The readings on open science, and several of the links in the readings for open data, refer to "the semantic web." This world of linked data that is machine readable is a way to expedite research and to bring together data so that more time is spent on analysis and synthesis as opposed to searching. Some are referring to the semantic web as "Web 3.0." Tim Berners-Lee describes the semantic web "as a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines." (Wikipedia entry on Semantic Web). Our readings about the Open Science community indicates that such open data on the Semantic Web would be a major step forward in the fields of scientific endeavors.
One of the sites linked is the open data page at data.gov. This site invites us to
Make recommendations on data that should be shared. Create an app or
mashup that makes that data understandable. Share your views on what
the policies should be for making government more transparent.
As an education administrator I have a great appetite for data in evaluating the success of our programs and charting the course for their future. I often feel inundated with the data that I have available, but also feel that the data critical to the evaluation or decision to be made is lacking. The request at the open.gov site is important in two ways:
Much of the data that would improve what we teach, and the effectiveness of the way we teach is not openly shared and requires a lot of effort to mine pertinent information
The invitation to identify the data that is available, suggest data that should be available, and creating access mechanism to make the data understandable is an invitation that will provide access to more data AND actually make it usable.
The TED presentation by Tim Bernars-Lee that is linked under the Open Data link at the course webpage provides his reasoning for proposing accumulation and tagging of data to form the Semantic Web. He said that his motivation for the proposal of hypertext and the web was, to use a term borrowed from Eric Raymond, a programmer scratching an itch. His frustration with different applications, databases, and communication and storage formats motivated him to propose the use of hypertext and the http infrastructure. This eliminated many of the issues that were frustrating him. The proposal of open access to raw data with tagging is scratching the same itch. The use of http naming for data and things allows us to search for data, and related data, if we can get that data open to access and then appropriately tag the data.
He suggests three rules for open data:
Use of http naming for data and things
Use of http to search for data
Use hyyp naming to associate related data
Berners-Lee makes the statement in this video that "the interesting thing about data is the more things you connect together, the more powerful it is." He decried the "hugging" of data where people hide raw data while they work to make it beautiful through a carefully structured databases or websites. He encourages to make the raw data available now.
As a side note to our openness conversations to this point. One of the interesting thoughts that has come to me is the degree of professional and academic humility that active participants in any open community must have. I think we all feel insecure about letting others watch the process that we go through to assemble our thoughts and ideas. There is an element to transparency that makes us feel inadequate and exposed. I think that there may be both cultural and personality based reasons for us to want our exposed work to be finished and bug free. When we use an open notebook approach in our formulation of ideas or practices we are also leaving the many of the trial and error experimentation that we pursue visible to others. We have to feel a little more comfortable with people seeing our mistakes and not take offense when they notice them or offer alternatives that correct them. The degree of humility required is important.
Somewhat related to the humility is consideration of the value of our contributions. We live in a world that is driven by money. Or if not money, at least the accumulation of some currency that can be used to acquire the necessities of life. In saying that I am not necessarily referring to the accumulation of wealth. Unfortunately, sustaining a flow of some type of trade-able currency is necessary to sustaining a flow of food, clothing, shelter, and other basic needs of life. One might argue over how much is enough, but the need cannot be denied. The accumulation of knowledge and the process of discovery and invention has been one of the ways that our culture has evolved to create that currency. In order to guarantee the ongoing flow of that currency, there are advantages to being first and legal protections have been created for those who are first. It takes a great deal of tolerance for sacrifice to give away that culturally evolved currency. It is my observation that most of those who are proponents of openness are also in positions of relative security when it comes to the flow of currency. They are in relatively safe in their positions funded by governments, enjoy the benefits of tenure, or are already independently wealthy (at least to the extent that they feel the need). I wonder how their zeal for openness might be tempered if they were in a position earlier in their career or profession?
In making the last observation I do not mean to imply that the security of tenure, independent wealth, or nature of employment are the reasons for espousing the benefits of openness. I also do not mean to imply that this conversation is about greed and wealth. The motivations are varied and most who desire openness, particularly where it comes to education and revealing knowledge, are genuinely interested in expanding the opportunities of learning to everyone, without regard for their ability to pay.
But openness has to deal with these cultural evolutions related to currency and protection of invention as it moves forward. There needs to be adequate consideration of the sense of personal security that researchers and discoverers must wrestle with, particularly when out society rewards original research, discovery, and entrepreneurial in academia and business. I think we all need to be mindful of the issue that arose when Stallman began to drive people away by his approach to those struggling with open software in the early years of GNU. Sometimes our zeal can create a sense of judging the poor motives of others that cause them to misunderstand the benefits of openness and result in a hardening against it. That is no way to help others overcome the societal insecurity when a valuable asset is created or discovered by them and then freely given away. Whether this is right or not is not the issue. The issue is that there is an issue. And we must deal with these cultural and personal motivations and rewards for openness to be accepted as the standard way of generating and sharing knowledge.
One aspect of open science that I find compelling is the tremendous savings in terms of time, effort, and resources that can be achieved with the disclosure of what one of our readings labeled "dark data.' This is the data on failed experiments that rarely gets exposure in the research community. If such failures were revealed in some forum where other interested researchers could gain access, the likelihood of other researchers structuring their experiments in a way that is the same or similar to previously failed experiments would be reduced. In fact, a researcher interested in solving the same problem being addressed by other investigators may be able to derive modifications or new approaches by reviewing the failure of an experiment rather than having to experience the failure on their own first. Such an approach would save time and money.
