#ioe12 Open Licensing, Copyright, Public Domain, and the Common Man

David Bushnell, in his article entitled “Understanding Copyright and Licenses”, writes “Understanding copyright and licenses allows us to do what we do best: be creative.” (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/14/understanding-copyright-and-licenses/) and he’s right–everything we create is built on the knowledge and ideas of others. Yet, I would bet that most people have almost no understanding of copyright and licensing, and most believe it’s simply too complicated to understand.  What happens is that we end up with black and white  beliefs about usage that are just plain false: things are either “don’t touch my stuff unless you pay up” or “take freely with no restrictions”, and the gray area that exists between the two, referred to by the term “fair use”.

Copyrights were established primarily to encourage creativity by protecting the rights of the creators/discoverers in order to insure that they received benefits for their work: recognition, money, etc. For the public good, limits were established on the length of time the copyright would remain in effect. After that time, the work would go into the Public Domain.  Fair Use was established to allow for commentary, clarification, parody, research, education, and other similar activities, but “The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.” (http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html)

But even with all of these protections in place, this system has many faults including that they often bound the creator of the work themselves.

If I publish a written work (book, paper, etc) through a publisher, I sell my rights to the company in order for that work to be published. In fact, it is not me the writer that owns the copyright, but the publisher and I must abide by the same copyright rules everyone else must abide by. This copyright applies even to my own derivative works. What I do receive is a portion of the profits from the book for a time, and of course my name must be associated with use of my work. For the most part, that has worked out well, but not always. And sometimes copyright laws make it so that works are less well known than they would’ve been otherwise, because access is limited. Sometimes organic advertising of a piece is the best way for someone’s work to become well known–just think of all those viral videos on YouTube!

Newer forms of licensing (Creative Commons for example) grant a creator with much greater control over how and when their work can be used, while providing more opportunity for creativity inspired by the work, or based on the work.  While understanding the licenses, and how they work, may take a bit of time to learn, understanding them is not out of reach for the common man. In fact, there is a little game, that was part of the Open Licensing unit, that is perfect for understanding how to use Creative Commons Licensing and how to use creations with a Creative Commons License on them: http://indstudy1.org/univ/355460515034/Flash/Lesson2/PracticeVersion.html

 

A new year and a new venture. I’m currently enrolled in the Open Education course hosted by David Wiley: http://openeducation.us/welcome and working my way towards some badges.  I’ve begun a study group to work through this course with me: The OER Taskforce for the ESC Center for Distance Learning. We will earn badges together, and at the same time work on a document, that defines the various aspects of Open Education, which will be published for the college. We will also be presenting, as a group, at the Center’s upcoming conference and at the All College Conference–sharing our work.

 

As we wait for the dawn of this new year

Every year, at about this time, I make a list of all the things I accomplished during the year. It helps me to reflect on the year, stimulates my memory, and encourages me. So, as the New Year has arrived in various parts of the world already and is moving around the globe, I wanted to add my two cents to all the other two cents on what were the big “things” in education this year. My vote goes to the continued development around open education and the particular focus on credentialing: OER University which held its first meeting of the anchor partners this year, the Badges for Learning  (Open Badges) initiative, and the announcement of the certificate program soon to be offered as MITx. I believe these will impact education in ways we’ve yet to imagine. There are some tides of change that happen regardless of those who would like to stop it. The cost of education, and the importance of it, are driving new ways of achieving what’s necessary. The future, though it is right outside our door, is yet to be seen.

Happy New Year everyone!

Student Feedback for Assessment

About a year ago I was working with an institution on its adoption of an Online Course Evaluation tool. It was a rather long process which included getting information on options and associated costs, piloting the program, responding to the concerns of the faculty about how the surveys would be used, setting up the tool so that the surveys would go out in emails to students, developing the survey tool itself (the questions) and then analyzing the results of the surveys to determine if the questions did, in fact, give us the type of information we were looking for.

Sadly, one of the greatest hurdles was the reluctance on the part of faculty to have a survey at all. I say “sadly” because such surveys can be invaluable for an instructor, a course designer, and the institution itself. If nothing else, well constructed surveys can  help in determining if a program has redundancies, have difficulty navigating the course, or if students are unclear about the learning objectives.

Course surveys should occur, at the very least, at the end of a course.  Even though information gathered at that time would be too late to make the course better for those students, the information can improve the course for the future students, and perhaps even improve the program as a whole. Too many instructors have the belief that students do not know enough to be able to determine whether there were clear objectives, whether they were met, whether there were unnecessary redundancies, or even if the work assigned was too much (or too little) for a 3 credit course.  My experience has taught me that students do know, and we should ask them.

The ideal would be to survey students at the very beginning of a course, at the midterm, and at the end.  The purpose of the beginning survey is to determine what students may already know or have experienced, and what they expect from the class. The midterm survey should be given to determine if the course is meeting its goals, and to determine if the students are struggling with a particular part of the course. The benefit of this is that necessary changes can be made before the course is done and it’s too late. We’ve already discussed the final evaluation.

If the questions are framed right, the survey can even cause students to reflect on their learning–to think about what they’ve done and learned. It can be used to develop metacognitive skills. There is a free tool available to assist with the development of these surveys. The site is called Student Assessment of  Learning Gains, and you can access it here: http://www.salgsite.org/ You can use the wizard to create your own surveys, and you can browse a library of surveys to get an idea of what other instructors are asking.

Assessing what we are doing, all along the way, is an important part of insuring we are meeting our students needs and expectations.

MITx: a game changer!

The Open CourseWare movement began in 2002 when MIT began offering its courses for free online. Since then, the Open CourseWare offerings have increased significantly, and the effects of that growth have spawned calls for credentialing of learning achieved via OCW.  This year has seen some pretty spectacular progress towards this with the founding of OERU, Badges for Learning, and the offerings of Stanford, to name a few.  But, the year is not over and so it seems fitting that in these final weeks of 2011 MIT would announce MITx.  There are two parts to this announcement: a new learning platform, and the credentialing of learning through MITx.

“MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

  • organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
  • feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
  • allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
  • operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.”
    http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html

There are two important parts to this announcement, the biggest being that MIT will be offering certificates for those who complete coursework through MITx. At at time when there is fierce competition for students, when many colleges are seeing enrollments declining, and the number of online offerings increasing, this is HUGE!  Why? Because it is quite possible that obtaining a certificate from MITx would be as valuable, or more valuable, than a degree from many other institutions.  And the cost, though it has not yet been announced, is sure to be competitive as well.  As I said in the title: a game changer.

The less noticeable point of the announcement refers to a new platform for learning. Those who’ve followed the world of LMS (Learning Management Systems) will remember that MIT was one of the institutions involved in the development of SAKAI–an Open Source LMS that, while picking up some market share, never was a big competitor for Moodle.  The announcement today talks about a new platform stating:

“MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings.”

The question is, will this go beyond the LMS and even ePortfolios to a new Personal Learning Environment, an idea that has risen to the forefront of many discussions on what learning platforms need to look like? What MITx and its platform will look like and do is yet to be seen, but there is no doubt it will change a great deal in regards to education in the future.

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  • A critical look at education: assessment of learning, institutional assessments, and assessments of the education system