I want to welcome Christine Geith and thank her for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Her post is scheduled to appear on February 1st, 2008 (eastern U.S.). Christine will be writing about how OER may be shaping the future of a new type of university. Will online learning go away? is there a new opportunity to serve an underserved market? Can current institutions in higher ed figure out how to use these new resources as part of current business practices? The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement around the world is rapidly gaining momentum and taking shape. For example, the Open CourseWare Consortium is scheduled to officially become a non-profit association during the next couple of months and already has over 170 institutions around the world sharing over 5,000 courses. This week, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration officially launched its global call to action. Corporations with content are starting to get involved. Governments are declaring OER as key strategies. And, ideas for new OER universities are emerging.
Christine is an assistant provost and executive director of Michigan State University’s MSUglobal, the university’s entrepreneurial business unit that works with academic partners across the campus and worldwide to develop online institutes, programs and services. She is responsible for developing strategic frameworks and business models and leading all activities that impact revenue growth.
I met Christine over a year ago at a meeting organized at the Commonwealth of Learning, where we discussed the use of MediaWiki and related FLOSS technologies and free cultural works for eLearning to reduce access barriers to education. I am very much looking forward to Christine’s posting, which will point to something that a lot of folks have been talking about, few institutions have commitment to, and no institutions, that I am aware of, have used as first principles when founded. Christine captures this with an intriguing question, “Can the OER movement birth a new university?” Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.
Author - Christine Geith, "Can OER Really Impact Higher Education and Human Development?" Originally submitted February 1st, 2008 to the OSS and OER in Education Series, Terra Incognita blog (Penn State World Campus), edited by Ken Udas.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are rapidly growing and taking shape. What might it mean for higher education? The movement holds promise for opening up access and improving the quality of higher education around the world. It could even create new types of universities.
In the early to mid 90’s, online learning held similar promise. Early adopters of online learning also focused on access and quality. The web enabled exciting new ways to design and deliver student-centered learning; it enabled the convenience of anytime-anywhere education.
Yet, when you look at online learning’s impact, at least in the U.S., it has not delivered on the promise of increased access (for quality it has faired better). Nor is online learning the disruptive innovation it was hyped to be in the 1990’s. OER shares some of the characteristics of online learning. We can look to online learning as a guidepost to OER.
Viewed as content alone, it is likely that OER will become another incremental innovation: it is an extension of existing higher education activities; it provides more options for learning and it expands reach to include those not typically served by the institution. In this way, it expands access – access to resources. But resources are only part of what is needed.
OER promises cost-reducing efficiencies. Using OER to produce teaching materials lowers costs of creation and distribution. Low-cost or free textbooks, video lectures, handouts, etc. are important for increasing access to resources around the world. New systems could be built on these efficiencies that could make education less expensive, while still being local and personal. Low-cost models have been implemented using online learning. For example, you can now earn a U.S. regionally-accredited master degree online for $4,900.
At least one concept for a new university has been discussed that is based on the efficiencies of OER content. For example, Jim Fay, California State University, and Jan Sjogren, Argosy University, proposed an open source online degree-granting institution at the Fall 2007 MIT-LINC meeting. Their Open Source Online University is modeled after a traditional university in structure and functions. It uses the innovation of OER to lower costs and increase scalability by creating a new publishing mechanism for faculty while it creates a global online open curriculum, with many variations, to be openly shared around the world.
OER are also communities. From this point of view, OER may be able to have a bigger impact on access, equity and quality because it is imbedded in a network of people and organizations that collaborate and share similar goals. Wikieducator is a good example of OER as community. Recently celebrating 2,500 users and 100,000 edits, Wikieducator has the makings of the kind of “digital university” described by John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid in their landmark paper from 1995. It is more likely that new solutions for access will come out of these kinds of community models.
Perhaps the goals of access, equity and quality are too vague – what are we really trying to achieve? If we are trying to address the global need for higher education - the gap of 150 million more college graduates that Sir John Daniel of the Commonwealth of Learning talks about – then we need to think beyond traditional, formal higher education institutions as the means to closing the gap. We need to focus on the end goal – human development.
