Apart from all sorts of misgivings about Georgia Tech’s MOOCish Master’s program in Computer Science, I want to take a moment to do the math. You charge $7000 a year tuition with the idea you’ll have a 2-year cohort of 10,000 students. If you add that up, you get $140 million. That’s massive, especially when you’re only hiring eight new faculty to educate those 10,000 students. Follow the money, this is no joke, the profits are huge even after you split 40% of the kitty with Udacity.

Those are some truly staggering numbers. And just as easy as that, MOOCs are simply the “new” elearning – purportedly less expensive than on-campus instruction, purportedly just as effective, and with the promise of thousands of new students flocking in from around the world driving unimaginable levels of new revenue.

It’s like a national regifting of the 1990s hype around elearning with a giant MOOC-colored bow on top.

While I completely and fully support recent calls to “reclaim open“, I think the term MOOC is irretrievably out of the barn. Consequently, perhaps the only way left to put an end to the openwashing of the big for-profit MOOC providers is to redefine the term MOOC in the popular mind. I propose that, whenever you hear the acronym MOOC, you think:

True, the obfuscation is less massive and more transparent each day. But now that DRM is here, we can no longer call these things open. We need to call them what they are. As Audrey wrote,

What was a promise for free-range, connected, open-ended learning online, MOOCs are becoming something else altogether. Locked-down. DRM’d. Publisher and profit friendly. Offered via a closed portal, not via the open Web.

They have become Massively Obfuscated Opportunities for Cash.

The one section of the letter that absolutely breaks my heart is the top of page 4:

Good quality online courses and blended courses (to which we have no objections) do not save money, but purchased-pre-packaged ones do, and a lot. With prepackaged MOOCs and blended courses, faculty are ultimately not needed.

Oh, MOOCs. How thoroughly, completely, and profoundly you have failed us.

The SJSU faculty’s last statement is true if and only if one underlying assumption is met – that the content of the pre-packaged course is traditionally, fully copyrighted. So with regard to this particular edX course, whose YouTube videos all say “Standard YouTube License” for example, the SJSU criticism is accurate. This fully copyrighted, pre-packaged MOOC is clearly meant to run as is, and is not meant to be taken apart, adapted, localized, and customized by local faculty. If edX intended for those things to happen, they would take down their silly registration barrier and put a proper license on the course.

(Don’t even get me started on how edX oh-so-deceivingly puts “Some Rights Reserved” in their footer without ever specifying which rights those are. “Some Rights Reserved” is, obviously, a nod to Creative Commons licenses – but the site does not use one. Check their Terms. When you don’t use a Creative Commons license, why try to hoodwink us into thinking you’re “one of the good guys” by putting that language in the footer of EVERY page?!? And this is how the one NON-profit in the space behaves. No wonder people are suspicious…)

If entities like edX and Coursera and Udacity would simply be open – meaning, use an open license for their materials – the concerns of SJSU faculty and others could be assuaged. Rather than pre-packaged, teach-as-you-receive-it collections of material meant to undermine faculty, openly licensed course frameworks empower faculty to tweak and customize and modify while still saving money. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You can have your cake and eat it, too, when you use open licenses. The either/or presented by the SJSU faculty is only true when purchased-pre-packaged courses are copyrighted – like the edX course is.

Come on, MOOCs. There’s no innovation in allowing open enrollment. The OU/UK has had that for decades. There’s not even innovation left in open licensing – we’ve been doing that for over a decade, too. What exactly is it you’re doing that we’re supposed to be so impressed by?

(Grab the letter as a PDF or as plain text.

The books are open source, meaning that the person who wrote the book is doing it for the goodness of mankind and expects no compensation. I know that’s hard to believe, but I’m a teacher and have been working on some of the science books mentioned. Other than the State Office covering the price of my substitute for two days I haven’t been paid a thing (same for the other 20-30 teachers on the project). The books are now done and FREE for the world to use. The best part about these books is a year from now after using them in our classrooms we’ll get back together (USOE covering our subs) and fix the issues we have found and make them even better to again be posted for the world to use for FREE.

Now THAT’s what I’m talking about.

