated debt to serve and if we achieve success in recruiting 15 new partners, a little open magic is going to happen.

Watch this space!

W

  

On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Irwin Devries <Idev...@tru.ca> wrote:

Congrats indeed for this foresight. It’s a cautionary tale for all of us to keep track of our original source content. One can never be sure when freemium moves to a new and less free/open model.

Irwin

From: <Wills>, Sandra Wills <swi...@csu.edu.au>
Reply-To: OERu planning <oe...@lists.oerfoundation.org>
Date: Saturday, October 4, 2014 at 4:51 PM
To: Irwin DeVries <idev...@tru.ca>
Subject: Re: [OERu] Open planning, OERu digital history and lesson learned

How annoying for you having to re-do all that work putting up the videos – thanks so much for spotting it and thanks for your patience in reinstating them.

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[M Verhaart]

Hi Wayne,

As a suggestion why not get Jim to give you access to a folder on the wiki educator server and you can upload the videos into it, then hyperlink to those videos. I have resorted to using my google drive to store external files (including examples for my HTML/JavaScript code) into a Google drive folder that I have made shareable. Unfortunately you cannot guarantee the same won't happen to Vimeo as BlipTV.

Regards Michael 

WikiEd: http://wikieducator.org/User:Mverhaart

 http://wikieducator.org/VirtualMV

Sent from my iPad

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[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the suggestion. 

Just to clarify, the issue is not storage of the source video files, but relates to challenges of embedded playback of open format and openly licensed video files in the wiki without advertising being displayed on the WikiEducator site. 

As a free software user I personally prefer to use open format video files (like ogv).  We do support embedded playback of open format files on WikiEducator as well as those available on the Wikimedia Commons. With HTML5 things are getting better and most modern browsers support native playback of open video file formats - but this is not true of all popular browsers.  Many users are free to download the codecs required to play open format video for their browsers. However, sadly, in today's world there are still many educators in tertiary and secondary education who do not have admin privileges to download and install the codecs needed for playing open format video. So this creates a challenge of ensuring the ability for all learners to have a way to play video without sacrificing freedom of choice. 

The use of Blip was a compromise, i.e. to enable users whose freedoms to play back open file formats were sacrificed by third parties. It was a feasible choice at the time because of automatic conversion to open file formats which was mirrored on the Internet Archive. 

You are right, there is no guarantee that the Vimeo freemium service will continue indefinitely and I would not advise using this. There are also terms of service restrictions which would not permit use of the freemium video service for OERu partners who charge fees for their services.  In the case of OERu partners who choose to use paid Vimeo hosting services, they typically purchase an affordable enterprise account for managing their video files. For now, this has worked well for the partners and it is less likely that Vimeo would delete files from paying clients.   

We also encourage WikiEducators to contribute to the commons by converting valuable video resources into open file formats and posting these for reuse on the Wikimedia Commons.

Rich media in an open world is riddled with complexity :-(

W

[M Verhaart]

Thanks wayne

Will need to look further at wikimedia commons and how to embed video

Cheers michael

[Joyce.M...@esc.edu]

Thanks Wayne.  Participating in last year's events were among the highlights of my life.  I am so glad you were able to rescue the videos.  I too have noticed that once open platforms seem to fairly quickly become closed and/or profit oriented.  I suppose part of this is human greed, but part of it may be the difficulty such platforms may have in meeting their very real expenses.  Years of helping people organize community based efforts have taught me that dependence on grants is ultimately not sustainable.  A membership model like the OERu may be, but there has to be some other approaches as well.   In the meantime, your warning is well taken.  All the best.  Joyce McKnight, ESC

-----OE...@googlegroups.com wrote: -----

To: "OE...@googlegroups.com" <OE...@googlegroups.com>
From: Don
Sent by: OE...@googlegroups.com
Date: 10/04/2014 08:41PM
Subject: Re: [OERU] Open planning, OERu digital history and lesson learned