James Dalziel is Professor of Learning Technology and Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
Prior to his current roles, James helped lead the COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services) project, was a Director of WebMCQ Pty Ltd, an e-learning and assessment company, and was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sydney.
James leads a number of projects including:
LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) - a tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities
MAMS (Meta Access Management System) - a national identity and access infrastructure project for the Australian higher education sector
RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities) - a project investigating open standards authorization and e-Research workflows
ASK-OSS (the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software) - a national advisory service on open source issues for the Australia higher education and research sector
Author - James Dalziel, "Learning Design and Open Source Teaching". Originally submitted May 16th, 2007 to the OSS and OER in Education Series, Terra Incognita blog (Penn State World Campus), edited by Ken Udas.
The field of Learning Design seeks to describe the “process” of education - the sequences of activities facilitated by an educator that are often at the heart of small group teaching. Consider this example:
An educator decides to break their seminar/tutorial class into small groups to debate an idea. Then each group reports back to the whole class. Then the whole class debates the different group ideas. Then the educator presents an article from the literature with a new perspective. Finally, the whole class discusses how their initial debate compares to the ideas of the article.
This example is typical of small group teaching around the world, and yet this dimension of education is notably missing from most of the e-learning technology field to date.
Learning Design seeks to describe educational processes like the example above. In particular, it has a special focus on processes that involve group tasks, not merely individual students interacting with content on a screen - rather, students interact with each other over a series of structured tasks.
Much of the work on Learning Design focuses on technology to automatically “run” the sequence of student activities (facilitated by the educator via computers), but an activity in a Learning Design could be conducted without technology. Hence, a particular Learning Design may be a mixture of online and face-to-face tasks (”blended learning”) or it could be conducted entirely face-to-face with no computers (in this case, the particular Learning Design acts as a standardised written description of the educational process - like a K-12 lesson plan). One way to think of a Learning Design system is as a workflow engine for collaborative activities. A particular Learning Design is like an educational recipe for a teacher - it describes ingredients (content) and instructions (process).
Educators can share Learning Designs in the same way they can share content; but with the added benefit is that they are now sharing the teaching process, not just teaching content. The two main Learning Design initiatives globally (Coppercore and related projects; and LAMS) are both are freely available as open source software, and both have online communities sharing Learning Designs as open content (Learning Networks for Learning Design at OUNL - and the LAMS Community.
The vision of how Learning Design could contribute to improving education was, for me, best articulated by Diana Laurillard in the UK Government e-learning strategy in 2005. Point 89 says:
“We want to stimulate greater innovation in e-learning design to accelerate the development of the next generation of e-learning. The focus should be on design flexibility for teachers and engaging activity for learners. Flexible learning design packages would enable teachers in all sectors to build their own individual and collaborative learning activities around digital resources. This would help them engage in designing and discussing new kinds of pedagogy, which is essential if we are to succeed in innovating and transforming teaching and learning.”
The benefit of Learning Design is that it provides educators with a way to describe and share the educational process (not just content). By fostering sharing, we not only improve education through open dissemination, but as educators can adapt and improve the Learning Designs they receive, and share the improved version back with a global audience of educators. This could lead to improved educational outcomes while at the same time reducing preparation time.
If Learning Designs capture the heart of the education process, then could we, by analogy, call them the “source code” of teaching? And if teachers then share their Learning Designs with each other under open content licenses, then does this represent the birth of open source teaching?
I put forward this idea in a keynote presentation for ED-MEDIA in 2006.
The emphasis, for me, is on Learning Design as the “Source (code of) Teaching”, and then applying an open content license makes it Open (Source (code of) Teaching) - rather than the emphasis being “Open Source” for/of Teaching. As ugly as this close textual analysis is, it turns out to be important.
I am happy to call the Creative Commons BY-SA-NC (Attribution, Share Alike, Non-commercial) license (the typical license used in the LAMS Community) an “open” license. But when I ran the terms “open” “source” and “teaching” together, some colleagues took exception to this phrase being applied to Learning Designs that are licensed in a way that is incompatible with the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition (ie, no restriction on fields of endeavour, including commercial endeavours).
On the other hand, I’ve spoken to many educators who are comfortable with open sharing of their educational work for non-commercial purposes, but would be uncomfortable with a blanket license that permits any kind of commercial use as well (in passing, I should note that the issue here is rarely that users of the non-commercial clause are against any kind of commercial use; rather, they would like to be asked first, and have the option to negotiate terms on a case-by-case basis, typically with the implication that if someone else makes money from their work, they’d like a cut).
