OpenVentures/OpenEducation

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Open Educational Resources [OER]

OER Overview

Open Courses

One of the ways education has embraced the Open marketplace is through the implementation of Open Courses. Teachers, professors, and laypeople work to develop courses that are available in flexible, online format, with few barriers to enrollment. These courses, often called MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, are available on the web and cover a diverse range of topics and audiences. This field has experienced exponential growth in the past half-decade.

Recent announcements and widespread adoption made by top universities “to turn to new forms of educational delivery…have not only captured the interest of academics and students at higher education but also the interest of students and teachers at high schools.” Massive open online courses “[represent] open access… [content] to high volume participants aiming to take a course or to be educated” The term MOOC was first mentioned in 2008 but truly exploded in popularity in 2011 when professors at Stanford released video content with supporting resources publicly. As we look deeper, according to the UK University, the largest number of students who enroll in MOOCs are hobby learners with the second largest group being individuals who want to further their professional knowledge. Adoption at the high school level is still clearly low with only 11.8% of students falling into this age demographic .

Remember, the removal of barriers is an important component of 'Open', so not all MOOCs are considered at the far end of the 'Open' spectrum if there are barriers to access for instance, logins & passwords, registration, or time bound accessibility. Further, if MOOCs are not released using an Open Creative Commons licence (CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) then these courses would not be considered an Open Educational Resource.

K-12

For those with K-12 learners, many MOOCs are available for free, for example author John Green's YouTube series Crash Course or Khan Academy which offer elementary and high school-level video and interactive content intended to supplement more traditional teaching methods. Challenges: The downside is that privacy may become a huge issue: "Massive open online courses, first envisioned as a way to democratize higher education, have made their way into high schools, but Washington is powerless to stop the flood of personal data about teenage students from flowing to private companies, thanks to loopholes in federal privacy laws."

Khan Academy and K-12

In order to make a practical transition into the world of MOOCs, high school educators can make use of a wealth of publicly available content.  One such tool that has been widely covered in the media and has been “described as a ‘glimpse of the future of education’” is the Khan Academy .  Khan Academy is a free web-based resource available to anyone with an internet connection that has been created to allow educators more class time to engage in meaningful discussion about course content and less time standing and delivering lessons .

Similarly to a MOOC, Khan Academy allows students to engage in course content through media such as YouTube videos and to work at their own pace.  This is a great tool for those students who are either wanting to refresh content to coincide with their classroom work or prepare for an upcoming unit or course.  Without teacher intervention, this obviously requires a student to be self-driven and proficient in previous content in order to build meaningful connections with new material. 

Khan Academy’s popularity is apparent when we learn that it is currently being used in more than 29,000 classrooms worldwide in 216 countries.  There has also been statewide implementation in Idaho with more than 10,000 students piloting the system in 2013-2014 .  Following through a module in any subject area, it is clear that research is done to create short, concise lessons to maximize student time.  One of the goals of the Khan Academy is to allow educators to flip the classroom where students can watch the lessons at home and be able to spend class time engaging in content in other ways.  Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy stated “that with Khan Academy ‘a teacher can finally have every kid going at their own pace and have the teacher really focus on what we would consider… higher value-added activities, which is running simulations with students, doing actual interventions, [and] getting students to teach each other the concept’” . 

Through their research, Cargile and Harkness found that many teachers were not implementing this resource in the way Khan had intended.  They found that most teachers were assigning the videos for homework with little revision to their classroom time.  The teachers were omitting their lecture, but were filling student time with worksheets and reinforcement of learning through repetition.  Regardless of the intentions of the founder and the actual uses we are seeing in classrooms, the Khan Academy remains a great tool for high school teachers to embrace in the blended classroom.

Post-Secondary & Adult Education

MOOCs for post-secondary and adult learners have thrived as technology ventures. Services like Coursera, EdX, and iversity offer course content, often for free, from globally-recognized academic institutions (including UBC!) to learners around the globe. However, these services differ from those offered to K-12 because they offer additional paid services including verification or grading. Some providers, like EdX, go further, to offer more professional-level certificate programs, requiring an enrollment fee. EdX CEO Anant Agarwal believes that open source educational ventures like MOOCs are a powerful tool for teaching: "The last time we gave teachers a new tool was 1862: a piece of chalk and a chalkboard.”

Educational Perspective

MOOCs have engaged learners in a new and exciting way and, in most cases, allow for flexible learning. Instead of being required to be in a certain place at a certain time, MOOCs allow learners to go at their own pace, on their own schedule, to complete their work. However, MOOCs have an abysmally low completion rate, about 5%, indicating that there is still an enormous amount of room for improvement as to delivery and motivation provided by these courses. Furthermore, credentials earned from MOOCs have not yet obtained equivalence with credentials earned from accredited (paid) academic institutions, so students enrolled in these programs may struggle to find work based on online-credentialing alone.