One powerful example that was used in one of our readings was that of a research line in the pharmaceutical industry where literally billions of dollars could be expended by multiple researchers and corporations performing the same failed experimentation just at different times. Sharing these failures could reduce the duplication of failed experiments, quicken the pace of discovery, and shorten the time required to obtain governmental approvals. Getting from concept through formulation to trials and eventual approval could be significantly reduced if researchers were cooperating rather than merely competing.
Of course, since the pharmaceutical and other biological research entities can afford to lose billions of dollars repeating the same failed experiments in isolation, shows that big dollars are at stake driven by discoveries. The dollars involved in scientific discovery are much greater (in many cases) than that which is part of the conversation with OER and some other open fields of interest. Patents for end results and processes are currently lucrative to inventors and discoverers. This path to fortune seems to be a greater impediment to the concept of making science more open.
One other interesting point made in our readings is that there needs to be consideration of other incentives in the scientific research domain that may punish open behavior. The principle incentive mismatch is that there is limited career reward for participating in open projects when the coin of the realm in most scientific research is academic publication. Many journals will reject research that is open and has been made available through channels where open research is shared. There are also the issues that arise when sharing of the research results in the researcher being "scooped" by another researcher who builds on their work and published first. I thought the anecdote shared by Micheal Nielsen about Galileo's communication of his discovery of the rings around Saturn was interesting. I had not heard the story before. But Galileo communicating with other researchers with an anagram reporting his discovery as a way to protect his position as the initial discoverer, and to hide his research, shows that these pressures are not new.
We are discovering on our path through the openness conversation that the advantages to open interactions is the improvement in the scope of discovery and the speed at which it occurs when many hands (and heads) are participating. There has been a cultural standard established that individuals benefit from being discovers and that their discoveries have immense value in financial terms. Changing this to communal identities and sharing in the "value" of these discoveries will require a rethinking of centuries of tradition and culture around research and discovery.
This entry is the second of three content entries for the Open Ed Researcher badge. The articles and other resources linked herein are related to the use of open source software, particularly in the higher ed community. I also have an interest in researching the design and management of open source projects. A final interest that I have in this area is the motivation that drive the volunteer participants in the open source community.
Peer Reviewed Article #1 Higher education sub-cultures and open source adoption.
The first peer-reviewed article that I have linked is found in the journal Computers & Education. This article is behind a pay-wall so I recommend that you consider access through your University library if you do not want to pay the $24.95 purchase price. The citation (APA format) is:
van Rooij, S. (2011). Higher education sub-cultures and open source adoption. Computers & Education, 57(1), 1171-1183.
The article reports the second survey of academic institutions in the United States regarding the use of open source software (OSS) in their institution. The first survey covering this topic was conducted in 2006. This second, nearly identical survey, was conducted in 2009. The authors purpose was to evaluate the awareness and adoption of open source software at institutions of higher education, particularly among two major sub-cultures on campus: the academic sub-culture, and the technologist sub-culture. The author posits that the adoption of new teaching and learning technologies on campus are the result of a consensus of these two sub-cultures.
The academic sub-culture is represented in the survey by Chief Academic Officers (CAO), or the equivalent role, at the institutions that were identified through research by the author. The technologist sub-culture was represented by the Chief Information Officrs (CIO), or the equivalent role, at these same institutions.
The author notes that in the original survey (2006) there was limited familiarity by the CAO group concerning the availability and use of OSS. There was wider familiarity and move to adopt by the CIO group. While the CIO group was aware of OSS for academic use, they were also familiar with OSS that they were using for other purposes in their institutions (operating systems, web servers). In the literature review, the author quotes prior research that finds:
The impact of culture and sub-cultures on technology adoption has been richly explored. In their review of the literature on information
technology and culture, Leidner and Kayworth (2006) conclude that cultural values play a role in determing patterns of technology
development, adoption, usage, and outcomes. The occupational sub-culture of technologists must be perceived as possessing the knowledge
necessary to deploy and maintain a new technology.
For the academic sub-culture, the ability to capitalize on the maximum learning
affordances offered by various technologies based on solid pedagogy as well as on awareness of available technologies (Dabbagh & Bannan-
Ritland, 2005) is a key input to adoption.
The different and sometimes competing perspectives of the technologist and academic sub-cultures have only begun to be explored. For
example, Smith (2006) examines the impact of the faculty sub-culture on the adoption of technology in the classroom of a large mid-Western public university. Drawing on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory (1995), Smith notes that the academic sub-culture, of which
the faculty is a part, tends to support a conservative diffusion of technology unless it is essential to the content of the course or it is supported
financially by the administration.
The authors primary interest is in the knowledge and adoption of OSS that is used for managing learning of campus (LMS). One of the interesting findings if the survey is that the awareness of such OSS LMS systems among the CAO group increased substantially in the three years between surveys. Along with this awareness, the survey noted an alignment of values within these two sub-cultures related to the adoption and use of OSS LMS on campus.