• Based on the CK-12 Foundation‘s open science textbooks
• Customized specifically for Utah students by Utah teachers
• Each book’s Table of Contents is the Utah Science Core Standards
• Professionally designed
• Print copies available from Amazon’s CreateSpace for an average cost of $5 per book (for schools that need a print option)

And here are the links to the free and open PDF versions of the books:

• Integrated 7th Grade Science
• Integrated 8th Grade Science
• Biology
• Earth Science
• Physics
• Chemistry

and the print versions available from CreateSpace:

• 7th Integrated Science -https://www.createspace.com/4215253
• 8th Integrated Science – https://www.createspace.com/4215270
• Earth Science – https://www.createspace.com/4241278
• Biology – https://www.createspace.com/4241344
• Chemistry – https://www.createspace.com/4241213
• Physics – https://www.createspace.com/4241314

Seeing the USOE launch the initiative statewide for this coming fall is the extremely gratifying culmination of years of collaborative work and research between the USOE, the Nebo school district, BYU, and Lumen. My research team (the Open Education Group) are currently finalizing an article analyzing data from last year’s expanded pilot, which shows statistically significant gains in student performance on the state’s end of year standardized tests for students using the $5 books.

Later this week, or perhaps early next, I’ll publish our process guide for creating and adopting open science textbooks statewide. We’ve learned many important lessons along the way…

MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete…. There has been a great rebranding and co-option of the concept of the MOOC over the last couple of years. The near-instant response from the elites, almost unprecedented in my experience, is a recognition of the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs (which they would like very much to erase from history).

In summary, Stephen sees the rapid adoption of MOOCs among prestigious universities as a proactive attempt to co-opt their potentially subversive nature.

I think this is giving these schools WAY too much credit. As we saw with OpenCourseWare a decade ago, there is a HUGE amount of public relations benefit from being involved in these initiatives. As we saw in the early 2000s, every single school that launched an OCW initiative garned an incredible amount of press and praise – until the new car smell wore off. If you were one of the first schools out of the chute, you were showered with media coverage. But after OCW “got old,” additional OCW launches received no press coverage whatsoever.

Coursera has done an incredibly effective job harnessing this Presidential passion for press. Coursera – ‘the platform for offering “open” courses’ – has been very noisy about the fact that they only work with prestigious universities. What school doesn’t want to join the Stanford / Tecnológico de Monterrey / Princeton / École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne club? For the cost of offering one class in a new format, a President can officially put his or her institution in the same category as these “prestigious” schools. What Board of Trustees doesn’t want that?

Don’t mistake lust for fame with forethought. The current mania around MOOCs has nothing to do with strategic neutralization of a potential threat to higher education’s business model and everything to do with needing to be in the New York Times. Assuming the prior gives way too much credit where it isn’t due – twice. First, to the leadership of schools who have jumped speedily on the MOOC bandwagon. And second, to the creators of the MOOC approach who by implication have supposedly devised a method so brilliant as to be capable of destroying formal higher education (which, apparently, is to be lauded).

Among the wide range of issues we discussed, one topic that came up in both conversations was the observation that many “inside” the OER community seem to think of MITE as “outside” the OER community, despite the fact that they publish much of their content under Creative Commons licenses.

Why is that? I want to explore this a little. MITE is a case worth talking about both (1) because of the very high quality of the multimedia and other content they produce, (2) because of the incredible adoption and usage of their content (literally millions of users – many of whom are teachers using the materials in their classrooms and consequently represent 30 or so additional users), and (3) because MITE is one of an extremely small number of OER producing organizations that can be called sustainable.

MITE in 60 Seconds

MITE spends significant resources creating a relatively small number of very high quality courses, which they license under Creative Commons licenses. In this regard, you might think of MITE as the Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative of the secondary education space. An additional significant amount of non-development work goes into making the resources easy to find and use. For example, in addition to creating alignments with Common Core and state content standards, MITE aligns their content with popular textbooks. Using their Textbook Correlations tool a teacher or student can do a search like “show me content relevant to pages 103-111 of Glencoe’s 2010 Algebra 1 textbook.” It’s an amazing interface that makes it very easy for parents or students to find and use supplemental materials, for example.

