Into the Wild (Book cover)

From the blurb:

Between 2009 and 2012 the Higher Education Funding Council funded a series of programmes to encourage higher education institutions in the UK to release existing educational content as Open Educational Resources. The HEFCE-funded UK OER Programme was run and managed by the JISC and the Higher Education Academy. The JISC CETIS “OER Technology Support Project” provided support for technical innovation across this programme. This book synthesises and reflects on the approaches taken and lessons learnt across the Programme and by the Support Project.

This book is not intended as a beginners guide or a technical manual, instead it is an expert synthesis of the key technical issues arising from a national publicly-funded programme. It is intended for people working with technology to support the creation, management, dissemination and tracking of open educational resources, and particularly those who design digital infrastructure and services at institutional and national level.

You may remember Lorna writing back in August that Amber Thomas, Martin Hawksey, Lorna and I had written 90% of this book together in a Book Sprint. Well, the last 10% and the publication turned in to a bit of a marathon-relay, something about which I might write some time, but now the book is available in a variety of formats:

• If you want glossy-covered paperback, then you can order it print-on-demand from Lulu (£3.36); if you’re not so fussed about the glossy cover and binding then there is a print-quality pdf you can print yourself.
• If you have an ePub reader you can download, there is a free download of an epub2 file.
• If you have a Kindle, you can download the .mobi file and transfer it, or if you prefer the convenience of Amazon’s distribution over whisper-net you can buy it from them (77p, they don’t seem to distribute for free unless you agree to give them exclusive rights for all electronic formats).
• finally, if you prefer your ebook reading as PDFs, there is one of those too.

All varieties are free or at minimum cost for the distribution channel used; the content is cc-by licensed and editable versions are available if you wish to remix and fix what we’ve done.

Available via the Cetis publications site.

The potential of text and data mining is probably well understood in technical circles, and were well articulated by JohnMcNaught of NaCTeM. Briefly the potential lies in the extraction of new knowledge from old through the ability to surface implicit knowledge and show semantic relationships. This is something that could not be done by humans, not even crowds, because of volume of information involved. Full text access is crucial, John cited a finding that only 7% of the subject information extracted from research papers was mentioned in the abstract. There was a strong emphasis, from for example Jeff Lynn of the Coalition for a digital economy and Philip Ditchfield of GSK, on the need for business and enterprise to be able to realise this potential if it were to remain competetive.

While these speakers touched on the legal barriers it was Naomi Korn who gave them a full airing. They start in the process of publishing (or before) when publishers acquire copyright, or a licence to publish with enough restriction to be equivalent. The problem is that the first step of text mining is to make a copy of the work in a suitable format. Even for works licensed under the most liberal open access licence academic authors are likely to use, CC-by, this requires attribution. Naomi spoke of attribution stacking, a problem John had mentioned when a result is found by mining 1000s of papers: do you have to attribute all of them? This sort of problem occurs at every step of the text mining process. In UK law there are no copyright exceptions that can apply: it is not covered by fair dealling (though it is covered by fair use in the US and similar exceptions in Norwegian and Japanese law, nowhere else); the exceptions for transient copies (such as in a computers memory when readng on line) only apply if that copy has not intrinsic value.

The Hargreaves report seeks to redress this situation. Copyright and other IP law is meant to promote innovation not stifle it, and copyright is meant to cover creative expressions, not the sort of raw factual information that data mining processes. Ben White of the British Library suggested an extension of fair dealling to permit data mining of legally obtained publications. The important thing is that, as parliament acts on the Hargreaves review people who understand text mining and care about legal issues make sure that any legislation is sufficient to allow innovation, otherwise innovators will have to move to those jurisdictions like the US, Japan and Norway where the legal barriers are lower (I’ll call them ‘text havens’).

Thanks to JISC and the SCA on organising this event; there’s obviously plenty more for them to do.

