The Future of Open Education....

[Delmar Larsen]

Dear Open Colleagues,

I tend to let my walking do my talking, so this is the first time I have put out a “request for consideration” to the community; I hope it is well considered.

I have been thinking quite a bit recently about the bigger picture of Open Education and, more importantly, how we might address it collectively. This has been prompted by a growing concern in the community about the lack of growth and, in some cases, the backward slide of Open Education in the U.S. and elsewhere. We are seeing development efforts stall, external and internal funding decline, and even established programs collapse, e.g., OERu and Manitoba Campus, among others.

I know there are important exceptions. For example, California is moving forward with great enthusiasm and speed prompted by the State's unprecedented $115 million investment in Open Education in the California Community College system. This demonstrates what is possible when there is sustained institutional and public investment.

These thoughts are also prompted by the recent development of the Open Education Association (https://www.opened.org) in the U.S.; I believe this association can and should play an important role in facilitating larger-scale efforts, as such associations should function.

The question I pose is: 

What do we, as an Open Education community, need to do collectively to ensure that Open Education not only survives, but grows?

I have formulated one possible approach to this question in a recent Medium post (https://medium.com/p/2239a13e19b6), in which I propose building, populating, and sustaining a centralized “Open Courseware Ecosystem” that mirrors the functionality and scope of competing commercial, for-profit courseware.

I personally don't see how Open Education can compete effectively and at scale with commercial courseware without building such an ecosystem with comparable functionality that brings together OER powered by Open Technology and/or Open Access Technology. Over the past decade, commercial publishers have increasingly moved beyond simply selling textbooks and toward providing integrated courseware ecosystems. If Open Education is going to compete at that level, I believe we need to think beyond individual textbooks, repositories, and projects and build an ecosystem that provides comparable functionality while preserving the values of openness.

I am intentionally separating the discussion of how to build such a courseware ecosystem from the more fundamental question of whether such an infrastructure is needed or how to support its construction. All three discussions are obviously interconnected, but I believe we should first establish whether there is a shared need and vision before delving too deeply into questions of implementation.

Why do I think this is important?

• Discovery and access: A centralized system could make Open Education substantially easier to discover, particularly for people outside our community who have limited experience finding and evaluating OER. We have created an enormous amount of valuable content, but much of it remains difficult for the average instructor to find, evaluate, assemble, and adopt.
• Competing with modern commercial courseware: A repository such as OER Commons can help address discovery, but a courseware ecosystem would go much further. Commercial publishers have spent the past decade transforming their products into integrated courseware systems. To compete effectively, Open Education needs an equivalent ecosystem—not simply a larger collection of openly licensed materials.
• Sustainability: A shared ecosystem could provide a mechanism for sustaining the corpus of Open Educational Resources and the technologies that support it. Ideally, this would create a sustainable community infrastructure without reproducing the financial and governance problems that can arise when critical educational infrastructure is dependent on for-profit companies or short-term funding.

A greater discussion of these points can be found in Medium post referenced above.

I don't believe any one organization can, or should, build this Courseware alone. The pieces already exist across many organizations, institutions, projects, and communities. The question is whether we can bring those pieces together into something substantially greater than the sum of its parts.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Delmar

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Delmar Larsen
Professor and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Affairs
Department of Chemistry
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue 
Davis, CA 95616
+1 (530) 754-9075
dla...@ucdavis.edu