In "Teaching in a Digital Age", Tony Bates summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of MOOCs:

Strengths

• MOOCs, particularly xMOOCs, deliver high quality content from some of the world’s best universities for free to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection;
• MOOCs can be useful for opening access to high quality content, particularly in developing countries, but to do so successfully will require a good deal of adaptation, and substantial investment in local support and partnerships;
• MOOCs are valuable for developing basic conceptual learning, and for creating large online communities of interest or practice;
• MOOCs are an extremely valuable form of lifelong learning and continuing education;
• MOOCs have forced conventional and especially elite institutions to reappraise their strategies towards online and open learning;
• institutions have been able to extend their brand and status by making public their expertise and excellence in certain academic areas;
• MOOCs main value proposition is to eliminate through computer automation and/or peer-to-peer communication the very large variable costs in higher education associated with providing learner support and quality assessment.

Weaknesses

• the high registration numbers for MOOCs are misleading; less than half of registrants actively participate, and of these, only a small proportion successfully complete the course; nevertheless, absolute numbers are still higher than for conventional courses;
• MOOCs are expensive to develop, and although commercial organisations offering MOOC platforms have opportunities for sustainable business models, it is difficult to see how publicly funded higher education institutions can develop sustainable business models for MOOCs;
• MOOCs tend to attract those with already a high level of education, rather than widen access;
• MOOCs so far have been limited in the ability to develop high level academic learning, or the high level intellectual skills needed in a knowledge based society;
• assessment of the higher levels of learning remains a challenge for MOOCs, to the extent that most MOOC providers will not recognise their own MOOCs for credit;
• MOOC materials may be limited by copyright or time restrictions for re-use as open educational resources.

Market Analysis

MOOCs are an example of how online education can be commercialized. Through the sale of verified credentials, or advanced course content, they are able to generate earnings and encourage increased enrollment. Due to the scalability of online courses (e.g. their lack of space limitation) they have the potential to instruct an enormous number of learners at one time.

Wikis

A wiki is a website that provides a space for its users to modify and collaborate on editing, adding or altering the content. Developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994, the name "Wiki" is derived from Wiki Wiki shuttles that ran between the terminals at Honolulu International Airport. Wiki websites consist of a series of pages that users can edit using conventional web browsers. Through collaboration, users of Wikis aim to crowdsource information on a particular topic, and creating connections between the topics in the form of page links.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqxwwuUdsp4

Examples of Wikis

There are ample examples of wiki’s out there. Some range from music to cooking or about space and the many stars in our massive universe.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/StarCraft_Wiki

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek

Educational Perspective

The use of wikis in education have disrupted the way in which we learn. They are filling a void, one that is encased in learning through means that are adaptable, rewarding and exciting. This enables students to interact with rich, flexible, but more importantly collaborative environments. With the use of wikis this allows a constructivist approach in the way students can manipulate or absorb information. While this isn’t a means to replace what pedagogues have worked so hard to instill, wikis offer platforms for students that are both transformation, open, free and amplify the learning already going on in the classroom.

Market Analysis

While the majority of wikis are free, there have been times where popular wiki sites such as Wikipedia have asked their users to donate money to allow the project to continue running.

Open Repositories

Open repositories, also known as "institutional repositories" are virtual spaces created by large, primarily research-intensive institutions like universities, to share their productive intellectual output (e.g., research and publications, presentations, white papers, course materials, dissertations, theses, past examinations, etc.) with the world. Before academics embraced digital record keeping, these types of materials would often go unseen or unrecognized, kept in personal files or on shelves of the library. Today, this form of digital recordkeeping has opened institutional data and records to the world, making enormous amounts of data widely available.

A benefit of open repositories is that they help scholars, students, researchers and faculty members to share their work, making it more visible, and allowing for more open collaboration across institutions.

Examples of Open Repositories

• The University of British Columbia

• The University of Toronto

• London School of Economics

Educational Perspective

Open repositories offer academic institutions the unique possibility to share their research output, even if it is not published or publishable in traditional formats. This form of broad information sharing allows for collaboration across institutions, and can also allow for data sharing and data collation for intersecting projects. Open repositories can benefit educators through the sharing of digital teaching materials and aids. Students can access materials to support the development of e-portfolios and other academic endeavors.