So I remain uncertain how to address this challenge: if most of my colleagues only feel comfortable to share their work on a non-commercial basis, then is it better to encourage them to share their work (and hence ultimately improve education) rather than trying to persuade them to change their mind about allowing commercial use (and run the risk of them not sharing if they are not persuaded)?
I still really like the phrase “open source teaching”, primarily because of the image of Learning Design as the “source code” of teaching. But I’ve held off using this term any further because I don’t feel that the issues above have been resolved. Regardless of the term, I see great potential in the open sharing of Learning Designs to foster improved education for a better world.
16 Responses to “Learning Design and Open Source Teaching”
I love the concept you describe here and the practicality of your approach. I think that the creative commons license has been incredibly useful for ethical reuse of learning objects such as diagrams one can find on Wikipedia (for example), download, embed in and power point and attribute. Such processes really do streamline academic processes and provide cost effective ways in which academics can be ‘digital rights’ role models for their students and still have time to learn and reflect. And maybe creative commons for learning design will encourage academics to invest the additional work associated with describing learning designs in formal languages and then uploading or publishing them to the world at large. I do sincerely hope so.
My issue is that I have as much instinctive trouble with the idea of attaching ownership to learning designs as I have with copyrighting DNA. I am a realist and appreciate that it takes an individual or organization considerable effort or inspiration to generate and codify a novel and interesting* learning design and that in the real world of activity based costing such effort should be rewarded or acknowledged. And this is part of my worry: how do we verify that a particular learning design was generated by a particular individual? It seems possible that, if incentives exist (be they academic esteem or financial reward), then there could be an epic land grab in which particular ways of teaching are suddenly owned by a person, university or corporate entity. In this admittedly paranoid future it is possible that particular ways of learning and teaching could only be applied in pre-approved contexts or by those with ready cash to hand. To be contentious, are there potential parallels here with drug research costs and the needs of the developing world?
*If* that land grab happened, then I for one would lose sleep. To avoid potential bags under my eyes, I feel that some form of peer review system is needed to help the community to assign authorship in the first place and that some thinking needs to be done on whether academic processes should be licensed at all and if so by whom.
In the here and now I like the concept of open source teaching a lot, it is an advance and my intuition is that it will be a force for good.
Simon Shurville (simonshurville@btinternet.com)
(* this is based on Margaret Boden’s hallmark of creativity)
Hi Simon, Thanks for this feedback. At one level, the move towards open licensing of education resources (eg, Creative Commons) for any educational resources (eg, Learning Design, image, article, etc) is a step forward from our current restrictive copyright regimes. Under most copyright law, you have little or no right to use and modify a (complete) work without prior permission from the author - which introduces huge “transaction costs” (ie, the effort required to get this permission) into the practical sharing and improving of educational content.
By comparison, Creative Commons licenses can give users certain rights “up front” to use (and depending on the license, modify) educational content without needing to first ask for permission - and this “up front” permission can foster a far more efficient system for using, adapting and improving educational resources.
In the case of copyright in a Learning Design - my understanding (NB: I am not a lawyer) is that your copyright applies only to your specific instance of the relevant content you entered into your design, not any generic design that uses the same activity structure as your design.
So if I write a sequence for introduction psychology students that helps them reflect on their ideas and misconception of psychology (see http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq%5fid=10489 ) then the combined “work” of the activity structure and the specific text used in each tool within this sequence is copyright to me, but not the activity structure on its own
(in any case, while this particular sequence is copyright to me, it is then licensed using Creative Commons BY-SA-NC, so you’re welcome to use it and modify it for non-commercial purposes without asking me first. If you change it and share it with others, it becomes your copyright, but the “share alike” clause of the license requires you to share it using the same Creative Commons license. If you don’t accept this “share alike” requirement, then you lose your original right to modify it in the first place).
The generic activity structures that can be created in a tool like LAMS are so general that I don’t believe copyright should be able to exist in these on their own (that is, without any specific content within them). If it ever turned out to be possible that the generic structures alone could be meaningfully copyrighted, I’d make the case that all possible combinations of generic activities are anticipated by the way the LAMS software operates, and hence any possible copyright in them vests in the LAMS Foundation (which owns the LAMS software and makes it freely available as open source software). The LAMS Foundation would assign copyright in all possible generic structures to the public domain (or failing this, the most permissive open content license available, say CC BY).
So my sense is that the land grab for copyright of generic activity structures can’t happen, or if it were possible under certain copyright regimes, then there are ways to fight it to keep everything open anyway.
