I’ve had someone (who isn’t a university student, and therefore doesn’t need or want credits) ask about receiving a certificate from the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for successful completion of the experience. So here is what I’m going to do (sorry about the detail, but if you ever want to do this at your university the detail may come in handy):

1. If we call this a “non-credit workshop with a credit option,” then everything works well policy-wise / procedure-wise here at USU. And since the majority of the folks who are participating are not doing it for credit, this makes sense.

2. It turns out that the Center can charge as much or as little as it likes for “non-credit workshops” where credit is not being awarded.

3. Therefore, if you don’t need university credits but would like a certificate at the end of the experience saying that you “successfully completed” the workshop, I will invite you to make a $50 donation to the Center. If you do the specified work and successfully complete the course, you’ll then get an official certificate from the Center signed by me saying that you successfully completed the Introduction to Open Education workshop.

4. HOWEVER, if you would like the certificate but can’t afford the $50 donation, just email me to let me know you want to earn the certificate, and I’ll be happy to send you one at the end of the class for free (assuming you do all the work).

I’m really looking forward to the class! See you all next week!

This article seems to still take the point of view of republishers or educators.

Yes, I am an educator, and this article is written from my perspective. In fact, I titled it *My Current View* on the CC-NC Licensing Option Controversy in OCWs. I’m not apologetic at all about this. I want to participate in the work of expanding educational opportunity, and I can only do it as an educator. That’s what I am.

The greatest beneficiaries of open access will be students and learners – people who want to read or use the materials in order to learn, not people who want to republish them for their own personal gain.

Of course. I would augment this statement by saying that many students and learners will benefit because the materials will be adopted and used by teachers and faculty. Educators do have *some* impact – even if limited – on students and learners.

It is true that most corporate – and even some non-profit – entities won’t use material stamped with a ‘NC’ clause. Big deal. Who cares?

I care. We are on a *very* slippery slope the day we begin judging some people or organizations as being worthy of our help and others as unworthy. If someone else feels qualified to make that call, I suppose they can. I certainly am not qualified – I’ll stick to trying to be helpful to everyone I can.

No student working on their own, blogging content, creating mash-ups, or sharing files would ever confuse themselves with a commercial entity, and no such student would be deterred by the ‘NC’ clause. We don’t need to know exactly where the fine line is. The important thing is to get out of this producer-consumer mentality. CC-NC is about sharing in a non-commercial community, a network of learners, not content producers.

If no one is producing content, what is being shared in this non-commercial community? What materials are being shared and studied by the network of learners if there are no content producers? Or is the point that we should work to exclude professionally produced materials from legally and freely circulating within the network, and only allow the sharing of materials produced by amateurs? Why is that a good thing? Why should we discriminate against educators and others who produce educational content for a living? This is would be a blatant case of “discrimination against a field of endeavor,” a definite no-no according to the Open Source Definition.

This, in my view, is the big danger of relying on publishers and industry in general for any aspect of open access and open learning – the danger of becoming bogged down in conditions and arguments that revolve around their needs and interests, the danger of turning what should be free into something that is (in perhaps everything but name) a commercial enterprise.

How does “allowing” people like me to participate in an ecology of sharing equate to reliance on publishers and industry? If some of the content circulating in the network is produced by educators, why is that a problem? Even with the 2500 or so courses worth of CC-licensed material in the university OpenCourseWares, the *overwhelming* majority of CC-licensed content in the world comes from blogs, Flickr, and other sources like those that Stephen mentions above. How is it that, by sharing my course materials in a freely available OCW, I’m participating in a commercial enterprise?

This solemn responsibility is the context in which we work.

How are we to fulfill our duty to humanity? Many suggestions have been made. As have many others, Truman simply and concisely expressed the two most important characteristics of any such effort:

“Only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people.”

“The material resources which we can afford to use for the assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible.” Truman’s 1949 Inaugural Address

We first affirm that the exercise of force or compulsion will find no home within our efforts. We have neither the moral authority to compel anyone, nor the practical capacity to compel everyone. We believe that when met by genuine opportunities to improve their own lives, many people will respond by seeking to exercise those opportunities.

Our work, then, is to do our part to create these opportunities.

We second recognize that the nature of knowledge is unique in that one need not discard an idea to share it. Unlike material goods that must leave the custody of one to enter the custody of another, when knowledge is shared from one to another, both end the conversation in full possession of that which was given.

Unfortunately, the simple existence of educational opportunity alone will not improve the lives of many. There must also be freedom to exercise one’s right to education and incentives to exercise that right. This may require many social, economic, and political changes that will likely interact with each other in complex ways. But the existence of these interdependencies does not require us to slow our efforts in sharing what we know. Indeed, now is the time, instead, to accelerate them.

The most sustainable work we can do to create these opportunities is to work to freely share what we know. And the most sustainable and appropriate way to do this is to first share how to share. This will enable those who choose to do so to be equal participants in a community of sharing rather than relegating them to the status of receivers and consumers.

Those of us currently engaged in the field we call open educational resources are not so important because of the content or software we freely share as we are because of the example we might set for others. In a time of almost unimaginable greed, we have an opportunity to show that helping your neighbor is still the right thing to do.

