We start off with Greg this week, and his post Learning Objects are not Dead, You Just Didn’t Understand Them. After that title, he has no fear jumping in and saying that some learning objects deserve to die (and I couldn’t agree more):

I think when people say that learning objects are dead they are not talking about the Wiley definition of learning objects. If the definition of learning objects is, “A digital resource that can be reused to mediate learning,” then learning objects are certainly still alive and well. If we define learning objects as digital resources that reside in a closed system and are only available for out of context and non-adaptable learning experiences, then they should be dead.

He then takes me to task:

Something that I heard in David Wiley’s Presentation troubled me. He said that it is not possible to make a piece of instruction more effective for everyone in every culture and this is why localization is so important. Yet there are those in the field who would say that instruction is a science and you can do certain things that will improve instruction universally. M. David Merrill would be one of these people, his First Principles of Instruction is a work that attempts to combine prominent instructional theory into a universal whole.

I have a whole post on localization coming… More of that later.

Erik’s discussion of
Open Education and Learning Objects includes a hilarious analogy of traditional learning objects and UPS shipping boxes that you should check out. He also nicely summarizes one of the primary problems with fully copyrighted learning objects:

Learning objects have to be broken down to a very basic form in order to be adaptable since they have to be used in full, and not modified. Due to this breakdown, by the time a learning object (and I use the term loosely since there isn’t really a definition) is to a point that it could be used as a whole there isn’t much educational value left.

Jessie sums up the way we all feel about learning objects with this confession:

I found in this week’s reading there are lots of new vocabularies for me; so I need to look up the dictionary all the time. I even can’t find the exact translation for the term learning objects, the English definition help me understand this term. I am still not 100 percent sure about the exact definition since there are a few similar but different definitions for it. It hasn’t been found the definition what learning objects are.

But she deals with her confusion admirably, and throws this new assertion back at us:

I do agree that localization is very important, but I think it is possible to make a piece of instruction effective in every culture because the world is getting flatter.

I must admit I never thought of this perspective before. Our personal biases affect each of us, and I believe this is one case in which I’ve been blinded. In truth, I don’t want to believe that this is possible – that the world could become so culturally homogenized that the same instruction would be effective for all people from all countries and all cultures. Hmmm…

Jennifer has another great visualization for us, in which she compares learning objects and open educational resources side-by-side. It reminds me of some of the tables from my dissertation, but in a good way. =)

Yu-Chun suggests that:

Learning objects are designed for learners in independent use or learning. Little chance of communication or interaction is delivered. Learners are just like passive receivers of a large amount of information or knowledge, but don’t know how to grasp them efficiently or effectively. No worldview can be observed in this kind of the isolated learning processes which preclude learners from other learners. In contrast, OER emphasize the importance of collaborative learning, and it encourages interactive dialogues among learners.

I’ve heard this before, and wonder where this notion comes from. Why is it that if you take a learning object, and change it’s license from (c) to (CC-By) it suddenly becomes collaborative? I don’t understand this assertion. Perhaps someone will explain it to me. It’s still the same resource… It’s pedagogy hasn’t changed at all. Emanuela also has some thoughts along these lines, talking about LOs being more appropriate for didactic uses.

Rob follows the “simple wins” philosophy with this statement:

Since much of the work with implementing learning objects, defined by some as reusable (purpose) resources, was done by software engineers (people), who wanted to ensure that content systems were technically interoperable (policy). How usable are the software and standards we ended up with? Well to give you a hint, people don’t use them. They use tagging and RSS, which are simple and friendly for all the non-engineers that are actually trying to develop and share content for teaching, rather than IEEE’s LOM and other complex metadata implementations that the software engineering community designed. With two distinct communities, it is no wonder that tools developed by one were not usable for the other.

In Jon’s Learning Objects and Broken Metaphors he takes my brick and mortar metaphor to task. He begins:

Being familiar somewhat with the brick laying profession I know how a brick is modified to fit into a particular position, such as a corner. The brick layer will cut the piece to the appropriate dimensions, sometimes using a saw to make a very precise cut, and other times using a trowel to strike the brick at the right spot, making a rougher cut. These “alterations” to the brick relate to changes that could be made to content that was open. The changes made to the content might be very precise, requiring a trained instructional designer. Or they might be rougher, requiring less expertise. In either case the ability to change the brick to fit a desired context allows the brick to be used for multiple purposes; i.e. the brick can be used for both a side wall and a corner.

