What Web 2.0 can teach Open Education

Web 2.0 is all about a move to user created, collaborative media. If you look at the top sites on the internet, 5 of the 10 are completely made of user generated content. What makes them work?

There have been some great research projects done on these sites. For example, accuracy criticisms were addressed in the Nature study on wikipedia.

Methods of this meta-study:

• Empirical Articles only (Hard to find! Only 53 existed out of 200k on wikipedia for example)
• GRounded theory approach (Thematic open coding)
• 131 Themes were found

Top theme: Content Quality

Ideas for Web 2.0

1. Individual production
2. Power of the crowd
3. Epic Scale
4. Architecture of participation

Top reasons they work well: User Community and Tagging

So what can we learn about design:

1. Build with users in mind
2. Allow some user control
3. Opportunity to have a voice
4. Have user interactions

But sometimes, giving the users the control backfires. Sometimes a faculty member can create an online course and find that the users editing it take it in the wrong way, even posting the opposite meaning and interpretation.  One member of the audience even noted having an instructor ask to have their name removed from an article they originally developed!

Creating Sustainable Open Education

A few financial models of Open Education Resources:

• Value Added – Free, charge for extra services like documentation or support
• Freemium – Restricting some set of the features to only paying customers
• Sponsorship - TV model
• Producer Side Payment – Contributers pay to be included

 

 

Only two entities have resources to pay, Individuals or Institutions. Since we go back to being “free to anyone” that means we are looking for instutions to pay. But what are they getting for their money?

How to do it?

• Value should have an existing budget line item
• Value purchase should be only a few decisions makers
• Value purchase decision should happen in a short time
• Value should not dramatically increase your work or overhead

Considering Price Point and Market Size - Find out the highest price possible for this value and determine that amount that would need to be sold to make it. Can you support that kind of production/support?

The main way they have had success is with membership services. At the basic level, they rebrand and host the software for institutions. Above that, they provide more support. They can roll out a custom version in only minutes each.

One big lesson is that Search Engine Optimization is an imperative for both the business side and the mission side of most OERs. It needs to be found!

I would assume this also means that for an open source initiative to succeed, communication and PR in general is essential.

Magnatune, a Creative Commons music label (Teresa Malango)

The old model of mainstream music labels has some problems. Music genres like classical, are on the edge of being cut because they are not bringing in enough sales. Many Bands have a hard time to surviving because so little of the sales of their music ever makes it back to them because of the label’s re-cooping costs.

Magnatune is trying something new. It is a consumer and a distribution business all under the Creative Commons licenses. In specific, they use: 

• BY – Attribution to allow a try before you buy in full (not 30 second snippits)
• NC – They can be used in non-commercial projects, schools, blogs, etc.
• SS – Share and Share alike allow partnerships for remixers

 

They have 264 artists representing a large range of generas. They are not trying to have millions of songs, they are trying to curate beautiful things. For example, classical music accounts for a 1/3 of Magnatune’s revenue, while the regular labels have seen classical music decline from 20% in 1988 to .75% in 2006.

They take their model, “We are not evil,” seriously

• All music is original or in the public domain.
• Artists remain all ownership
• 50/50 with artist
• Contract is non-exclusive so artists can work with other labels. To survive artists must diversify
• No musician makes their entire income from magnatune, but many can only be heard on magnatune
• Flexible pricing asks “How much do you want to pay?” and radiohead showed how it worked. 1.65 million were sold when the physical cds were offered evan after many people decided to download for free.

 

Music is a $12 Billion a year buisness, $8 Billion is through licensing. Magnatune allows a client to type in information about their project then provide a real-time quote for a flat fee, one time payment and immediate HQ download. In the regular world, it takes between 8-18 months for license clearance. The ease works great for legal use by filmmakers, second life creators, bloggers, educators, students, home movie makers.

 

For example, this a snippet from their site when I told it that I wanted to make a class podcast:

To get the best-quality audio: we ask that you buy the album if you want to get a perfect quality audio version. You can then use the album for free in your student project.

Download 128k mp3s with speaking on them: You can also download the MP3s for this album. Each mp3 will end with spoken text that says “you just heard…” If you’d rather not have the speaking at the end of the mp3s (and we assume you would) please see option number one above.

The TUSK learning system on mobile devices

TUSK is a system to collect and organize content assets for Tufts university. 

It has some cool affordances:

1. A meta-vocabulary is referenced when a term comes up within any document. For example, “high blood pressure” might automatically link to the “hypertension” glossary even if the author doesn’t tag it.
2. Vertical and horizontal of integration and reuse of information. This means information is not “silo”ed into courses
3. Personal knowledge management

Tufts University’s mission is to support global health and internationalism. This creates challenges.

