Ten Years Later: Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education, and Why We Should Care

I had read the post the previous day and had already decided not to respond because tbh I just wouldn’t know where to begin.

However since David is offering “a large drink of the author’s choice” as the prize for the best response, I have been persuaded to take up the challenge. Which just goes to show there’s no better way to motivate me folk then by offering drink. (Mine’s a G&T David, or a red wine, possibly both, though not in the same glass.)

I am still at a loss to offer a serious critique of this article so in the best spirit of OER, I am going to recycle what everyone else has already said. Reuse FTW!

The article can basically be summarised as follows:

It’s 10 years since MIT launched OpenCourseware. Since then OERs have FAILED because they have not transformed and disrupted higher education. List of reasons for their failure: discoverability, quality control, “The Last Mile”, acquisition. The solution to these problems is to built a “global enterprise-level system” aka a “supersized CMS”. And look, here’s one I built earlier! It’s called LON CAPA.

PS. “The entity that provides the marketplace, the service, and the support and keeps the whole enterprise moving forward is probably best implemented as a traditional company.”

I should point out that I am not familiar with LON-CAPA. I’m sure it’s a very good system as far as it goes, but I don’t think a “global enterprise-level system” is the answer to anything.

David Kernohan himself was quick off the mark when the article first started circulating, after tweeting a couple of its finer points:

“OERs have not noticeably disrupted the traditional business model of higher education”

“It is naïve to believe that OERs can be free for everybody involved.”

He concluded:

So the basic message of that paper is “OER IS BROKEN” and “NEED MOAR USER DATA”. Lovely.

Because, clearly, if we can’t measure the impact of something it is valueless.

Which is indeed a good point. Actually I think there are many ways you can measure the impact of OER but I’m not at all convinced that “disrupting traditional business models” is the only valid measure of success. After all, OER is just content + open licence at the end of the day. And we can’t expect content alone to change the world, can we?

This is the point that Pat Lockley was getting at when he tweeted:

My Blog will be coming soon “Why OER haven’t affected the growth of grass”

Facetious perhaps, but a very pertinent point. There has been so much hyperbole surrounding OER from certain quarters of the media that it’s all too easy to say “Ha! It’s all just a waste of money. OER will never change the world.” Well no, maybe not, but most right minded people never claimed it would. What we do have though, is access to a lot more freely available (both gratis and libre) clearly licenced educational resources out there on the open web. Surely that can’t be a bad thing, can it? If nothing else, OER has increased educators’ awareness and understanding of the importance of clearly licencing the content they create and use, and that is definitely a good thing.

Pat also commented:

I’m just tired of OER being about “research into OER”. The cart is so far before the horse.

Which is another very valid point. I probably shouldn’t repeat Pat’s later tweet when he reached the end of the article and discovered that the author was pimping his own system. It involved axes and jumberjacking. Nuff said.

Jim Groom was similarly concise in his criticism:

“For content to be truly reusable and remixable, it needs to be context-free.” Problematic.

What’s the problem with OER ten years on? Metadata. Hmmm, maybe it is actually imagination, or lack thereof. #killoerdead

While I don’t always agree with Mr Groom, I certainly do agree that such a partial analysis lacks imagination.

As is so often the case, it was left to Amber Thomas to see past the superficial bad and wrongness of the article to get at the issues underneath.

“The right questions, patchy evidence base, wrong solutions. And I still think oer is a descriptor not a distinct content type.”

And as is also often the case, I agree with Amber wholeheartedly. There are actually many valid points lurking within this article but, honestly, it’s like the last ten years never happened. For example, discussing discoverability, which I agree can be problematic, the author suggests:

The solution for this problem could be surprisingly simple: dynamic metadata based on crowdsourcing. As educators identify and sequence content resources for their teaching venues, this information is stored alongside the resources, e.g., “this resource was used before this other resource in this context and in this course.” This usage-based dynamic metadata is gathered without any additional work for the educator or the author. The repository “learns” its content, and the next educator using the system gets recommendations based on other educators’ choices: “people who bought this also bought that.”