He goes on to break down and build up the metaphor further, as only an insider can. Absolutely worth reading.

Silvana asks What if we emphasize the “Learning” part of the Object? “Shall we ever have LOs which activate our students learning process to reach volcanic explosions? A sort of Lava of imagination which prevents an earthquake? I don’t think this will happen until the term ‘reuse’ is interpreted as ‘technical interoperability only’ without any implication with pedagogy or contextual dimensions.” This wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all.

Stian says Just put it out there, we’ll have to refashion it anyway:

I think that the current model of saying that “as long as the code is available, and it renders in a standard web browser”, it is reusable, is realistic. Just plugging in quizzes and sections into your course is unlikely to generate a course that is very pedagogical or interesting, it will take reworking and refashioning either way – and the important part is lowering the barriers to reuse, whether those barriers are intellectual property, or file formats, or lack of easy tools. It would also be good to make it easy for refashioned objects to link back to where they came from, so that people can “follow their trajectory” around the world.

He also argues for a small pieces loosely joined approach, pointing to sites like Wikipedia and Connexions as good examples.

Thieme’s Open Education & Learning Objects includes an excellent bulleted list of problems with learning objects, and then goes on to present a table in which he discusses how OERs might address each of these problems.

I agree with almost everything Antonio says about learning objects in this post:

I guess one reason for this difficulty is because we are pursuing an almost impossible goal: an easy, automatic, complete, reuse of content. If we ask to any experienced teacher, he/she could says us that this “total reuse” is a chimera. Yes, of course, previous year materials could be reused, but near certainly they have to be adapted. For me, this is the key: adaptation, not reuse! … It is necessary to abandon the idea of the LEGO metaphor: it’s definitely not working!

Megan voiced some of the frustration many people felt when reading about learning objects, but then had the Mr. Miyagi Moment:

I was trying to figure out why I needed to learn about a technology that already seems to be dying, when I don’t know enough about the new up-coming stuff like Open Education Resources (OERs). Until I hit David Wiley’s lecture comparing the two – and then it became perfectly clear. We learn about Learning Objects (LOs) because they show us the mistakes to avoid and the path to take for OERs.

Is it just me, or is the Mr. Miyagi Moment one of the most under-appreciated phenomena in education? Of course, it only occurs when you blatantly refuse to establish relevance to the learner up front…

Bryan hits on another one of the beauties of adaptable resources, aka OERs:

Another nice facet of OER is that there doesn’t need to be an argument over taxonomy. The nature of OER is that someone would take the resource and then repurpose it and configure it to fit with what they are teaching. In the process of doing this they would reconfigure the content’s terminology to better align with the one they are looking to use for when they deploy the material. Too often when attempting to categorize every little detail about a page of content you end up using terms that others don’t understand to have the same meaning. In our departments’ discussions of this we came upon one term that no one could agree on in our college: “Design”.

Karen echoes a sentiment Derek Keats and I formalized a few months ago: “My primary thought after doing this reading is that if all the time spent discussing arcane definitions of learning objects and complex formulations of common sense observations was instead spent developing some useful educational resources, the world would be a better place. But then I never was much for academia.” (Derek and I agreed that every time we were tempted to descend into the meaningless free versus open debate, instead of wasting half a day on a pithy email we would spend our time creating OERs.)

Lastly, Catia calls for visionaries, explaining, “to me the assumption that open educational resources are the solution to achieve the democratizion of education is still the stronger one. Maybe this sounds visionary and idealistic but, well, the world does not progress without those elements.” And Eliza encourages us all to keep hoping and striving toward our goals of open education: “It is a hard work, almost a ‘war’, but it can be done. Never give up.”

