This is a longish summary of a presentation I gave recently, covering why I was talking, the spectrum of openness, the ways of being open, the range of activities involved in education and how open things might apply to those activities. You may want to skim through until something catches your eye

Why I did this

When Marieke asked me to give a “general introduction to open education” for the Open Knowledge Foundation / LinkedUp Project Open Education Handbook booksprint I admit I was somewhat nervous. More so when I saw the invite list. I mean, I’ve worked on OERs for a few years, mostly specializing in technologies for managing their dissemination and discovery; I’ve even helped write a book about that, (which incidentally was the output of a booksprint, about which I have also written), but that only covers a small part of the OER endeavour, and OERs are only a small element in the Open Education movement, and I saw the list of invitees to the booksprint and could see names of people who knew much more than me.

However Martin Poulter then asked this on Twitter

Anyone remember who said that the way to get information on the internet is not to ask for info but to give false info? Google isn't helping

— Martin L Poulter (@mlpoulter) August 14, 2013

and I thought why not take inspiration from that approach. I can say stuff, and if it is wrong someone will put me right; it’ll be like learning about things. I like learning things, I like Open Education and I like booksprints. So this is what I said.

I wanted to emphasize that Open Education covers a wide range of activities. It has a long history, which we can see in the name of institutions like the Open University, but has recently taken on new impetus in a new direction, not disconnected with that history, but not entirely the same. Being a bit of a reductionist, the simple way to illustrate the range of Open Education was to reflect on the extent and range of meanings of Open and the range of activities that may be involved in education.

The spectrum of openness

A couple of weeks ago this discussion on the spectrum of open passed through twitter. At one extreme you have “proprietary”, i.e. the commercially licensed use of other people’s resources covered by copyright or patents. Is this open? Well not in the sense of Open in OERs, but it is more open than material which is covered by non-disclosure agreements or trade secrets, and “fair use” or “fair dealing” may sometimes offer an exemption to needing a licence. So it makes sense to start the spectrum of openness here. Then you move to more liberal licences, say Creative Commons Licenses with ND or NC restrictions, through Share Alike to the most liberal attribution-only (CC:BY) and unrestricted (CC:0) licences. And then you pass into illegal use which ignores property rights, for personal use, for sharing (piracy) or claims that something is what it isn’t (counterfeiting).

When using, sharing and repurposing resources, teachers tend to work in the part of the spectrum spanning from proprietary through to the ignoring of property rights. It is interesting to reflect that much technical effort has been spent on facilitating the former (think Athens, Shibboleth Access Management Federation, and single sign-on solutions for identification, authentication and authorisation), political effort on legitimising some of the latter (e.g. use of orphan works, exemptions for text mining) and educational effort on avoiding what is not legitimate. One of the benefits of the OER/Open Access approach is in avoiding effort.

The ways of being open

That all focusses on open access to and use of resources, but there are other ways of being open, seen in terms such as “open development” “open practice” “open university” and even “open prison” which all have something to do with who you allow to participate in what. There is much gnashing of teeth when this sense of openness gets confused with openness of access and use; for example complaints that a standard isn’t open because it costs money or that an online course isn’t open because the resources used cannot be copied. Yes you could spend the rest of your life trying to distinguish between “open” “free” and “libre”, but in real life words don’t align with nice neat categories of meaning like that.

I don’t think participation has to be open to everyone for a process to be described as open. As with openness in access and use, openness in participation can happen to various extents: towards one end of the spectrum, participation in IMS specification development is open to anyone who pays to be a member, ISO standardization processes are open to any national standardization body; wikipedia is an obvious example of a more open approach.

This form of openness is really interesting to me because I think that through sharing the development of resources we may see an improvement in their quality. I think that the OER work to date has largely missed this. And incidentally, having a hand in the development of a resource makes someone more likely to use that resource.

Activities involved in education

I think this picture does a reasonable job of showing the range of activities that may be involved in education, and I’ll stress from the outset that they don’t all have to be, some forms of education will only involve one or two of these activities.

