ICTlogy

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges)

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Case Study 2. Massachusetts Institute of Techonolgy. Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds
Shigeru Miyagawa, OpenCourseWare Advisory Committee, MIT

Move away from the MIT.com (dot.com) approach. MIT OCW is, no way, a means to get revenues: on the contrary, the participants are driven by the aim of sharing.

Open Educational Resources: technological aspects
Miguel Ángel Sicilia, Information Engineering Research Unit, Alcalá University

Providing the sources is crucial so things are really “open”.

To manage the licenses, Open Digital Rights Language:
http://xml.coverpages.org/odrl.html

Reusability depends on the context: the more contextualized the learning object, the less reusable, but more usable. So, should we reward reusability, even if there is a trade-off with usability?

Opennes (in technology issues) should bring us from single opencourseware sites to federated ones and brokers… And standards are already ready.

Open Educational Resources: economic aspects
Peter Baumgartner, Department for Interactive Media and Educational Resources, Donau-Universität Krems

From a strictly educational point of view, it’s crazy to think that we can create the tiniest learning objects, so we can build with them bigger educational resources, namely “courses”. Not even Lego — to follow the usual metaphor (118 Kb) — provides tiniest one size pieces: there are different sizes of pieces, and even different shapes. We should rethink the idea of granularity.

Assumptions:

• The quality of educational settings is a mix of content and a learning environment
• different types of educational resources support different kinds of learning environments, and vice versa

Three teaching modes:

Canned content is not (necessarily) open content. And content varies widely whether the institution promoting the open content is public or private, and whether it is about virtual learning (autonomous learner) or blended learning (educational support).

Why open content?

• for “a better world”
• for reputation
• for content: so I can mix it with other open content
• for other services: I give you content and you give me feedback on how it worked / you give me medatada / etc.

Barriers

• copyright infringement
• material has to be improved for general use: it was ok for my internal use at my lecture classes, but opening means public exposure, so it should be improved
• print is better than web
• lack of knowledge
• giving away content can mean giving away business opportunities

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges)

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Open Educational Resources: institutional challenges
David Wiley, Instructional Technology Department, Utah State University

Shifts:

• Analog -> Digital
• Tethered -> Mobile
• Isolated -> Connected
• Generic -> Personal
• Consuming -> Creating
• Closed -> Open

How the educational model is being challenged?

• Content is changing: the University no more the one and only content holder
• Expertise is changing: more and more accessible (out of the University) experts
• Credentialing is changing: certifications can be worth more than a university degree [personal note: this brings me/us directly back to (open) ePortfolios, personal digital repositories, personal research portals, etc.]
• So, the monopoly is being broken apart

The problem is that institutions do not understand “online”, they’re digital immigrants, not natives.

And it’s also about respect: if you do customize your courses if you have to impart them in other cultures different than yours, why not doing the same when moving to “digital cultures”? This customizing requires “open”, to enable creation, connection, personalization… So, it’s not because it’s politically correct, but educationally/instructionally correct.

Open Educational Resources: educational aspects
C. Sidney Burrus, Senior Strategist at Connexions, Rice University

[Traditional] Publishing disconnects the author with his audience (mainly students and other teachers), and they become shutouts.

Two phases to major technological change:

• Phase one: new technology does old job better
• Phase two: new technology invents new application that could not have been predicted

All content is in XML, including “strange” content: Mahts, MathML; Chemistry, CML; Music, MusicXML; etc. This enhances editing, searching, aggregating, localizing…

New Intellectual Property issues:

• Get it right from the start
• Make content safe to share

Sustainability

Connexions online

• Free
• Forever

Generate mission support revenue

• Revenue from low-cost textbook production
• Community College Initiative
• University Press Initiative
• K-12 Textbook Initiative
• Supporting developing world & financially disadvantaged

Information is free, books are not

All content, compulsory, is licensed under a Creative Commons “attribution” license. So, you can commercialize Connexions content and make money out of it. The reason? If the market does work, only people adding value to the content can actually charge money on it. Otherwise, people will just download the content and print it.

Case Study 1. Open University UK. Open Educational Resources and the Future of Open Universities
Niall Sclater, Director of Virtual Learning Environment Project, Open University UK

Open University model is not based or aimed to publishing, but to online displaying. Thus, web support is the focus, powered by a Moodle installation, with quizzes and activities, etc. Lots of other open source tools do complete Moodle features i.e. for instant messaging.