Yes! I agree!

Simple? No, currently impossible, because the deployment of a resource is usually disconnected from the repository: content is downloaded from a repository and uploaded into a course management system (CMS), where it is sequenced and deployed.

Erm…impossible? Really? Experimental maybe, difficult even, but impossible? No. Why no mention here of activity data, paradata, analytics? Like I said, it’s like the last ten years never happened.

Anyway I had better stop there before I say something unprofessional. One last comment though, Martin Hawksey pointed out this morning that there is not a single comment on the Educause website about this article, and asked:

Censorship? (That’s the danger of CMSs configured this way, someone else controls the information.)

I can’t comment on whether there has been censorship, but there has certainly been control. (Is there a difference? Discuss.) In order to comment on the Educause site you have to register, which I did yesterday afternoon and got a response informing me that it would take “several business hours” to approve my registration. I finally received the approval notification at nine o’clock at night, by which point I had better things to do with my time than comment on “global enterprise-level systems” and “supersized CMS”.

So there you have it David. Do I get that G&T?

ETA The author of this article, Gerd Kortemeyer may just have pipped us all to the G&T with a measured and considered defence of his post over at oer-discuss. While his e-mail provides some much needed context to the original article, particularly in terms of clarifying the specfic type of educational institutions and usage scenarios he is referring to, many of the criticism remain. It’s well worth reading Gerd’s response to the challenge here. Andy Lane has also written a very thoughtful and detailed critique of the article here which I can highly recommend.

Dan Stucke has blogged a short sumamry of the presentation on his blog here.

Comparison with the music industry

Anya made that point that although recording industry sales have slumped people are now spending more and more money on downloads and ticket sales to attend live performances. So although artists may receive less income from sales of recorded music they gain more income from live performances. Paul Walk of UKOLN felt comparing education to the music industry was unhelpful and David Kernohan argued about the validity of Anya’s assertion within the music industry itself. However Mike Ellis of Eduserv argued that this is indeed a reasonable model for comparison.

paulwalk Paul Walk
oh…. another comparison with the music industry

dkernohan David Kernohan
musicians don’t mind about not selling music as they make money from live performance!! Not many musicians agree.

paulwalk Paul Walk
can we have a rule: no bogus comparisons to (mostly speculative) points about music industry business models?

m1ke_ellis Mike Ellis
@paulwalk don’t see it as that bogus – question is about openness, where the value is in the chain, how to cope

paulwalk Paul Walk
@m1ke_ellis music industry is pretty much passive entertainment. Hope HE hasn’t reached that sorry state yet…

m1ke_ellis Mike Ellis
@paulwalk you’re being too specific, surely? The point was surely not about the mode of use but the env in which the content lives

paulwalk Paul Walk
@m1ke_ellis I think the mode of use is crucial to figure out appropriate business models though

The Church, the Reformation and Educational Institutions

Early in her keynote Anya made the point that our current educational paradigm has changed little from the 11th century when educational institutions were founded by the church. I forget the details but somehow this kicked off a discussion on twitter about the impact of the reformation on the church and the role of the church in the formation of educational institutions.

KavuBob JohnRobertson
AK: “the cathedral of rationality”, sage on stage pointed to 1088ad illustration of origins; scarcity of knowledge

dkernohan David Kernohan
of course, churches *founded* universities to meet their needs as employers. (sound familiar?)