She contrasts directed collaboration (e.g., group work in a class) with what we are currently seeing online – “Each person brings individual contributions to the network based on individual needs and interests. While they may interact and in turn support each other, they are not necessarily focused on achievement of the same goal or for a specific outside audience.” I think this is an absolutely critical point to understand. One way of defining self-organization would have to be the public, self-interested actions of a massive number of individuals that result in completely accidental, and therefore zero overhead, collaboration. There’s a lot of writing to do here. I’ll leave it for another post.

When we rely on the self-interested actions of others, sustainability becomes less of a problem. As Jennifer notes, “Contrary to my post from last week, not being preoccupied with the needs and concerns of the broader audience may be a good thing for the sustainability of open education. Go figure?!”

And finally, one point I wish we could get through to higher education – “the world will continue to get flatter, so we should capitalize on it rather than to fight it or keep on doing what we’ve been doing.”

Jon read Coase’s Penguin, and makes some comments about motivation and sustainability.

“In some cases a monetary reward could be inversely related to social-psychological satisfaction. For example (Benkler’s example), a friend who invites you to dinner might be offended if you tried to pay him/her…. Projects that provide non-monetary benefits such as ways to track reputation, power to make decisions about content, and the ability to create (Benkler describes the urge to create as an intirinsic-hedonistic motivation) are more likely to receive and maintain contributions.”

I don’t know if a project that offers these rewards is more likely to receive contributions (if I offered $1000 per I’d probably receive several), but I think he means to say that they are more likely to be sustainable over the long-term, and of course, he’s right.

He also makes a comment that echoes Jennifer’s comments about the producer-driven model. “Where markets and firms use pricing and management hierarchy to determine the best fit for a particular agent; in the peered-production model the agent decides for him/herself where they can be of the most value.” You can clearly read this to say ‘Where NGOs try to find out what content is needed by who, and determine who should build it, in the open education model, everyone self-selects what they can and will build.’

Erik read “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and so Little Good.” His summary touched a nerve with me when he said: “The book talked about the lists that would be created by the planners, but then there was no follow through because no one was held accountable. Good ideas are a wonderful thing, but if you don’t have the plan and means to carry them out they are worthless.” This is why I think all students in instructional technology programs need to learn to to use the tools of our trade. Not just to do designs; not just to do evaluations. Our students need to learn to program. If all you can do is sit around and make lists, plans, and have ideas you’re not nearly as useful to the world as someone who can do those things AND whip out a functioning prototype.

Erik then goes after on of the sacred cows of open education: “Some of the analogies in the book made me question if free was best, but that is a topic for another paper.” I sincerely hope he comes back to this thought in another post.

Yu-Chun also read Coase’s Penguin. She picks up on Benkler’s discussion of the size of the unit of work and the difficulty of adding it to the overall system: “The granularity of the modules is important for maintain a project. When a project of any size is broken into little pieces, each of pieces can be independently performed by an individual in a short amount of time. It will be amazing if pooling the efforts of different people with different capabilities.” Short amount of time, of course, equals lower barrier to entry for individuals who want to contribute to the project.

But Yu-Chun also picks up on a problem lurking in the background. “However, I am wondering if modularity can be applied to any kind subjects and if there is some pitfalls that it will bring. Take cookbooks, for example. It is good for users to add any contents for specific topics. Each cooking skill can be a unit, and users can be responsible for a small part to decrease the mistakes which probably will happen during editing. Each cooking skill is independent from each other, so we don’t need to worry about the consistency of the contents. But what if there are a series of scientific concepts which will be edited in different units? Since each concept is related to each other, I wonder if each segment is consistent with each other. If related contents are not consistent, learners must feel confused during learning.” There are several open textbooks. But have you ever seen a really good one that was written by a distributed group via a wiki?

Congratulations to Jessie, who got married last week! She found time during the honeymoon to blog about The World is Flat, including some goals for the movement: “The task of open education movement now is to make the education borderless among countries, companies, universities and help creativity and individuation of each learner.”

But I had to chuckle when I read this next part of her post – the grass really is always greener on the other side of the fence. “Open educational movement is getting mature in developed countries, but it just started in some developing countries especially big country like China. It seems harder to make meaningful progress in Asian countries even developed country like Japan because of the cultural and government issues in those countries. It may take a while for the open educational movement innovators to solve those problems.” I wish we had solved the cultural and governmental issues here in the US!