Sometimes (and growing) content becomes activity, and activity becomes content. Everything that happens in the virtual environment can be reused and converted into content. ePorfolios, thus, are somehow created on the run.

Podcasting, for instance, is communication (interactivity, activity) but, as it remains, it becomes immediately content. And this applies whether the podcast is a teacher’s or a student’s.

Questions ahead

• Can distance universities survive in a World where content is free?
• Should we put more emphasis on supporting students to reuse content developed elsewhere and less on developing our own resources?
• Can we build self-sustaining communities around open resources where learners and teachers discuss and enhance the content?

These days is taking place the virtual forum of the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges.

My colleague Juli

In some ways, this could be called Web 2.0 and diffusion of research (part IV): the article. History goes as follows:

• I give a seminar on Web 2.0 issues applied to research and self-archiving
• Colleague César Córcoles joins to improve the seminar and impart it again, adding a deeper technological background and broader range of examples.
• A review of the seminar is published

Now, Carlos Casado, colleague of both César and me here at the University has joined the team and the result is the article The 2.0 Teacher: teaching and research from the web, recently published at UOC Papers review. I think (I hope) that the output has once again improved, as Carlos added his own part on blogging in the classroom, besides valuous contributions to the whole. Pity is that 5,500 words is not really plenty of space to deal with all the matters we wanted to, and the balance among a “diffusion paper” and an “academic paper” is quite a difficult thing to accomplish: you’re asked to be both, and each kind of reader thinks it’s not either.

Anyway, here goes the abstract:

The aim of the article is, first, to give a brief presentation of what the web 2.0 is from the teacher and researcher’s point of view, leading to a consideration of some of its proposed uses in the classroom and to conclude by considering how it has begun to affect, and will continue to affect, the world of research, especially in terms of publishing completed work and establishing a new framework for collaboration among researchers.

Consequently, we will be talking about a web 2.0, which, in terms of technology, offers a wide public a set of sophisticated content publication and management tools and, in social terms, makes it possible for a collective intelligence to appear, based on the aggregation of non-systematised or explicitly guided individual contributions. Both points come together in the teaching and research activity of teachers, affording them tools-such as blogs and wikis-and ways of doing things that they can use at different times during their activity to increase their communication and motivation capacity in the classroom, and to optimise the efforts devoted to searching for information, collaborative work and the communication of their results in the laboratory.

The article concludes that the confluence of new tools and attitudes should lead to an academic panorama with greater collaboration between peers and a natural evolution of the current meritocracy system.

• Full article (Spanish) (366 Kb)
• Bibliographic citation

Taking as a baseline Open Knowledge, Free Society, the 3rd edition of the Online congress of the Observatory for Cybersociety will take place from November 20th to December 3rd, 2006.

Five working groups have been created:

• Topic A: Policy and social change
• Topic B: Identity and Social groups
• Topic C: Communication and culture
• Topic D: Education and learning
• Topic E: Critic and Innovation

each one still accepting papers for submission (deadline: October 30th).

The whole congress is a gem but, if you focus on ICT4D issues, Topic A. Policy and social change is your place.

If I had to pick one or two tracks — choose or die — I’d take these two:

• A-6. Las TIC y la cooperación al desarrollo: después de la Cumbre Mundial para la Sociedad de la Información [ICTs and cooperation for development: after WSIS], coordinated by friends Manuel Acevedo and Mila Gascó.
• A-7. Los Telecentros, ¿un recurso necesario para alcanzar una sociedad más libre? [Telecenters: a necessary resource to reach a freer society?], coordinated by Ricard Faura and Jose David Carracedo, whom (Jose David) I met when we organized the II Workshop on Internet and Solidarity and spent together richest time.

Feel like registering?

The 2nd International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training will take place at the Kenyatta International Conference Center in Nairobi, Kenya, from May 28 to 30, 2007.

The “subtitle” of the meeting is Building Infrastructures and Capacities to Reach out to the Whole of Africa, thus the list of themes is a comprehensive effort to cover all subjects around education, capacity building, e-learning, development, ICTs, open access, open source, etc.

Call for papers is open until Friday, December 8, 2006. Besides the usual presentations, other possibilities of collaboration are open too.