Process

In order to notify faculty of open publishing, during the CTL design process faculty will be asked to sign the BYU OER Participation form. This form will:

• Describe the BYU OER project and the mission of CTL
• Acknowledge BYU ownership of IP produced by or in conjunction with CTL
• Explain CC By-NC-SA license
• Describe possible OER usage

Faculty who sign the BYU OER Participation form acknowledge the aforementioned and may choose to have their name (along with BYU and CTL) attributed to the OER. Faculty may opt out of attribution or not sign the form, however such refusal will not alter BYU’s ownership of CTL-produced IP or CTL’s ability to publish and share the CTL product as OER.

Technology

(The following is hypothesis only at this stage)

CTL OER products will be stored on a publicly accessible BYU OER web site (powered by Equella). The web site will:

• provide search features based on title, description, and other metadata
• list OER by topic or academic department
• attribute OER to BYU, CTL, and faculty contributor(s)
• demonstrate OER
• ? support direct linking to instances of OER
• support downloading of OER as modular packages
• ? provide source code or raw data of OER where applicable
• ? support community interaction by allowing user
• ? allow registered user commenting on OER
• ? allow registered user keyword tagging of OER

SPARC provides a form that faculty can sign and send with manuscript publishing agreement we need a NSF mandate to automatically

This Week’s Challenge

Figure out how to put Center for Teaching and Learning resources into a library for open sharing.

1. Faculty disclosure in CTL process
2. License recommendation / “default” IP policy with override for third party publishing
3. Figure out Equella thing for publishing

Jon Mott recommends Equella for publishing platform. Equella is a CMS built by post-Bb guys, The Learning Edge International (JMS: Is it CMS or LMS? Sounds like the latter). An experimental Equella environment is available at BYU. “Activity assembler” available for sequencing LOs. Bill Lundt can talk about it.

(JMS: All these LMS innovators [GoCourse, eInstructure, Equella] had better consider what their “moat” will be to beat out Bb, D2L, Angel, Moodle, etc.)

IP Licensing

In context of CTL “walk-in” center, What license do we recommend? (JMS: Is CTL able to license materials? Does BYU have/need a process for approving CC licensing? I suppose we will find out…)

Perhaps CC By-NC (I am currently anti-SA, but that might change).

Dr. Wiley suggests SA may not be terribly meaningful. John Hilton gave a good case study, paraphrased:

If I publish By-NC then someone takes and remixes the content, s/he is not obligated to release under By-NC because of lack of the SA, so could a derivative version be licensed as By and then commercialized? Seems like the answer is yes.

(JMS: This sounds like a good thing to me as a creator. I only want to disallow commercialization of copies, but not necessarily of significantly altered works, remixed works, or derivatives.)

Justin: If NC then Creative Works Office doesn’t have to get involved(?)

(JMS: When in flow workers seem exceedingly efficient. How do we foster a work environment that inhibits interruption of workers’ flow?)

Documentary Filmmaker’s Guide to Fair Use

Here’s what we’re going to claim as Fair Use. If anyone has a problem with it, they can deal with us as a whole.

Movement amongst higher ed institutions in the works to apply Fair Use to media held within an OER (without altering the license of the © work).

Fair Use

1. Purpose (educational non-profit)
2. Nature of copyrighted (e.g. factual vs creative works)
3. Amount and significance
4. Impact of the use on potential market

BYU Center for Teaching and Learning Walk-In Center

• Anything within scope of employment belongs to creator.
• Anything created with any additional BYU resources, such as CTL staff, belongs to BYU.

CTL OER as default: we will share, but faculty may opt-out. Would such a form hurt the culture of BYU? Justin suggests a one-time form to opt-in.

CTL has 40-50 new projects a month, e.g. scanned images, PPT backgrounds, Flash animations, video, et c.

What about intentionality? Capture directions for use? Do we preserve teaching info as metadata? CTL Tracker tracks information. What about forum/discussion area for teacher-contributed suggestions for use? Could be. I’m seeing this like a Podcast on a blog platform.