Greg chose Free Culture. He provides a nice counterpoint to some of what Jennifer and Jon said above:

“I think the open education movement can learn a lot about the idea put forth in Free Culture about the importance of free speech and allowing all voices to be heard. These ideas can be applied to the instructional strategies that open educational materials use, the methods in which they are disseminated, and the formative evaluation methods they follow…. Most OER come from a rich and powerful places of the world because that is who has the money and other resources to create them. So the voice of the rich and powerful is placed into the OER, not because of some evil intent, but simply because that is the mindset of the creator.”

So how do we balance this out the ideas of letting people produce what they want to with the problem that only the rich have leisure time to create OERs?

Other thoughts sound a lot like what I have tried to do (with only mixed success) in this very class: “Open education can be seen as a way to spread the knowledge of the few to the many and it is a laudable movement. But in the actual instruction being done does open education allow the few to speak for the many, or does it give ample opportunity for self-expression specifically among its users, the learners and teachers? I think that the former is more common. Another way to give voice to participants is to use instructional techniques in the actual delivery of instruction that allow for discussion, reflection and learner-centered activities rather than direct instruction techniques. Technologies do not currently make it very easy to hold a quality synchronous meeting over the Internet but they are getting better. Lessig mentions the power of the blog, where people can post items for peer review and content. Ideas are discussed at length and arguments are made. Technologies certainly allow for a quality discussion to happen over the course of time on blogs. The voice of the student is heard.”

Greg finishes up with an extended commentary on a debate between Lessig and Valenti that is also worth reading.

Rob also read The World is Flat, and knocked me out with this picture he painted:

“Something else that got me thinking, as I’ve been reading lately about open source, open content, copyright, and licensing mechanisms, was when Friedman talked about Japan and China working together. Even with the bitter feelings the Chinese still have towards the Japanese who occupied their country and used biological weapons to kill millions of Chinese, the Japanese are outsourcing to China. The economics override the hate. That made me wonder if at some point we’ll see some collaboration among Richard Stallman, Larry Lessig, Steve Ballmer, Tom Giovanetti, and Marilyn Bergman. Stallman’s and Lessig’s licenses, GFDL and CC, don’t currently work together even though they’re on the same team. The software and recording industries seem pretty much united in their opposition to anything being open, although Ballmer does claim that he likes to see open source development happen using Microsoft products. If Lessig and Stallman can’t present a united front, however, how will anyone be able to withstand the attack from the MPAA/RIAA/ASCAP/Orrin Hatch/Microsoft front?”

Rob also observes, “The businesses that will survive the outsourcing of many common tasks, according to Friedman, are the ones that localize, defined by Joel Cawley of IBM as ‘[taking] all the global capabilities that are now out there and [tailoring] them to the needs of a local community.’ One of the important functions of the OER movement is in providing resources available to anyone that are compatible with technological and legal frameworks that allow localization.” How would these sentences read if instead of businesses we talked specifically about education?

Bobbe brings home one of the messages from The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid to our own program here at USU:

“Part of the success of ICICI Bank is its philosophy: “If you are going to gain sustainable competitive edge, you have to leverage technology in a big way.” They could see that moving from “physical-branch banking” to “virtual banking” would be a lot more profitable. This is a fact that Distance Education has yet to learn. USU has been doing Distance Education for a couple of decades – reaching out to the very rural areas of Utah. They did it by building ‘brick and mortar’ buildings around the state and then piping in the ‘virtual’ part, causing students to sit in F2F classrooms that utilized expensive technology. That was understandable in the beginning, but as rural areas gained access to home computers and connectivity, the university failed to make changes and continues to invest in even more expensive equipment to replace the stuff that is getting old. Rural students have to leave their home computers and travel (an hour or two) to an outreach building, to attend ‘virtual’ classes, synchronously. The investment in unneeded technology is proportionate to the inability to let go and let virtual.” Yea Bobbe!

