Open Everything

Well, I have taken the plunge back into being a student. After writing and presenting about many of the "open learning" initiatives online, I registered last week for my first course at P2PU. P2PU (as in Peer To Peer University) has a mission "to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other." It combines open educational resources and structured courses to offer high-quality low-cost (or no-cost) educational opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.

I signed up for "Copyright for Educators, Cycle 2."  All courses are open for sign-up until Wednesday the 3rd of March and the courses will begin 12 March. This course is for educators and learners who want to understand how copyright affects the use of learning materials and how to use copyright to facilitate education.

The goals of this course are:
1. to help you identify copyright issues in education and give you a firm grounding in copyright, exceptions and, licensing
2. to help you recognize open licenses, and find open license material and apply open licensees to resources
3. to get you thinking, writing, and conversing about how to use  copyright exceptions and open licenses to enable education.


I have several reasons for taking the course. I have always had an interest in copyright issues for educators and have done presentations and workshops on it over the years. Though I don't consider myself an expert on copyright, I know more than most educators. Of course, that's fairly easy since most educators (perhaps I will need to qualify that as "U.S. educators") know very little about copyright other than claiming "fair use" when questioned about their use of copyrighted materials.

Since P2PU has more participation outside the United States, part of the appeal to me of this course is to learn something about copyright beyond the United States.

I also want to see how P2PU works from the inside. How are the courses designed? How are they facilitated? What kind of audience and interactions occur?

I know that when I have mentioned P2PU and other open courseware initiatives to other educators (and in posts on this blog), they have a very skeptical attitude about free and open learning. They are immediately wary of anyone "giving away" learning for free. They are distrustful of the quality of the courses and the instructors.

My only hesitation in signing up for the course was time. It runs 6 weeks. Although I am not teaching any courses his semester, I am designing a new grad course for summer session and my full-time job fills the daylight hours. If I just stop all my blogging though, I should have plenty of time to do the assignments! Of course, knowing myself pretty well, it is likely that taking the course will generate a lot that I will want to blog about, so...

The course "organiser" (instructor, facilitator...) for my course is Delia Browne. She is the National Copyright Director, Copyright Advisory Group of Australian Schools and Technical and Further Education Institutes(TAFEs) and an experienced intellectual property lawyer. In her current role, Delia manages the National Copyright Unit which provides specialist copyright advice to the education sector and conducts negotiations with collecting societies on behalf of schools and TAFE institutes. Prior to her current role, Delia worked at law firm Minter Ellison providing specialist copyright advice to the education and media/entertainment sectors. She is also a strong advocate of the open education movement and has actively participated in several international meetings and projects on promoting open resources, technology and teaching practices in education.

I would be very pleased to get an instructor with those qualifications for a course I would pay for at a local college.

A Nielsen survey out this month on paid Web site content asked those surveyed about what they will pay for (like news and entertainment) that you now get online for free.

They were not looking at the idea of getting "educated" (learning minus the degrees and certifications) online for free using open courseware and other resources - but maybe we can draw some parallels.

They surveyed 27,000 consumers (52 countries) and, not surprisingly, 85% prefer that free content remain free. Drilling down to specifics, the content they were more willing to consider paying for includes things they already pay for in some way like games, music, movies and video.

What are they least likely to want to pay for? User-generated content - the homegrown video, podcasts and writing (like this blog).

Of course, media companies are most interested in whether or not we will pay for news (including traditional formats like TV channels, newspapers and magazines that we are used to using that has been essentially free online. Content that has a cost to produce needs to make back that cost and a profit to survive.

The business models are not really determined yet. Payment models include subscriptions, individual transactions and, more recently, micropayments which got the best response in the survey (though only 52% favored it). And an easy-to-use payment system isn't here yet either.

I'm sure most cable/satellite subscribers would prefer a cheaper menu option that let them choose and pay for just the channels they watch. But, like buying a new car, "packages" that include the high and low demand items are what we have now.

Advertising has been the way to support media from newspapers to TV for as long as the mediums have existed. That won't go away too soon. Everyone is used to it. When I was a kid, watching TV on a set connected to an antenna on the roof, it certainly seemed free to me except for the electricity. I never thought of the commercials as a business model. When cable came, there were no commercials, but I paid more directly with a monthly bill. I actually might prefer the old model.

It is clear in the survey that users say they are not willing to have advertising AND pay a subscription - although that's what I do when I watch the commercials on CBS, NBC and others via a paid cable service.

We are used to paying for an education whether it's obvious like a college tuition or somewhat hidden in our local, county, state and Federal taxes. Does that mean the pay-to-learn model will survive? Or will the degree and certification model lose its stature as employers become willing to hire people who have the knowledge no matter where they obtained it?