(JMS: The CTL Tracker sounds like a great way to start and track a new project. Sounds like my original course design mapping app, but better. I wonder what software they use? Something home-grown? We need one of these, similar to our dP but more expansive, updating everthing such as Google Spreadsheet. How could dP be mod’ed to facilitate this?)

Independent Study might be able to contribute 10hrs a week to uploading OER to platform.

We could/should also go back in time to get permission on existing materials because there are so many great materials. Also, we could get MBA students working on case studies, Engineering students working on problem-based learning scenarios. (JMS: I’m feeling overwhelmed by the availability of resources her.)

(JMS: At UVU could we get a temporary blanket approval for OER from the President’s office, e.g. to say, From May 2009 – April 2010 we authorize all UVU-owned, DE-developed learning materials to be licensed under a CC license for use as OER. Renewable with signatory.)

(JMS: Seems like the first hurdle that we are skipping is getting BYU approval for CC licensing of CTL materials. Will this be done from CTL up?)

Seth: wants to go back to Equella and the importance of metadata. I agree, but the technical aspects of this seem far more easily manageable than the licensing process, which frightens me.

Tracker creates a new folder for each project. When project is completed it creates an archive folder. Completed product is moved physically and project folder is deleted. Is there a readme? No, you find data through the Tracker. Tracker stores faculty information. (JMS: How would we do this with dP? Is it built-in?) JMS: Could tracker take stored info and spit out a readme? Why not?

Could we provide both final file and source file(s)? 4 Rs. These would be uploaded/handed off to (OER) librarian for archiving and indexing. (JMS: Does DE need to get UVU librarians involved? Who is the institutional librarian at UVU? Jean D’emall might be or might know.

(ClassTop’s plugin uses Facebook to reuse OER and create self-organizing learning communities.)

Do we need to actually ask faculty to opt-in, or does this wrongly imply that faculty own the materials (in conflict with BYU IP policy)?

In an opt-in form we articulate that the materials are BYU owned under IP policy and that faculty acknowledge this when opting-in. We would do so as a professional courtesy, for even though faculty do not own this, they think they do. We are at the early stage of nurturing a cultural shift towards openness. Baby steps.

Is that Tracker software open source? (JMS: I might be able to mod it as suggested if UVU can have a license to the software. Will follow up at CTL afterwards)

Clarified that we will draft the document for CTL to request upper administrative permission to license ALL CTL-products as OER.

Spend Thursday as a group writing proposal document.

Class has moved from Know and Understand to Analyze and Apply.

• Reuse – verbatim (easy)
• Redistribute – share (fairly easy)
• Revise – derivatives (harder)
• Remix – combinations

Open is a continuum; “Things can be more or less open, like a door.” Watch for 2R vs 4R OER. 2R is waaay better than nothing, but 4R (should be) far superior still. E.g. open Access movement (free access to peer-reviewed articles). Paraphrasing Wayne Mackintosh: “I’d rather have an #@$!? open resource over a great proprietary resource because I can fix the #@$!? resource.”

Media issues outside of licenses (SLAM):

1. Meaningfully editable? (e.g. HTML vs. JPG/PDF of notes or printed text)
2. Self-sourced? Ready-to-edit and ready-to-use? (e.g. HTML –> HTML vs. fla –> swf )
3. Access to editing tools? (e.g. HTML vs. MS OneNote)
4. Level of expertise? (e.g. DOC/ODT doc vs. 3D model, Flash quiz)

If you’re not paying attention, an open-licensed OER may still be “closed” for all intents and purposes, because of the 4 Rs.

OCW Examples:

• MIT Simplicity Theory. Clearly handwriting on lined binder notes, scanned in.
• MIT Mathematics. Powerpoint and LaTeX source files are available upon permission.
• MIT Linear algebra. Video, transcripts, downloads in different formats, YouTube.
• OLI Predicting college success. Course has Flash-based quizzes and diagrams.