MITE has settled on a sustainability model that requires you to become a paying member of their NROC Network if the uses of their materials you’re planning on making include things like being “downloaded en masse, stored on institutional servers, or otherwise incorporated into institutional resources (including learning-management or student-information systems) or distributed directly via institutional channels.” But, you might ask, how can they require network membership before permitting these uses if their content is CC licensed? Answer: they take a unique perspective on the NC clause in order to do it.

How Does It Work?

To expand the previous quote from MITE’s Terms of Use just a bit, MITE considers it “commercial use when the materials are downloaded en masse, stored on institutional servers, or otherwise incorporated into institutional resources (including learning-management or student-information systems) or distributed directly via institutional channels.” MITE uses this definition of NC to require anyone who wants to make these kinds of uses of their materials to join their membership network.

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled article with a brief foray into license technicalities. Skip down two paragraphs if this kind of stuff puts you to sleep.

There is one place where the MITE Terms of Use could be greatly improved. A little background first: The language in the BY NC SA license which constitutes the Noncommercial provision begins, “You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that…” In other words, the NC clause is triggered by the what the user does, or the kind of use that is made of NC licensed materials. The clause is not triggered by the type of entity making use of the NC licensed materials. Unfortunately for MITE, they take the uses they consider commercial (downloading en masse, storing on institutional servers, etc.), bundle them up, and label the bundle “Institutional Use.” By doing so, they confuse types of use (which NC addresses) with type of user (which it does not).

To expand the previous quote once more, the Terms of Use actually say “Institutional use is deemed to be commercial use when the materials are downloaded en masse, stored on institutional servers…” By appearing to attach their definition of commercial to type of user (“Institutional Use”), they appear to place it beyond the reach of the NC trigger language in the license. MITE really needs to get a new name for the bundle of uses they consider to be commercial, and that name needs to be descriptive of the uses themselves and not even smell like they’re related to the type of user who might make them.

So MITE has created a unique definition of commercial use. Of course, folks in the know about the inner workings of the CC licenses understand that this “defining NC” language in the Terms of Use document is probably not binding on end users because of Section 8.e. of the BY-NC-SA license, which 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.” Either way, including this statement of their interpretation of NC does cause school districts, state offices, and others to pick up the phone and call MITE, so the desired effect is achieved regardless.

But back to the main point… even MIT OCW persists in offering its own unique definition of what constitutes commercial, and consequently unallowable, uses. So why does following MIT OCW’s lead make people think of MITE as outsiders? What’s up?

What Makes MITE Different?

A number of years ago, Creative Commons commissioned and published a report called Defining Noncommercial. This report demonstrated the wide range of attitudes regarding the meaning of “Noncommercial” held by both the general population of internet users and “Creative Commons Friends and Family,” a separate group of survey responders that actually knew something about the Creative Commons licenses.

Unfortunately the report itself only presents the results from the general population in any detail. However, the raw data on the CCFF group’s responses are available for analysis by anyone willing to download Open Office. The CCFF group’s responses are particularly important for our conversation because the OER community know and care about the Creative Commons licenses, and consequently their attitudes will be much more accurately reflected in the CCFF data.

Both groups of survey respondents were asked to rate the following scenario on a scale of 1 – 100, where 1 means “Definitely a Noncommercial Use” and 100 means “Definitely a Commercial Use:”

“Your work would be used for course materials in a school — a not-for-profit organization that does not charge tuition”

For people who view themselves as “creators” in the general population (n = 263), the mean response was 33.5 (median = 10, std dev = 36.8). For users in the general population (n=280), the mean response was 44 (median = 38, std dev = 40.9). So on average the general public believes that use by public schools is more Noncommercial than Commercial.

What you won’t see in the report are the following, much more striking data: For creators in the CCFF group (n = 1078), the mean response was 13.8 (median = 1, std dev = 25.4). For users in the CCFF group (n = 137), the mean response was 18.5 (median = 1, std dev = 31.6).

