A Very Brief History of Open Education

1840s: Distance Education eliminates time and place requirements

1970s: Open University of the United Kingdom eliminates most admissions requirements

1990s-2000s: Open content, then OpenCourseWare, open educational resources, and open textbooks eliminate registration requirements for access to course content

Examples: MIT OCW, Flat World Knowledge, OpenStax

2000s: Open Teaching, then MOOCs, eliminate registration requirements for access to teacher and peer interaction and feedback, as well as credentials

Examples: University of the People, Peer 2 Peer University, Change11, Udacity, Coursera, EdX

2010s: Open Badges eliminate technical and legal barriers to using credentials to gain employment or additional education

Examples: Badges displayed on my blog, badges awarded in my IPT692R class, Degreed, Learning Jar

How Many Licks Does It Take to Get To The Center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

How Many Layers Do You Have To Penetrate To Get a Job Via Formal Post-secondary Education?

Admission – fees and past academic success
Registration – tuition, fees, and course availability
Attendance – being present at a prescribed place and time
Verification – signature and fee for access to an official transcript

The historical trend of open education, and its future path forward, is the systematic removal of all barriers to educational opportunity.

Open Access and New Metrics

Academic publishing is horrifically, and arguably irreparably, broken
The Truckers Tale

Faculty are complicit because they keep signing copyright agreements
Administrations are complicit because they keep rewarding (or punishing) faculty for signing copyright agreements (or not)

Reporting the impact factor of a journal in which you publish is a PROXY for the actual impact of your article

Can you imagine a highly cited article appearing in a low IF journal? Can you imagine an article that never gets cited being published in a high IF journal? What is our tolerance for Type I and Type II error here? How concerned are we about over or underestimating the impact of our work?

Why settle for a PROXY measure of your impact when you can have a DIRECT measure (e.g., Google Scholar)?

Buy One, Get One – Pizza in Ohio, and the 98% / 2% Contribution

So What Happens Now?

Discussion

What I am addressing with remarks like “we should not depend on the expert” is the stance that ought to be taken by the learner with respect to the learning material extant on the web and elsewhere. And I mean this two two distinct but related ways:

- first, the learner should not accept the report of the expert uncritically…
- second, the learner should resist the characterization of certain sources, certain perspectives, and certain content types *as expert*…

What is significant, to my mind, is that by being able to adopt such a critical stance with respect to expertise, learners are not only much better able to vet for themselves the reliability and authenticity of a piece of expert advice, they also acquire the capacity to look beyond a smaller set of ‘trusted sources’.

So, a bit anticlimactically, our whole conversation seems to be a commentary on learners’ critical information facility and a warning about the dangers of blindly trusting experts. I agree, completely.

That said, this part of his response still bends my brain:

We should be like the educator whose primary interest is in teaching people to read, so they do not need to come to us at all, so there is not only no need for a hall and for fees to be paid, but no need for our particular expertise, because everyone can have it.

There’s a traveling-back-in-time-to-kill-your-own-grandfather quality to this thinking. It’s true that we can teach for the purpose of helping someone never need to depend on a teacher again. But can we say that we never needed teachers in the first place after a teacher helps them develop their expertise? And if it turns out that the person was benefited by their interactions with the teacher, wouldn’t the next generation of learners benefit similarly? I just don’t understand this desire to shut the doors on formal education as soon as we can. Is formal education evil somehow? I don’t think so.

Ok, I came really close to understanding…

The current version of the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, Section 8, Subsection e, reads:

This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You.

This means that the extra “add-ons” organizations try to attach to CC licenses are, according to the license itself, prohibited and meaningless in the context of the license.

The most popular of these add-ons is one in which institutions define “Noncommercial Use.” The way these statements are included on websites next to the link to the CC license would lead you to believe that they are somehow incorporated into the license by reference. Not true, it turns out – in fact, the license explicitly prohibits a Licensor from trying to do that.

Now, why would CC want to prohibit people from providing local definitions of Noncommercial Use? Let’s take a look at two concrete examples of the prohibited add-ons. First up, the relevant language from MIT OCW’s add-on:

Materials may be used by individuals, institutions, governments, corporations, or other business whether for-profit or non-profit so long as the use itself is not a commercialization of the materials or a use that is directly intended to generate sales or profit.

Next up, the MITE add-on:

MITE understands that the Noncommercial (NC) restriction on this Creative Commons license precludes institutional use of the materials, including by governments, corporations, public entities, and businesses, whether for-profit or non-profit.