There are two other issues that the author attempted to address related to the adoption of OSS LMS. The first is a hypothesis that the change in the economic situation between the two surveys my have changed the priority and awareness in the CAO community. The author writes that the economic situation appears to have elevated efficiency and LMS cost concerns above some of the more stringent pedagogical and faculty motivation concerns that weighed more heavily in their thinking in the 2006 survey. This economic concern matched the level of that in the CIO group in the first and second survey as far as priority.
One of the greatest economic concerns within both sub-cultures was the cost of commercial LMS installations (Blackboard, etc.) and the risks involved with the transition away from these proprietary LMS environments to the OSS LMS environment. The concerns arise largely from the lack of a formal support structure for the OSS LMS and the unknown experience of others who have attempted that transition. But there are increasingly visible successful transitions that are now being published in the literature that are breeding greater confidence in the decision to adopt an OSS LMS in response to economic conditions.
The second issue the author addresses is how the use of OSS aligns with institutional strategies for the use of technology on campus. The 2006 survey of the CIO sub-group showed an amazing lack of institutional policy related to technology on campus in those institutions surveyed in 2006. The second survey reveals how the implementation of regulations and rules governing security had changed the policy structures on campus related to technology in the three year interim. The 2009 survey shows that institutional policies governing the use of technology by the academic sub-culture is still sorely lacking. perhaps indicating the lower importance placed on using technology by this academic sub-culture. The table below shows the changes as reported by the CIO group.
2006
2009
Policy
% with
% w/o
% with
% w/o
Faculty use of technology
Ownership
of intellectual property developed by faculty
60.8%
39.2%
75.8%
24.2%
Recognition/reward
for use of technology part of faculty professional development
35.4%
64.6%
37.4%
62.6%
Recognition
of use of technology part of faculty recruitment, retention, & tenure
27.4%
72.6%
27.5%
72.5%
Campus technology policies
Security
of new technologies
38.5%
61.5%
84.6%
15.4%
Compliance
w/ regulations (FERPA, etc.)
27.8%
72.2%
78.0%
22.0%
Evaluation
of acquisition, implementation, and maintenance costs of new technologies
24.8%
75.2%
68.1%
31.9%
Adoption
of new technologies
21.7%
78.3%
63.7%
36.3%
%
with = percent of institutions with a policy defined for the topic
%
w/o = percent of institutions without a policy defined for the topic
At the conclusion of the discussion section of his paper the author writes:
Adoption patterns and key drivers as reported by the CAOs and CIO indicate a shift from the strong dichotomy seen in the 2006 survey administration to some meeting of the minds in 2009. In 2006, CAO engagement with OSS lagged far behind that of CIOs, consistent with what the software engineering literature identified as the gap between the technologist who is the end-user of infrastructure-level software and the non-technologist who is the end-user of business or academic application-level software, and the need for mutual understanding between users and developers (Behlendorf, 1999; Courant & Griffiths, 2006; Evans, 2002; Glass, 2003).
Although CAO focus remains on technology in the service of pedagogy, the 2009 data indicate that CAOs are beginning to recognize total cost of ownership as a critical factor in OSS adoption decision-making. In the same vein, CIOs are beginning to recognize the importance of faculty satisfaction and support, along with technical efficiencies and cost effectiveness. Consequently, it could be argued that economics is the great equalizer and that the current economic climate has pushed cost of ownership into the minds of both academics and technologists (Green, 2009; Claffey, 2009).
In addition, there is now considerable evidence that OSS teaching and learning applications, particularly Moodle and Sakai, have evolved into sustainable communities that provide support mechanisms as well as technical expertise, reducing traditional barriers to widespread OSS adoption (Collins & Committee, 2009; McDonald, 2009). Consequently, the Mellon Foundation’s recent cessation of grant funding to Sakai and other OSS projects is not expected to be fatal to Sakai adoption (Parry, 2010).
Evidence of success is important to the academic sub-culture, particularly for faculty transitioning from commercial systems to OSS teaching and learning applications (Sclater, 2008), but also for non-technical support staff seeking to build their own best practices inventory. The academic sub-culture responds favorably to OSS for teaching and learning when, like any technological change, it is (a) evident, so that there is an awareness of OSS and of how OSS is being used, (b) easy to use, without having to choose from a host of features, functions, and complex user interfaces, and (c) essential, so that the what’s-in-it-for-me (WIFM) is clear, rather than being a mandate from above (Haymes, 2008).
I think this research and report are important factors to consider as we look at OSS in the higher education community. My personal experience with the administration at my current University is that there is little knowledge or concern about the faculty mastering technology in general expectations so there is a wide variance in the use of, and support for, academically-related technology. Some faculty love it and are very adept at using technology to better serve their students. Others see it as an added nuisance that gets in the way of their "real" work. This sub-culture in particular seems to hold great sway over the adoption of technology in general, let alone any conversation about using open source.
Peer Reviewed Article #2 Intrinsic motivation in open source software development. The second peer-reviewed article that I have linked is found in the journal Journal of Comparative Economics. Like the first article in this post, this article is also behind a pay-wall so I recommend that you consider access through your University library if you do not want to pay the $31.50 purchase price. The citation (APA format) is:
Bitzer, J., Schrettl, W., Schroder, P. (2007). Intrinsic motivation in open source software development. Journal of Comparative Economics,35(1), 160-169.