Context suggests meaning. E.g. Airplane: Q. “Surely you’re joking.” A. “I’m not, and don’t call me Shirley.” and Police Squad: Q. “Cigarette?” A. “Yes, I know.”

Putting things in time or place suggests more meanings. (e.g. Obama, Obama by Lincoln, Obama by bin Laden, Obama flanked by two black athletes). The more things are put together, the more we specify intended meaning.

We can usually tell when things don’t fit the context.

Size of a resource is a function of the context inside the OER.

David’s reusability paradox. An OER/LO teaches effectively vs easy to reuse. (JMS: this plays into what I recall of George Siemens’s work, especially re. connectivity. Will teaching invest in helping students make connections, creating or finding context. Does the (immediate) future of networked information culture require that users be able if not deft at finding connections and making context or meaningful connections between disparate pieces of information? Will technology soon be able to facilitate connecting or providing context for an individual resource? Would “new” ideas of information fluency allow students to adapt to the deficits of high reusability? For instance, scanning and ignoring non-critical information?)

MIT structured content like course so context is apparent, but you can take the context apart. The structure is an aid for helping you find and use individual components. Course as (full of) disposable content. (JMS: Another good perspective on my recent conflicts with textbook publisher e-packs.)

Collections — a collection of marbles doesn’t exist in a strict sequence, but a string of pearls does.

Referenced today’s article in Chronicle on “courseocentrism”. What can we do with “courses” that we have been too limited to do? 2R “open” resources have been accused of being a “Trojan horse”, as evidence of hedgemony of the West, of cultural imperialism. (JMS: Whatever.)

I can’t make this post without reflecting on a myriad of others who have written on (and, more importantly, engaged in) openness, but most prominent on my mind today is Scott Leslie‘s recent post, Planning to Share Versus Just Sharing, in which he pulls the curtain on institutional decisions to share. While Scott notes his intention was not to address OER projects, the points he hits on resonated strongly with our open project. In the comments Jim Groom calls out “the inanity and paralysis that pervades the whole conversation around sharing at an institutional level”, and I must concede the past three years of slowing and intermittently petitioning administration to let us license stuff under Creative Commons has been paralyzing and inane indeed. Chris Lott notes, “It’s easy to overlook how much easier planning and getting read and getting ready to get ready are than actually doing anything.” So true. And now there should be no more excuses for UVU.

The most important part of this announcement is not that UVU will be engaging in opencourseware, nor even that we can officially join the OpenCourseWare Consortium (though we intended to do so, and soon!)—the key for me is having the chance to explore and articulate a vision for openness at UVU, and how we might proceed in a way that contributes uniquely and with impact.

Scott argues that a problem with institutionally-guided sharing is “they [the planners/sharers] didn’t actually know what the compelling need was, it just sounded like a good idea at the time.” In our case the “need” has driven me from the beginning. Instead of just saying, “Hey, OCW is cool and the OCWC has a lot of big names (not to mention the press coverage!)” I had to understand why anyone in the world would care that Utah Valley University, a former trade college, would be sharing it’s course content, activities, and educational materials.

Really, with so many bigger, better funded, and more reputable institutions out there doing this, what’s the point?

The answer: Because we are a trade college. Because we have a vocational history. Because we have dozens of expert faculty in vocations and trades, and skilled students preparing to excel in their fields.

Because learning materials in the vocations and trades have the greatest potential for impacting in a positive way the opencourseware audience that everyone talks about but very few reach: the people who can’t afford to go to college, but desperately need the education to survive. The people who need to kick-start a new career to improve their lives. The people who have intrinsic motivation to learn something new from the ground up. Am I being idealistic? Perhaps, but I maintain my idealism is better than PR/marketing-oriented cynicism. UVU Open may encourage students to attend, but hopefully by sparking enthusiasm with our materials, not through bylines in The Chronicle.

So to me it is of critical importance that UVU Open encourage sharing and opening of learning materials from the trades and vocational departments as a priority. If we put any money into content development or publishing it should be focused there, and it should aim at complete learning content published in sequence.