So here are two almost perfectly contradictory definitions of Noncommercial Use. I’m not passing judgement on which is better – for sake of my argument it doesn’t matter. The salient point is that the definitions contradict each other.

Both these sites (MIT OCW and MITE) use the ShareAlike clause together with the NC clause. The SA clause includes the statement, “You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of this License.” This language forcibly relicenses materials remixed into a BY-NC-SA work under the same (BY-NC-SA in this case) license as the original work IF the work is to be distributed or publicly performed. For this reason, BY-NC-SA works (like MIT OCW) and BY-SA works (like Wikipedia) cannot be remixed – the SA clauses of the BY-NC-SA and the BY-SA license conflict, both trying to relicense the other under its own terms. (If this is confusing, please play my CC licensing remix game which will help you master the the underlying concepts.)

Consequently, if CC licenses were to allow local definitions of NC to be incorporated into a BY-NC-SA license by reference, we would frequently – but not always – find ourselves in a situation where two BY-NC-SA licensed materials could not be remixed because they would actually be licensed under different licenses due to the language of the add-on. To be more concrete, if add-ons were legal you could not remix MIT and MITE content because they would be licensed under two different licenses, even though on the surface they appear to be the same license. And you thought NC was confusing before!

In the current draft of the 4.0 licenses the Section 8 Subsection e language has been removed (see this handy comparison chart.) If something similar is not put back in its place in the proposed new Additional Terms section, CC will not have six licenses – it will have infinitely many licenses. Talk about license proliferation! Consequently, I believe the 4.0 licenses MUST INCLUDE language similar in function to the current Section 8 Subsection e.

Frankly, the whole situation is reminiscent of the entangled problems of immigration reform in the US. Since the Feds refuse to act on the issue, individual states are acting in ways that are not entirely harmonious (or necessarily sensible). Similarly, if CC continues to refuse to define the NC term, individual Licensors are each going to want to provide their own definition. However, under no circumstances should they be allowed to do that.

People sometimes wonder why I talk about 4R permissions, asking if “revise” and “remix” are really that different. Revise is something you do to the inside of a resource. Remix is combining two or more resources together into a new work. If MIT and MITE were allowed to define NC locally, remix with other BY-NC-SA works would cease to be permitted for their works, but revise would continue to be permitted. License incompatibilities are the primary reason why there are 4 Rs instead of just 3.

UPDATE: Diane just sent an email saying that language like that in Section 8 Subsection e will definitely be part of the 4.0 licenses, and pointing out that I just missed it in my review of the docs available on the wiki. This is excellent news. I hope that, going forward, we can do better education / outreach to the CC community to make sure that (1) Licensors know that they can’t “redefine” Noncommercial with little “clarifying” add-ons, and (2) users know they can safely ignore the Licensors who still choose to write these add-ons anyway.

You can see the contradiction here, but that’s all you’ll be able to see…

It’s that love and respect that makes me me sit up and want desperately to understand when Stephen says something like, “I’ve spent a lifetime pursuing this objective.” He clarifies this lifetime of work as follows:

But let’s be clear about exactly what this objective is. It isn’t about (as the OECD report was titled) “Giving Knowledge for Free“. That is, it isn’t about the wonderful rich people engaging in charitable work as some sort of civic duty (as though that somehow made they wealth OK). It’s about actually empowering people to develop and create their own learning, their own education. So not only do they not depend on us for learning, but also, their learning is not subject to our value-judgements and prejudices. We (those of working in MOOCs) have also been clear about the influences of people like Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire. And it’s not just about ‘flipping’ courses. It’s about reducing and eventually eliminating the learned dependence on the expert and the elite – not as a celebration of anti-intellectualism, but as a result of widespread and equitable access to expertise.

None of this happens by magic. There isn’t some ‘invisible hand’ creating a fair and equitable education marketplace. The system needs to be built with an understanding that personal empowerment and community networks are the goal and objective.

I’ve been confused by similar statements Stephen has made in the past, but perhaps a little too embarrassed by my inability to understand them (due to some lack of sophistication or nuance on my part) to admit it publicly. Or maybe I have and just don’t recall confessing previously.

I fully agree that we want to empower people. That seems to me to be the purpose of education. However, I don’t understand Stephen’s remarks regarding experts. My reading of the last sentence in the first paragraph is that we will eventually eliminate learners’ dependence on experts by making sure they have more equitable access to a larger group of experts: “It’s about reducing and eventually eliminating the learned dependence on the expert and the elite – not as a celebration of anti-intellectualism, but as a result of widespread and equitable access to expertise.” I’m confused.