This authors consider the motivations of those who contribute to OSS projects from the perspective of the academic study of economics. The literature review indicates that this was a research topic of great interest in the early years of the last decade (2000 - 2007). Many publications that the authors cite indicate that there is some type of signalling that occurs when a developer contributes to an OSS project. Signalling is the economic term that is used to describe the motivation that someone has to send a message of some kind to a receiver in order to obtain a greater reward. The most typical form of signalling is a job applicant informing a potential employer of educational attainment or prior employment successes and experience. This information is not known to the employer without a signal from the candidate. And the candidate is providing this signal in hopes of gaining some reward or satisfaction that is external to them (a job, higher salary, recognition from others, etc.) This form of signalling was put forward by many researchers as a reason for the participation by some in the OSS community.
These authors were troubled by an indication that this did not always ring true, especially for those developers who initiated the projects that were created and made open source. The authors indicate that most developers would seek some type of economic benefit from their software, or at least keep it private so that others could not exploit the benefit. But the community is filled with projects and developers willingly treating their projects as a public good (thousand of applications in development are currently listed at SourceForge.net). As the authors point out, typically
in general, economics would predict that privately provided public goods suffer from problems of under-provision, delays in supply, and inferior quality.
But this is not the case with the product of OSS projects, particularly those that become well-known and established. There are many extrinsic motivations that can come from participating in these projects that may include social recognition, association with particularly effective code, and even the reaching of some altruistic goal regrading freedom (i.e. Richard Stallman).
These authors argue that there are some intrinsic motivations that appear to be present in those who write software that solves a problem that they need to address and then freely share it, and those who become involved in those sharing projects forming an OSS community. The authors write:
The paper departs from existing economic accounts of the OSS phenomena by arguing that traditional signaling payoffs cannot satisfactorily explain the involvement of hundreds of thousands of volunteer programmers in a veritable flood of humble and utterly invisible OSS projects and activities. In particular we argue that signaling – although it can have a role in explaining the involvement of programmers in mature and famous OSS projects – rarely features among the motives of those who start up OSS projects. Instead we rely on a set of predominantly intrinsic motives that have been discussed in the wider OSS literature: (a) user programmers that actually need a particular software solution, (b) the fun of play or mastering the challenge of a given software problem, i.e. homo ludens payoff, and (c) the desire of belonging to the gift society of active OSS programmers. In particular the latter two motives, though widely acknowledged in social the sciences in general, are often ignored in economics, yet carry important insights for the case at hand.
Our paper incorporates these three motives into a simple dynamic private provision-of-public-goods model. Given this set-up, the privately provided public good OSS becomes less of a puzzle. We are able to characterise the contributing individual and to determine the time of provision, generating results that compare well with empirical accounts of the OSS phenomenon.
In contrast to the standard models of the private provision of public goods (e.g. Bliss and Nalebuff (1984) or Alesina and Drazen (1991)), but in line with results of Hendricks et al. (1988) and Bilodeau and Slivinski (1996), this model features no delay. Open source software is provided at ‘maximum’ speed. The individual who will actually provide the OSS is characterised as follows. Ceteris paribus the provider extracts a higher gain from using the software, obtains a larger gift benefit, has a longer time horizon (i.e. is a younger individual), has lower costs of development, and is equipped with a high value from play.
I will include in this post a link to the results of a survey published by Martine Aalbers in 2004 with some demographics regarding participants in OSS projects. For those who read this paper you will see that the authors propose an economic model that can be used to predict who will participate and what will motivate that participation. The use an equation to inform the understanding of these intrinsic motivations. That may be of interest to you but I found that the greater interest (at least for me) was the discussion of motives.
Peer Reviewed Article #3 Investigating recognition-based performance in an open content community: A social capital perspective. The third peer-reviewed article that I have linked is found in the journal Information & Management. Like the first two articles in this post, this article is also behind a pay-wall so I recommend that you consider access through your University library if you do not want to pay the $31.50 purchase price. The citation (APA format) is:
Okoli, C. and Oh, W. (2007). Investigating recognition-based performance in an open content community: A social perspective. Information & Management,44(3), 240-252.
This article was referred to in an earlier post in this blog and I repeat much of that post here to fulfill the assignment for this badge, and also because it relates to my interest in the motivations of participants in teh community. This article points out a form of signalling through the extrinsic motivation to secure social capital with others through their participation.
The article points out that those not familiar with the OSS community, and who are more familiar with the traditional economic models and motivations for financial and recognition aims are often puzzled by those who willingly participate in the OSS community. The authors surveyed 465 active Wikipedia participants to assess their motivations using social capital theory for perspective.
Discussing the principles of motivation that appear to be prevalent in the literature the authors wrote:
One notable motivation is the participants’ desire to be recognized in their virtual community of open source participants. This occurs when a participant receives informal praise and acknowledgment from their fellows, and also by tangible tokens such as recognition in the open source communities by the granting of administrative, or “insider”, rights that permit high-quality contributors to add their changes directly with minimal prior review, and to have an important role in deciding the direction of the project. Thus the action is equivalent to promoting an employee to manager status in a traditional organization and thus is a recognition of achievements.