Catia read Coase’s Penguin. She zeros in on the core issues of sustainability outlined by Yochai, who, “analyzes why the large-scale collaboration systems can be sustainable. Sustainability here is due to these factors, according to the author: modular work, granularity and low cost integration.” She also picks up on the risks of when ‘low cost integration’ goes wrong, saying “when someone’s contribution is not integrated properly into the whole project, changing its quality,” it not only bogs down the project, but disincentivizes people from making future contributions.

Antonio also read Coase’s Penguin, and picks up on the difference between different types of OER projects.

“Peer production are best fitted with project that are modular, high-granular with a low-cost integration of the pieces. They should be modular for allowing individuals to indipendently author a small piece, the dimension (granularity) of this piece should be minimized for admitting occasional, small-sized contributions from everyone and, finally, these pieces should integrate without a high, centralized effort. Of course, the integration relates also with quality, which is attained mostly by peer-review. So, I want to add one more constraint, related to the size of the community: peer-reviewing is usually well done if the number of reviewers is high or they are very specialized (but this case would lead to rise integration costs…)

It seems the identikit of Wikipedia!

But OER are not only encyclopedias: more structured productions are neeed too, as textbooks or coursewares. Unfortunately, they have not all these characteristics… Maybe that in these cases, the “firm model” is more suitable, providing the necessary information and control for coherence and consistency. Furthermore, educational resources have often to be more contextualized than an encyclopedia entry. This implies the need for additional efforts and/or for specialized roles for participants.”

In short, Antonio is highlighting Benkler’s suggestion that not all OERs are amenable to development with the commons-based peer production process.

I think it would be an improvement to have one week where we have readings and comments on our own, and the following week where we comment on others work. Gives me a chance to form my own ideas and questions, and then have feedback.

So, as of today, I’ve updated the syllabus to implement this great idea. Weeks 10-15 are all updated, so please make sure you’re working from the most recent copy of the syllabus. There are a number of other great ideas re: how we tag our posts, etc., that are worth looking at.

Thanks to everyone for your patience with this experiment, and for helping to make it better! Please keep sending your ideas, and please keep up the great work!

A few weeks ago I changed my first few weeks’ practice of posting highlights here to posting comments directly on people’s blogs. However, there have been several votes for bringing back the highlights here. So, that’s what I’m doing! Here’s some of what I’ve seen and thought recently.

Jennifer’s Comparison of Open Education Projects is something to see and thought provoking once again, as is Rick’s matrix, Antonio’s matrix

I wish I had known about Rick’s presentation on OERs for faculty a year ago.

Rick also bemoans “even one of the OpenEd enablers is inhibited since we don’t have the authority to assign CC licensing rights as the state owns all but a few kinds of things that a faculty produces.”

The somewhat obvious subversive end-run around this ridiculous policy is to have our faculty *start* from copylefted resources, like something licensed CC By-SA. The license will then require them to put their derivative works back out for the public under CC By-SA. If you can get this to happen, and provoke a battle with administration over it, you can force the administration to make a conscious, public choice in favor of or against open sharing. Remember, old policies will be based on the false binary of university owns or faculty owns. Open education introduces a third option. Someone should provoke this fight as soon as possible – alas, I come from a university with a much more enlightened policy where the fight is not possible.

Jon has an enlightening if brief discussion about the interaction of the notion of “producer surplus” and Creative Commons Noncommercial licenses.

In the aptly titled “one button to rule them all” Greg opines, “It seems to me that this would need several things to fall into place if it were to become widespread. First, technologies (including proprietary systems like blackboard) would have to widely adopt a “one button” functionality to take a course that is online from being closed to open.”

In my experience, the main problem with getting courses from closed to open systems is not the technical problem (and since this is a real problem, you know the main problem must be significant). The main problem is figuring out the copyright status of the individual bits of the course, and deciding what to do once you identify materials you aren’t allowed to share. The only way to remove this primary problem is for professors to commit to using only open resources, even in the classroom. Then you will know that everything you do is fair game to go up online. I made this commitment a few years ago, and it has made my participation in the open education movement significantly easier. Can we get other faculty to do this?

