As we drafted the language for the Cape Town Declaration‘s Strategy 3 on Open Education Policy, I worked to champion the idea that ‘taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.’ This is the line of argument that helped secure legislative funding for the Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance. This language and other great ideas did eventually make it into the Strategy:

3. Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.

So now what is obviously needed is some legislation that makes these policies real! Borrowing and improving the definition of OERs from the California bill, I’m thinking something along these lines:

Open educational resources are curriculum materials or learning resources whose copyrights have expired, that have been placed in the public domain, or that have been released with an intellectual property license that permits their free use, reuse, revision, and redistribution by others without further permission from the original authors or creators. Open educational resources include items such as courses, course materials, textbooks, lesson plans, videos or podcasts of classroom lectures, homework assignments, activities, tests, and any other tools, materials, or techniques that have an impact on teaching and learning.

Utah’s public schools spend a significant amount of taxpayer money each year purchasing or licensing curriculum materials and other learning resources. Given the limited nature of public funding available, Utah’s public schools can become better stewards of public resources by making greater use of open educational resources. Specifically, in cases where existing open educational resources provide a viable educational alternative to traditional curriculum materials, these should be strongly considered for adoption by the schools and districts. In cases where public funds are used to purchase or license materials instead of adopting educationally equivalent open educational resources, schools and districts have an obligation to justify these decisions to the taxpaying public.

Utah’s public schools also spend a significant amount of taxpayer money each year producing original curriculum materials and other learning resources. In order to provide the largest possible benefit to Utah’s public schools, any time public funds are used to produce curriculum materials these should immediately become open educational resources and be made available for free use, reuse, revision, and redistribution by other public schools and the public at large.

Such measures will create real cost savings for districts and schools. These cost savings can be redirected back into the schools and districts in a number of ways, including supporting teacher professional development regarding the discovery, creation, use, and sharing of open educational resources, summer funding for teachers to improve existing open educational resources, and summer funding for teachers to develop new open educational resources.

I realize right away that a bill espousing these principles may be far too right-headed to have a chance of passing, but as I was recently reminded, “being sure you will lose the fight does not free you from the moral obligation to fight the fight.” And yes, I realize this isn’t the proper format, &c., for a bill, but I’m only testing the ideas at this point. And yes, the ideas in the final paragraph probably don’t actually belong in the bill.

Know anyone who might want to sponsor legislation like this in Utah? Let me know! I’m doing my own searching in the meantime…

Open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.

If you ask me – which I realize you didn’t – open education is comprised of at least three things:

1. open educational resources
2. open learning support
3. open credentialing

At a bare minimum, you need content (1) in the form of websites, podcasts, videos, simulations, and yes, even textbooks and lectures. You need help, answers, and explanations (2) from someone when the content is stumping you; it’s also quite useful if you have social interactions (2) with others to help contextualize and explore the local relevance of what you’re studying. Finally, you need assessments (3) that help you determine if you’re really “getting it” or “can do it” or not (studies of metacognitive abilities show that we’re actually awful at judging this ourselves), and you’d also like someone to attest to others that you actually “got it” and “can do it” (3).

Perhaps I’ll simply begin another flame war over terminology with this post, but that’s not the point. The point is that “education :: educational resources” as “open education :: open educational resources.” Content is not education, and of course open educational resources aren’t enough. But they’re a first step, and we need to continue pushing down this path while we also explore new models of open learning support and open credentialing.

Tired of investing in expensive textbooks and proprietary software programs, Florida education officials are looking to an open online-learning platform to teach young students basic reading skills… Florida has adopted FreeReading.net on its short list of K-3 supplemental reading programs that schools may use state instructional money to purchase for the 2008-09 school year. This is the first open instructional program to be approved through an official state adoption, officials said.

The story also covers the Cape Town Declaration and the “open education movement” briefly. Hooray for Florida!

I say hilarious, because the spoof really is funny. However, the spoof is also deeply disappointing because its subtext is a completely irrational, anti-sustainability mindset that is the single biggest threat to the success of the open education movement.

There are several people in our community (I don’t need to call them out by name) who see any involvement in our efforts by companies as inherently evil and wrong. Involvement by individuals who might attempt to generate income is also wrong.

Though it’s dangerous and often wrong to analogize open education with open source, this is one case in which we may safely do so. Try to imagine the current state of Linux if the GPL contained a noncommercial clause… That is, try to imagine a Linux without Ubuntu. Try to imagine Linux without Transmeta supporting Linus. Try to imagine Linux without RedHat supporting Alan Cox. Try to imagine universities or governments deploying Linux if technical support weren’t commercially available from RedHat. Try to imagine Linux without hardware vendor support from Penguin Computing, VA, IBM, or Dell.