If we take as a very loose definition of expert “someone who has more exper-ience than you do,” it is hard to imagine any form of learning that does not involve an expert – except pure, unguided, trial-and-error discovery learning. Without reference to any person – or any artifact created by a person – of more experience than ourselves, all learning would be maximally inefficient. We would each be left to rediscover the entirety of physics from scratch. And the entirety of music theory. And the entirety of every other field, without a conversation or a textbook or a Wikipedia article to guide us.

I can’t believe that this is what Stephen is advocating for. I believe one of the core purposes of education is to help learning be more efficient than blind groping in the dark, and I believe Stephen does, too. Which is part of what confuses me so terribly.

Stephen also mentions the “elite” in connection with experts. Are these people elite because they have expertise, and because expertise is such a rare commodity? I fully support creating more equitable access to a larger group of experts. And I agree that the way to make this happen is to democratize expertise, not by debasing our definition or lowering our standards of what makes an expert, but by helping more people rise to that level of achievement. However, I don’t see how I would decrease people’s dependence on, say, water, by insuring more equitable access to a larger pool of water. Pollenating expertise far and wide doesn’t make it any less critically important to learners, it only makes it easier for learners to get access to what remains critically important to them.

Stephen writes, “It’s about actually empowering people to develop and create their own learning, their own education. So not only do they not depend on us for learning, but also, their learning is not subject to our value-judgements and prejudices.”

This seems like a turtles-all-the-way-down argument. If learners are to benefit from any expertise at all, they will inescapably be subjected to the value-judgements and prejudices of those whose expertise they lean on while developing their own. Simply removing an economics teacher from the front of the classroom does not spare learners exposure to the biases and prejudices of John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, or Adam Smith work when they read works by these authors. How are we ever to gain access to expertise while avoiding the values that drove those experts to develop their own expertise?

He concludes, “The system needs to be built with an understanding that personal empowerment and community networks are the goal and objective.”

Personal empowerment is the goal and objective. Community networks are one means to that end. We should be careful not to confuse ends with means.

I find myself desperately wanting to understand Stephen’s characterization of his life’s work, but unable to. Stephen, or someone else, help please?

http://openeducation.us/badges-earned

I’ve used a very lightweight mechanism for issuing badges through the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure that I want to share. I know there are more complex, “scalable” systems for doing this, but I wanted to demonstrate that there is nothing stopping a single faculty member who wants to do something innovative from awarding badges in a DIY sort of way. Here’s my process:

1. The .json file is actually quite easy to create by hand – you can see an example here. But make sure you stay within the length guidelines for each field! See Section II of the Onboarding Issuer documentation for more details.

2. The one slightly confusing part of creating the .json file is hashing the recipient’s email address so that the address can’t be harvested for spam. I hashed recipient emails using the following little script:

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#!/usr/bin/python
import hashlib
email = raw_input('Email address? ')
salt = '#ioe12'
hash = hashlib.sha256(email + salt)
print (salt.encode('hex'), hash.hexdigest())

3. I included one line of javascript in the Badges Earned page so that I could use the Issuer API:

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<script src="http://beta.openbadges.org/issuer.js"></script>

4. Finally, next to each name on the Badges Earned page, I placed a single “claim” link (using javascript) that awardees can use to claim their badges:

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(<a href="javascript:OpenBadges.issue(['http://openeducation.us/issuer/assertions/dw-or.json'], function(errors, successes) {  });">claim</a>)

The result?

Easy-peasy!

Now, in addition to getting a grade on a transcript that no one will ever see, my students are getting multiple, tamper-proof badges, with links to supporting evidence, that potential employers can see, judge, and validate TODAY. I’m pretty excited.

I’m not a lawyer and can’t say whether reverse engineering is – legally speaking – derivative or not. I’m neither defending nor accusing Boundless of violating copyright law. But to some extent, the lawsuit isn’t the primary goal here for the publishers (though I’m sure they would think a win was nice). The textbook cartel’s broader strategy is crystal clear:

1. Realize that the vast majority of the public have never heard of OER.

2. Use their multi-million dollar marketing budget to make sure that “Boundless = OER” in the public mind.

3. Message their side of the lawsuit to drive public opinion against Boundless, who they will paint as scrupulous “pirates” of their “intellectual property.”

4. Connect the dots to shape public opinion toward the idea that “OER = cheap copiers without creativity and who lack basic respect for copyright.”