Greg continues, “There is still the question of courses that are not currently online or are only online as a supplement to face to face courses. Conversion of these courses to an online system such as Moodle or Sakai still takes an enormous amount of work and therefore, cost. The open educational resources movement does not have, to my knowledge, any tool that will help a professor who is not adept at technology to take their own face to face course and add it to Open CourseWare with a type of ‘one button’ function.”

The ‘one button’ would truly rule them all. Using iPod recording devices comes pretty close – push one button to record the audio of a lecture or other presentation, sync to iTunes, and upload. This is what we did with the Open Education Conference a few weeks ago, and the process is so simple that we trained volunteers to do the recording and had every single presentation at the conference online within 10 minutes of its ending. So maybe something like 51Weeks is the future of open education?

Jon draws some interesting comparisons between open education and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

There have been several arguments made as to why OpenCourseWare initiatives do not endanger the universities who participate in them. For example, I’ve argued that content alone is not enough, and if it were libraries would never have evolved into universities. Rob adds another interesting point to the argument: “Thinking back to my bachelors and my MBA, much of the material we learned was in textbooks (the same textbooks used at Harvard or other prestigious universities, it was pointed out to us). So if I have the same textbook as a student at Harvard, and I have the same ability as him or her to go to Google or Wikipedia and read or publish information or even collaborate directly with that Harvard student, what makes the Harvard degree so different from mine? The actual content being deposited into us is non-differentiating.” The verb deposit takes us back to the banking concept of education.

Rob then makes a point which seems clear on the surface: “It seems that everything would run smoother and more efficiently without having to worry about tracking all the IP issues inherent in creating closed content.” And yes, not having to worry about IP issues would be fabulous. However, it turns out that IP issues are not the sole province of closed content; there are plenty of IP issues to worry over in the world of open content as well. Problems related to license compatibility across different collections are one of these huge worries.

Which brings me to Stephen’s response (Understanding Me) to my recent post (Misunderstanding Stephen) And let me again publicly thank Stephen. I wish everyone in the world had a Stephen in their life – someone who pushed their thinking and forced them to write more than they would otherwise.

David writes, “When a group of learners who are in no way affiliated with a company or any other for-profit organization are prevented from remixing OERs by the copyleft provisions in the GFDL and the CC-By-SA or the CC-By-NC-SA, how is it that this is only a problem for commercial exploiters of open content?”

Leaving aside all the presumption packed implicitly into this statement with phrases like ‘group of learners’… Here is my counterexample: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/10/mixing-content.html.

“Are you saying it’s ok for these learners to violate the license terms, because no one will care since they’re not making any money?”

Yes. Because there is no reasonable interpretation of those terms that would see them applied against individual students creating their own learning content for their own personal (and sometimes shared) use.

I think Stephen is either making a “security by obscurity” argument or a “fair use” argument. The security by obscurity argument that says, “it’s ok to speed down this obscure country road because no police ever come out this far” is only safe most of the time and is right none of the time. The same is true of violating license terms on the assumption that no one will ever catch you – not being caught doesn’t make it right. But I don’t think this is really Stephen’s argument.

On the fair use side, I think he’s saying, ‘Yes it’s ok to break copyright law if individuals are doing it for their own personal use, because this use should be protected under the notion of fair use.’ I have two problems with this argument. First, very much hangs on the word “should.” It may be hard to provide proper incentives to people when all we can tell them is that, even though they’re breaking the law, their breaking of it will probably be protected because it occurs in a legal grey area. But the much more troubling problem with the fair use argument is that all fair uses are black holes – no adaptations or improvements made under the assumption of fair use protection can ever come back out to be shared with the broader OER community.

Moving on, Erik says the only way to avoid the analysis paralysis possible when looking for OER sustainability models is to jump right in. “Once again it all comes down to trial and error. Someone has to be willing to take the first step. At this time the ball is rolling so either get moving or be prepared to be flattened.” Currently, lots of universities are giving away OERs. None are looking to create sustainability models that don’t involve grants and gifts. Someone has to get in this space, even if they do it wrong. Spoiler: COSL will have a piece of software available next summer that will provide on pool for universities who want to sustain their OCWs to jump into.