One solution is to bridge formal and informal learning. In the U.S., nearly 13% of all adults who use the Internet have taken an online class. The Pew Internet for Life project, estimates that 160 million adults use the internet and that 20.8 million say they have taken an online course for personal enrichment or fun. That total is significantly higher than those participating in higher education. Likewise, OER’s biggest users, according to the MIT data, are self-learners. What can we do to help these self-learners earn a degree? For decades, adult-serving institutions have been enabling learners to maximize their experience for transfer credit. We can look to them for models.
A model in the form of a virtual university is the Western Governor’s University (WGU). Celebrating 10 years and 8,000 students, WGU is one model that did come out of the 90’s heyday of online learning’s promise. It is a competency-based assessment-only university accredited by four of the six accrediting bodies in the U.S. (an innovation in itself). To earn your degree, you work with an advisor and a rigorous assessment process to demonstrate that you’ve achieved the knowledge, skills and behaviors required by the competencies defined for your degree. Following in the footsteps of other adult-serving institutions, it doesn’t matter how you earned the knowledge, but that you can provide evidence of your achievement.
Another model for bridging formal and informal has been proposed by Jim Taylor at the University of Southern Queensland. Taylor describes a concept for an Open Courseware University. In this model, self-learners using OER from Open Courseware Consortium members would be supported by volunteer tutors and gain credit on-demand from providing institutions. Credits earned in this way from various institutions would be aggregated by a new mechanism that would award accredited degrees. This model lowers costs and increases scalability by using innovations in academic support and accreditation to leverage online learning using OER.
Unless a new solution to the world’s higher education gap is created out of the strengths of OER, and online learning, these promising innovations will have limited impact in terms of increasing access. They will certainly be used by faculty and institutions to increase the quality of their offerings and to extend their reach from existing activities. We can go a long way through incremental innovations to existing practices. But, online learning and OER alone will not be enough to make a dent in closing the gap. We need creative ways of bridging informal and formal learning. We need teaching, learning and student support systems enabled by the efficiencies of OER and online learning. We need to expand the frame of the problem, and therefore the solutions, in terms of both the means (institutions) and the ends (human development). By focusing on solutions for human development, we can realize the unique strengths of OER and online learning as significant innovations.
Taylor’s “Open Courseware University” is a spin on the longstanding model of separating instruction from evaluation. Students in many countries can already prepare for credit-bearing examinations from the University of London External Programme and the like by learning the material at third party tutorial colleges. OERs could fit into such a system in many ways, such as through a consortium of tutorial colleges who would like to lower the costs of curriculum development through that sort of cooperation.
The issue that raises is that of the role of the private sector. Much of the growth of open source software has come from private companies that release their software openly to build a user base and to get attention, with a revenue model of selling ancillary services such as technical support and customization. Similarly, there’s room for proprietary institutions of higher education to develop OERs, especially institutions that understand the difference between instruction and evaluation and have a revenue model based primarily on the latter.
What we’re doing with the Web is a signal that Open Source is significant. We do need to beware of ‘rapture of the technology,’ however, and the other features of technology that have led to so many frustrations in past decades.
I wrote about some of those self-defeating features a few years ago, and made some suggestions about how to get past those barriers.
http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/V_Cycle_of_Failure.html
Most of these barriers, and strategies, are just as relevant to this generation of technology as they were to the previous ones.
Recognition of Prior Learning and Assessment of Prior Learning are increasingly common services in Australia and New Zealand. RPL is generally known as a process that simply recognises the prior educational achievements of the candidate and aligns them with the assessment process being applied. APL is more along the lines of what you call for I think. It is more like an interview process where a trained assessor will assist the candidate to express what they know so as to meet the assessment criteria. APL is not as common as RPL in Aust and NZ, and many institutions implement the services very poorly, often resulting in the candidate electing to simply do the course to avoid the strain in the RPL or APL process!
I agree though, that it could be through these processes that an education through OER could be obtained. Institutions already working in OER have a head start, because they are familiar with their own OER. Assessing the learning done through another institution’s OER would be more difficult however.