Our efforts will neither scale nor succeed until “freely sharing what you know” becomes common practice among common people, until common tools allow this common activity to reach into and out of every corner of the earth, until common sense prevails over common selfishness, and until the opportunities to exercise common rights and enjoy common freedoms displace needlessly common ignorance, poverty, fear, and hunger.

Though very ordinary in itself, this work will bear extraordinary fruit if we will take it up. The work is ours to do – let us do it!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not. My primary interest always has been, and I suspect always will be, in increasing access to educational opportunity to people who have been denied that right for any of a variety of reasons. I loved the learning objects idea because the “write once, use anywhere” idea had a lot of economic appeal – once an object had been created for whatever reason, we could copy it (for free) and send it (for very close to free) almost anywhere around the world to be employed in the exercise of an individual’s right to education.

For a very long time now (in 1999, in 2000, and heck, NSF even gave me a CAREER award founded on this criticism in 2002) I’ve been saying that the idea of LEGO-like assembly of resources simply will not work from a learning perspective. The role of context is simply too great in learning, and the expectation that any educational resource could be reused without some contextual tweaking was either naive or stupid. I will here attribute learning objects’ inability to live up to the incredible hype and investment they received to the fact that the premise of the possibility of simple reuse was simply wrong.

An example.

The ultimate success story in the “write once, use anywhere” history of educational materials is the textbook. However, you will notice in this long and storied history that there has never been any confusion over whether or not a collection of algebra, algebra ii, geometry, trig, and calc textbooks could be “simple sequenced” and presented to a learner without additional contextualization and support. Or that the sections in one of these books could be simple sequenced (to become the textbook) for use by learners without significant contextualization and support. As I enjoy saying frequently, “libraries would never have evolved into universities” if all that education depended on were preexisting, high-quality resources.

So if learning objects are dead – and they may be – what is it that we should care about? As instructional technologists interested in further empowering people to exercise their right to education, what should be the focus of our design and research efforts? In a previous JIME article Stephen left the idea of learning objects behind and encouraged us to think simply about “resources,” and get away from the jargon of learning objects. There’s something to the idea of simplifying things that I like quite a bit. However, for my purposes (and I readily recognize they may not be your purposes) I have a need for something more than just resources. As I’ve thought about that need, I think it is best expressed as easily localizable resources.

In the first round of learning objects definition wars, I contributed “any digital resource that can be reused to mediate learning” as my best shot. In retrospect, the primary weakness of this definition was supposed to be the keyword it all hinged upon: “reuse.” Because the systems that authored, managed, and delivered learning objects were all software systems, the majority of the people doing the actual work on learning objects implementations were software engineers (or people parading as software engineers). “Reuse” was almost unanimously interpreted by this group as “technical interoperability” with no thought for the pedagogic, semiotic, or other contextual dimensions of the term. The whole learning objects field of work turned into a giant software engineering exercise aimed at answering the question “can your content send scores for true / false items to my management system?” Because the term reuse (as used by many more people than just me, I’m certainly not trying to hoard all the blame here) was only partially understood, learning never really got into learning object systems. If anything, they were “technically interoperable content systems.”

Now, for my money, the technical interoperability of content doesn’t need to go much further than “can be properly rendered by most web browsers.” (IMS or SCORM Content Packaging is nice since it gives us a way to move metadata around with content, but my last statement was about content.) When you really believe that reusing educational resources is a contextualization or localization exercise, and not a matter of intelligently slapping a “Next =>” button somewhere on the object, it turns out that you don’t need much more in terms of technical interoperability than what every good students knows at the end of an HTML course. Create your content in such a way that it will render properly in most browsers and don’t purposefully futz with your source code so that people have a hard time seeing what you’ve done (WebCT’s HTML, anyone?). Feel as you may about the GPL, WebCT and others might do well to remember its language here:

Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed…on a medium customarily used for software interchange…. The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. GPL

What if all the effort and money spent hyping and building technically interoperable content systems had gone into better understanding the process of localizing educational materials, and developing whatever new tools were necessary to support that process? <sarcasm>Of course, there’s very little market for these processes and tools, because when you’re talking about supporting people who have been unable to exercise their right to education, you’re obviously talking about “poor people,” and how would you make any return on products developed for “poor people?” I mean, after all, how are they supposed to pay?</sarcasm>

So whether learning objects are dead or not, I couldn’t say. And to some extent, who cares? As long as people are willing to (1) openly share (2) educational materials that will (3) render properly in most web browsers, and they also (4) provide access to the unobfuscated source for the materials (especially for Flash files, Java applets, Photoshop images with many layers, and the like), I certainly don’t care. Argue about what to call them all you like – I’ll be busy trying to help someone somewhere figure out how to localize some of these things so that they can actually derive some value from them – maybe even improve their lives some. Won’t you help, too?

An important debate is currently taking place within universities but also among researchers, diplomats and governmental sectors all over the world. Can education be considered as a commercial service and, as a result, regulated by the World Trade Organization (WTO)? If the reply is positive, does this mean that the rules and principles of GATS (the General Agreement on Trade in Services) apply to education or should it be considered as a public service? What are the implications of the answer to this question? And if the idea of public service is retained, what are the principles that must guide the organization, content and policies for higher education in developing countries in general?

The Objectives and Institutionalism of the Global University System was written by the former Director of the Division of Higher Ed of UNESCO.