KavuBob JohnRobertson
@dkernohan yes, but (in Scotland post-reformation) there was an intent to educate whole populous->v. high literacy rates from 15thC

dkernohan David Kernohan
– comparing HE reform to the Reformation. Not sure the Reformation worked that well for the church, all told?

sheilmcn Sheila MacNeill
@dkernohan was thinking much the same thing

KavuBob JohnRobertson
Reformation just got hijacked to become the right to sit at home and watch football on Sundays #innerchurchhistoriancringe

philbarker Phil Barker
@dkernohan well, reformation certainly lead to *more* churches

KavuBob JohnRobertson
@dkernohan @sheilmcn i’d argue that- led to fresh thinking & renewed spirituality on both sides of the Ref split & more critical engagement

KavuBob JohnRobertson
@dkernohan @sheilmcn though perhaps no one has a neutral stance on that question

dkernohan David Kernohan
@KavuBob @sheilmcn aye, but also to several bloody wars, insurrections, torture…

sheilmcn Sheila MacNeill
@dkernohan @KavuBob I’m off to watch tv

….another little ingredient to add to the recipe of female-tech-doom: petty, ridiculous cattiness amongst other women in tech.

She then goes on to ask:

Have each of us done all we can (within reason) to help and encourage our female peers in tech? Or are we fiercely and unnecessarily competitive? If there’s a younger women that’s asking for what tech events you go to to meet new contacts, do you tell her? Bring her along? Or at least point her in the right direction?

@FindingAda described the post as being:

….fabulous, and brave, …. something I’ve seen too much of myself.

While I can identify with being:

….a woman standing in a sea of men at a tech conference….

I can genuinely say that in the domain of educational technology and interoperability standards I have never experienced the kind of attitudes from female colleagues described by Cate and @FindingAda. I have certainly had plenty of arguments and differences of opinion with lots of colleagues regardless of gender, however I really and truly and never experienced this kind of bitchiness.

As evidence of this I’d like to point you to some of the posts that have appeared online to commemorate Rachel Heery.

Sarah Currier commented in response to my own blog post:

I always looked forward to seeing Rachel at meetings. You always knew you had an ally- not an ally in the back-room handshake sense, but in the cut-the-crap, ‘let’s work out what’s best’ sense. She was fun and funny and an excellent role model for younger women coming through.

To which Lorcan Dempsey responded:

….(Rachel) was also very conscious of being a woman in a male-dominated, often techie, environment. I think she would have been very pleased by Sarah Currier’s remark on Lorna Campbell’s blog entry.

This has been my over whelming experience of working with other women in educational technology and other related domains. They may not give you any easy breaks but they are endlessly supportive and encouraging, even while questioning your opinions and picking your argument to pieces!

Advice ranged from the obvious:

Make sure you read the call. sounds obvious, but you would be amazed at how many bidders don’t!

We’ve all done it – it’s simply not fun, and risky, sending proposal on deadline day. Get into mindset of deadline is week before.

Provide *all* info asked for – such a shame to mark down a bid because it didn’t include risk assessment for example

10 page limit means 10 page limit. Do not put your budget on page 11.

Read the circular. Then read it again. Then do what it asks.

To the astute:

Don’t underbid to be competitive if this means your project will run out of money before the end.

Your background/intro section is too long. Ditch half of it and write a really good use case scenario instead.

Make it clear what funding your proposal would do for the wider community.

To the obscure:

A project with an acronym that alludes to bodily functions or sexual practises will (almost) always remain an unfunded project.

To see all those tweets in their full glory go to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23jiscbids

With thanks to @lastkaled, @morageyrie, @dkernohan, @Joe_Librarian, @hwillimason and many more.

Malcolm Read and of the JISC and David Sadler of the Academy opened the meeting with a general introduction to the aims and objectives of the call – to link together a corpus of open educational resources at national level and to promote cultural change at institutional level.

David Kernohan then went on to discuss the pilot programme in a little more detail before introducing the JISC and Academy representatives with responsibility for each of the three programme strands:

• Subject strand – David Sadler and Joanne Masterson, Academy
• Institutional Strand – Heather Williamson, JISC
• Individual Strand – Sharon Waller & Ellie Spilman, Academy

David stressed the ground breaking nature of this pilot project which, if it’s successful, will help to increase the range and quality of educational resources available in the public domain, facilitate re-use, build capacity and expertise across the sector adn act as a catalyst for institutional change. All projects are encouraged to include a range of content and to attempt to embed the practice of opening access to educational resources within their institutions beyond funded phase of the programme. Sustainability is key.

