I'm sorry, HOW much?

[Steve Foerster]

Interesting article in the Guardian about OERs:

http://tinyurl.com/yhf44oj

What got me was the part near the end where it's talking about MIT's
OpenCourseWare project and says, "But it costs the university between
$10,000 and $15,000 to put the material from each course online because
the materials have to be properly licensed and formatted."

I'm sorry, what? I'm racking my brain trying to figure out how they
could possibly spend fifteen grand just getting course materials from a
professor's PC to their web server. I mean, yes, they package things as
zip files and everything, but fifteen grand?! The only thing I can
think of is that they have to buy these materials from their own faculty
members, is that the case?

(By contrast, imagine what WE could do with thirty million dollars!)

-=Steve=-

--
Stephen H. Foerster
http://hiresteve.com
http://hiresteve.com/blog
http://wikieducator.org/steve

[Randy Fisher]

Hi Steve,

Ahh, that's a good point - do you think a responsive letter to the editor would be a good idea? You could point out the merits of using WE... <smile>

- Randy

--
Open Education is a sustainable and renewable resource.

________________
Randy Fisher, MA, OMD
Senior Consultant & Facilitator, Intersol Group, Canada

Senior Consultant, Organization & Business Development
International Centre for Open Education / OER Foundation, New Zealand

Elected Member, WikiEducator Community Council, www.wikieducator.org
+1 613.230.6424 x144 (EST)
Skype: wikirandy
Twitter: wikirandy

* Stakeholder Engagement, Change / Transition Management & Performance
* Organization Design & Development
* Sustainable Project Implementation & Community-Building
* E-Learning, Online Collaboration & Communities of Practice
* Coaching & Facilitation
* My Bio: http://www.communitybuildingexpert.com

[Samuel Rose]

Hi Steve, greetings Wiki Educator

My name is Sam Rose

I am Director of Forward Foundation, partner in Future Forward
Institute, creator of open source http://socialmediaclassroom.com,
http://localfoodsystems.org and a member of http://p2pfoundation.net

a quick response follows:

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 6:34 AM, Steve Foerster <st...@hiresteve.com> wrote:
>

> Interesting article in the Guardian about OERs:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yhf44oj
>
> What got me was the part near the end where it's talking about MIT's
> OpenCourseWare project and says, "But it costs the university between
> $10,000 and $15,000 to put the material from each course online because
> the materials have to be properly licensed and formatted."
>
> I'm sorry, what?  I'm racking my brain trying to figure out how they
> could possibly spend fifteen grand just getting course materials from a
> professor's PC to their web server.  I mean, yes, they package things as
> zip files and everything, but fifteen grand?!  The only thing I can
> think of is that they have to buy these materials from their own faculty
> members, is that the case?
>
> (By contrast, imagine what WE could do with thirty million dollars!)

Having worked with many Universities, I can tell you that they are
generally role-based economies, which means that there is a specialist
for everything. And specialization tends to have been in existence for
decades or centuries in these institutions. So, this means that MIT
likely pays not just the professor, but also multiple IT people, PR
people (including copy editors, program directors, etc), and records
managers, and archivists to produce this material. So, the number that
they publish means that this is their accounting of the parts of the
salary for all of the people in their huge bureaucracy that the work
is passed around to.

I would be willing to bet that the amount represented as being spent
is quite accurate, and typical of how a major University would handle
this. I agree that the amount of resources expended revlieals an
incredible amount of wastefulness. I agree this demonstrates that
network-based production ecologies can out-compete traditional
industrial ecologies on cost and resource usage. I believe it could
currently be argued that network based production ecologies can also
out-compete in terms of quality, too.

Right now people "trust" the "brand" of MIT, but what if there were
one or more ways to "certify" network-based contributions" I think
that certification/maintaining of open education packages by smaller
service organizations will increase perceived trust. This
certification and maintaining could potentially be done by up to
thousands of collaborating participant groups, educators, etc.

>
> -=Steve=-
>
>
> --
> Stephen H. Foerster
> http://hiresteve.com
> http://hiresteve.com/blog
> http://wikieducator.org/steve
>
> >
>

--
--
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Tel:+1(517) 639-1552
Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
skype: samuelrose
email: samue...@gmail.com
http://socialsynergyweb.com
http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing
http://flowsbook.panarchy.com/
http://socialmediaclassroom.com
http://localfoodsystems.org
http://notanemployee.net
http://communitywiki.org

"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
ambition." - Carl Sagan

[eliza papajanis]

Hi Steve,

I am glad I have found your post as it partly relates to my question (placed on 'Apennyforyourthought"ning already online)and touches a very sensitive subject of balance between the techers pay and their fear of truth on matters related to the education.Would you be so kind and take a look to the question on the ning and respond to it,please.