The literature further identifies incentives for participants in open source communities that included:
pragmatic motivations to improve an application that they were using
social motivations to support the work of other volunteers
hedonic, or intrinsic motivations
As one considers the development of an effective open community effort, the article states that
. . . since most are volunteers with individual motivations for participation. Aligning performance measures with motivations would be helpful to organizers and evaluators of OSS projects. According to the resource-based model of social structure sustainability, online social structures should provide members with positive benefits, such as the opportunity to be influential, to affiliate or champion, and the ability to disseminate ideas rapidly. While not absolutely necessary for participation, it is very important for open source participants to be recognized for their contributions; thus they gain status and respect in the community. To better encourage participation in open source projects, research is needed to understand the dynamics of recognition as an incentive, and how the attainment of this motivation serves as an indication of a participant's performance, in the sense that they have achieved a desired individual goal. (footnote links will take you to the footnote in the article)
I found the consideration of these motivations enlightening. I also think that these descriptions could be applied to those creating content that they intend to publish as open resources. That may be why the Creative Commons licenses all require attribution. This allows the egalitarian goals of sharing to match with the motivational goals of recognition.
This article discusses two "types" of social capital: that which comes within a closed network (or network closure) and that which comes and that which comes from open or loosely-structured networks (or structural holes). The "closed, dense or cohesive network view, such as [proposed by] Coleman and Walker et al., . . . argued that closure or density of social relations is the primary ingredient for the generation of social capital."
Counter to this view, proposed by Granovetter and Burt is
the structural hole view, assert that “true” social capital can be efficiently produced and maintained under open or loosely coupled networks, in which members can access the resources available in heterogeneous sub-networks. They have stated that loosely developed networks rich in structural holes allow the individuals to access and mobilize social resources and that bridges, structural holes or weaker ties are the building blocks necessary to construct or configure the network and thus produce “fresh” information while “social redundancies” are minimized. Thus the diversity and uniqueness of information become the crucial aspects of social capital, and they require a network rich in structural holes.
Both of these views have validity in the previous research. The research in this study tried to assess which view was most effective at motivating participant performance. Their findings showed that the network closure type of social capital (direct and indirect ties within the network) "had a significant positive effect on increasing participants’ recognition-based performance." The structural holes type of social capital (loosely structured or more open networks) "had mixed effects on participants’ status, but were generally a source of social capital."
Reflecting on the findings of this study I wonder about it's application to the OER community. The findings from this study seem intuitive to me. When you participate in a community motivated towards a shared goal, with participants known to you, and with whom you communicate, there is an energy to keep the momentum going. We read the Cathedral and the Bazaar earlier in the OER course and Raymond shared the experience of the torch for his popmail/fetchmail application and noted that were he not there to accept the role of championing additional development, the application may have stalled at the point where he took it over. I believe that a closed network would be more likely to keep its subject maturing and developing than a loose network would. I believe that any substantial effort to advance anything requires a committed and dedicated group that feeds off of itself and enhances motivation and performance.
From my outsider perspective I have seen this in the OER movements. There is a group of champions who are evangelical in their zeal to motivate positive change in society. I do not use evangelical or zeal in the negative ways that they are sometimes terms of mockery in our society. I believe that the efforts, based on strong moral convictions of the need to bless our fellowmen, have enabled this collection of individuals and growing network to motivate each other as they call for change. We see evidence of their success in initiatives being advanced in institutions of learning and the halls of governments.
The first additional resource I provide is a link to the survey results I mentioned earlier. These results were reported by Martine Aalbers in 2004. The survey reports on some of the key demographics of those who participate in the OSS community. This community is participating in the Blender project. The linked document is an appendix with some discussion from a much larger publication. I find that the participant demographics align with the participant demographics reported by Bitzer in the intrinsic motivation article I posted above. The participants are younger, predominantly male, highly qualified and educated.
This is a video from one of the open courses at Stanford. The course is the CS 547 course and this particular session is about 1 hour long. The lecturers are John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox. The video talks about the Firefox development strategies. One interesting note is that the lecturers state that approximately 40% of the developers of Firefox are paid, "which is about the same percentage of other large open source projects." That was news to me.
This is a link to an article in Educause Quarterly where Thomas J. Trappler, the director of software licensing at UCLA, who talks about some of the issues that arise when considering the use of OSS at institutions of higher education. He makes the point that there may be some immediate economic arguments in favor of moving to OSS "to save money because no license fee is required." He also notes that "the use of OSS can provide other benefits, including improved flexibility for customization and reduced likelihood of vendor lock-in."
He cautions, however, that "OSS is not a panacea, and along with its benefits come some risks, including the potential increased need for in-house support. Additionally, complex intellectual property issues affect incorporating OSS in new works and contributing new code to existing OSS projects."
He goes on to list other issues that should be considered when evaluating the move to OSS on campus. This article has some excellent points to consider when discussing the possibilities of OSS with administrators.
This is a report by the Digital Connections Council for the Committee for Economic Development that was prepared and submitted in June 2006. The Committee for Economic Development is an independent research and policy organization of over 200 business leaders and educators. CED is non-profit, non-partisan, and non-political. Its purpose is to propose policies that bring about steady economic growth at high employment and reasonably stable prices, increased productivity and living standards, greater and more equal opportunity for every citizen, and an improved quality of life for all.
