Open Education
K. Pisutova
**
Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
Empire State College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA
Katarina.Pisutova@esc.edu
Abstract— Introduction to some concepts of openness in
education. This presentation addresses concepts of Open
Licensing (Creative Commons licenses), Open Content,
Open Coursewere, Open Educational Resources, and Open
Teaching (Massive Open Online Courses – MOOC). The
presentation loosely follow structure of David Wiley’s
Introduction to Openness in Education course[1], but
chooses areas to focus on. The main focus is kept on open
teaching and Massive Open Online Courses.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Openness and sharing has always been part of education
process. Sharing knowledge is the very definition of
education. In his TEDxNYED presentation [2], David
Wiley compares sharing in education to overcoming our
inner two-year old, screaming “MINE!”. However,
society’s proprietary rules encourage our inner two-years
old. And even in education, where sharing should be the
core of the process we have rules, it encourage us not to
share knowledge freely.
Internet gave us means for easy and immediate sharing of
knowledge and within the last decade movement for more
openness and sharing is gaining wide support in
education including changes in institutional approaches
and policies of many universities. Empire State College
(ESC) decided to join the movement. ESC became a
founding anchor partner in the OER University (OERu).
A Learning Resources task force (which I was a member
of) was created in fall 2011,
to investigate the
possibilities of using these emerging open resources
within the ESC courses and for other open learning
initiatives. In an effort to familiarize themselves with
terms and concepts and to explore the issues related to
open resources, in Spring 2012 the members of the task
force went together as a group through open course on
Openness to Education taught by David Wiley [1].
This is an open course, consisting of 12 topics: Open
Licensing, Open Source, Open Content, Open
Courseware, Open Educational Resources, Open Access,
Open Science, Open Data, Open Teaching, Open
Assessment, Open Business Models and Open Policy.
Each topic contains video and text resources. Participants
maintain personal blogs and are required to post a blog
article reflecting on each of the topics. Final blog article
should contain links to each of the topic article and after
instructor’ review of all the articles, participants can
receive course completion badges.
We proceed through the course as a group, met physically
every two weeks, reviewed video resources together and
discussed and analyzed issues arising within each topic.
This article briefly summarizes key issues from the
course, provides links to course resources, as well other
resources on the topics. However, I pick and choose
topics of interest, so this article doesn’t provide full
summary of the course. I also focus a lot on issues that
raised from our discussions, as well as discussions from
different conferences, where we as a group presented
summaries of issues studied in the course.
II. OPEN LICENSING
Open licensing was the first topic of the course and it
also was the only one focusing more on regaining
practical skills in being able to recognize and use Creative
Commons licenses.
Video resource for this part is TEDx speech by
Lawrence Lessig [3], where he clearly explains why
licenses that allow sharing, re-using and modifying work
of others are necessary for creativity. He uses Walt Disney
and his most famous classic movies (such as Cinderella,
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) as an example of
extraordinary work of using and remixing work of others.
Unfortunately later Disney Company made sure that
nobody else can do to them what they did to brothers
Grimm. Unfortunately, recent copyright laws are rather
restrictive in copying, distributing, editing, remixing and
building upon work of others.
Creative Commons licenses are a way for creators to
allow others to copy, distribute, edit, remix and build upon
their work still within copyright laws. Basic description
of licenses could be found on Creative Commons website
[4]. The course’s website also provides link to a Creative
Commons License game [5]. Understanding licenses
means knowing how to use them and this game is a
perfect tool to make us realize it is not simple.
III.
OPEN SOURCE AND OPEN CONTENT
Concept and reality of open source software has been
around for a while. Some 15 years ago, open source
software was not extremely user friendly comparing to
commercial products and was considered used exclusively
by computer geeks. Times have changed, for instance
Moodle increases its share of the Learning Management
Systems market, has most language mutations, user
friendliness is comparable and there are free tutorials and
instructions to be found for each and every feature.
Similarly open content is not anymore just stuff nobody
would buy anyway.
In an effort to define open content, Wiley [6] uses
analogy of an open door. It can be opened fully or just
half-way or just tiny bit, but it is still not closed. The same
way, open content can come with no restrictions or some
restrictions for its free use. However, the primary
permissions for open content usage are based on "4Rs
Framework:"[6]
1.
Reuse - the right to reuse the content in its
unaltered / verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the
content)
2.
Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or
alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into
another language)
3.
Remix - the right to combine the original or
revised content with other content to create something
new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
4.
Redistribute - the right to share copies of the
original content, your revisions, or your remixes with
others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
IV.