1. Lack of computers in partner schools
2. Students need content “on the go”

 

“I think it’s time that we recognize that for the majority of the worlds’ population, and for the forseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool and the school book, and the ….” Joel Selanikio

 

• 300 Million computers in the world vs. 3 Billion cell phones (metcalf)
• Spending in the dev world in telecommunications is larger than other sections(Hammond)
• Nearly 100% of partners have phones, less than 10% have computers

 

“The question we should be asking ourselves, then, is not “how can we buy, and support, and supply electricity for, a laptop for every schoolteacher” (much less every schoolchild), but rather “what mobile software can we write that would really add value for a schoolteacher (or student, or health worker, or businessperson) and that could run on the computer they already have in their pocket?” Joel Selanikio

 

My thoughts exactly.

Open Courseware Consortium Toolkit Launch

The OpenCourseWare Consortium encourages the creation of OpenCourseWare projects at institutions around the world. There are currently over 6,000 institutions participating in different ways and provide resources on how to become a part of the movement. These are the benefits:

• Institution – Advances the institutional mission, stimulates innovation, and generates alumni and community pride.
• Academic departments – Showcases departments’ offerings, enhances faculty and student recruitment, accelerates adoption of digital materials in teaching, and fosters collaboration among faculty.
• Faculty – Provides a new vehicle for contributing to faculty members’ discipline, affords greater visibility for themselves and their work, provides a valuable service to faculty for enhancing the presentation of course materials, provides an information resource and embraces faculty values.
• Students – Helps plan their courses of study and provides supplementary study materials.

Here are some of the interesting Universities that are participating from the US:

UC Berkley - They have posted a few dozen courses in webcast format just for the Fall 08 semester

Notre Dame – Mostly SCORM content packets of resources and assignments

MIT – Videos and Resources for a hundred or so courses, some in languages other than english

10 Years of Open Education (David Wiley)

Once upon a time, David wrote a js calculator and realized that digital resources were magic. They are different than than a physical asset because millions of people can use them at the same time. On top of this, the GPL “freedom” movement was picking up because of Richard (Stallman?) Freedom scares people away though, so they started to call it “open source”

He thought, “we should do this for educational materials,” and the term open content was born. So in 1999, they started thinking of educators as publishers. A couple conversations revieavled that publishers wanted to:

• Not be undercut
• Be given credit

The open publication license created an IP around this and was picked up by a number of books, such as all of red hat’s tech documents. It had problems, but “God sent us Larry” and Creative Commons which cleared up all the legal problems and misunderstandings.

 

So how much CC exists after these 10 years?

• 75m flikr images
• 7 million wikipedia articles
• 430k audio files at sound flick
• 8k soungs on magnatune
• 400k vids in rever
• 6.4k open course consortium universities
• 16k curriki k-12 resources
• 1600 capetown declaration institutions

So how about the next 10 years?
Flatworld Knowledge – making textbooks available though open source
It is in private beta right now in 25 universities, but makes money by selling different versions.

Open High School of Utah
Public, completely online that can only use open ed resources

New Models in Higher Education For example, Western Governor’s University – No courses, simple assessments and certifications. They don’t care how or where you learned it.

Wiki Educator

The first presentation of the Open Education conference jumped right into a large community owned curriculum development project, wikieducator.org. 

It is goverened internationally ,using a console consisting of a mix of elected and nominated members from Asia, the Indies, Africa, the US, Europe.

The Open Education Resource Handbook is one of the premiere projects being developed on the site. It is addressing these challenges:

 

• developing royalty free textbooks for primary and secondary schools;
• simplifying licensing of resources for authors and educators;
• packaging and indexing educational materials so they are easier to find and use;
• nurturing online communities for teachers and authors; and
• growing open education as a field and a movement.

One of the cool features of wiki educator, is the ability to create a collection of wiki pages, brand the items you selected (with a logo for example) then generate a pdf document. All the advantages of WIKI for development, all the advantages of PDF for packaging and print. Brilliant.

 

Growth rates of the site have exceeded expectations, and participation in creation exceeds the ratios wikipedia runs with. They say it is because of the investment into the community itself. They conduct free workshop in exchange for the promise for the teachers to share some of their knowledge. Right now a few thousand lesson plans exist.

They began by establishing foundations by creating wiki skills and hitting the skepticism around OAR.

The project has outgrown its original home, and will now be hosted at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand. They are revolutionary institution in the sense that they enforce a blanket OAR IP agreement. Everything created there is open sourced through CC. Everything!

SOmething interesting about the way wikieducator.org works is that it works on multiple modes of funding. They aim to pay some authors to seed high quality materials.

Question: Let’s talk more about quality. Many projects that rely on the “wisdom of the crowd” have very low quality results. How do expect to address that? 

Response: “Quality” varies depending on where you are. We are worried.

Question: Wikipedia is all about refrence material. How might Wikieducator might go beyond and become interactive, etc.

Response: Our main goal is to produce OARs to be used by teachers.

Question: Any examples of how it is being used?

Response: Otago Polytechnic is using the material in about 20 courses. Students can sign up for courses without being part of the university, but they need to be enrolled to receive a certificate.

Question: It is very international, does the system support multiple languages?

Response: WE do have a few versions. For example, Hindi and french are going well. Others are more challenging.