 

Cheers

Eliza Papajanis

2009/11/15 Samuel Rose <samue...@gmail.com>

[valerie]

Sam got this right, especially in US education - Right now people
"trust" the "brand" of MIT - the infallibility of anything that costs
a lot of money and has a great PR department.

Wikipedia, Connexions, MERLOT are free, so most of my colleagues are
unwilling to consider these as academically rigorous. This is a
surprisingly big hurdle to overcome. Students are having to drop out
of school because everything is so expense - $100-150 textbooks,
$30-50 course packs, even though their tuition is essentially free -
California community college s about $20 per unit.

But like the man said - Times, they are a changin...

..Valerie


On Nov 15, 6:20 am, Samuel Rose <samuel.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Randy Fisher]

Hi All,

Interesting points - maybe we have to open another front in the drive to embracing open education - PR. Perhaps amongst us, we can find PR friends of open education, and help the wheels turn a bit faster.. I'm thinking opinion pieces news items, articles, promotions, events, etc. .These PR friends can be in any country, in any language....all of it can help...:-)

- Randy

[Samuel Rose]

I agree with PR,

Yet, I also think that there is a role for service organizations that
are already trusted in local communities to take on the role of
"vetting" and "certification". This is what we are doing with Open
Education related to Local Food Systems now...

[Peter]

Great discussion.

And i would have to agree with the point about roles, responsibilities
and the administrative processes cost big $$$. Also fold in the legal
costs of dealing with copyright confirmation / issues and there you go
15k burn. Certainly bodes well for OER and all the new approaches
toward education. It will be very interesting to see where the quality
of an education related to the brand of an institution ends up. With
all the reputation that is out in the open with the Internet will the
brand of an institution weigh more than a persons reputation and will
tools grow that support peoples academic accomplishments without being
associated to an institutional brand?

Again, great discussion folks.

Peter

On Nov 15, 7:42 am, Samuel Rose <samuel.r...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with PR,
>
> Yet, I  also think that there is a role for service organizations that
> are already trusted in local communities to take on the role of
> "vetting" and "certification". This is what we are doing with Open
> Education related to Local Food Systems now...
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Randy Fisher <wikira...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi All,
>
> > Interesting points - maybe we have to open another front in the drive to
> > embracing open education - PR. Perhaps amongst us, we can find PR friends of
> > open education, and help the wheels turn a bit faster.. I'm thinking opinion
> > pieces news items, articles, promotions, events, etc. .These PR friends can
> > be in any country, in any language....all of it can help...:-)
>
> > - Randy
>

> email: samuel.r...@gmail.comhttp://socialsynergyweb.comhttp://socialsynergyweb.org/culturinghttp://flowsbook.panarchy.com/http://socialmediaclassroom.comhttp://localfoodsystems.orghttp://notanemployee.nethttp://communitywiki.org

[Jesse Groppi]

Hi all,

I'm definitely just as excitable over this topic as everyone else.
There's so much to get excited about! The first thing that came to my
mind about the cost is that they probably tallied up every
microscopically detailed expense; that's what US schools do, afterall.
Also, some of the expenses may actually overlap with other work MIT
does. I was unsure, though, if that 10-15k was a per year expense, or
per course. The wording in the article was vague, and journalists are
notorious for using statistics at odd angles for their shock value.

Jesse
http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Jesse_Groppi
skype: jesse.groppi

[Mary]

Licensing fees for databases of expert information to support the students learning and academic research are very expensive. If I understand this correctly, the university has to pay a fee per password for access to the propriatary databases such as DIALOG, LEXIS-NEXUS, APA.

"KRI/Dialog has doubled annual fees paid per-password by its users in the U.S. The new $144 Knight-Ridder Information Membership Fee will bill semi-annually. Overseas users in Europe and Japan, who have not paid an annual fee before, will now pay $72 per password each year." SOURCE http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-18812757.html

[LEXIS-NEXUS] charge[S] anything from $20 - $40 just to type in a search statement. If you make a typo and have to re-enter the statement, you get charged again.
SOURCE http://www.montague.com/review/lexis.html

Level	FTE	APA Data Fee
1	Up to 2,499	$575
2	2,500–4,999	$850
3	5,000–9,999	$1,100
4	10,000–14,999	$1,425
5	15,000–19,999	$1,925
6	20,000–24,999	$2,750
7	25,000–59,999	$3,450
8	60,000+	Contact APA
Notes:  License fees cover unlimited access for all users affiliated with the institutional licensee.  Fees apply to geographically distinct institutions, such as a single campus of a university. Multiple campuses, satellite locations, etc., require separate licenses.

