This document summarizes a presentation on open education practices given at Athabasca University. Some key points: - Athabasca University has 34,000 students in fully online programs up to the doctorate level, making it the largest online university in Canada. - Open education values student freedom and control as well as continuing education as a basic human right. - The presentation covered open educational resources, open textbooks, open data, open publishing, and open pedagogy. Researching open education practice was also discussed. - Challenges to adoption of open practices include institutional resistance, governance issues, commercial social media influences, and lack of staff engagement. However, openness also provides opportunities

1. Terry Anderson,
Professor, Athabasca University
Canada
Dec. 2013
The Struggle for Openness
Studia Generalia Lecture
April 2015

2. Athabasca University,
Alberta, Canada
* Athabasca University
34,000 students, 700 courses
100% distance education
Graduate and
Undergraduate programs
Master & Doctorate
Distance Education
Only USA Regionally
Accredited University
in Canada
*Athabasca
University

3. Values
• We can (and must) continuously improve the
quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and time
efficiency of the learning experience.
• Student control and freedom is integral to 21st
century life-long education and learning.
• Continuing education opportunity is a basic
human right.

5. Presentation Overview
• Open Education Practices
– Open Educational Resources
– Open Texts
– Open Data
– Open Article Publishing
– Open Pedagogy
– Researching OE Practice

6. Definitions of Open on the Web
(From Google)
• affording unobstructed entrance and exit; not shut or
closed;
• affording free passage or access;
• open to or in view of all;
• accessible to all;
• assailable: not defended or capable of being defended
• loose: (of textures) full of small openings or gaps;
• start to operate or function
• not brought to a conclusion;
• not sealed or having been unsealed

7. BBB Definition of Open Access
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free
availability on the public internet, permitting any users to
read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the
full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass
them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful
purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other
than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet
itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution,
and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to
give authors control over the integrity of their work and the
right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-04.htm#progress

8. Slide from Martin Weller

9. Open Scholars Create:
• A new type of education work maximizing:
– Social learning
– Media richness
– Participatory and connectivist pedagogies
– Ubiquity and persistence
– Transparency
– Open data collection and research process
– Open network Creation

12. ‘50% of Canada’s Scholarly Publications
will be out of business within two years
due to open access competition.’
Athabasca Pres. Frits Pannekoek, 2013

14. And an opportunity

15. • “Eckhard Höffner believes
it was the chronically
weak book market that
caused England, the
colonial power, to fritter
away its head start within
the span of a century,
while the
underdeveloped, agrarian
state of Germany caught
up rapidly, becoming an
equally developed
industrial nation by 1900.”
• UK Copyright Law 1710
• Prussia - 1837
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-
industrial-expansion-a-710976.html

16. Openness
OERs
Open
Courses
Open
public
ationsOpen
data
Open
Soft-
ware
Open
Profiles

17. Open
Univ.
Open
Source
Knowledge
• Lower cost to
produce
• Collaboration
• Near zero
cost to
transport

18. “He who receives an idea from me, receives
instruction himself without lessening mine;
as he who lights his taper at mine, receives
light without darkening me.”
Thomas Jefferson

19. Open Educational Practice
Developing and
applying
open/public
practices in
teaching, research
and service.
Beetham, H., Falconer, I., McGill, L. and Littlejohn, A. Open practices: briefing paper. JISC, 2012
https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/51668352/OpenPracticesBriefing

20. ttps://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/lessons-to-be-learned-via-mooc-mess-at-courser
Massive
Open
Online
Course

21. Open Scholars Use and Contribute
Open Educational Resources
Because it saves time!!!

22. Why Create OERs?
• Students as prosumers
• Teaches:
– Production skills
– Planning, network literacy
– Collaboration
– Altruism
– Participatory technologies
– Net presence
Pedagogy, Technology and Student as
Producer

23. Who Should Own Copyright on
Text Books?
• Faculty?
• Institution?
• Both – “Tragedy of the Anti-Commons”
“economic value may disappear into the ‘black hole’ of
resource underutilization” (Buchanan and Yoon 2000).”
In recent years, economic modeling of the anticommons
has become quite sophisticated.
• Everyone