I also agree that “competency standards” potentially gives OER currency in the assessment process. If an international initiative to develop AND maintain competency standards was established, then OER developers could look to them as assessment guides, learning objectives, content structure, even a base level curriculum… but establishing an internationally agreed set of competency standards AND maintaining them into the future is a pretty hefty thing.
I think a wiki is the natural place to develop such a thing however. We are seeing many many different courses, content and worksheets being developed on the platform, but little scope for an agreed understanding that will assist the migration and cross institutional accreditation and assessment that could make
OER a very significant pathway for education. I know that Australia and New Zealand both have comprehensive competency standards:
Australia = NTIS
NZ = NZQA
And Wikibooks has the entire South African Curriculum!
So… should the educational institutions devote one employee to work on developing, negotiating and maintaining an internationally recognised wikibook of competency units to use as an OER reference point?
umm. one employee each that is ;)
Can OER impact Higher Education?
I believe it already has and the evidence comes from places like MIT’s OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/) and the success of initiatives like the open courseware consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/). The amount of impact is greatest in countries outside of the “developed” world where they struggle with the costs of producing materials, wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/South_African_Curriculum) is a good example of this. I believe these current offerings of OER have created much dialog, even among the most traditional and proprietary institutions of higher ed. I believe this dialog is having an impact. Do I believe OER will CHANGE the nature or structure of higher ed institutions in general? No. New “global” institutions may form that use OER extensively, some institutions, departments, faculty… may move toward an OER based model with there content. I believe that Higher Ed is about individuals (and the collective) connecting with knowledge and taking ownership of the knowledge to make it their own. Once owned, mastery can be achieved, (outside of research) this is the goal of higher ed. To make new researchers who have mastered the knowledge of a domain and then, in turn, create new knowledge… So it is not the OER that creates the mastery, it is the process, experience and intimacy with OER (or any educational resource) that creates the mastery. This will not change and this is the “mission” of higher education, mastery is about the process not the resource. This then leads into the second half of your question.
Can OER impact Human Development?
Yes. I believe that all things Open are having an impact on human development. There is a growing acceptance of all things Open and a move away from those that are proprietary. This is evidenced by the global acceptance (and success) of Open Source software, of blogging (which is open knowledge exchange), of file sharing, of wikis, of microfinance (I know that is a stretch, but I do see microfinance as the open sharing of financial resources). It is this openness (and altruism) that is changing development. So back to mastery… If individuals (or collectives) take ownership of knowledge, learn it, massage it, alter it, add to it, localize it and re-release it as OER and then another individual (or collective) does the same, all within a framework of a “borderless” OER supporting infrastructure then OER and related approaches has had a huge impact on human development. I do see our present focus upon the OER is only half the equation, it is also an OER infrastructure (that is more in its infancy) that will really push all this along. The ability to utilize OER, alter it, add to it, localize it and re-release it, takes infrastructure, a global infrastructure. An infrastructure that includes versioning, histories, branching (which is particularly important for localization), cross referencing, licensing, etc… I look forward to seeing what OER and its related infrastructure looks like 15 years from now.
As someone who is just beginning to learn more about OERs, I’m not sure how to answer the question of whether it’s living up to its promise, since I’m not exactly sure what its promise is. After reading some initial background materials (the OCWC site and the Cape Town OED site), the promise of OER is not that much clearer to me. As others have already pointed out, its impact apparently will be felt in places where educators lack resources but have the motivation to take advantage of access to free content. To get a better assessment about the perceived impact of OER, I’d go and ask some of the signatories of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration why they signed it. Why are there so many signatories from Poland, for example? What do they see in it?
The main issue I have with OER at the moment is that education is about a lot more than content, as Gary and others have pointed out. The OCW Consortium Institution Memorandum of Cooperation (the document which truly defines what it means to participate in making OERs available through OCWC; see http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ocwcforum/docs/MOC_Institution_090406_OCWC.pdf) specifies that “high-quality university level educational materials” implicitly vetted by higher education institutions is the admission ticket to the OCWC. Based on this definition, OERs are a relatively small piece of the entire puzzle. Education is an entire infrastructure in which content resources are an important component but certainly not the only one.