Does anyone have any experience with iTunes U? Our University is thinking of starting a presence on Apple’s iTunes U (the section of the iTunes store that distributes podcasts and video podcasts from higher education institutions). It looks very professional (see for example the OU’s presence at http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/itunesu/ ) and there are over 300 institutions who are represented there.

HOWEVER, I can’t shake the feeling that this is a very bad idea, even for lovers of Apple products. My main misgiving is that the content isn’t accessible apart from through the iTunes browser, and hence it is not Googleable and hence it is pretty-much invisible. Why would anyone want to do that? Isn’t it a much better idea to put material on YouTube and use the whole web/web2 infrastructure?

I’ld like to summarize the discussion here so that the important points raised get a wider airing; however it is a feature of these high quality discussions like this one that people learn and change their mind as a result, so I please don’t assume that people quoted below still hold the opinions attributed to them. (Fro example, invisibility on Google turned out to be far from the case for some resources.) If You would like to see the whole discussion look in the JISCMAIL archive

The first answers from a few posters was that it is not an either/or decision.

Patricia Killiard:

Cambridge has an iTunesU site. […] the material is normally deposited first with the university Streaming Media Service. It can then be made accessible through a variety of platforms, including YouTube, the university web pages and departmental/faculty sites, and the Streaming Media Service’s own site, as well as iTunesU.

Mike Fraser:

Oxford does both using the same datafeed: an iTunesU presence (which is very popular in terms of downloads and as a success story within the institution); and a local, openly available site serving up the same
content.

Jenny Delasalle and David Davis of Warwick and Brian Kelly of UKOLN also highlighted how iTunesU complemented rather than competed with other hosting options, and was discoverable on Google.

Andy Powell, however pointed out that it was so “Googleable” that a video from Warwick University on iTunesU video came higher in the search results for University of Warwick No Paradise without Banks than the same video on Warwick’s own site. (The first result I get is from Warwick, about the event, but doesn’t seem to give access to the video–at least not so easily that I can find it; the second result I get is the copy from iTunes U, on deimos.apple.com . Incidentally, I get nothing for the same search term on Google Videos.) He pointed out that this is “(implicitly) encouraging use of the iTunes U version (and therefore use of iTunes) rather than the lighter-weight ‘web’ version.” and he made the point that:

Andy also raised other “softer issues” about which ones will students be referred to that might reinforce one version rather than another as the copy of choice even if it wasn’t the best one for them.

Ideally it would be possible to refer people to a canonical version or a list of available version, (Graham Triggs mentioned Google’s canonical URLs, perhaps if if Google relax the rules on how they’re applied) but I’m not convinced that’s likely to happen. So there’s a compromise, variety of platforms for a variety of needs Vs possibly diluting the web presence for any give resource.

And a response from David Davies:

iTunesU is simply an RSS aggregator with a fancy presentation layer.
[…]
iTunesU content is discoverable by Google – should you want to, but as we’ve seen there are easier ways of discovering the same content, it doesn’t generate new URLs for the underlying content, is based upon a principle of reusable content, Apple doesn’t claim exclusivity for published content so is not being evil, and it fits within the accepted definition of web architecture. Perhaps we should simply accept that some people just don’t like it. Maybe because they don’t understand what it is or why an institution would want to use it, or they just have a gut feeling there’s something funny about it. And that’s just fine.

mmm, I don’t know about all these web architecture principles, I just know that I can’t access the only copy I find on Google. But then I admit I do have something of a gut feeling against iTunesU; maybe that’s fine, maybe it’s not; and maybe it’s just something about the example Andy chose: searching Google for University of Warwick slow poetry video gives access to copies at YouTube and Warwick, but no copy on iTunes.

I’m left with the feeling that I need to understand more about how using these services affects the discoverability of resources using Google–which is one of the things I would like to address during the session I’m organising for the CETIS conference in November.