Next it was over to Amber Thomas to outline the technical requirements of the programme, which I’ll cover in a separate post, followed by an excellent presentation from Liam Earney of the CASPER Project on the realities of addressing legal considerations based on the experiences of the RePRODUCE Programme. Liam stressed that “open” means the ability to download and modify resources, not just to read them, but added that many institutions have contradictory policies on what can be done with educational materials. The main lesson projects must learn is to allow lots and lots of time for rights clearance and to allocate sufficient resources and budget to this task.

Unsurprisingly Liam’s presentation on legal issues set the tone for much of the following discussion with many of the questions relating to the practicalities of rights clearance across project consortia. Many of the other questions focused on the logistics of constructing bids, the practicalities of putting together consortia agreements, and what constitutes match funding. A somewhat opportunistic question that surfaced more than once was given that educational content represents a valuable asset from the institutional perspective can JISC funding be used to effectively buy out this content? Malcolm Read quickly pointed out that HEFCE are not offering money to “buy” content and that the commitment they are looking for from institutions is sustainability.

For a fuller record of the day’s discussions, and in particular the question and answer session see http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23oerday However to my utter, utter, shame I used the programme tag #ukoer rather than the briefing day tag #oerday for the earlier part of the day so see also http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ukoer

Presentations from the day are available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/oer/briefingday.aspx

* I was told that JISC no longer use the term town meeting but no one was able to tell me why!

Now clearly there are pros and cons to using twitter as a live blogging tool, one of the biggest cons being that you end up spamming all those followers who may not be interested in the particular meeting you’re covering. However the feedback I got on the day was wholly positive so I carried on tweeting, and tweeting, and tweeting until 15.30 when up popped the following message:

“Wow, that’s a lot of Twittering! You have reached your limit of updates for the hour. Try again later.”

Sheila gamely took over the live blogging until 16.00 when sure enough, I was able to post again.

I wasn’t aware that there was a maximum allowable number of tweets per hour, and nor was anyone else I spoke to, but a bit of googling turned up plenty of discussions on twitter limits. I couldn’t find a definitive list of limits at twitter.com but blogger Sugree lists twitter’s limits as follows:

* 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices
* 250 total direct messages per day, on any and devices
* 100 API requests per hour
* Maximum number of follow attempts in a day

I’m surprised I exceeded any of these limits at #cevw09 but not at #cetis08 but I guess I must have done. Next time I’ll either have to use a different application or exercise bit more editorial control!

The working group has two primary aims, firstly to act as an expert working group for the new JISC SemTech project, also funded as a result of the conference session, and secondly to develop recommendations for potential future work based on the outputs of the project. The first meeting of the working group was closed to enable us to focus in detail on the scope of the SemTech project however future meetings are likely to be open to the wider JISC community and all those with an interest in the use of semantic technologies for teaching and learning.

Participants at this initial meeting included Robin Wylie of Learning and Teaching Scotland, Michael Gardner from Essex, Sue Manuel from Loughborough, Tony Linde from Leicester, Simon Buckingham Schum from the OU, Helen Beetham from JISC, Hugh Davis and Thanasis Tiropanis from Southampton and Sheila, Wilbert, Phil and I from CETIS. And not forgetting, as Wilbert tweeted at the time, “iSight, conference phone, projector, 3g modems, ipod, mobile phone herd and the odd mouse.”

Thanasis Tiropanis opened the meeting with an enthusiastic and engaging introduction to the SemTech project which is based at the University of Southampton and will run until February 2009. The aims and objectives of the project are:

1. Survey of the relevance and use of semantic tools and services in HE/FE, informal and exploratory learning. The impact of current work on semantic enhancement of successful Web 2.0 services will be reported.
2. A roadmap for further developments in semantic technology adoption in HE/FE, informal learning and exploratory learning.
3. The HE/FE institutional perspective of tools, services, relevance and quantifiable benefits.

