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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:

Please continue the conversation, add corrections, and correct mischaracterizations in the comments.

The Teaching with Technology Tuesday for 26 October 2010 was held as a panel discussion, a different format for the CLC series. With the special sponsorship of the Graduate Teaching Center, we featured three graduate students discussing their views and policies on laptops in classes they have taught and sections they have led. Our moderator was Jennifer Frederick, Associate Director of the GTC. Our participants were Maureen Canavan from Epidemiology and Public Health, Michael Meadows from Italian, and Alexandra Seggerman from History of Art. (A photo of each is on the GTC site.)

Jennifer set the stage by noting the near- or seeming-ubiquity of laptops and other mobile computing devices in the student population and asked us to consider the pedagogical implications as well as how we can manage their use. First up was the strong con position, taken by Alex, partly on the basis of the distractive power of the network as well as the laptop as physical barrier between the instructor and student. For her there is also a distinct drawback of the rapidity with which students can take notes, resulting perhaps in word-level comprehension without any learning occurring on the part of the students. Michael took a more favorable view, arguing that students can use the network to fill in their knowledge gaps during class discussion or lecture. He acknowledged that some students engage in off-task activities but that this has not been a majority of his students or a majority of the time, and emphasized that the instructor bears the burden of teaching students how to integrate their laptops into the course appropriately. Finally, our middle ground was supported by Maureen, who tries to focus on and foreground the course or section goals for her students and incorporating (or forbidding) laptops as needed.

The bulk of the time was taken up by thoughtful back-and-forth with the audience (though the contributions suggested it was more a group of fellow participants).

One commenter noted that she really only interfaces with education through a laptop. That is, she loses paper notebooks, but always retains her computer and consequently makes better use of class notes on a laptop. Alex responded that she feels students would just the same learn better by taking fewer notes and digesting them after class, implying that paper note-taking acts as an automatic throttle on note-taking speed for most students. Maureen added that she also organizes her education better on a laptop, but that having them in a discussion section pushes the instructor to be a “hall monitor”.

Another brought up lecturecasting as a way to discourage students from feeling pressure to record every word from the instructor’s mouth during a lecture. This, he said, might make it easier to forbid laptops and encourage thoughtfulness during class time. Alex wondered why students would bother going to class in that case. Michael suggested that lecturecasting continues to foster the negative behavior of students trying to record everything that is said during a lecture. Maureen suggested that lecturecasting would end up not serving anyone, since most students would be unlikely to access the recorded lecture later.

The conversation quickly broadened into the role of the instructor in the classroom and the role of the traditional lecture in a Yale education. Participants commented on gaming the undergraduate educational system, on the long tradition of students not paying attention during lectures (reading newspapers, sleeping, thinking about other subjects), and on problematizing lectures in the contemporary environment of multiple alternate avenues to much of the material shared in a lecture. We didn’t solve the problem, but it can be hoped that participants left considering how they will organize their teaching and learning efforts differently in the future.

Ken Panko asked for some closing comments from Michael Farina, an Italian instructor known for frequent and affirmative use of the network in his courses. He strongly feels that it is not an instructor’s responsibility to police students. Rather, it is the instructor’s responsibility to make the class engaging, to ask students to close laptops if there is a particular point in the class session that demands it, but also to encourage the students to take notes collaboratively, thereby contributing to other students’ learning and broadening their own.

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