Session aims

1. Make sure the projects know about CETIS and our role in the UKOER programme.
2. Make sure the projects are familiar with the programme level technical & metadata requirements.
3. Get projects to think about their own metadata and technical requirements.
4. Discuss the relationship of the third of these to the first two.

Out of scope: IPR, Creative Commons and other legal issues; issues relating to the Jorum that don’t directly relate to the broad aims above (e.g. Jorum deposit procedure).

Who should attend
Discussion will largely be technical or library oriented, but will require an understanding of project aims and objectives: we want to talk about solutions to real problems.

Preparation required: the rough outline below includes some information and indicative questions for participants to be thinking about. Useful reading: OER Programme Technical Requirements; Metadata Guidelines for the OER Programme; Open Educational Resources, metadata, and self-description.

Rough outline of session
Intend roughly 50:50 mix of presentation and discussion, for a little over an hour, and then open Q&A. The presentation/discussion part will cover:

• (briefly) what is CETIS.
• CETIS’s role in the UK OER programme.
• What is metadata, what is it for?
• Programme technical and metadata requirements, what do these support.
• Content aggregation: who, what, when, where, why?
• Project technical contexts, expectations and requirements.

The last item will require input from participants, e.g. what hosts are you using (repository, just a website, web 2.0 / social sharing sites, just the Jorum), how do you think users will find your resources, what will you do to facilitate that; what information could you provide information to support resource selection and use, how would you gather that information and what format would you provide it in?

The first time was in a forum discussion about repositories for learning materials which got onto the question of whether research outputs and learning materials should stored in the same repository. (Aside: I’m inclined to think the answer is no, the purpose of the repository is different, a learning material isn’t an output, sharing means something different for the two resource types,etc. If you think a repository is a database and a bit-store then you may come to a different conclusion, but I think a repository is a service offered to people and your choice of starting point in offering that service will affect how easy your journey is.) Someone said that they kept learning materials and research outputs in the same repository because linking research and learning was important to their institution. I rudely (and involuntarily) blurted out that it wasn’t the right way of making that link. Apologies to the person concerned, it wasn’t a constructive remark, it really was just a reflex reaction that leaked out.

On the second day of the meeting two speakers raised points that allow me to make a more constructive contribution. Simon Coles of the eCrystal federation, speaking about data repositories, said that 40 years ago solving three crystal structures would be enough for a PhD thesis, now you can do that in a few days. That sort of advance is what has made activities that used to be long research projects something that students can do. Then Jeff Heywood said that one of the spin-off benefits of open access repositories was that students are finding primary research literature through Google and engaging with it in a way that hasn’t happened for a long time. I think the same applies to open research data of the type that Simon was talking about. That, I think, is where there is potential for repositories to link research and teaching activities.

Actually, I don’t really like the use of the word “marketing” here, but the first of these thoughts is an extension of the ideas expressed in “Marketing” with Metadata, a successful guide produced by a former colleague of mine as part of the PerX project. The idea there was that the effort of exposing metadata openly through OAI-PMH (and the same is true of RSS and ATOM) could be justified by publishers as of a means of marketing the content it described.

During the meeting at Milton Keynes we heard that the same may be said about open content as means of marketing HE courses. Andy Lane director of the OU’s OpenLearn gave a figure of 9,000+ registrations for OU courses from OpenLearn users. Russell Stannard of the University of Westminster, told how by creating the MultimediaTrainingVideos.com site, and linking from there to the University of Westminster course he used the videos in, he had boosted the position of the Westminster course page on Google results pages for queries about multimedia education.

Well, those are just two self-selected instances, not enough in themselves to constitute firm evidence, but it’s easy enough to think of believable reasons why open content would help market courses in this way. One can believe that students would feel more confident choosing a course if they could view some aspect of that course before they choose it (and this would be true at a pan-institutional discipline level, where school leavers especially might not know what constitutes higher education for certain disciplines). One can believe that Google will rank course content higher that course prospectuses in results pages: the search terms will be in the content, and there are likely to be more links to the content than would be the case for a prospectus alone. Furthermore, I can also see parallels between the desire to disseminate OER through web2.0 channels and some search engine optimization practices. This might be enough for leaders at some institutions to decide that marketing should be one of the reasons why they should consider making their content open, though I imagine many would want more convincing.