This report attempts to explain the issues related to OSS from the perspectives of the users, producers, and the software companies. It also propose public policy such as:
Governments should not dictate standards, particularly in fast-developing areas of technology. But, governments should strongly encourage the development of open standards, especially with regard to infrastructural technologies, because of the substantial benefits of open standards in fostering competition and promoting economic development.
The results of government-funded research should be readily accessible and freely available to be used in standards development.
Another proposed policy is:
The Council opposes any mandate that would require any governmental agency to utilize only a particular form of software license or development process, be it proprietary or open source. Procurement decisions should be based on identifying and obtaining the software that best meets the needs of the particular governmental activity involved.
The Council recommends that governments at all levels should identify critical governmental functions, particularly as they involve citizen-government interactions, and place a high priority on requiring interoperability across various platforms for any software that is acquired related to performing these critical functions.
The government should advocate open standards and interoperability in critical areas of governmental function and should support royalty-free licensing of any intellectual property required to implement such standards The government should consider additional areas in which interoperability would provide significant improvements in governmental performance, such as in the area of homeland security, where the lack of interoperability of first responder data and communications systems on September 11th provided a lesson in what not to do.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has an exemplary record in such studies and should continue to expand the areas under review. The U.S. government should not be an advocate in the international arena for any particular type of software licensing or development and should oppose mandates for the utilization of any particular type of software licensing or development.
This policy recommendation relates to OSS. There are many other recommendations in this report and some of the recommendations have been, or currently are being, considered in patent and copyright law discussions.
This report from the conference proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Software Engineering provides an excellent discussion about participation in OSS projects. The authors note some commonalities among successful OSS communities and analyze these effective participants communities from the perspective of Lave and Wenger's Legitimate Peripheral Participation in communities of practice. This theory includes the adoption of roles in the community. The adoption of the roles "structuralizes" the projects and provides sustaining strength as they move forward.
These articles and resources all point to the need for an active, motivated, and freely participating community of OSS is to bear fruit and endure. Some of the considerations and motivations that are found here lead to conversations about effective planning and execution of strategies by organizations, communities, and others interested in perpetuating the availability and quality of open source software for the public benefit.
This entry is the first part of the three-part entry (plus summary) to earn the OpenEd Researcher Badge for the Introduction to Openness in Education course at BYU. This entry provides links to three peer-reviewed articles, and several other resources pertaining to OpenCourseWare. The materials describe elements of the creation and adoption of OpenCourseWare by Universities. While the creation has many altruistic motives to spread access for learners, there are strategic institutional reasons for entering this domain of open learning. Institutions may find benefits to current students, their supporting funding bodies (governments & foundations), the potential to increase the pool of interested students from which to recruit, and as a gateway to paid enrollments in credit-offering on-line programs.
The research shows that the institutions bear a cost to prepare and offer OpenCourseWare, the largest of which appears to be copyright and intellectual property clearance. There are additional societal costs that are required for the full realization of the potential of OpenCourseWare. These costs involve overcoming the digital divide which limits access to the internet and computers in the developing world. Another issue that one of the articles mentions is the colonialism that is inherent in globalization of education resources, particularly with the fact that a large percentage of the content is provided in English and developed in the developed world.
This
article reports a survey of adults in the State of Utah and the
incentives and disincentives that were identified as they consider
participating in available OCW. The study reports that the survey respondents indicate the low cost, convenience (availability), and opportunities to pursue additional learning in subjects of interest are incentives. The respondents indicated that the lack of possibility of earning a degree
or certificate, the lack of support resources (access to tutors, TAs,
faculty), and limited course availability (compared to interest of
respondent) were disincentives. This report notes that most
participants in OCW are those who are aware of its existence and seek it
out. But that there is a much larger population who is either not
aware of its existence, or do not know how to access available OCW. The
report recommends institutions consider marketing the availability of
the courses through consortium and aggregating sites and that the
consider the possibility that the OCW might be a recruiting tool to
attract more students to their campus.
This article considers the history of OCW and the possibilities that the such courses have to expand access to the Tertiary Preparation Program at the University of South Queensland in Australia. The authors identify some of the barriers to successful use of OCW in their target audiences. The authors also highlight issues that should be considered regarding the cost of creating and supporting OCW, particular to add features of localization when so much of the existing OCW is globalized according to standards in the region or country where it was developed.
The authors report that other studies show that the greatest cost in most institutions concerns copyright and intellectual property management. The article title indicates that there may be a conflict between the intention to provide access and the intention to make a profit. However, they note that these two motives can co-exist and function well as long as the right to education is paramount.
One section from the paper says,
MIT’s initial nervousness about doing this, including within its own ranks, was based on a simple error: “confusing courseware with courses. But a course is a totality that includes courseware among many other factors” (Newmarch, 2001, ¶ 30), such as feedback on assessment, structured time-tabling, interpersonal communication, and, of course, conferring of a qualification. Universities essentially sell the latter, and this is not likely to lose its value. “OCW is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for-credit courses. Rather, the goal is to provide the content that supports an education” (Kirkpatrick, 2006, p. 53). For Newmarch (2001) the central point is: once costs are met, why not just give it away?” Why not, indeed!
While it is clear that the main impetus for OCW from an institutional perspective is a profit motive (despite rhetoric to the contrary), we argue here that this is not necessarily a problem if the by-product of that motive is wider access to education.