Running down the diagonal you have the core processes of formal education (but note well: this isn’t a waterfall project plan, I’m not saying each one happens when the other is complete): policy at a national through to institutional level on how institutions are run, for example who gets to learn what and how, and who pays for it; administration, dealing with recruitment, admissions, retention, progression, graduation, timetabling, reporting, and so on; teaching, to use an old-fashioned term to include mentoring and all non-instructivist activities around the deliberate nurturing of knowledge; learning, which may be the only necessary activity here; assessment, not just summative, but also formative and diagnostic–remember, this isn’t a waterfall; and accreditation, saying who learnt what. Around these you have academic and business topics that inform or influence these processes: politics, management studies, pedagogy, psychology, philosophy, library functions, and Human Resource functions such as recruitment and staff development.

Open Education

OER interest tends to focus on the teaching, learning, assessment nexus at the middle of this picture, but Open Education should be, and is, wider. Maybe it would be useful to try to map where some of the other open endeavours fit. Open Badges, for example sit squarely on accreditation. Open Educational Practice sits somewhere around teaching and pedagogy. Open Access to research outputs sits roughly where OER does, but also with added implications to pedagogy, psychology, management and philosophy as research fields. Open research in general sits with these research fields but is also a useful way of learning. Open data is a bit tricky since it depends what you do with it, but the linked-up veni challenge submissions showed interesting ideas around library functions such as resource discovery, and around policy and administration, and learning analytics kind of comes under teaching. Similarly with Open Source Software and Open Standards, they cover pretty much everything on the main diagonal from Admin to assessment (including library). And MOOCs? well, the openness is in admission policy, so I’ve put them there. I suspect there is a missing “open learning” that sits over learning and covers informal education and much of what the original cMOOC pioneers were interested in.

Useful?

Lorna and I ran a session at the CETIS conference on the topic of Open Practice and OER Sustainability, we had 10-minute presentations from ten brilliant people who have been involved in the UKOER programme each giving a view from their own perspective on the general problem of “what now that the Jisc money has gone?” It’s fruitless to try to summarise that in full, so what I will do is add links to presentations to the session page linked-to above and give my own very cursory summary of a few of the themes. Lorna has also written a summary on her own blog.

“Scratch your own itch”

One of the most telling comments on sustainability, from Julian Tenney talking about the Xerte project, was that a project would most likely be sustainable if it was about doing something that the people involved needed doing anyway. Not necessarily something that would be done anyway (though in Xerte’s case mostly it was), but definitely not something that was being done just because the money was there. I agree with a comment that was made that there is a problem with the way that Universities treat project funding in this respect (at least in research departments), always the emphasis is on chasing money, getting the next grant. There were many examples of what it might be that “needs doing anyway”, at personal, subject community, institutional, and national/sector-wide level, from the sharing of resources between humanities teachers using HumBox, extra mural studies of the Department of continuing Education at Oxford University, the institutional teaching and learning policy at Leeds Met University, FE colleges in Scotland working in ever closer union and student progression from College to University.

(By: Nick Sheppard, Leeds Metropolitan University)

Nick Sheppard asked for a technical infrastructure to support these institutional and other policies. He (and others) asked for APIs and other links between repositories (and the rest of the web, I assume) so that the greatest advantage could be had for effort. Sarah Currier told us about the new offers from Mimas to make your OER effort “Jorum Powered” through a hosted repository, a web interface into Jorum, or by building custom applications using the new Jorum API.

But with technical infrastructure come technical requirements, David Kernohan was worried that these requirements are only bearable by an academic with help, and that once the Jisc funding goes that support will also go. Suzanne Hardy also touched on this.

by David Kernohan, Jisc. The teddy bear is an academic.

The concept involved here was identified by Yvonne Howard as relative advantage, the advantage of something has to be compared to the costs and the costs have to be minimised, as can be done through clever technology such as maximum use of machine created metadata.

“It’s like MOOCs stole OER’s girlfriend”

So far I’ve mentioned advantages for many people but glossed over the fact that different people will see different advantages; they don’t and for that reason they will pursue different directions, as we have seen with MOOCs. Amber Thomas of Warwick University (but yes, the same Amber as was of JISC) described MOOCs and OERs as distant cousins who used to get on but are now no longer friendly for some reason. And it’s not like the O for Open in the two really stands for the same thing, as Pat Lockley said, their open is not necessarily our open. But, he asked, what is open? a footpath through private land or a National Park with the right to roam where you please (if you can manage to get there)?

(this last photo is mine and is covered by the CC-BY licence of this blog; the others aren’t and are used according to their various licences or permissions from their creators.)