Here then, finally, is the issue that makes some people in the OER community look at MITE as being somehow different or outside the “mainstream” community. While the median survey response for both creators and users in the CCFF group regarding a scenario like ‘a public school using NC licensed material’ was 1 on a scale of 1 – 100, indicating that the average member of the CC community feels that this kind of use is clearly and “Definitely a Noncommercial Use,” MITE feels very strongly that use of their “course materials in a school — a not-for-profit organization that does not charge tuition” is Definitely a Commercial Use.

Why Be Different?

If you spend any time reflecting on the question, “Why would MITE take an approach that differs so significantly from the rest of the Creative Commons / OER community?” the answer is actually very straightforward. MITE’s materials are designed specifically for use in secondary schools. If secondary schools – MITE’s primary audience – can use all of MITE’s content without contributing anything back, there is literally nowhere for MITE to go for a sustainability model beyond being “just another OER publisher living from grant to grant.” So while sys admins, teachers, students, parents, and others are free to do anything else they like with MITE materials, they can’t engage in activities like loading them into LMSs (unless they join the network) – because these activities go straight to the heart of what “commercial” means to MITE.

MITE’s focus on middle and high school is critical. There is currently no real “direct to student” path to sustainability for OER producers who focus on K-12. At the secondary level, curriculum purchases are made by a district or school. These adoption decisions are centralized, lucrative, and the competition over them is ruthless. On the other hand, higher education is almost the complete opposite – adoptions are made by individual faculty and textbook purchases are (or aren’t) made by students themselves. This creates an opportunity for an organization focused on OER in higher ed to build relationships directly with the students using their OER, and try to follow a “direct to student” path to sustainability by offering proprietary supplemental materials and services. Due to the quirks of the K-12 adoption process, there is no similar path to sustainability for a publisher of secondary OER.

MITE’s approach to NC is so different from other members of the OER community because their goals are so different from others in the OER community. What other organizations focus primarily on producing original middle and high school content and licensing it as OER? CK-12 does, but they’re a foundation with an endowment to fall back on. Khan Academy also produces original secondary level content, but they’re currently supported by a huge array of foundations, and appear to have no sustaining model in sight beyond hat-in-hand.

MITE, which is also a non-profit, is a grand experiment in trying to figure out how to be a “sustainable producer of high quality middle and high school OER.” Since no one else in the OER community is really trying to do that, it makes sense that MITE’s approach would be significantly different from everyone else’s. Actually, since so few initiatives in the OER community are actually sustainable, MITE must to be doing something different.

Give MITE a Hug When You Can

MITE is absolutely a member of the OER community. A really innovative and interesting one, at that. If they seem a little far away from where you are and what you’re doing, remember they’re doing something different from you – trying to find a sustainable path through territory that no one else has successfully navigated. Yes, they’ve got a technical issue to solve with their license, but it’s fixable. And their sustainability model seems to be fundamentally sound.

If you’re a “sustainable producer of high quality middle and high school OER” that has figured out how to do that with a more “mainstream” approach to open licensing, I’m sure MITE would love to hear from you. But if you’re not willing to invest your energy in helping them find a “better” model, for the love of Pete don’t waste your energy complaining about the model they do have. It’s still very early days for OER, and we need all the interesting experiments in sustainability we can get. We need more experiments as different from the “mainstream” as MITE’s work is. (You see how successful the “mainstream” has been at sustaining itself.)

Essentially, this is an effort to create an open narrative infrastructure for legal fan fiction. All of the story content, characters, settings, etc. will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license so that everyone who writes in the world will be able to share, publish, or sell their writing (unlike other fan fiction, which is forced to live underground). Like all fan fiction, our project is especially useful for beginning writers who struggle to juggle the dozens of tasks involved in writing fiction. Rather than starting from a blank page and the need to invent characters, setting, and conflict from whole cloth, beginning writers will be able to start with characters, setting, and conflict already in pocket.

While supporting formal instruction is not the primary aim of the project, once the novellas and stubs are complete Lumen Learning will create CC BY licensed instructional supports to helps teachers bring the Massive Fiction world into their writing courses if they’re interested in doing so.

Check out the Massive Fiction site on Kickstarter and consider supporting the project.