The authors point out that there are opportunities for the institution
to meet the goal of eCommerce sites and keep their OCW participants
coming back for more (make their OCW sites "sticky"). Eventually, OCW
participants may become candidates for recruitment and admissions. This
meets the "profit-motives" that all institutions actually have but
cannot blatantly state.
This article reports a study at BYU by a doctoral student that assesses the impact of OCW on an existing Independent Study program which markets courses for credit for which it charges tuition. The analysis captured the costs of converting courses from their exiting online, full-credit, delivered version to an OCW version. The research also measured the impact of offering these courses in an OCW format on the paid enrollments in the for-credit courses. The study was setup to:
Determine the cost to convert to OCW
Negative impacts on enrollments (if any) when a course was available in both the OCW and the for-credit versions
Potential for positive impact on enrollments by giving students a "free trial" of the course as a marketing entry gateway.
The underlying purpose of the research was an attempt to consider if this model
might provide a sustainability path for OCW that was outside of the
traditional institutional and philanthropic funding models that
dominated OCW programs at other institutions in the early years of OCW
development, particularly as these funding sources were drying up.
The results of the research showed that there is a minimal cost of conversion at BYU Independent Study to convert the courses from their full online content version to the OCW version. Accounting for the learning curve that was experienced in the first-course conversion, the study showed that additional conversions could cost as little as $280 to $1,200. This is compared to calculations in other studies of several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars (see study for literature). The cost of conversion benefited from much of the cost already being sunk in the development of the full-credit version of the course. A strategy of developing an OCW version from scratch would have been higher.
The study reported a conversion rate of just over 2.5% of OCW participants actually moving through the OCW gateway into the for-credit course. Considering the revenues these conversions generated, the authors found that, at least in the case if BYU Independent Study, such a model is sustainable funding source. Profit margins required on the for-credit enrollments would need to be less than 5% for the ROI to go negative.
This article recounts the internal processes and conversations at MIT that led to the decision to offer OCW. The article is from an issue of Academe that was published in 2002. I think it is interesting to read how some of the thinking has evolved regarding student enrollments in OCW at MIT from the initial conversations at MIT where students would not be offered access to MIT resources (faculty, etc.) nor would they receive credit (see Additional Resource #2) below. Some of this may be driven by revenue pressures but the MITx site does not make mention of any fees for the certificate that students earn.
This is an article from Tuesday, February 14, 2012 announcing that the first MITx course (Circuits & Electronics 6.002x) was open for enrollment. This is the first of the next generation of MIT OpenCourseWare that allows student interaction and the receipt of a certificate at the completion of the course. The course has a registration process, requires participation and completion within a certain time frame (March 5 - June 8). This article notes that this will be a test of the MITx offerings. This is the link to register in Circuits & Electronics 6002x.
I reviewed the terms of service on the site and did not see a mention of any fees that will be charged for the certificate. The primary differences between MIT OCW and MITx appear to be a requirement to register, opportunities to interact with faculty, submit lessons and receive grades, and the certificate that will be given via email at the completion of the course. This first version appears to include some copyrighted materials so the course may not truly be open in the sense of the creative commons license familiar to all other OCW efforts.
This is a link to the December 2011 post at Inside Higher Ed explaining a course offered OCW by Stanford that allowed students to participate in the assessments, submit homework assignments, and participate in virtual office hours. 23,000 participants took the mid-term as well as the 175 students enrolled in the course on campus. The OCW participants could receive Stanford credit (based on the proctoring of the exams) or receive a letter from the instructor noting their participation and the ranking in the class.
These last two links (#2 & #3) provide information on an emerging trend in the next generation of open education.
Additional Resource #4 Stanford iTunes U Site
This link takes you to the Stanford University iTunes U site with all of the courses available for download and participation through iTunes U. You will note that there is a donation option at the bottom of this page. That appears to be a part of their sustainability model.
This link takes you to an example of the open Biology course taught at Berkeley. I have included this link and the Standford link for examples of OCW that could be compared to what you found following the link on the topic page to the MIT OCW site.
Open Access (OA) is the movement to make scholarly publications freely available over the internet. The characteristics are that it is freely available, unrestricted, and online. There were different options for open access mentioned in the introductory video. The first is to publish in an open access peer-reviewed journal. The second is to place a copy of a previously published article in an open repository.
A common definition of works that are OA states that
the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users copy, use,
distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and
distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible
purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship
Suber says that truly open access removes price (subscriptions, licenses, PPV fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions). OA creators still retain copyright protection but are choosing to allow access and academic use of their creation within certain limitations. Most
choose to retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. Some choose to block commercial re-use of the work . . . Essentially, these conditions block plagiarism, misrepresentation, and
sometimes commercial re-use, and authorize all the uses required by
legitimate scholarship, including those required by the technologies
that facilitate online scholarly research.
OA for research is becoming a key part of the arrangement with faculty in employment terms with schools that have their own OA respositories and require that their research be made available there. OA requirements are written in to many government funded research grants. Recent legislation and regulations have mandated OA publication and availability in federally funded research in the U.S. (although I believe I recently read that there is legislation in congress to revoke those rules at the present time). Some foundations and other philanthropical organizations that provide grants for research also require OA publication of the findings.