24. Do Students Like Open Texts?
“We aggressively marketed the course as "textbook free"
and designed a survey to measure the impact of this
variable on student motivation to enroll and the overall
engagement level. The results were telling:
• 90 percent of our students found the course's digital
content "more engaging" than a traditional textbook.
• 25 percent said that the "no required textbook"
advertising was an incentive to enroll.
• 50 percent said that textbook costs had been an
academic barrier in the past.”
OneClick Digital and the Medrano Project: OER
as Content, OER as Pedagogy

25. 2014 CALPRIG Study http://bit.ly/1pZN0Gx

26. • Finding 1: High textbook costs continue to
deter students from purchasing their assigned
materials – despite concern for their own
grades.
• In this survey, 65% of all respondents said that
they had decided against buying a textbook
because it was too expensive.
2014 CALPRIG Study http://bit.ly/1pZN0Gx

29. We can’t afford textbooks
• Textbook prices skyrocketed 82% between 2002
and 2012,
• average student budget for books and supplies
has grown to $1,207 annually (USA figures).
• Current Bill to support open texts across US, goal
of reducing costs by 80%
• Washington State program since 2010 has saved
students $5.4 million versus State cost of less
than $1.8 Million
• All students get open text books!
http://www.sparc.arl.org/advocacy/national/act

30. Are commercial e-texts the answer?

31. DRM (Digital Rights Management)
You CANNOT
• Copy & paste, annotate, highlight
• Text to speech
• Format change
• Move material
• Print out
• Move geographically
• Use after expiry date
• Resell
Slide credit Rory McGreal

32. Publisher’s Response
All resources linked to provincial learning outcomes

33. Open Educational Practice Networks
Open sharing of
teaching ideas and
know-how

34. Components of ‘Open Pedagogy’
• Student ownership and control
• Artifact Persistence
• Open to participation globally
• Creation and curation of open artifacts
• Affordable – the educational “digital dividend”
Innovating Pedagogy,
2013 Open University

35. Beetham, H., Falconer, I., McGill, L. and Littlejohn, A. Open practices: briefing paper. JISC, 2012
https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/51668352/OpenPracticesBriefing
Use of Open Source technologies

36. If it is not licensed,
it is not open.
Image Nino Barbieri

37. CC Licensing Options

40. Challenges to Adoption of Open
1. Institutional impotence –“resistance
manifested itself as both an active form of change
blocking and in more passive forms of
intransigence that become a form of institutional
impotence both institutionally and at an academic
and student level.”
2 Governance -“Governance itself became an
activity rather than a means to implement
activity”
3 Commercial social media
4 Staff engagement – no time
Bryant, P., Coombs, A., Pazio, M., & Walker, S. ((2014). Disruption,
destruction, construction or transformation? Open Praxis

41. Open Data
• Sharing not only research results and reports,
but the data that generated those results.

42. Open Scholars License, Use (and re-use )
Open Data

44. Open Data Can generate $3-5 Trillion
http://tinyurl.com/kj93vku

45. Learning Analytics
• for individual learners to reflect on their achievements
and patterns of behaviour in relation to others;
• as predictors of students requiring extra support and
attention;
• to help teachers and support staff plan supporting
interventions with individuals and groups;
• for functional groups such as course team seeking to
improve current courses or develop new curriculum
offerings; and
• for institutional administrators taking decisions on
matters such as marketing and recruitment or
efficiency and effectiveness measures.”
Powell, S. &MacNeil.S. Institutional Readiness for Analytics A Briefing Paper.
CETIS Analytics Series. JISC CETIS, December 2012..

46. “Big data and personal information are converging to shape the
Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. They’ll
predict your needs, store your memories, and improve your life—if you
let them.” - MIT Technology Review

47. Big Data & Education
1) Technology: maximizing computation power and
algorithmic accuracy to gather, analyze, link, and
compare large data sets.
2) Analysis: drawing on large data sets to identify
patterns in order to make economic, social, technical,
and legal claims and design interventions.
3) Mythology: the widespread belief that large data sets
offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that
can generate insights that were previously impossible,
with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy.
Boyd, d. & Crawford, K. (2013). Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations
for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon

48. Adaptation of Course Content by Type
of Learner
Hermans, H., Jansse, J., Vogten, H., & Koper, R.
(2015). Flexible Provisioning Adult Learners.
Journal of Universal Computer Science 21(2)
openness