SOURCE http://www.apa.org/psycEXTRA/pricing.html

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Steve, and others

Great thread and very timely discussion :-).  In many respects, this is the raison d'être of the OER Foundation --- an independent organisation that provides leadership, networking and support for educators and educational institutions in fostering the development of a sustainable OER ecosystem.  Our mission in life is to build a sustainable OER ecosystem -- one which is self-sustaining and results in real cost savings and efficiency gains for education institutions.

A few (rather long winded) reflections:

I'm not surprised at the cost of an MIT OpenCourseware offering --- very much a standardised mass production model which is not succeeding in leveraging the potential of peer production systems. I wouldn't be surprised if these costs are significantly underestimated from the perspective of the attribution of fixed cost associated with the face-of-face, research-led teaching model of MITs operations. To what extent have the fixed costs and overhead of the MIT model been attributed to the costing of an OpenCourseware course?

I wonder whether MIT would have moved into the OpenCourseware arena in the absence of the millions of dollars invested, for example by the Hewlett Foundation? Here we must commend the foresight of the Hewlett foundation in targeting a high profile institution and investing real dollars in moving this agenda forward in a substantive way. Everyone in higher education knows about MIT OpenCourseware and the marketing impact of getting the notion of open content into the sector should not be underestimated. Sadly MIT OpenCourseware uses a restrictive content license and content is stored in formats which does not facilitate easy remix :-(.

For those of us with a background in the open distance learning model (distance education) --- we would not attribute MIT OpenCourseware as a model of pedagogical innovation.  MIT OpenCourseware is more akin to the digitisation of lecture notes and lectures than we'll designed independent learning packages. Moreover, the cost of developing high quality learning materials using a team approach for design and development is significantly higher than the costs cited by MIT OpenCourseware.

OERs are a low-cost alternative to high content development costs.  This is not rocket science --   sharing the cost associated with developing high quality teaching materials among ten institutions is considerably cheaper than one institution doing this alone. What is need is a shift from the producer ==> consumer model where one institution tries to develop an OER course, that is a shift away from the mass-standardisation model.

We need to think about sustainable OER in terms of the mass-customisation model, that is using flexible and agile design and development systems that are able to produce customised learning packages for individual institutions at costs which are lower than the traditional mass-standardisation model. Their is an extensive experience from industry in mass customisation approaches, yet education has been slow in refining the model for our benefits.

OER combined with mass-peer collaboration provides fertile ground for implementing mass-customisation models for designing and developing high-quality courses, with added advantage for individual institutions to brand and customise the content (we permit derivative works :-) ) and to extend the diversity of their curriculum for courses with historically low enrolments (long tail economics.)

The OER Foundation has costed this model, assuming 40 tertiary education institutions signing up for a "gold membership" status (USD$5000 -- significantly lower than the cost of an MIT OCW course ) we are able to reinvest back 80% of membership fees into paying academics to develop OER.  Similarly, we calculate that individual organisations receive $14700 dollars worth of "benefits" for an outlay of $5000.  That's pretty good math -- especially since these contributions represent an investment in the social good of education :-)

Links:

Operational business model:

http://wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:OER_Foundation/Operational_plan

Institutional Membership Categories:

http://wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:OER_Foundation/Membership_categories#Table_of_OERF_Benefits_-_Detailed_Comparison


Something to think about -- WE can make the future happen!

Cheers
Wayne

2009/11/16 Steve Foerster <st...@hiresteve.com>

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

[Jaapb]

One remark from a publisher from the Netherlands. If someone is
working with a contact for a school (or any boss), in that contract
should be an agreement about copyrights. Most institutions do own the
rights of the texts of their workers if the workers write in working
hours. So the rights (copy rights) of a teacher 's text he made for
the school are the property of the school. That is what he is paid
for. So if MIT has problems, they don't have good lawyers and
contracts.
Jaap Bosman

On Nov 15, 10:14 pm, Wayne Mackintosh <mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Steve, and others
>
> Great thread and very timely discussion :-).  In many respects, this is the

> *raison* *d'**être* of the OER Foundation --- an independent organisation

> http://wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:OER_Foundation/Membership_catego...

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Vriendelijke groeten Jaap

You are very right -- in the case of most schools, national copyright law assigns copyright to the school, and not the teacher. However, in tertiary education this can be different, depending on institutional intellectual property policies and/or something called "academic exception" -- which many countries adhere to.