5. Whether or not they win this specific lawsuit, the publishers get their wish – the first exposure to “OER” for most Americans will be on the publishers’ terms, equated to theft, piracy, killing bunnies, and the end of civilization generally.

The more interesting issue is this: CC licenses are perpetual (see the 3. License Grant section of the BY-SA Legal Code.) Now that these textbooks are available online under a BY-SA license – which cannot be revoked – what will happen if a judge decides that these perpetually openly licensed materials violate copyright? Hmmmm.

Open Education has come of age. The tiny movement that began in the late 1990s as a desire to increase access to educational opportunity has blossomed into requirements in national grant programs, key strategies in state legislatures and offices of education, content sharing initiatives at hundreds of universities and high schools, and a wide range of innovation and entrepreneurship in both the commercial and nonprofit sectors.

We have largely succeeded in building out a vast, high quality content infrastructure atop which a new generation of educational innovations are being built. Open educational resources are increasing learning throughout the world and saving students, institutions, and governments money. Come join us as the Open Education 2012 Conference celebrates these successes.

For over a decade the focus of the open education community has been on open educational resources. As we celebrate the success of that work the Open Education 2012 Conference will also lay out a road map for the next decade where open education moves beyond content.

Join us in showcasing projects building the new generation of open education innovations including:

• institutional and governmental policy and strategy
• assessments – formative and summative, diagnostic and adaptive – required to help orient learners and those who support them
• open study groups and other opportunities for social interaction
• new pedagogies that leverage the reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute potential of OER
• permeable institutions and processes that connect with community-based and informal education in the wider world
• collaborations that refine and scale open education
• models to financially sustain programs of openness
• and other open inventions

In each of these areas – open policy, open assessment, open support, open teaching, and open business models, a small but growing number of successful initiatives exist. Open Education 2012 is your opportunity to learn from this work and help the field expand systematically into each of these areas of the learning ecosystem.

As open education expands out we’ve come to see our work as part of a broader context of openness – open data, open access, open government, open source, to name a few. At Open Education 2012 we’re looking to connect our thinking and build synergies with these parallel movements.

OpenEd12, the ninth annual Open Education Conference, will frame the conversation about the future of open education. Come be part of the discussion – we need your energy, brains, passion, and dedication!

Join us for the “annual reunion of the open education family,” spanning three stimulating days in Vancouver, BC, October 16-18.

“Badges are not assessments.” OER provide a huge content infrastructure on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OER existed. The Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) provides a standard, interoperable system for issuing, managing, and displaying credentials on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OBI existed. However, no one is paying sufficient attention to the gap between learning anything anywhere (OER) and receiving a recognition (OBI) – this gap is called “assessment.” A badge is not an assessment anymore than a blue ribbon is a foot race. Someone has to pay attention to designing the assessments, experiences, and challenges people will complete in order to EARN badges. There is a huge opportunity for “open assessment infrastructure” in this chasm between OER and OBI.

“Assessment as status update.” People already invest significant effort updating Facebook statuses, tweeting, writing book and product reviews, blogging, uploading videos, etc. Given the opportunity, people will complete simple in-place assessments in order to let the world know what they’re learning from what they’re reading / watching. In addition to the existing “status update” motivations already driving people’s behavior, lots of organizations have a vested interest in seeing this body of data come into existence. Assessment will be ubiquitous in the very near future.

“Browser history as high stakes exam.” If an entity like ETS can establish predictive validity around different performance / behavior patterns and college completion or success, one can easily imagine submitting their usernames for Google Web History, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Blogs, Google Reader, YouTube, etc. IN PLACE OF taking a four hour high stakes exam like the ACT or GRE. Why make a high stakes decision based on a few hundred data points generated in one morning (when you could be sick, distracted, etc.) when you could get 1,000,000 data points generated over three years? Organizations that can figure out how to leverage big, messy data will win. While some will run the other direction screaming “privacy!,” many people will opt to take this non-test path into college. The precedent exists in our willingness to give all our financial data to companies like LifeLock or Mint to monitor against identity theft or recommend better products to us. When sufficient value is available, we are typically willing to pay with personal data.

I think these more granular, learning outcomes-based badges (or LOBs, which I wrote about in more detail the other day) provide students with more immediately actionable credentials than three credits on a transcript do. It’s nice to be able to award both the badges and the credits to the formally enrolled students – it’s the best of both worlds for them. And I think the informal learners will appreciate the badges, even without the credits.

It’s been a good day! Here’s to at least 40 more years of increasing access to educational opportunity…