A few other things that come out of the survey -

78% say that if they already pay for content (subscriptions or services), then its online content should be free. (Pay for the face-to-face course, get the online version free?)

71% believe that in order to justify a payment, the online content would need to be of a higher quality than what is available for free. (A standard I wish schools already demanded for their online courses.)

Most (62%) also feel that if they buy content, they own it and should be able to to copy or share. That never was accepted by the music industry, and I doubt that education would accept it either. Not that the music industry benefited from that hard line.

The Nielsen study is by no means the last word on the subject. And it remains to be seen if consumers are saying one thing but will wind up doing another.

The survey likely serves as confirmation of what most of us already knew. That’s because we’re all consumers as well, and most of us have an aversion to paying for stuff that we’ve usually gotten for free.

Read the Nielsen survey (PDF)

OpenLearn started out with 900 hours of learning material, rising to 5,400 by the end of the pilot and still growing. There are over 500 study units now available, covering 40% of the Open University (OU) course offering. In the first month we saw 70,000 visitors and regularly saw over 400,000 visitors a month during 2009, totaling 8 million unique users to date.

There have had 10 million visits to OpenLearn since launch in October 2006.

The OU was the first UK University to make materials available at this scale. They received funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. They are now a national support center for OER, and OpenLearn is expanding in the coming months to be an online media hub, with a more community-focused front-end featuring more interactive content.

I first wrote about (P2PU) back in 2008. It has taken them longer than originally planned to actually launch the project, but they are now ready and offering offering enrollment for the first courses.

Peer 2 Peer University is an “online community of open study groups for short university-level courses”. They use the Internet, social applications, open educational resources (OER) with structured courses. The hope is to offer high quality courses at low or no cost. The model is similar to OpenLearn’s LabSpace allowing users to remix and reuse Open University (OU) course materials. P2PU will be using for the pilot a pbworks site but may transition to another platform. (OU uses a combination of Moodle and Drupal as its platform.)

These first courses are free but P2PU plans to have a pricing model including a fee for sign-up after the pilot.They also plan to seek accreditation for coursework.

The pilot "semester" has registration through August 26 and the courses will start on September 9. The semester is 6 weeks.

These classes are small groups chaired by a volunteer who organizes and disseminates the syllabus, study materials and schedule.

The courses being offered are: Introduction to Concepts in Behavioral Economics and Decision Making--Copyright for Educators--Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature--Land Restoration and Afforestation--Open Creative Nonfiction - Take Away Narratives--Poker and strategic thinking

P2PU is currently run by volunteers and is supported by the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation for basic start-up costs and receives administrative and legal support from the University of California at Irvine.

One for the weekend.

Here's a great example of how our government works - or at least how it moves forward (or backwards) in the area of information technology and the Internet.

This transcript excerpt comes to us from a Town Hall Meeting to Announce the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State in Washington, DC on July 10, 2009

MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle:

Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)


SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, apparently, there’s a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don’t know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The answer is at the moment, it’s an expense question. We can --

QUESTION: It’s free. (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Nothing is free. (Laughter.) It’s a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we’re looking at. And thanks to the Secretary, there is a significant increase in the 2010 budget request that’s pending for what is called the Capital Investment Fund, by which we fund our information technology operations. With the Secretary’s continuing pushing, we’re hoping to get that increase in the Capital Investment Fund. And with those additional resources, we will be able to add multiple programs to it.

Yes, you’re correct; it’s free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you’re running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs and other devices, you’re caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can’t do everything at once.

There's some humor in that portion of the meeting as shown by the (Laughter), but like most humor, it also contains some truth. Even free applications require support.

If it's you using Firefox or Chrome, Moodle, Ning or Twitter, Linux or any other open program, the cost is probably your time. You need to download, install, run updates etc. But if it's your school or company and there are fifty or hundreds or thousands of users, that time is money. Though I am certainly an advocate of open everything, one fear I do have when schools look at "free" products, they avoid looking at support.

For example, downloading Moodle is free, which compares very favorably with a commercial product like Blackboard. But if you're on the team that is going to support faculty and students using it, you know there is a lot more to it.


Transcript (and video!): http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/july/125949.htm

The first Wiki-Conference New York will be held over the weekend of July 25/26 at New York University. The event is hosted by Free Culture @ NYU and Wikimedia New York City.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be giving one of the keynote talks.

It is a two-day weekend event. Participation will be free, and everyone is welcome, but active Wikipedians/Wikimedians are especially invited to attend. The organizers also hope for participation from members of the Free Culture movement and from cultural institutions interested in developing Open Education projects.
The event will be a modified unconference - a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.