For the final Teaching with Technology Tuesdays of the Fall 2010 semester, the Collaborative Learning Center was pleased to host a panel review of Open Educational Resources (OERs).
Representing Yale’s OER production, we welcomed Paul Lawrence and David Hirsch from Yale’s Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, campus home of Open Yale Courses (OYC). With an simultaneous undergraduate and national point of view, we had Adi Kamdar ’12, a member of the Yale chapter of Students for Free Culture and a board member of the national organization. Finally, Nick Bramble provided some legal perspective from his positions as a lecturer at Yale Law School and a postdoctoral resident fellow with the Internet Society Project.
ITG manager Ken Panko gave a brief introduction, delineating the concepts of open as used in institutions such as The Open University and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and as used in FOSS/FLOSS arenas. One of the keys is the distinction between providing material or intellectual property for use or for reuse.
Paul Lawrence gave a similar overview of Yale’s OER efforts, starting with AllLearn in 2000, in partnership with Oxford and Stanford, and continuing with OYC, which began in 2007. In contrast to the ambition of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, begun in 2002) and which posts all MIT courses, OYC is a more modest effort to have public representations of targeted Yale courses. The focus for Yale is on high-quality video, audio, and transcriptions.
David Hirsch walked the attendees through a slightly more detailed history, departing at Stephen Downes’s 1998 piece, The Future of Online Learning (revisited by the author in 2008) and his notion of a heterarchical, less restricted flow of knowledge than a traditional university. Taking its own steps in this direction, OYC tries “to provide as rich and complete” an educational experience as possible. Key to this has been the work of creating robust transcriptions and captioning for the published courses. Though this is the most time-consuming and expensive part of the process, it has borne fruit, evidenced by the highly favorable comments OYC receives and the traffic the site sees. (So far, they have gotten over 2 million unique visitors and continue to receive roughly 250,000 hits monthly.) Other lessons learned include the need to have multiple distribution points for the content (YouTube and iTunes U, in addition to the OYC site) as well as the benefits of licensing the content under the Creative Commons program. Hirsch’s slide set is available on Google Docs.
Yale junior Adi Kamdar gave a tip of the hat to OYC before his words, having made use of it in high school. After a short rundown of Students for Free Culture, including the notable Open Access (OA). While Yale has no program for OA in place, it is an implicit part of the Faculty Handbook [PDF] and Yale Students for Free Culture is working to get one started. Since Yale is not even a signatory to the Open Access Compact, it’s an uphill battle. They’re hoping to build a coalition of faculty, librarians and archivists, administrators, and students to bring this change about. Kamdar’s presentation is available for viewing — and reuse, since it is CC-licensed.
Our last panelist, Nick Bramble, spoke on the benefits that inhere to institutions practicing OA. In his time at Harvard, Bramble saw a transformation of attitude and direction, spearheaded in the faculty ranks by Stuart Shieber and at the university library by renowned historian and University Librarian Robert Darnton. Echoing Kamdar’s coalition-building, Bramble noted that Yale’s OA conversation needs to expand to include more stakeholders. As concerns Yale’s existing OER efforts, Bramble pointed up the limited utility of merely providing lectures as opposed to providing as well (re)use guidelines, suggestions, and examples (as does MIT). In addition, Bramble reflected Hirsch’s closing quote from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks with a few comments about the power of social learning networks. He went on to acknowledge the issue of IP rights and to call on Yale to articulate explicitly the rights and responsibilities of faculty and students as concerns course materials and Fair Use, the latter as exemplified in best practices set forth by the Center for Social Media. By the same token, Bramble called for reform of copyright law, including the TEACH act, to comprehend asynchronous learning environments.
With that and a decent Q & A period, we wrapped up Teaching with Technology Tuesdays for fall 2010 and started looking forward to January 25, 2011, when season 6 of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays kicks off. See you there!
Further reading:
- UC Berkeley course webcasts
- OYC course listing
- Hewlett Foundation, funder of OYC
- Participatory Culture Foundation
- YouTube EDU
- P2P U
Please continue the conversation, add corrections, and correct mischaracterizations in the comments.