OERs appear to be very useful in some contexts, but hard to see how free content by itself will result in sweeping change – certainly not on the scale implied by the sweeping statements of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, particularly in its opening statement that “Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.” Based on how OER is defined in the declaration, this statement reflects a confusion between education and knowledge and between education and learning, as if education is generated just by content-learner interaction. The second sentence is just plain pompous in its overreaching assumptions. When will everyone on the planet have access to this world of ubiquitious access? It reminds me of the label “No Child Left Behind,” frankly. It also assumes that OER will somehow become the focal point for human knowledge generation and that faculty-created and university-vetted course materials are the principal engine for human knowledge generation. I don’t buy it — how is OER any more a world for generating human knowledge than Google or the Web itself?
Even as content, many OERs are of limited value. For example, the recent launch of Open Yale Courses exquisitely illustrates how educators can confuse content delivery with learning, with the result being open courseware of dubious quality. [also see http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/167]
Even with highly regarded open courseware such as offered by MIT’s “international Internet guru” Professor Walter Lewin, [also see http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/171]
MIT itself has noted the limitations of this approach and is moving away from it with its residential students. [also see http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/172]
What’s disappointing to me about the OCWC and CTOED sites so far is that I did not come away with a clear sense of what kind of impact OERs are making. So, perhaps OERs will have a huge impact for some learners and be an incremental innovation in other respects. Perhaps there are some unforeseen, serendipitous events which will change its effect. But I haven’t yet seen any visible reasons to expect a huge impact. Has someone else?
BTW, I also disagree with the assertions that online learning in the U.S. “has not delivered on the promise of increased access” and has fared better for quality. There are now over three million online learners annually in U.S. higher education and probably over 12 million cumulatively since its inception. The majority of this has happened at community colleges, for which access is an integral part of their mission. How does this not represent an increase in access? While I think that online learning has finally succeeded in establishing a perception and reality of quality, IMO this still lags behind relative to its achievements in improving access. If online learning failed to deliver relative to some of its initial hype, the fault is with the hype.
Thank you all for your comments so far.
I asked this question on LinkedIn and there are some interesting answers there as well, see
Also, Stephen Downes noted the posting in OLDaily yesterday http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm
Answering John Sener’s questions about access - yes, the numbers are impressive, but when you dig deeper, they don’t appear to have resulted in any more degrees being produced in the U.S. (one measure of access) - you’ll be able to see our argument when the paper I did with Karen Vignare goes live here in the next day or so at http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/index.asp and to the international series at http://www.distanceandaccesstoeducation.org
Thank you Steve Foerster for suggesting a look at the University of London External Programme - your idea for a consortia of tutorial colleges is a model to consider.
Leigh Blackall makes a bold suggestion and call to action for developing global competency standards - any takers? How about a pilot program - Leigh already has a start on tour guiding using the New Zealand standards at http://www.wikieducator.org/Tour_Guiding
prawstho makes the case for a more robust infrastructure - even if it’s 15 years out - for further thinking here, the Hewlett Foundation report by John Seeley Brown, Dan Atkins and Allen Hammond has a high-level description of what they call an “Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure” http://www.oerderves.org/?p=23
Steve Ehrmann, gives us some good advice in the link to his paper - “Technology and Revolution in Education: Ending the Cycle of Failure.” In it, he suggests 7 strategies for a revolution including #1 Form a coalition - “…campaign to build support for the necessary constellation of changes in curriculum, staffing, faculty development, library resources, technology support, and assessment.” I’d say by the way OER is shaping up, these things are starting to happen which bodes well for OER’s success.
HOWEVER, as John Sener points out, much of the coalition building and many important developments are still under the radar for many who could be partners in OER’s development. As your comments have pointed out so far - many of the components for OER’s success are here or emerging: we have models, we have the start of competency standards, we have the beginning infrastructure, and we have some of the important makings of a revolution.
How can we get the word out and invite more thought-leaders and action-takers to participate?