OPEN COURSEWARE
In 2001, MIT made a groundbreaking decision to
publish content of their courses online. At the time, they
made it clear [7], that they are giving away materials, not
the education. According to one faculty member at the
press conference in 2001 [7], "raw material is not true
education." Open CourseWare (OCW) isn't replacing
traditional course work at MIT. According to the faculty
panelists, a "true" MIT education comes from the
interaction of the students with faculty, students with
students, students with lab work and equipment, facilities,
community, etc.
Another way to think of OCW is as a publication, rather
than a form of distance learning. It is material; not
instruction.
MIT was then quickly followed by the launch of similar
projects at Yale, the University of Michigan, and the
University of California Berkeley and many more
educational institutions around the world.
Open
Courseware Consortium now unites over 200 institutions
from over 40 countries around the world [8] with
materials from thousands of courses accessible.
V.
OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
Most current definition of Open Educational Resources
(OER) according to UNESCO[9] is:
“Open Educational Resources are digitised materials
offered freely and openly for educators, students and selflearners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and
research.”
So as opposed to OCW here we are talking not just
about materials from college courses, but any and all
educational materials and resources.
OER movement got support from private donors such
as Open Society Institute or Shuttleworth Foundation,
international organizations like UNESCO and government
policies. Amount of OER online can be a bit
overwhelming. The source we as a group found very
useful is the OER Handbook [10].
VI.
OPEN TEACHING
MOOC – a Massive Open Online Course is a next step
beyond providing course content and resources. MOOCs
are courses provided by universities a student can take for
free. The MOOC is defined as follows [11]:
 The course is open (all work is done where
people can read and comment on it)
 The course is cost free (you can take it without
paying for participating in the course – payment
for credit is possible though)
 The work in the course is shared with all the
people taking it
 The course is participatory – you gain by
engaging with other people’s work (there usually
aren’t specific assignments, but engagement with
other people and materials)
 The course is distributed (all participant’s blogs,
discussions and contributions are part of the
course, but don’t reside on the same website)
The first MOOC was taught by David Wiley at Utah
State University in 2007. This was a graduate course in
open education that was opened to participation by anyone
around the world. About 50 people from eight countries
participated. In 2008 George Siemens from Athabasca
University and Stephen Downes from National Research
Council in Canada run another open online course called
“Connectivism and Connective Knowledge”. In this
course participated 25 tuition-paying students at the
University of Manitoba and 2,300 people all over the
world who took the class free of charge. The term MOOC
was also introduced with connection to this course [12].
More courses with increasing numbers of students
followed. In the fall 2011 over 160,000 people signed up
for a Stanford University’s course in Artificial
Intelligence.
At the Beginning of 2012 two private educational
companies - Coursera and Udacity (both started by
Stanford University professors) and non-profit initiative
Edx (common project of MIT and Harvard University)
focusing on MOOCs were launched.
MOOC development seems to go in two different
directions. One is represented by earlier MOOCs based on
connections, social networking and interaction – these
courses are called cMOOC and one is represented by
Coursera courses, referred to as xMOOC.
George Siemens [13] explains the difference between
the two: “our cMOOC model emphasises creation,
creativity, autonomy and social networking learning. The
Coursera model emphasises a more traditional learning
approach through video presentations and short quizzes
and testing. Put another way, cMOOCs focus on
knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs
focus on knowledge duplication”. He notes that in time
the xMOOCs “may well address the “drill and grill”
instructional methods that are receiving some criticism”.
Coursera gains new partnerships very fast. According to
an article from September 19, 2012 [14], Coursera
announced new partnership with 16 universities
worldwide to help them produce MOOCs. This more than
doubles the number of their institutional partners and
pushes number of Coursera courses over 200. However,
even though Coursera claims to be for-profit company, so
far they haven’t started making a profit. According to
Daniel [15] Coursera lists 8 possible business models at
the end of their institutional agreements:

Certification (students pay for a badge or
certificate)
 Secure assessments (students pay to have
their examinations invigilated (proctored))
 Employee recruitment (companies pay for
access to student performance records)
 Applicant screening (employers/universities
pay for access to records to screen
applicants)
 Human tutoring or assignment marking (for
which students pay)
 Selling the MOOC platform to enterprises to
use in their own training courses
 Sponsorships (3rd party sponsors of courses)
- Tuition fees.
According to Young [16] certification and employee
recruitment are under the most active consideration.
VII. MYTHS AND ISSUES ABOUT MOOCS
Involvement of top US universities into offering MOOCs
brought media attention and significant increase in
attendance. With such a stir, inevitably myths developed
even though MOOCs have been around for a relatively
short time. Following analysis of issues is mainly based
on Daphne Koller’s (one of the Coursera founders)
presentation [17], article by John Daniel [15] and blog
entry by Tony Bates [18].