For completeness, a different approach would be to *patent* certain generic activity structures. Patents allow you to restrict not just the particular manifestation of an idea, but any particular example that embodies the patented idea - so if someone succeeded in patenting a “problem based learning” activity structure, then this could potentially be used to restrict any particular content example that relies on this structure.
Again, I am not a lawyer, but I also see this as unlikely to succeed. First, in many countries, patents over software and business methods are not acceptable. In other countries, the highest court of the land is yet to rule to actually say that software patents are definitely legitimate (this includes the US!). In any case, generic activity structures in education (eg, problem based learning) tend to have long histories that predate recent software implementation, so they would not be considered “novel” (a requirement for a valid patent). A related issue is that even if a particular software implementation of an activity structure was somewhat “new”, it may be “obvious” to any skilled practitioner in the field. Patents that are obvious are also not valid, and the US Supreme court has recently ruled that obvious should be interpreted broadly rather than narrowly.
Apart from all of the above, Coppercore and LAMS were the first software systems to implement Learning Design concepts, and so any subsequent work after these systems would be affected by this “prior art” - again, if a concept already exists or is anticipated in an existing system, then it makes later patents invalid. So I think there are strong arguments against any attempt at patenting generic activity structures because of a lack of novelty, their “obviousness”, and the existing prior art.
Having said all this, it is worth noting that the systems for granting and litigating patents have become deeply flawed in certain countries (especially the US), so that despite all of the above, inappropriate patents can and are sometimes used against the public good, even in education. So there is no guarantee that a patent fight could not erupt - only that there are good grounds to believe that such an attempt to take something beneficial away from the common good, and to then give a monopoly right to a commercial endeavour based on restricted use of a previously common good, would fail. But let us hope that none of us ever have to tread this path - it would be a colossal waste of time for those seeking to build a better world through better education.
James
Dear James
Thank you for a detailed and reassuring reply. I am in complete agreement with everything you write here. I was particularly impressed by the idea that “all possible combinations of generic activities are anticipated by the way the LAMS software operates, and hence any possible copyright in them vests in the LAMS Foundation (which owns the LAMS software and makes it freely available as open source software)” and by the noble sentiment that “The LAMS Foundation would assign copyright in all possible generic structures to the public domain (or failing this, the most permissive open content license available, say CC BY).” It is lucky for us all that LAMS emerged from the community of “those seeking to build a better world through better education”.
A great blog so far and I look forward to further installments, Simon
James & Simon, this is great. I am really enjoying the direction that this discussion is taking. As I was reading through the comments I was thinking a bit about the practical limitations and flaws of the US intellectual property regime. I too am not a lawyer or a self-taught expert on IP law, but it does seem that the notion of ownership and commercialization of intellectual assets that were created with the intent to be used openly for the public good is quite contentious. That is, the dialog can become pretty polarized pretty quickly, which in my estimation is good. How the debate, particularly around the Non-Commercial restriction is framed is important because respectful but critical dialog will be the quickest way of addressing the practical problem that James identified in his post.
So I remain uncertain how to address this challenge: if most of my colleagues only feel comfortable to share their work on a non-commercial basis, then is it better to encourage them to share their work (and hence ultimately improve education) rather than trying to persuade them to change their mind about allowing commercial use (and run the risk of them not sharing if they are not persuaded)?
James, although you are not a lawyer, you are a psychologist and I would like your thoughts on this phenomena. Let’s just assume that most of our colleagues who contribute to “Open Source Teaching” by contributing learning designs or content to the commons are doing so for the “public good.” Let’s also assume that our colleagues would like the impact that their contribution has on “Open Source Teaching” (and the common good) to be the greatest possible. Furthermore let’s assume that the more frequently used the contributions are the greater the impact and public good. Why would it matter if the impact is magnified by commercial use? It seems to me that if somebody adds some value to the creation and then uses a market mechanism to propagate the benefit, while also respecting the Share Alike component of the license, the impact of “Open Source Teaching” will be greatest and our colleagues’ interests are met.
This is sort of a long-winded way of indicating that my observations point to less of a problem with commercial organizations making money on Open Source Teaching resources, than having those resources not being used very much and their value being under realized. The NC restriction might not be at the root of this, in fact, I would guess that right now there are other issues around the culture of western education and technology standards, that are equally important issues, but I think that the NC restriction is a potential barrier in that it makes the license more complex and potentially confusing. It seems to me that “Commercial” use is a term that has some ambiguity and might not get to the nub of what folks are concerned about and why they decided to contribute to the public good in the first place.