Now UVU is not just a vocational/trade school (though I daresay there is more than one administrator who would like to de-emphasize that fact now that we are a university); most of our programs are in the liberal arts and sciences, and I know faculty in those areas will be interested in sharing what they are doing, too. Because we have only recently become a university, I know we have a lot of faculty who are seasoned and enthusiastic teachers, not researchers, and that may make them more likely to share what they do best. So our approach has to facilitate these folks as well, and keep the process as unencumbered as possible. To this end, the process we have proposed neglects the OCW/OER labels, and focuses on re-licensing of UVU-owned (“work-for-hire”) content under a Creative Commons license. At this point it’s a single form, and once it’s been signed by UVU administration the faculty member will be free to publish the content under any medium available.

Speaking of publishing media, because we’ve never solicited grant dollars for endeavor, we’ve always known we would have to do openness on the cheap. In fact we have a designated budget of zero. This is not a drawback; rather, this fit perfectly with our intention of putting the power of openness into the hands of the authoring faculty, not in the workflows of a committee or team. Openness and sharing should be an integral part of the authoring/publishing process, not an ancillary process. In order to do this our technical solutions would have to be inexpensive to implement, inexpensive to maintain, and easy to use. Some options:

• The technical publishing plan has included using Moodle as an OER/OCW-publishing platform. If you teach on Moodle, you can publish your stuff on Moodle. Simple as that.
• We now have a (pilot-phase) campus wiki, called WikiLearn. It’s open to faculty and the students they teach, and is organized by department or academic discipline. This will be a place faculty can go to author content, and, surprise! it’s open to the public, too.
• For a number of years campus IT has hosted a basic Web server on research.uvu.edu, and folks using that will simply want to indicate the CC-status of any open content published there.
• I plan to work toward the implementation of a campus blog service as well, inspired in part by my own joy in blogging and Jim Groom’s work on UMW’s WordPress MU system. This platform is importantly different from a wiki but still naturally open and conducive to sharing, and will give faculty (and students?) a place that they feel they have ownership of.

So that’s the news. There’s still a lot of work to be done before UVU Open is worth checking out; not all of the dominoes that we’ve set in place are still standing, but with the power to tip the first one we are in an exciting place.

I know this very active practice rubbed off on me, from my willingness to do car repairs, to the palpable responsibility of doing house fixes myself, to doing any sort of grunt tasks on all sorts of projects at work. But I worked on the most memorable DIY projects as an undergrad in college: a self-published collection of poetry by amateur writers from my region in Utah. The project took about a year, but I ended up with an amusing collection of poems with audio recordings featuring the writers themselves that I called “Speak Black Spots”.

As I reflect on this project, my thoughts steer me to consider my motivations for DIY–with things like car repairs and house work I admit it’s largely been a matter of finance; with other things my DIY attitude is often born of a “If you want something done right…” mentality–execution of ideas, to me, is sometimes too precious to hand off to someone else; with “Speak Black Spots” my motivation may have been altogether different: I believed that what I wanted to do had no place in the traditional publishing outlets, and DIY would let me provide freedom of expression, creative control over the product, and immediacy. At the time I thought I was very punk, in fact too punk for punk. The end result was nothing famous or exemplary, but looking back at the last decade I realize this project predicted the attraction and power that self-publishing on the Web would hold for me.

So this all goes far afield of Jennifer’s questions (the most important one, I think, “If we speak and don’t do, who will?”), so let me refocus on the idea that DIY happens for good reasons, one of those being because the institutions or traditional processes don’t always serve the users. I think the sluggishness and bureaucracy of these institutions is born of cautiousness and self-protection–arguably acceptable reasoning when taxpayer/investor dollars and learning outcomes are at stake (this is essentially the conservative point of view which reacts against what may appear to be knee-jerk demands for “change”), but this reality also ensures that there will always be a place for–no, a need for DIY.