Market Analysis

Open repositories offer academic institutions an opportunity to promote their research and intellectual content without seeking publication. This can increase the profile of the institution without necessarily increasing the burdensome cost of publishing onto the researcher or institution. Furthermore, institutions with repositories can use their content as a marketing tool, to attract faculty and students based on the quality and quantity of research output in a given field. According to Tony Bates, author of "Teaching in the Digital Age", the primary factors that drive cost are:

• the development/production of materials;
• the delivery of materials;
• number of students/scalability;
• the experience of an instructor working with the medium;
• whether the instructor develops materials alone (self-development) or works with professionals. From an instructor perspective, time is the critical cost factor.

Open Licenses

Open source licenses are a type of permit for software (code) and other content that allows users access to its source, the nuts and bolts, or the blueprint of said software. This, in turn allows users to be able to alter, remix, modify or share the content.

Dungeons & Dragons

Let's examine Dungeons and Dragons for example. While the game is licensed under creative commons et al., the works involved allow users to reimagine new worlds, new stories or new scenarios. Dungeons & Dragons paved the way for open license, which involves content that is developed and produced by major gaming studio (TSR, now Wizards of the Coast). Lessig defines this as “transformative uses” of original content, works that have communities immersed in the content and have built something completely new from what the original content was intended for. Philip writes “the multiple new artistic and cultural forms created by ripping and mixing are Lessig’s examples of ‘transformative’ uses—that is, uses which transform the content of materials out there, or which transform the markets they compete in.” (2005) While open source licensed software is generally free, authors may decide to charge for the source code, however the assumption is that you are able to share, rework or alter the content, while preserving the name and authors and origins of the software.

Copyright

"It is extraordinarily troubling with respect to transformative uses of creative work’ that ‘copy and paste’ has become a crime." Philip, K. (2005) The lines of copyright have been blurred for many years, resulting in many disputes, legal battles and damages done to original works.

YouTube: a case study

YouTube has served as a platform for millions to upload content and share it with people around the world. The content produced can vary, from gaming footage, music videos and how-to guides to fix a car. YouTube has disrupted, transformed and otherwise reworked the way we consume media. Individuals, of all ages tinker, build, edit, rip, remix, produce, mod, content that pushes the boundary of a potential copyright infringement of original content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQVHWsTHcoc

Content producing has come a long way. YouTube personalities, eventually emerged from this new and exciting medium, allowing people to make money from ad revenue. The more people who viewed your video, the more money you made. Unfortunately this was later changed due to various copyright infringements, such as uploading commercially available movies and music. The video is a great AMA (Ask Me Anything) from Chris Pirillo, a content producer and tech enthusiast talking about copyright and content ID, the struggles of being a content producer and the ethical dilemmas that face it.

Creative commons

A creative commons license are public copyright licenses that allow the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A creative commons license is when the author gives users the right to use, share, remix, build a work that they have created.

Business examples - DOTA: a case study

Fans will always seek ways to alter commercial content and develop something new. A classic example of this involves a team of young gamers using WarCraft 3’s map maker tools or world editor to create a completely new game called DOTA.The game was later released on Battle.net and hailed by the community has something new and exciting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnQfdSEqGDA

Are they pirating the game or content? Is this being stolen to create content later to be sold? Are they making a profit? Does that not infringe on copyright laws? Are the major gaming studios afraid of what the new “owners” will do with the content? Are we changing the authorship? Should they be praised? In the case of DOTA, the game was eventually pushed to created a second version, this time with Valve, making it quite controversial. A game created with Blizzards engines, was to be re-released using Valve’s infrastructure. Trademark issues gave mixed feelings to an ever loyal community whether or not they would continue to push the game and promote it for play.

Open Textbooks

Open Texts and Learning Objects

Examples of Open Texts

Open Textbook Library; OpenStax College (Rice University); Florida Shines; College Open Textbooks; The Global Text Project; MERLOT II; Shareable Online Learning Resources;

OER Commons

Educational Perspective

Strengths

1. Many of these resources are free - although open source does not mean free and those who write for open source are often paid for their work through sponsorship. 2. It enables you to keep costs as low as possible or free for students. So if free open source books are equivalent to or better than a standard textbook, then why not offer this alternative?. 3. Digital books reduce our carbon footprint. 4. Digital books from an open source enabling authors to update them more quickly as they don’t have to pass through the usual publishing process. This means they’re likely to be more current. 5. Some open source textbooks allow you to alter the text or combine it with other texts to make it more relevant to your specific program.

