Activity 10 Applying sustainability models #h817open

I consider a number of open education initiatives and after a brief look at their web sites attempt to determine which of the three funding models, MIT, USU and Rice, proposed by Wiley in his OECD report are being used.

• Change MOOC: the facilitators are the cMOOC kings who seemed to provide their time gratis with the apparent help of volunteers. Certainly the 30 or more speakers, one per week, provided their input freely and to great affect. It would seem that the Rice model is being used here.
• Coursera: set up as a private company but still offering free MOOCs prepared by a large consortium of high-profile universities around the world but with most being in the USA. Each MOOC is prepared professionally with the cost met by member institutions. The total team size of full-time equivalent staff is likely in the thousands. Coursera presents and operates as a single entity so I would put them in the MIT category.
• Jorum: funded by JISC (a UK charity) collects and shares learning and teaching materials allowing for reuse and repurposing.  Although the materials served are free for reuse Jorum is supported by full-time professional staff so again is more akin to the MIT model. Since the OERs in the Jorum repository are obviously provided by a wide range of 'volunteer' contributors across the globe it could be argued this is like the USU model as well.
• OpenLearn: operated entirely by the Open University UK to provide MOOCs to the world. This would seem to definitely conform to the MIT model.

From the chosen open education initiatives it would appear the MIT model carries much weight. Wiley's model categories seem a sensible spectrum but it is obvious elements from two of more of his models are mixed in practice.

Activity 9 My choice of licence for my creative works #h817open

Asked to choose a licence for my own creative works, both in a professional capacity and for personal uses, I would choose probably the weakest Creative Commons licence CC-BY.

I believe the attribution requirement (BY) is sufficient for me to be satisfied that I will receive recognition for my work when it is copied, reused in new contexts and remixed in new uses. These hopefully will be many and varied. My only regret is that I as an individual and even with the search power of Google will be unlikely ever to know the full extent of any reuse in scope and over time.

There is a temptation to add the not-for-commercial-use (NC) provision but I am persuaded by Erik Muller in his case against the NC provision. I feel the reduction in basic and beneficial uses that NC will force is real. Also any thought of sharing in a potential profit from commercial use is dashed by the inevitable complexity of legal agreements and the time taken to prepare them.

The share-alike (S) provision sounds excellent in principle but highly likely to be ignored when the work is reused. Also there appears to be no productive method of following the trail of sharing to police or even just to check that the provision has been followed. If my work is incorporated into a successful commercial work the attribution of my contribution would be valuable in raising a digital profile.

CC-BY is good enough for me.

Activity 8 An OER Course #h817open

Digital Literacies Course

Five week course for undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, and so on.

1. Network Communications
• Internet and protocols
• Web and links
• Bytes, bandwidth, digital formats
2. Network Devices
• ADSL, fibre, wi-fi, Bluetooth
• Wireless access points
• Mobile, tablets, laptops
• Memory, filestore
3. Network Software
• Browsers, downloads
• Searching text, music, video
• Email clients
4. The Cloud
• Social media
• Office cloud apps
• Cloud storage and sharing
5. Simple Programming
• Basic data types
• Sequence, conditional, repetition
• Scripting in AutoHotkey, JavaScript

OER Repositories Search Results

General impressions of locating suitable material from each repository by week:

Ariadne: 1: medium, 2: medium, 3: poor, 4: very poor, 5: medium
Jorum: 1: good, 2: good, 3: good, 4: very poor, 5: medium
Merlot: 1: good, 2: good,3: good, 4: medium:, 5: good
MIT: 1: medium, 2: medium,3: medium, 4: medium:, 5: good
OpenLearn:  1: medium, 2: medium,3: medium, 4: good:, 5: poor
Rice Connexions: 1: poor, 2: poor,3: poor, 4: poor:, 5: good

Difficulties faced included:

• locating a suitable education level for such introductory material; most courses or modules were multi-week or simply too extensive and would need considerable contraction amounting to an effective rewriting of the content
• the significant effort required to drill down to sufficient detail in each OER found by the initial search to determine the suitability of the material
• a worryingly high number of broken links to OERs which highlights the sustainability problem
• some much of the material in the OERs was old and out of date, a big problem for the very fast moving topic of digital literacies

I found that Merlot which gave access to different types of course materials not just whole subjects was the most appropriate source of OERs readily usable without a great deal of detailed rummaging and research.

5 year technology outlook for Australian Higher Ed

The Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-2018 has just been published without many surprises. The context with previous reports and research provides a look at trends:

The 1-year horizon is predictable with the vague social media topic being unhelpfully broad. I had already predicted that 3D printing would move to a closer horizon as its influence is growing at a great rate. It is good to see virtual and remote labs coming into the 5-year horizon but I had introduced virtual IT teaching labs to Bond in 2008, exactly 5 years ago.

As always the report makes good reading.

Activity 7 Exploring OER Issues #h817open

I firmly believe in the Open Educational Resources philosophy outlined by Downes (2007) as a collective social product to be shred universally. The OER movement has foundered on the over-engineering of the learning object and metadata technologies used in the disparate repositories. It seems to be pointless to continue to plough monetary resources into the current OER implementations.

The three problems from my perspective are:

1. Re-usability. The unit of a whole course is too cumbersome and over complex, and by its very nature will have non-useful, specific institutional context that immediately impacts on the OER being re-purposed elsewhere.
2. Granularity. Recordings of typical university lectures 1-2 hours in length are simply not useful for students. One aspect that MOOCs have shown us is that video lengths of up to 10 minutes only are effective. The same remarks apply to slide shows, audio, animations and simulations, and of course text readings. Keeping them small and reasonably standalone allows for remix to suit local requirements.
3. Onerous metadata and storage. The complexity of the OER objects and their metadata from the perspective of preparation, deployment, discovery and reuse means the technology is expensive in terms of time and expense. A major rethink of the technologies employed is needed with an emphasis on instructor self-publishing models with automatic sharing and hashtag-like metadata.

The problems of IP and copyright will inevitably remain until CC BY becomes the norm for all educational materials - a distant hope at this point in time.

Refs
Downes, Stephen (2007), 'Models for sustainable open educational resources', Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, vol. 3. Available from: http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf

Note: For a MOOC there should be an iron rule, all readings must be open access on the web. Many of the Academic References on the Cloudworks suggested OER reading list failed this test miserably. Even those with URLs are not marked as links on Cloudworks. A typical student on a MOOC is unable to access closed academic journal papers.

Activity 3 #h817open

My synopsis of open education for Activity 3 in the Open Education MOOC #h817open

Create your own mind maps at MindMeister

Studying the Open Education MOOC from OU UK

As an avid supporter of MOOCs will form the future of all open education I have enrolled as a student in the Open Education MOOC offered by the Open University UK. The distinguished education technology guru +Martin Weller is the lead instructor. I hope to learn about the pedagogy behind MOOCs for my own talk to my local higher ed institution where I hold the honorary position of Adjunct Prof.

To regular readers of this blog please note that all posts tagged with the #h817open label are work items submitted to this MOOC. Such posts may not be directly relevant to cloud matters per se but will be of interest to cloud education at least.