Much of the rest of the meeting was taken up by a discussion of what constitutes “semantic technology” for the purpose of the project. Unsurprisingly this discussion was not entirely conclusive but there seemed to be some agreement that there should be some level of reasoning involved at the machine level. “Inference” was another term that kept cropping up. There was also general agreement that to be relevant to the project the technology must be used with some pedagogic intent and not simply for recording or resource discovery. For example mindmapping tools may not be regarded as semantic technologies for the purpose of the project however an application such as Omnigator which consumes topic maps and merges them on the fly is very much in scope. There’s still a lot of discussion to be had on these issues and it’ll be very intriguing to see what kind of technologies Thanasis and the SemTech project turn up.

For further information on the SemTech project please visit the project website at http://www.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ or to learn more about the CETIS Semantic Technologies Working Group contact Sheila or I.

Jennifer Trant of Archives & Museums Informatics gave a thought provoking keynote Access to art museums on-line: a role for social tagging and folksonomies which presented findings from Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project. Steve is:

engaged in systematic research into how social tagging can best serve the museum community and its visitors.

Jennifer began by asking if tagging could help museums answer common queries such as:

Im looking for a picture of a well dressed man standing in front of a window. Can you help me find this painting?

Museum catalogue records, or œtombstone data, are not good at answering questions such as these.

To illustrate this point Jennifer showed us a painting by Winslow Homer called œThe Gulf Stream.

Copyright © 2002-2008 www.winslow-homer.com This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

Now it’s hard to miss the sharks here but nowhere, Jennifer pointed out, does the catalogue record mention the word œshark (Personally I was stunned by the sheer tackiness of this painting but thats another story¦ The Steve project attempted to address the œmis-match between the vocabulary of the visitor and the museum by inviting the public to tag almost 2000 works in 11 museums. 86% of the tags allocated by the public were œnovel to the resource and the intersection with museum terms was primarily œgenre terms such as photograph, sculpture etc. Clearly the public found these terms useful but the project concluded that the tags also had significant value for searching and broader retrieval purposes. More importantly they were able to incorporate new points of view into museum records. The public had effectively created an alternative scholarly vocabulary.

Im not sure how many parallels we can draw between the museum sector and the teaching and learning domain, however I liked the idea that users can generate living dynamic descriptions of resources which can complement more static œtombstone data. I also whole-heartedly agreed with Jennifers concluding assertion that

we dont know enough about how people search and what they are searching for.

This is certainly something we have been aware of in the education domain for some time. Its difficult to create effective educational metadata profiles if we dont fully understand how teachers and learners search and what they are searching for. Semantic density anyone? We do need to recognise that individual teacher and learners will view and experience educational materials in very different ways and we also need to acknowledge that theres more to metadata than œdefinitive static records. In order to improve access to educational resources we need to create services that can accommodate dynamic resource descriptions from a range of sources rather than mausoleums of tombstone metadata. (Okay Ill stop pushing that metaphor now¦)

The other keynote which caught my attention was by Paul Miller of Tallis. What struck me about this presentation was that, excepting a very interesting potted history of the dotcom era, it was awfully reminiscent of a keynote I heard Tim Berners-Lee present at a World Wide Web conference in Toronto almost 10 years ago called The Challenges of the Second Decade (these slides provide only a bare outline of the presentation I remember) and Im not sure how much has changed in the intervening years. I already know that

the Semantic Web is about facilitating connections between data and unlocking value in all the data we collect and maintain

but has this happened yet? And if not, when will it? Dont get me wrong, Im very interested in the potential of semantic technologies and in particular the affordances they may offer to teaching and learning however I did rather feel like I was stuck in a bit of a time warp. I wonder if we need to wait a third decade before the Semantic Web becomes a reality?

The new ghosts complain and the old ghosts weep, and under the grey and dripping sky the air is full of their baleful twitterings.

Somehow that just conjured up all the wrong sort of imagery¦..

Translator (David Hawkes [1967]). A Little Primer of Tu Fu. Oxford University Press. ISBN 962-7255-02-5.