A. Access to Education in Developing Countries
Argument, that MOOCs will resolve issues with access
to education in developing countries seems to be used
quite often. However, US universities partnering with
Coursera don’t offer credits or degrees for completions of
their MOOC courses. These MOOC courses offer
interesting alternative to people who are seeking
knowledge, but not credits or degrees. This is not true for
majority of population in developing countries.
B. Quality Issues
The second myth is that a course from good and famous
university is always a good course. Not necessarily. The
elite universities that are starting to offer xMOOCs en
masse gained their reputations in research. This doesn’t
say anything about their abilities of online teaching.
For face-to-face as well as traditional online courses,
the drop-out rates are significant in quality assessment.
MOOCs with their less than 10% completion rate would
not score very high in this sense. Methods to assess
quality of MOOCs still need to be developed.
C. Computers Personalize Learning
One of the largest problems with online learning in
general (and one of the causes of large drop-out rates) is
that students feel alone and abandoned without feeling
personal attention of their instructor. However cleverly
constructed assessment program still won’t give student a
feeling, that there is somebody on the other side who pays
attention to them personally and who might get
disappointed if they drop out. This has been researched
on traditional online learning where average class sizes
are about 15 students per instructor [20].
With thousands students in a MOOC course students are
essentially on their own, communicating with computer
program and (if course structure calls for it) with their
classmates.
VIII. POSSIBILITIES AND FUTURE OF MOOCS
At this time MOOCs are fashionable and institutions
are flocking into the business. Even though nobody has
yet figured out how to make MOOCs profitable or at least
financially sustainable. Some of MOOC ventures will
probably go down, some might survive. They are bringing
new options and opportunities for people who desire
knowledge without needing degrees.
If institutions work out systems and open ways to
gaining credits for MOOCs cheaper than for traditional
education, this might open more affordable ways to
college degrees. However, due to their massive character,
their completion rates might stay as low as they are and
only most motivated and self-sufficient students would
succeed. But on the other hand – from my personal point
of view – there are courses out there on topics I am
interested in taught by professors who are renowned in the
field – and they are free. There is nothing wrong with that.
This article is a very incomplete overview of issues in
and around openness in education. I picked and chose
information and topics that felt interesting and relevant for
me and for this conference. For more complete overview
take the David Wiley’s open course on openness in
education.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Thanks to members of OER Task Force 2011/2012 at
the Empire State College Ellen Murphy, Joyce McKnight,
Claire Miller, Hui-Ya Chang, Robert Kester, Rebecca
Bonanno, Katarina Pisutova, Suzanne Hayes, Xenia
Coulter, Michele Ogle, Deb Staulters
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]
Wiley, D. (2012) Openness in Education http://openeducation.us/
Wiley, D. (2010) Open Education and the Future. TEDx
presentation, June 23, 2010 http://youtu.be/Rb0syrgsH6M
[3] Lessig, L. (2010) Open Licensing. TEDx presentation, March 6,
2010 http://youtu.be/FhTUzNKpfio
[4] Creative
Commons
(2012)
About
the
Licenses
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
[5] BYU Independent Study (2011) Finding and Using Open
Educational
Resources
http://indstudy1.org/univ/355460515034/Flash/Lesson2/PracticeV
ersion.html
[6] Wiley, D. (2011) Defining the “Open” in Open Content
http://opencontent.org/definition/
[7] Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001) Open Courseware
Press Conference, April4, 2001 http://youtu.be/4XFvqOSRsa8
[8] OCW Consortium (2012) Website of Open Courseware
Consortium http://ocwconsortium.org/
[9] Hylén, J. (2006). Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and
Challenges. OECD http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/37351085.pdf
[10] Gurell, S & Wiley, D. (2008). OER Handbook for Educators
http://wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator_version_one
[11] Cormier,
D.
(2010)
What
is
MOOC?
http://youtu.be/eW3gMGqcZQc
[12] Wikipedia
(2012)
Massive
Open
Online
Courses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOC
[13] Siemens, G. (2012) MOOCs are really a platform. eLearnspace.
http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-aplatform/
[14] Kolowich, S. (2012) MOOC Host Expands, Inside Higher
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Myth, Paradox and Possibility http://sirjohn.ca/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2012/08/120925MOOCspaper2.pdf
[16] Young, J. R. (2012). Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart
Company Might Profit from Free Courses, Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 19 http://chronicle.com/article/How-an-UpstartCompanyMight/133065/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
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(2012)
TED
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