Hi Ken,
Many thanks for these thoughts. I think the issues of adoption of Learning Design (your last point) and licensing for open content are mostly separate at the moment, so I’ll take each in turn in separate posts. Listed below are some reflections on the reasons for the slow adoption of Learning Design to date:
(1) A typical Course Management System (CMS) is mostly used to support existing practice, rather than transform the pedagogy of a course. Typical real world CMS use (ie, announcements, email, calendar, course documents and slides) seems to me to be “e-admin” for learning, rather than actual “e-learning”. These “e-admin” components are helpful contributions towards an efficient course, but they are quite different to the introduction of online scenarios for problem-based learning or role plays (as examples of more transformational pedagogical approaches). So while Learning Design systems may be strong in their support for transformational pedagogies, the reality is that current CMS use is mostly not in this direction to date. When innovative work is done in a CMS, it is mostly “single-learner” content (eg, rich multimedia courseware), rather than collaborative sequences of activities.
(2) Following on from (1), a problem that I now see regularly is that instructors who have used a current CMS have narrowed their view of what might be possible for online learning to just the feature set of their current CMS. This is pragmatic and understandable, but I’ve noticed that some of the people I would most expect to grasp the benefits of Learning Design are actually most resistant, either because they now think of e-learning only through the lens of their current CMS, or they don’t want to consider a different approach. What’s interesting about this problem is that I find it more prevalent in universities (where CMS use is widespread) than in K-12 (where CMSs are now being adopted more, but not as widely or as quickly as in universities). I’ve seen a number of cases where K-12 teachers have used LAMS, and then later been introduced to a typical CMS for the first time, and been dumbfounded at the “lack of features” in the CMS to support sequences of collaborative learning. I don’t see the problem as one of a natural evolution from “basic” use of a CMS to “advanced” use of a Learning Design approach; rather, it seems that the initial tools you use for e-learning affect the way you perceive future tools with different assumptions.
(3) Following from (2), Learning Design systems (such as LAMS) have not tried to add all the traditional CMS features to their core “workflow” features, and so if an instructor wants all the helpful “e-admin” features (and this includes me when I teach!), they aren’t available in a Learning Design system. This means that two systems will be needed (CMS + Learning Design) and in many cases, technical restrictions make this difficult or impossible. (As an aside, it is amazing to me how many of the real decisions about e-learning technology use in educational organisations are made by technical staff, rather than instructors; and when there is a disagreement between these groups, the instructors rarely get what they want). However I should note that since we released integrations of LAMS with Moodle, Sakai, .LRN, Blackboard and WebCT, we have seen increased interest in using LAMS within these CMSs.
(4) From a different perspective, I think early Learning Design systems have had some important limitations that made them seem too rigid for some instructors. For example, ever since we started building LAMS, colleagues have been asking for a feature that would allow them to change a “running” sequence “mid-stream”. The idea is that as an instructor, even when you plan a set of activities ahead of time, you often find yourself changing these halfway through due to new realisations you’ve had along the way (”oh - that next activity is not going to work, I should do something different”) or simply that the discussion among students within the sequence has taken a different direction to what you expected, and so you want to change the later activities to better reflect the unexpected direction of the discussion. As a teacher myself, I’ve always wanted this feature too, as it is pretty fundamental to the way education works in practice.
Unfortunately, Learning Design systems turn out to be very complex software applications (they are basically concurrent multi-actor workflow systems, which is bleeding-edge technology even for the most advanced workflow systems), and so the software requirements for editing a running sequence “on the fly” proved to be really hard. However, I’m pleased to say that after rebuilding LAMS from the ground up for the V2 release in December 2006, we were able to put a new architecture in place that would support “Live Edit” (as it is now called). This feature comes out in the LAMS 2.0.3 release due in the next few weeks, and if you want to see it in action now, it is available in the new “RAMS” beta release (RAMS is the eResearch workflow version of LAMS - see http://demo.ramscommunity.org ). For an animated walkthrough of this new feature, see http://saturn.melcoe.mq.edu.au/lams2/docs/winks/live-edit.html
Two other technically difficult but pedagogically important features to come soon in LAMS are “branching” and “floating activities”. Branching allows an instructor to have multiple pathways for different groups of students (and these pathways can be based on instructor or student choice, or automated - such as using a quiz score to determine which path a student follows). Floating activities are activities that are not “inside” the flow of the sequence -