Weaknesses

Open Source textbooks and learning objects do not yet go through the rigorous editing process offered by a publishing company. However this could easily be fixed with a peer review system. There is still much improvment needed in the realm of open textbooks, and more specfically digital or e-textbooks. Studies have consistently shown that students prefer to read from a print text if they are given the option. Further, student comprehension has been shown to be higher through print textbooks. It is assumed that with the fluidity and organic nature of an open textbook, that many of them would be electronic.

Market Analysis

As the cost of education rises there is an increasing number of teachers who are joining the open source community to collaborate and co-author books and other learning resources for the benefit of their students. With the growing popularity of digital books and the proliferation of high resolution mobile devices, the interest of free or near-free books will continue to grow  

Additional reading: Things You Should Know About Open Textbook Publishing

Open Journals

One of the ways information and data sharing has accelerated in the past several years has been through the adoption and expansion of the open journal model. Open journals are academic publications which strive to make their publications and associated data available online, for free, without burden to the reader. This model exists primarily in academic literature.

Open journals have disrupted the traditional model for academic publishing. In the past, journals were funded through subscription fees, with individuals, organizations and academic institutions paying considerable amounts to access the information. The cost of access could and still can be prohibitive, and as such not all researchers or students have equal access to the valuable information produced. The open journal model sought to democratize scientific and academic data by making it openly available to all, for free, online. However, some open journals will charge the author a submission or publication fee to offset their lack of earnings from subscriptions. This can be seen as limiting as not all authors will have the same access to funding and as such authors with more substantial funding may have the opportunity to publish more frequently. Furthermore, when journals rely upon author fees to fund their existence, they tend to publish higher percentages of submissions than journals in the traditional, "prestige" model.

Open Journal Platforms (Ventures)

• Open Journal System

Educational Perspective

Open journals offer scholars and students alike the benefit of publicly-shared knowledge. Open journals let us access high quality, peer-reviewed information at the time of need, without requiring a library card, log in, or payment.

Market Analysis

Like the rest of the academic publishing market, open journals do not yet appear to have a sustainable funding model. In relying upon researchers to fund publication, they also risk bias, and self-selection.

Open Tools for Learning

Open Tools

Examples of Open Tools

Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments.

Udutu is an online course authoring tool that supports video, audio, graphic, and text functionality within courses; it also follows a “WYSIWYG” format, simplifying content creation. It’s meant for use by either corporate or academic e-Learning professionals.

Hour of Code is a free to use website with various challenges and games which promote coding principles among school aged children. They use current media (movies like Frozen or Star Wars) to inspire and excite kids. They also host events around the world in partnerships with various companies and government bodies.

Educational Perspective

Giving young people the tools and coursework that promotes a "do-it-yourself' culture, "encompass the need to ensure that every young person has access to the skills and experience needed to become a full participant in the 21st century, can articulate his or her understanding of how media shapes perception, and is knowledgeable of emerging ethical standards that shape his or her practices as a media maker and participant in online communities."

Empowerment

When it comes to creative media production, I can see how a participatory culture can be very empowering to students. Kafai and Peppler use the example of, “a young artist represented a DIY approach to creative media production in the creation of his own Manga.”. The novel “50 Shades of Grey”, which started out as Twilight fan fiction and news that ‘fan fiction’ stories can be bought from the author and made into multi-million dollar franchises could stimulate students to create their own work; They can how it can be readily adapted by the culture at large and can be something that is viewed, enjoyed, or ‘consumed’ by millions of people worldwide.

Open Source Backfire?

Like any technology, there are downsides to the idea of ‘open source’ information. The “Open Street Map” collaborative project that combines Google Map data with a “flexible editing tool that allows users to add rich multimedia content directly to specific map locations…”, but in one case, Google's similar “MapMaker” project, which allowed users to add information to Google Maps in much the same way, backfired in the case of some ‘rogue mapmakers’ who added some features to maps that were not altogether welcome by some.

Open Source Health Information

The “Health Talk Online community” claims that it is not only doctors who are experts in a particular condition, or a specific form of treatment, or surgical options. While it’s true that there are many in the healthcare profession that could provide legitimate health care advice, there is a risk that celebrity-endorsed pseudoscience like the ‘dangers’ of vaccine could spread if health advice is not left to professional organizations and peer-reviewed science. Then again, Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray mentions the fact that “70% of doctors use Wiki”, so maybe putting trust in professionals who consult a worldwide community-based knowledge system may be the future of medicine, and to education.

Market Analysis

With a greater push towards e-learning environments, there will be further opportunities to develop online learning platforms. The market has many competitors but does not appear to have reached saturation yet. There are still quite a few opportunities as there has yet to be a platform that has achieved a significant portion of the market.