Much of the education technology world – and many of the foundations and venture firms that provide the funding for it – are obsessed with adaptive learning. The Gates Foundation’s Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program RFP is the most recent evidence of this trend. The fascination largely stems from the fact that, because these systems are completely automated, they can scale. Scale matters to foundations because it means broader impacts for the work they fund. And, of course, scale matters to investors because it means more customers and, consequently better returns.

But some educational content publishers love the idea of adaptive learning services for a different reason. Open educational resources (OER) are driving the cost of educational content to zero. In fact, you can now graduate from high school (e.g., Open High School of Utah) and complete an associates degree (e.g., Tidewater Community College) without ever spending a penny on textbooks – because of the pervasive use of OER in these programs.

Adaptive learning services are a perfect response to the business model challenges presented by OER to publishers. While the broad availability of free content (e.g., CNN.com) and OER have trained internet users to expect content to be free, many people are still willing to pay for services. Adaptive learning systems exploit this willingness by deeply intermingling content and services so that you cannot access one with using the other. Naturally, because an adaptive learning service is comprised of content plus adaptive services, it will be more expensive than static content used to be. And because it is a service, you cannot simply purchase it like you used to buy a textbook (particularly useful for publishers given the Court’s recent decision upholding the first sale doctrine with regard to textbooks). An adaptive learning service is something you subscribe to, like Netflix. And just like with Netflix, the day you stop paying for the service is the day you lose access to the service.

The Attack on Personal Property

Given the Court’s decision, it makes sense that some publishers would zero in on this leverage point. Whether it’s music on Spotify, movies on Netflix, or TV shows on Hulu, the content industry is engaged in an active campaign to undermine the idea of ownership of personal property. Why would a publisher sell you a CD or DVD, for which you pay only once, when they could persuade you to subscribe to a service for which you will pay every month for the rest of your life? Why would they sell you a CD or DVD which you can listen to or watch forever, loan to a friend, or sell to a used record store, when they could have you subscribe to a service by which they deprive you of any first sale rights?

In short, why is it in a content company’s interest to enable you to own anything? Put simply, it is not. When you own a copy, the publisher completely loses control over it. When you subscribe to content through a digital service (like an adaptive learning service), the publisher achieves complete and perfect control over you and your use of their content.

To the extent that publishers actually have these motivations, the attack on ownership of personal property is annoying in the context of entertainment, but becomes profoundly disturbing in the context of higher education. But in some sense, whether these are the publishers’ motives or not, the end results for learners are the same – the move to subscription models results in a number of significant problems.

How the Past Differs from the Future

In the past, students bought textbooks. Because students owned the books, they could be sold back, loaned to a friend, or students could opt to keep them for future reference. But when you subscribe to an adaptive learning service you own nothing, you can keep nothing, there’s nothing to loan to a friend or sell back, and there’s nothing to reference in the future. When your subscription ends, everything goes disappears. Need to review the material from that math class last year for this semester’s science class? Sorry! Your subscription expired at the end of last semester. Would you like to rent another four months of access for $129.99?

In the past, students could highlight and take notes in the books they owned. This kind of intensive, structured studying resulted in the creation of personalized artifacts that were a meaningful portion of what students’ knew at the conclusion of class. Many adaptive learning services encourage learners to highlight, take notes, and build other learning artifacts by annotating their content. However, because students own nothing, the day their subscription ends all of their notes, highlights, annotations, and other study artifacts are unceremoniously deleted. An important part of what they learned in the class is gone forever, because they couldn’t afford to keep subscribing forever. The situation essentially becomes “You will pay, or you will forget.”

In the past, when a publisher went out of business students could continue learning from the books they had purchased from the publisher. But when one of the companies providing an adaptive learning service goes out of business, “pivots” to focus on other products, gets acquired, or for other reasons end-of-life’s the service, what happens? Even if you could afford to continue paying for a subscription, everything vanishes and you have literally no recourse.

From Content to Data

There is no analog in the old publishing world for the models of learners that adaptive learning services create in order to do what they do. However, it is clear that these models begin as empty algorithms, and are entirely dependent on the learner creating and contributing data to the system in order to function. If the learner does not contribute data to the system, the service cannot build a model of the student upon which it can adapt its instructional, assessment, and other features.