I was asked last week to provide some good examples of embedded licences in OERs. I’m pleased to do that (with the proviso that this is just my personal opinion of “good”) since it makes a change from carping about how some of the outputs of the UKOER programme demonstrate a neglect of seemingly obvious points about self-description. For example anyone who gets hold of a copy of the resource would want see that it is an OER, so it seems obvious that the Creative Commons licence should be clearly displayed on the resource; they would also want to see something about who created, owned or published the resource, partly to comply with the attribution condition of Creative Commons licences but also to conform with good academic and information literacy practice around provenance and citation. With few exceptions, the machine readable metadata hidden in the OERs’ files (such as MS Office file properties, id3 tags, EXIF etc.) are an irremediable mess, especially for licence and attribution information which cannot on the whole created automatically, and so are generally ignored. Also, the metadata stored in a content management system such as a repository and displayed on the landing page for the resource are not relevant when the resource is copied and used in some other system. So what I’m looking at here is human readable information about licence and attribution that travels with the resource when it is copied. Different approaches are required for different resource types, so I’ll take them in turn.

Text, e.g. office documents, MS Word, Powerpoint, PDF
Pretty simple really, you can have a title section with the name of resource creator and a footer with the copyright and licensing information. You can also have a more extensive “credits” page at the end of the document. Running page headers and footers work well if you think that people might take just a few pages rather than the whole document.
Example text OER with attribution and licence information. Note that the licence statement and logo link to the legal deed on the Creative Commons website.
Example OER powerpoint with licence and attribution information. Note how the final slide gives licence and attribution information of third party resources used.

Web pages
Basically a special case of a text document, the attribution and licence information can be included in a title or footer section, scroll down to the bottom of this page to see an example. For HTML there is a good case for making this information machine readable by wrapping the information in microdata or RDFa tags. Plugins exist for many web content management systems to do this, and the Creative Commons licensing generator will produce an HTML snippet that includes such tags.

Images
Really the only option for putting the essentially textual information about licence and attribution into an image is to add it as a bar to the image. The Attribute Images and related projects at Nottingham have been doing good work on automating this.

Audio
A spoken introduction can provide the information required. BBC podcasts give good examples, though they are not OERs; also the introduction to the video below works as audio.

Video
An introductory screen or credits at the end (with optional voice over) can provide the required information. See for example this video from MIT OCW (be sure to skip to the end to see credits to third party resources used).

Podcasts (and other RSS feeds)

As well as having <copyright> and <creativeCommons:license> tags in the RSS feed at channel and item level, Oxford Universities OER podcasts use an image for the channel that includes the creative commons logo. This is useful because the image is displayed by many feed readers and podcast applications. Of course the recordings should have licence information in them just as any other audio or video OER.

It’s open education week, lots of interesting events are happening and lots of reflections being made on what open education means. One set of reflections that caught my eye was a trio of posts from Jisc programme managers David, Amber and Lawrie: three personal attempts to draw a picture of the open education space to answer the question “what is open education and how does it fit in with everything else?”. These sprung from an attempt “to describe the way JISC-funded work is contributing to developing this space”. They are great. But I think they miss one thing: the time dimension. By a stroke of good luck, Lou Macgill has recently produced an OER Timeline which I think represents this very nicely. (Yes, I know that there is much more to education than resources, and much more open education than OER, but it’s resource management and dissemination that I mostly work on.)

Maybe it’s a sign of age, but the changes in approaches to supporting the sharing of content is something that has been interesting me more and more of late. Nearly two years ago Lorna, John and I produced a paper for the ADL Repositories and Registries Summit called Then and Now which highlighted changes in technical approaches to JISC programmes that CETIS had helped support between 2002 and 2010. The desire to share resources had always been there, the change was from a focus on tight technical specifications to one which put openness at the centre. This wasn’t done for any ideological reason, but because we had an aim, “share stuff”, and the open approach seemed the one that presents fewest obstacles. I tried to describe the advantages of the open approach in An open and closed case for educational resources.

The timeline helps me understand why we are doing OER rather than some other means of solving the problem of how to share content, but that is just one aspect. What I really like about the open approach is that it creates new possibilities as well as solving old problems. So as well as a timeline of solutions what we should have is a timeline that shows what we are trying to do, one which shows the changing aims as well as the changing solutions, and that I think would show a trend to Open Education.