In some instances the cost of the OA journal or repository may be recovered through charges to authors, their schools, and through revenue from advertising. Not all journals use the author pays model. The readings make great effort to base the decision for mandating open access on the funding sources. Since the taxpayers are funding the research, the taxpayers should have access to the research. Requiring the readers to pay fees is asking that they pay twice for the work they wish to access.
The UNESCO portal lists the organizations and counties that require OA publication of research results. The numbers are large and growing. There is a movement by some journal publishers (Springer for example) who see the writing on the wall and are modifying their access policies and agreements to adapt to the new reality driven by the funding sources for researchers. They are in the same boat as newspapers, book publishers, record companies, and others (including most of the education establishment) in needing to respond to the minimal marginal cost that production and distribution of digital content online is providing. I don't know that any of these industries has figured out how to thrive in this new world.
It is remarkable that there are 7,000 OA journals available. Since most basic research that is funded is driven by governmental and foundation funds there is an expectation that the research should be made available to expand learning opportunity and further drive the creative processes in the research communities. I understand the need to keep corporate-funded basic research proprietary and I believe it would not be prudent to require that their research be published OA. There are corporate funded research projects that are published and I believe that that most corporate citizens who perform research that benefits the public good will freely share that research in OA journals or repositories voluntarily, especially of it supports the good or service they are marketing as a public benefit I think that corporate-sponsored research could present a problem for schools that have standing OA requirements for research at their institutions. Obviously they need to build in opt outs for such corporate-sponsored research.
As a student doing a lot of research, I am grateful for the OA initiative. BYU has been generous in its support for library journal acquisition but cannot acquire access to all journals. The OA initiative helps students and faculty access as much information as they can in furthering knowledge through their research. I think I would feel the same way as a faculty member if the citations of my articles bloomed along with the accessibility.
Dr. Wiley makes the point in his video that knowledge is nonrivalrous and that technology makes the dispensing of knowledge relatively inexpensive compared to what such distribution took in the past. We can give someone knowledge without losing the knowledge that we gave them. In terms of nonriovalrous distribution he pointed out that if a student wanted to read a book in the library he could only read it if someone else (a rival) had not checked it out already. But with the advances in technology Dr. Wiley said:
This is the first time in human history that we find that both expertise, and the expressions of expertise, are able to be given without being given away. So this gives a really unprecedented capacity to share. At a scale that we have never been able to share before. And we can substitute the word educate in there as well.
In his video presentation Dr. Wiley makes reference to the lag between technological change and the policies that society create to deal with that change. He cited the Gutenberg Bible and the laws against scripture in the vernacular. These laws were largely to address the threat to the ruling class (social and religious) that the widespread reading and understanding of the scriptures would be to their status, wealth, and positions of authority. He asks if we are not pursuing that same course today about the significant change in technology that allows education to be given away more freely. Our current culture, dominated by intellectual property concerns, seems to me to have the same motives as the leaders in the 15th century had when they created their policies. Protection of status and wealth. While ownership of developed intellectual property is important, policies that prohibit sharing by those owners who desire to do so are a way of withholding knowledge and learning. In another interesting quote from Dr. Wiley in the video presentation he says
. . . the only proper role for technology in education is to increase our capacity to be generous. Whether that's with giving feedback. Whether that's with sharing materials. Whether its with the whole host of things that get away from those kind of static artifacts and get more into discourse and discussion and argument and debate and conversation and collaboration.
Another reading that I thought was informative and meaningful was the Benkler article in the readings list. I liked his definition of "commons-based" production. He had previously outlined that information, once published or made available, has zero marginal cost to the creator. He used the example that it cost Tolstoy no more for the 100 millionth reader of War and Peace than it cost him for the first reader. In a way there is the argument that charging more than the marginal cost for information may stifle its use. But allowing only the charge of marginal cost will eliminate the desire of creators to create. There is a balance that must be struck where information is available with a return that motivates creators, and provides users of that information a chance to accept it as inputs into their creative process. Benkler defines "commons-based production" as
that uses inputs from a commons over which no one has exclusive rights, and that releases its outputs back into the commons, to enrich both its creators and anyone else who, like them, follows the same patterns of production.
Borrowing from the world of open source software I believe that this concept accelerates the creation of new knowledge as well as the increasing quality of dissemination, with the possibility of decreasing its cost. He discussed the problem of expense in acquiring texts in developing countries, and the increasing problems that consolidation in publishers and the power of three states are creating in both price and quality of texts in the U.S. Benkler then describes the possibility of applying the commons-based production approach, Wikipedia and the text efforts in the South Africa show that there are challenges to managing production of texts with that process. But as recent experience here in Utah, and the announcement of the open textbook initiative in the past month shows, the creation of higher order artifacts for education can be managed and produce high quality educational materials.
The recent iBooks and iAuthor announcements by Apple show that there is an awareness by the publishing community that costs have expanded beyond the point of pain for many schools and students. The low cost alternative and interactive texts, priced at a mass-market cost, may be a first attempt at dealing with the application of technology to providing the "expressions of expertise" at a fractional price above the marginal costs identified by Benkler. But the movement will continue developing "commons-based" production options that will drive the cost of purchasing texts and other resources for education closer to their marginal costs. Even though the resources included in OER may pertain to texts, learning objects, games, etc. there is no doubt that even the concepts of schools and Universities as educational resources may soon face the challenges that textbook publishers are now facing.