The second thought about marketing and open content relates more to why one would want to convince people at institutions that there was a marketing opportunity in OER. There had rightly been a great emphasis placed on institutional commitment as part of any bids submitted to the recent HEFCE-Academy-JISC call for OER projects. During the day I had chatted to various people who had been involved in putting to together bids who all confirmed my own experience from a couple of bids that it has been really hard to get this institutional commitment. My own experience served as a reminder that not everyone has been following developments in OER over the last five years or so. Many of the key people don’t have much more knowledge than an awareness that MIT are doing something. It’s not easy to go from that level of knowledge to institutional commitment in the time span of a JISC call for proposals. So, the message for me was that one of the desired outcomes of the pilot phase of the Academy/JISC OER should be some convincing, evidence-based, reasons why institutions should want to commit to making their content open.

The two examples above are slightly short of perfect. I like to see the dates for the blog entries matching the dates for the diary entries (the Pepys diaries do this, Orwell managed it at first, but then slipped). And I think it would make more sense if the monthly archives were arranged to be read top-to-bottom in chronological order. Also I wonder if hosting on wordpress.com is the best idea. It has its attractions, but the tags in the Orwell blog link to posts from other blogs which are well out of scope while the Pepys diary has some very interesting customizations; also if the Orwell blog owners do ever find a way to go back to posting against the diary entry date I imagine they would have problems setting up redirects so that links to the current posts still work.

Notes:
1. I guess I should be clear: I’m not saying that these diaries are open content. The Pepys text is from Project Gutenberg, I don’t know the licensing arrangements for other aspects of the blog; Orwell’s text is still copyright in many countries (including the UK and the US), I don’t the licensing arrangements for the blog.
2. The Orwell diary is on WordPress.com; Pepys uses a customized installation of Moveable Type.

“Re-use is not in itself a good or bad thing and it should not be encouraged or discouraged as a matter of dogma. Rather it should be nurtured and supported where it can provide benefits and not where it will not.”

So the question we should ask is: when will re-use provide benefits? Here are some links to recent and ongoing work relating to the benefits of sharing, reuse and open content.

Firstly there’s an article Why Give Knowledge Away for Free? The Case for Open Educational Resources by Jan Hylén, in an online journal that covers open source developments. It’s interesting that this sits alongside articles about open source software but concentrates on the “giving away for free” side of the argument rather than the benefits of openness while developing a resource (“release early, release often“, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” etc.). Given the time required to develop learning materials (and hence the cost), there’s sense in thinking about sharing the load rather than giving away the product.

Secondly, following a recommendation from a recent report on sharing eLearning content, JISC have commissioned a project to “improve the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials”. Yep, I freely admit that in over a dozen years of trying to promote the sharing of learning materials I’ve based my arguments on “common sense”* and speculation rather than sound evidence and business cases. The project is being undertaken by Intrallect and due to deliver a report, with actual business cases and business models, by December.

Finally, and on a bit of a tangent, there’s a JISC podcast “Uncovering the social and economic benefits of open access”, about the wider benefits of institutional repositories and open access. It ignores learning materials, of course, and focuses exclusively on sharing research and development output; but it’s an interesting listen nonetheless. The main theme is that, since what we want is a cost-effective solution, any analysis of open access needs to look at benefits as well as costs. So the work described in the podcast models the effect of open access on the benefits to the wider community (i.e. the people who pay tax to fund universities) of knowledge creation through research and development: apparently the case for open access is clear.

(* Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.–attributed to Albert Einstein)

So here for clarity and ease of reference (but certainly not novelty) are six attributes of a resource which I suggest will make it more likely to be shared:

High quality

Pretty obvious that most people want the good stuff, the difficulty is defining and measuring what we mean by good and communicating the result. I believe that this probably depends on what subject the resource is about, and I also believe that there isn’t much high quality stuff about.

Licensable

The IPR ownership and the terms and conditions under which the resource can legally be used need to be clear. It helps if these are readily understood and not onerous, so something like Creative Commons helps.

Discoverable

If people don’t find it they won’t use it. This has implications for resource description and exposure to Google etc.

Editable

It helps if the user can tailor the resource to meet their needs, maybe changing notation, cutting stuff that is too difficult or irrelevant to them, adding links to related resources that they know and use. This has implications for licensing and for technology–so for the web, do as much in plain HTML as possible and where you do need to use, say, Flash for an animation, don’t put the text that explains the animation in the Flash file.

Repurposable

We took this to refer to reuse in a different context, say for teaching the same topic in different disciplines or at different levels, or using different pedagogies or in a different learning environment. It’s fairly obvious that this increases the breadth of appeal of the resource, but it’s not so obvious how to do it. Keeping the units small and editable helps.

Portable

This refers to the ability to move the resource between systems, e.g. from development tool/server to a repository (or other dissemination environment) to a VLE, and relies on the use of standards (open or proprietary). This helps make resources easily editable, and also allows the user to take responsibility for ensuring the availability of the resource.

I admit to having no empirical evidence to support any of those assertions, and I certainly wouldn’t like to suggest that they alone are sufficient to ensure that learning resources get reused! I would be very interested in hearing any evidence or other comments about whether they seem to be on the right track.

John Casey set the background for me very well in discussing the JORUM by putting content in context in terms of Ramsden’s three requirements for higher education teaching. He identified these as content, student activities and reflective practitioners, with content as being very valuable, but only when used (like money or petrol). I think that conveys one of the messages I wanted to get across, that content matters (which was the title I gave my presentation). A similar way of looking at why content matters is David Wiley’s content as infrastructure and the discussion it generated last year.

Another point I wanted to get across was that good content is hard to create, and for reasons I tried to explain in an earlier post, we might not find much of it in institutional VLEs. I think it requires a shared effort to create good content, which I think sits well with the open content paradigm that was the theme of the day. By the way, I do think teachers mostly want resources that are of a higher quality than they themselves can produce, and they won’t make much use of repositories that don’t provide them with it.

I also tried (and I think probably failed) to illustrate that really useful content is subject specific. So, for example, there are some concepts in physical science that simulations help explain really well but I wouldn’t expect teachers of other subjects to understand why (and vice versa: physicists aren’t well place to understand why other subjects are taught the way they are). Perhaps I should have used something on astronomy instead, illustrating simulations are really good at supporting some activities in physical sciences at undergraduate level. I could then have shown some virtual astronomy exercises, for example CLEA or VLA. But while that is easier to understand, to me it is less compelling. Anyway, the point I wanted to make was really about Shulman’s “pedagogical content knowledge”, that knowledge that good teachers (those reflective practitioners John mentioned) have about what students find difficult to learn in their subject and how best to help overcome these difficulties.

Finally I hoped to get across my desire that computer-based content actually exploits the possibilities offered by computers rather than just be used as an efficient (is it?) means of delivering the same type of material that can exist on paper.

My conclusion was that I would like to see cross-institutional, discipline specific projects to develop content that teachers in the relevant disciplines agree to be worthwhile in terms of using computers to explain their subject. Just knowing what they agree is worthwhile would be useful, but not as useful to them and their students as providing it. I can imagine these projects being something like an editorial board looking for existing content that can be disseminated either as-is or after a bit of polishing to bring it up to scratch, but I think the projects should also be identifying gaps in provision and commissioning content to fill those gaps. This would of course require funding, and there hasn’t been much funding of new content for elearning recently.