If in your mind you’re already asking “who cares whether or not universities or governments deploy? We’re trying to empower the people, not multinational corporations. And who calls tech support?” then you can stop reading right here. You seem comfortable living in the elitist world where only the uber-geeks need the benefits of open source. And since they already have them, congratulations – mission accomplished!

If you’re having trouble imagining what Linux would look like without the involvement and support of these companies, let me help you out – just think about where open education is today.

I’ll just pause a moment while that last paragraph sinks in.

For me the ethics of software and content distribution has always been about the nonrivalrous nature of the data. Once I’ve created a piece of software or some (digital) educational materials, they exist. I’ve created them for my own purpose, whatever it was, and now here they are. Once they’re posted on YouTube, or Flickr, or SlideShare (oops! more evil companies!), or the campus server, there is practically no cost involved in making and distributing perfect copies. And since there is practically no cost involved in making and distributing these copies, why would I charge money to copy and distribute them? Here is a perfect opportunity for me to help my neighbor at no cost to myself. And if I won’t even help my neighbor when there is no real cost to me, where are my ethics (let alone my Christianity)?

Technical support, unlike software and unlike content, is a rivalrous good. If Jane is providing you support on the phone, she can’t be answering my question on another line. Not only that, but if Jane is providing you support on the phone she can’t be out engaging in some other activity by which she can generate the income necessary to support herself and possibly her family. Jane’s ethics may occasionally cause her to volunteer her time in giving free technical support to friends and family, but obviously such volunteerism is not a long-term sustainable activity for Jane or her family.

Since software and content are nonrivalrous they can be freely given at no incremental cost (i.e., there’s no additional cost to me every time someone downloads my course). Since technical support is rivalrous it can be given only when costs are incurred (opportunity costs in the case of the volunteer and real costs in the case of the employer of a tech support person).

The important question then becomes – well, let’s try a few versions of it:

• Do you believe education or learning depend exclusively on nonrivalrous goods and services?
• Do you believe there is no need to provide rivalrous services in supporting learning?

When a learner has the inevitable question that the software and content cannot answer, what are they to do? And if they are to ask someone, if the learner is to “call tech support” as it were, how is the provider of that support supposed to sustain that answering activity over the long term? You might answer that “they should just go online and ask their question in a forum and wait for some good-hearted person to volunteer an answer.” I mention only in passing the information literacy prerequisites to finding the right forum in which to ask, which will preclude many of the people we want to reach from engaging in this asking activity at all.

To greatly oversimplify, the “depend on volunteerism” model of providing support for learners only works as long as (the number of people with expertise in the network) x (the amount of time they’re willing to volunteer answering questions) > (the number of questions asked) x (the complexity of those questions). Obviously there are more factors, but this communicates the basic message – the “depend on volunteerism” model relies on a high ratio of asnwerers to questions. (To be slightly more cynical about it, perhaps we depend on the information literacy barrier keeping those pesky know-nothings from screwing up the model.) When a billion new people plug into the network, will they bring more answers than questions? How willing to volunteer answers will they be? Do we really want to rely on this as our sole mode of support provision? Wouldn’t it be slightly more responsible and ethical to provide a more reliable service since we can?

If you believe that rivalrous services are a critical part of learning and of education, then you have two choices: (1) either welcome those who are willing to create sustainable ways of providing these services into our community, or (2) continue to try to drive the evil companies away, simultaneously guaranteeing that a critical part of the support infrastructure never comes into being. (If you believe that a purely volunteer model can meet the exponentially growing need for education services you either never learned basic computation or just haven’t seen the projections, like India’s need to build and staff 1500 new universities in the next seven years. Oh wait, I’ll just find 15,000 qualified faculty to volunteer their services full-time for the next several decades.)

Now, obviously I’m a big believer in the benefits of online self-organizing social systems. We’ve even built software to enable their formation. What I’m not a fan of is the religious zeal (which comes nigh unto jihad) against all those who will not accept the purity of the “one true model” of learners-only, PLE-based, teachers-be-damned, peer-to-peer, NC-clause laden, what degree? learning. There is an important place for this model of learning. There’s even a place for it in formal education. But there’s no place for this kind of closed-mindedness anywhere.

Anyway… what was I saying? Oh yes, I got a good laugh from the spoof. If you haven’t signed the Cape Town Declaration yet, you really should.