Jessie says when it comes to sustainability, the more the merrier. “Besides money, other key factors such as participation and ownership, government policies, social, gender and culture, technology, external political and economic factors and so on should also be put into count. OER’s target group is a wide range of people so a sustainable business can be build on something participated with wide range of people.” While this is true for a handful of major projects (i.e., Wikipedia), how many times can this model be replicated simultaneously?

Bobbe looks at new or alternative CC licensing options from the perspective of Ockham’s Razor, encouraging us to take the simplest path possible: “Creative Commons ought to have a completely different section of works for OER or get out of the picture. Licensing OER should not be complicated or available on multiple levels. It is time for us to work together on this issue. If you are going to submit work to OER, submit it freely.” I feel for the frustration in her writing here, but I’m not sure I agree with where her post ends: “The hard work of this global community is for free use – not for commercial use.” Given that commercial use can mean such seemingly innocent things as running ads next to OERs, this attitude might make long-term sustainability even more challenging than it already is.

Jennifer cuts right to the heart of the issue (as usual), with one of the best quotes of the semester so far: “While it is hard to criticize altruism, altruism for the sake of altruism does not guarantee need by the recipient”. Her color-coded matrix of OER projects and sustainability models is also a must see. In the past I’ve argued that a producer-driven model isn’t necessarily bad. I wonder what she’ll have to say to that.

Apparently . Stian tells us, “I used to boast about how in Norway even a street-sweeper (if we still had those), or a homeless person, could follow all the lectures of a given course for free (and legally – not by sneaking in), get a library card at the university library and check out all the books he or she wanted, etc. There is no reason why this shouldn’t be extended into the virtual space (as for access, luckily most Norwegian small cities have libraries that offer free access to the internet nowadays).”

He then goes on to propose a kind of specialization with universities that could make inexpensive credentialling possible: “With the incredible amount of options for learning autonomously and the need for continuous learning, and the eventual and necessary reform of university as an institution, this view could hopefully change. Until then, one interesting model is one that the Economist has been advocating (and unfortunately I cannot find the article in their archives – full-text search is failing me) of having world-class universities like Harvard or MIT separate their teaching arm from their evaluation arm. So that anyone in the world willing to pay a small administrative fee, could take a comprehensive Harvard exam, and if they passed, get a Harvard degree that was just as valid as any “Harvard” student. The neat thing about this is that it would force the education arm to really compete on education, not on name recognition.” If you’ve ever heard of the Western Governors University, you know that there’s at least one fully accredited, evaluation-only online university in the world.

Yu-Chun looks at donation and public-private partnership models, and suggests a specific public-private model: “Funding is important for the basic operation of OER websites. Users who use contents for commercial use will need to contribute at least 5 % of what they have earned from those contents.” Enforcement would be a bear, but perhaps we can make this work. Spoiler: I’ll have more to say about this approach and licenses in a month or so

Megan provides a review of the Easterly book, saying, “I think this idea – that we should focus on Searching for specific answers, instead of Planning the big plan – is a particularly important concept for the Open Ed movement. Flooding the world with generic blueprint OERs will not necessarily bring prosperity or learning to all. However, targeting the needs of certain groups of learners (the needs of learners, not of the educators) might result in several really great OERs. One size does not fit all.” This extends a drum that I’ve been beating a lot lately – it’s not sustainability, but localization that is the final frontier of open education, and “only a local can localize an OER.”

Megan also pulls two fabulous quotes from the Easterly: “A well established public health principle is that you should save lives that are cheap to save before you save lives that are more expensive to save.” (p. 253), and
“Public policy is the science of doing the best you can with limited resources.” (p. 256)

Thieme has a go at providing highlights of the recent course posts and does a fine job, and also points out why sustainability is so hard: “Sustainability involves many aspects. A “solution” does not only depend on the goals of a project or organization, but also on the environmental factors and opportunities. Clearly a hybrid form must be sought.” So that even if one OER project could find a sustainability model that worked for them, it likely would not work for another project unless that project existed in a very similar environment of opportunities.

Edocet gives us a photo and the sound of his voice, which makes his other writing instantly feel more personal somehow.