49. Open Scholars Filter and
Share With Others

50. Social Networks
• Facebook, LinkedIn,
• Academia,
• Twitter
• Blogs
• Listservs
• Private
– NING
– ELGG
– Drupal,
– Word Press

52. Personal
Identity
Professional
Identity
University
Identity
An Academic’s Open Net Identity
If you don’t create your web identity, someone else will

53. Networks add diversity to learning
“People who live in
the intersection of
social worlds are at
higher risk of having
good ideas” Burt,
2005, p. 90
Edge effects, estuary learning

54. aupress.ca
www.irrodl.org
Open Scholars Write and Read
Open Access Books and publish
in Open Access Journals
Teaching in Blended Learning
Environments: Creating and
Sustaining Communities of Inquiry
Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes,
& Garrison

55. A Tale of 3 Books
Open Access -
100,000 + downloads &
Individual chapters
Translations
Over 1600 hardcopies sold
@ $40 Can
Commercial publisher
934 copies sold at $52.00
Buy at Amazon!!
E-Learning for the 21st
Century 1st Ed.
Commercial Pub.
1200 sold @ $135.00
2,000 copies in Arabic
Translation @ $8.

56. Predatory Open Access Journals
“those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of
open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit”.
Typically, these publishers:
• spam professional email lists,
• broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose
of gaining income.
• operate essentially as vanity presses,
• typically have a low article acceptance threshold,
• Have a false-front or non-existent peer review process.
– Jeff Beall
http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

57. Researching Open Education Practice
http://www.icore-online.org/

58. Does OER make a difference?
http://chaos.open.ac.uk/

59. OER Policies
http://poerup.referata.com/wiki/Maps

60. How Many Ways can a Learner Learn?

61. The Battle for Assessing and
Credentialing Open Learning
• “open learning models have not
yet reckoned with the question of
assessment and its corollary
challenges of portability and
recognition” Dianne Conrad, 2013
• Prior Learning Assessment
and Recognition (PLAR)
.

62. Competency Based
Learning:
Assessing learning
– not credit hours
Image Pearson - http://researchnetwork.pearson.com/

63. Tallinn University Studia Generalia – a
broader view of the world
Studia Generalia is a series of lectures that consists of
public lectures delivered by the teachers, researchers and
visiting lecturers of Tallinn University. Anyone who enters
the University building can listen to what prominent
thinkers have to say on current topics that affect the
society, and also participate in the discussion. Anyone from
or outside of Tallinn University is welcome to participate.
Students can obtain two credits upon hearing the whole
series. Participation is free of charge.
!

64. Is everyone (anyone) an
auto-didactic?
• “open processes” is proposed, involving the
active engagement of learners in participation
and dialogue, as well as further critical
explorations of the relationships between
technology and education”
.
Knox, J. (2013). The Limitations of Access
Alone: moving towards open processes in
education technology. Open Praxis, 5(1), 21-29

65. Battle for Interaction
“There is a risk of assuming
that all learners require, or
even prefer to be part of a
larger community.” Peter and
Deimann, 2013
“According to constructivist theories,
learning is a social advancement that
involves language, real world
situations, and interaction and
collaboration among learners”
Ozar, 2004 Constructivism in Piaget and
Vygotsky

66. Engrami
Moving from a Set,
to a Net,
to a Group

67. Boundless Opportunities for
• Unanticipated consequences
• Challenges of net privacy/presence
• Emergent adaptation by students and
teachers
• Misuse and exploitation

68. Openness is a Spiral of Growth… but
you have to start somewhere

70. Available for Free download
Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media
http://www.aupress.ca/
Online Distance Education:
Towards a Research Agenda

71. Battle For Openness
• Big business
• Large profits
• Deep resistance
Versus
• Compelling advantages
• Increased Equality
• Empowerment
http://theswordbearer.org/

72. Tänan teid väga!~
Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
Blog: terrya.edublogs.org
Twitter: terguy
Your comments and questions
most welcomed!
Slides available at

73. Walled Gardens (with windows)
• Connectivist learning thrives in safe learning
spaces with windows allowing randomness,
external participation and public presentation