Sorry for dropping out of sight for a few days. There is some great dialog going on here. I would like to follow-up on one of two points in the discussion. Although minor points, I think that they are relevant. I hope that this serves to summarize some of the dialog while also iterating some of the questions.
I do think that there is some motivation for individual faculty members and institutions to create and to use OERs, under certain circumstances in place of traditional textbooks. Some examples include:
When there are niche local needs such as language requirements, need for specific types of examples in particular content areas, traditional textbooks are banned or censored by governments
and/or school administrations, etc.
It is not economically feasible to use traditional textbooks.
The content in the course is very dynamic and traditional publishing
operations and licensing agreements are not adequate for purposes of relevance. Etc.
These might all be reasons to suggest that engagement by individual faculty members and institutions potentially extend beyond “marketing” efforts. In Slovakia, for example, there was a process through which we published “course notes” and made them available to students and other faculty with no explicit restrictions. The course notes were a combination of a syllabus, instructions for using the notes, assignments, assessment criteria, examinations, and content. They were in essence annotated textbooks designed to meet the localization and economic needs of a university operating in a developing economy. There were no formal mechanisms in place at the time to distribute the content beyond Comenius University, so the usefulness of the content was sub-optimized.
As Wayne and Richard point out, there are potential economic drivers outside of the situations outlined above. Wayne and Richard, you have both worked at institutions that have large course design and production functions and understand the financial commitment and economics of traditional large-scale production of courses and education materials. There are some indefinable potential benefits to OERs for these types of shops. For example:
- Lower costs associated with creating and recreating existing content including graphics, audio files,case studies, original interviews, etc.
- Lower costs associated with regularly revising course materials that are dynamic.
- Higher quality revisions and materials when they are modified, checked, and edited by multiple authors on short and dynamic development cycles.
- Etc.
Following along with the article and following comments above, that these and other potential benefits will be liberated when some barriers are reduced and a “economy” for OERs is established. Just to summarize, two of the barriers discussed above include:
- Low barrier (free) tools to design, create, publish, edit, package, publish, identify, catalog, search, etc. content, and
- Appropriate distribution licensing.
Just as an aside, following up on the use and non-use of the NC license element, here is a table that outlines the licensing agreements that have been adopted by a number of the larger US open courseware initiatives:
Table
|
Open Courseware Project |
Creative Commons License |
|
Rice University, Connexions |
Attribution |
|
MIT OpenCourseWare |
Attribution – NonCommerical - ShareAlike |
|
Johns Hopkins |
Attribution – NonCommerical - ShareAlike |
|
Tufts University |
Attribution – NonCommerical - ShareAlike |
|
Carnegie Mellon |
Attribution – NonCommerical - ShareAlike |
|
Notre Dame |
Attribution – NonCommerical - ShareAlike |
|
Utah State |
Attribution – NonCommerical - ShareAlike |
|
UC Irvine |
Attribution – NonCommerical – No Derivatives |
This prompts me to ask:
- If we could identify just a few factors that would promote an OER Economy, what might they be?
- What OSS (free) software tools are available to reduce some of the barriers?
- What OSS tools still need to be developed?
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