From a publishers perspective I'm keen to here your thoughts around publishing models based on OER content, see for example:

http://wikieducator.org/WikiPublishing

How do we foster and promote partnerships with the publishing industry around just-in-time printing and distribution of OER texts?

Cheers
Wayne

2009/11/16 Jaapb <jaap....@gmail.com>

[Edward Cherlin]

California is certifying free digital textbooks, so here the original
source does not matter much.

FLOSS Manuals and Earth Treasury have as part of their business models
looking for development contracts for Free Software manuals and Free
replacements for paper textbooks. I was paid to participate in the
book sprint for How to Bypass Internet Censorship, which was
commissioned by Sesawe.net, and has been translated into several of
the relevant languages, such as Farsi.

http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/CircumventionTools/WebHome
https://sesawe.net/-Manuals-fa-.html

--
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Edward,

That's a very good example, and FLOSS Manuals is a great project.

The OER Foundation is looking to develop the educational equivalent for open textbooks, study guides etc. A small commission from book sales and distribution - eg 10% which as a non profit, we reinvest back into paying authors to develop open texts in high priority areas.

Not unlike the Pediapress service for ordering bound book copies of user generated collections of WikiArticles. Incidently we use the same technology for our wiki ==> pdf collections and WE collaborated with WMF in developing this technology.

The OER Handbook developed in WikiEducator is also a good example. We developed this collaboratively in the wiki  (http://wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator_version_one ), and the text is available for purchase on Lulu
(see: http://www.lulu.com/content/3597933 )

However not fully automated yet -- there was some manual DTP work to produce this pdf example -- but no substantial reason why we couldn't automate this process with a little work.

It would be great to provide tertiary education institutions, schools etc with their own customised open textbooks developed collaboratively in WikiEducator. These texts could use the institutional logo of the Univeristy / School for branding and a small commission of the print sales would come back to the OER Foundation to pay authors for developing OER.  In reality it would be cheaper to produce texts using industrial technologies than the comparable cost of printing out a text on a domestic printer.

Classic win-win -- students will get cheaper text books, publishers can still earn a fair income for print-on-demand and distribution services and academics retain their rights to earn fair remuneration for their inputs.

Now to make this happen :-)

Cheers
Wayne






 

2009/11/16 Edward Cherlin <eche...@gmail.com>

[Steve Foerster]

Thanks for all the great responses!

Valerie, your observation that your colleagues are unwilling to
consider a curricular resource that doesn't cost a ton of money or
have a gigantic hype machine behind it struck a chord, because I've
seen the same behavior. My work experience has only been supporting
faculty members in the U.S., so I'm not sure if it's just a problem
there, but I suppose I doubt it.

It reminds me of Wayne's observation that real innovation in this area
will come from the developing world. When people don't have the
luxury of silly prejudices about the financial provenance of their
content, and have to focus on using what actually works, then those
barriers can come down.

Also, I wanted to echo what Wayne said about copyright of materials
produced by faculty members. At least in the U.S., one of the most
important factors here is what the faculty has negotiated with the
university as part of their contract. That means you can see
variation on a school-by-school basis.

-=Steve=-

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 17:10, Wayne Mackintosh
<mackinto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Edward,
>
> That's a very good example, and FLOSS Manuals is a great project.
>
> The OER Foundation is looking to develop the educational equivalent for open
> textbooks, study guides etc. A small commission from book sales and
> distribution - eg 10% which as a non profit, we reinvest back into paying
> authors to develop open texts in high priority areas.

Excellent. As I wrote earlier, Earth Treasury is looking for contracts
to develop digital replacements for paper textbooks, for our members
to write, and to bring in experts from all subject matter areas and
all of the countries concerned. You can read about the concept and our
partners on our Web site.

The OLPC XO, at its current price of $189 in quantity 10,000, is
already cheaper than textbooks in many countries, even before you
consider the millions of other books that become available at no cost
over the Internet. We have had credible assertions that a successor
laptop can be built to sell for $75, which will be cheaper than
printed books almost everywhere.

I have been costing out computers, electricity, and Internet for
worldwide rollout of XOs, and considering microfinance business
opportunities that result. Using Grameen Phone as a model, it appears
that the whole thing could be done at a profit, with sufficient seed
funding.

> Not unlike the Pediapress service for ordering bound book copies of user
> generated collections of WikiArticles. Incidently we use the same technology
> for our wiki ==> pdf collections and WE collaborated with WMF in developing
> this technology.

Have you looked at the new Booki technology in development for
creating books at Floss Manuals?

http://booki.flossmanuals.net/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer/edit/