The utility of an adaptive learning service is a function of the amount of a student’s data to which it has access. And while these data are created by the students, and therefore would typically be the property of the students, publishers claim ownership of these data through Terms of Use and other legal tactics and refuse to provide students with access to their own data. Consequently, the longer a learner uses a particular adaptive learning service, the higher the switching cost becomes to move to a different service – because publishers will not allow students to take their data with them, they will have to train the new system from scratch. What happens when Johnny transfers to the school across town that uses a different service? What happens when Sally graduates and goes to college? What happens when Pat transfers from the community college to the university? In these and all other cases, the student is back at square one.

Summary

Through a general strategy of preventing students from owning educational materials as personal property, including taking away learners’ rights to their own data, publishers could have a ready-made solution to the problem of price pressure from open educational resources. And whether this is any specific publisher’s motivation for the move to subscription-based adaptive learning services or not, the resulting impacts on students are the same.

Because some of the research on these systems suggests that they can be very effective at supporting learning, publishers can claim to be “doing the right thing for students” while increasing revenue and decreasing degrees of freedom for students and institutions. As a comparison point, migrating from one learning management system to another would be a pleasant walk in the Sunday afternoon park compared to the switching costs associated with moving from one of these services to another. This before we consider the drastically increased “cost of ownership” of the subscription model, in which you don’t actually own anything.

I am not arguing in favor or against the instructional effectiveness of adaptive learning services. I am simply pointing out the completely unprecedented risks involved in betting an entire school, district, university, or state system on a service with the properties described above.

If creating a system of “super lock in” and perfect control over students’ use of content are not primary design criteria for adaptive learning systems, then we should see the emergence of multiple adaptive learning systems that do not have these characteristics.

Openness is the Solution

Each of the problems with adaptive learning services evaporates when principles of openness are applied to these systems.

• When the source code of an adaptive learning service is openly licensed (open source), even if a company or hosting service goes out of business, or gets acquired, etc., your institution can continue to utilize the service.
• When the content in an adaptive learning service is openly licensed (OER), that content, together with students’ notes, highlights, annotations, and other work within the system can be exported, archived, and used by students forever.
• When students own and can download the data they create and contribute to an adaptive learning service, they can maintain their own backups and make multiple uses of it – including potentially using that data with other systems.

Openness is the skeleton key that unlocks every attempt at vendor control and lock in.

Inasmuch as vendors are just beginning to encourage institutions to make their first adoptions of these adaptive learning services, there is still plenty of time for institutions to stand up for their students’ and their own best interests. Institutions should require guarantees regarding openness in the RFPs they create for the acquisition of these systems. No school has to race to adopt an adaptive system that doesn’t provide the guarantees necessary to protect the legitimate needs of the school and its students.

The Court at last seems to have reached a consensus on a seemingly intractable problem of copyright law: whether a U.S. copyright holder can prevent the importation of “gray-market” products manufactured for overseas markets….

In Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, the Court considered the “first sale” doctrine of copyright law. This is a rule that means that when a publisher sells a copyrighted work once, it loses any right to complain about anything later done with that copy. This is the rule that makes it okay to resell a used book to a used-book store, and for that store in turn to sell used books to its customers.

The issue in Kirtsaeng was whether the first-sale doctrine applies to copyrighted works manufactured overseas. Kirtsaeng bought textbooks in Thailand, where they are cheap, brought them to the United States, and resold them at a large profit. The lower courts said he couldn’t do this, and ordered him to pay damages to the publisher (John Wiley). The Supreme Court disagreed. The Justices said that the first-sale doctrine applies to all books, wherever made. So even if you buy a book made in England, you can resell it without permission from the publisher.

Now that the reselling of these kinds of books is unequivocally legal in the US, I expect we’ll see a host of interesting new tactics from students in their ongoing arms race against the publishers. Between this ruling and the ever growing impact of OER, it feels like it’s getting harder to be a traditional publisher. Don’t quite cry for Pearson yet though – “In 2011, Pearson increased sales by 4% in headline terms to £5.9bn and adjusted operating profit from continuing operations by 10% to £942m.”

We’ve still got a lot of work to do.