# OpenEd: Week 8


[Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational
Materials](http://www.benkler.org/Common_Wisdom.pdf "http://www.benkler.org/Common_Wisdom.pdf")
[Print
version](http://www.lulu.com/content/162436 "http://www.lulu.com/content/162436")
(Benkler, 32 pages)

[Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational
Resources](http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2007/IISITv4p535-544Kooh275.pdf "http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2007/IISITv4p535-544Kooh275.pdf")
(Koohang and Harman, 10 pages)

[On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in
Higher
Education](http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/9/38645447.pdf "http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/9/38645447.pdf")
(Wiley, 20 pages)

[Models for Sustainable Open Educational
Resources](http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf "http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf")
(Downes, 16 pages)

*QUESTIONS: How can you build a sustainable business around giving away
educational materials? How can you build a sustainable business model
around giving away credentialed degrees? Should governments fund open
education? (Do they already?)*

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/51609413_c882fdbfe0_m.jpg)Coming
from a country that already provides free education for all its
citizens, including university level (Norway), I clearly believe that
the state should “fund open education”. Indeed, it is strange that the
early movers in this space have been large privately funded US
institutions, and not the larger state-funded European universities,
with mandates to serve the whole population (the Open University in the
UK might be a good exception). When I was in China teaching in
university, I used to boast about how in Norway even a street-sweeper
(if we still had those), or a homeless person, could follow all the
lectures of a given course for free (and legally - not by sneaking in),
get a library card at the university library and check out all the books
he or she wanted, etc. There is no reason why this shouldn’t be extended
into the virtual space (as for access, luckily most Norwegian small
cities have libraries that offer free access to the internet nowadays).

Talking about sustainable, it’s funny that just this week a discussion
about this course should erupt, and we are asking if it is sustainable
to offer this course for free - and we are told that our teacher
(perhaps understandably) prioritizes the fee-paying students. I have
commented a bit on this earlier, but one thing that I wanted to add is
that we need to think about how this course can make a lasting
contribution to the OER realm. I am very glad, upon checking the
curriculum, that the last week of class is dedicated to reflection upon
the course - I hope we can have a really good discussion about how this
course was structured, what the motives or visions behind that structure
were, to what extent they were fulfilled, and how the course could be
better designed.

But in addition to that, a lot of the readings have talked about OERs
not being something that is designed for learners, but is something that
learners produce as a side-effect of the process of learning - so how
has our participation in this class contributed to help the next
learners on open education? What materials have we produced, assembled,
gathered, translated, marked up, mashed up, personalized, modularized?

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/97/205620757_c6bbe07589_m.jpg)There
are many different aspects to sustainability, because there are many
kinds of material. I think that by structuring their way of preparing
material slightly differently, professors could make a lot of the
material that they produce for class anyway public for very little cost
(as mentioned earlier, University of Oslo puts all their curricula for
all their classes online, and have never called that OER, only an
obvious service to students). Ideally university professors could
collaborate online, and by spending the same amount of time they now
spend on creating question sets and overheads, they could create really
valuable textbook-like resources.

However, “commons-based peer production” is also really valuable, and
Wikipedia is of course an incredible OER in itself - not only as a
stand-alone work, but as something that can be copied-and-pasted from,
both in terms of text, and in terms of incredible illustrations that are
all open to use (and won’t make your material non-distributable).
Benkler makes a point in that it is not necessarily as easy to break up
into small portions and distribute widely as Wikipedia, if we want more
“coherent” pieces of work, but in a sense a lot of this is being created
already today - people writing textbooks for their classes, or at least
long articles… If we can just collect them all, make them available
under open licenses, translate them, and have people use them actively -
that might be a very good start. And I really like the system of
“lenses” that Connexions provide, more so than absolute “peer-review”
because material really useful to some learners, won’t be useful to
others. This goes together with the idea of “playlist classes”.

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/29/41530381_b0ee1fc36b_m.jpg)Finally
(and I am talking to a large extent about higher education and further
education for educated adults here, because that’s where a lot of my own
thinking focuses), the movement for open access to academic research is
really a movement for open OER as well - in a lot of my courses, all our
readings are collections of articles. So perhaps then, at a university
level, open education would consist of a selected (playlist/lense)
collection of open access articles, plus a learning support community
(like this class), with assignments, deadlines, feedback mechanisms,
etc.

As for accreditation, I do think and hope that eventually society will
become more flexible about accreditation, because right now it’s very
coarse - one of the things mentioned in Jeff Rybak’s book [“What’s wrong
with university - and how to make it work for
you”](http://www.jeffrybak.ca/) is the fact that most employers only
look at your degree and not your grade. So all they see is “he/she did
four years of schooling”. And for the top students, the only way to
differentiate themselves is to do grad school “he/she did six years of
higher ed, great”… With the incredible amount of options for learning
autonomously and the need for continuous learning, and the eventual and
necessary reform of university as an institution, this view could
hopefully change. Until then, one interesting model is one that the
Economist has been advocating (and unfortunately I cannot find the
article in their archives - full-text search is failing me) of having
world-class universities like Harvard or MIT separate their teaching arm
from their evaluation arm. So that anyone in the world willing to pay a
small administrative fee, could take a comprehensive Harvard exam, and
if they passed, get a Harvard degree that was just as valid as any
“Harvard” student.

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/195/489310561_4c2363356a_m.jpg)The
neat thing about this is that it would force the education arm to really
compete on education, not on name recognition. Are Harvard students
better, because they got a better education, or because Harvard just
admits the best students? And it would mean that hyper-smart people that
didn’t have the money or the connections to get a scholarship could use
OERs and online communities of learners and scholars to gain the same
amount of knowledge and insight, and receive recognition for it. (This
is similar to what happens with the International Baccalaureate, which I
did for my high school, and another side effect of this is that since
the teacher is no longer evaluating you, and has no impact on your final
grade, your roles change, and your teacher can become more of your
partner, or accomplice. You both know the final goal, and hopefully your
teacher can help you get there.)

Of course, one could argue that this would just lead to dumbed down
cramming and MAs taken through multiple choice exams, but perhaps we
could take this as a challenge to create a truly comprehensive and deep
way of evaluation. In addition, one could argue that it would kill the
autonomy that the professors have to create truly unique learning
experiences, but in fact, what might be needed in higher education
(especially at undergraduate level) is more peer-review of teaching,
because too many professors take the academic freedom to teach what they
want, as freedom to not give their best to students who couldn’t care
less… And you can’t convince me that there is any reason that Econ 101
should be completely different, or expect completely different things
from students across a lot of different universities (at least not in
the same region/country).

Stian\
 *(thanks to [michael @ flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/mgallacher/)
for the arches photo, [Bond Sarah @
flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/42476745@N00/205620757/) for the empty
chairs photo,  [roland @ flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/roland/) for
the playlist photo* and [Swami Stream @
flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/araswami/) for the photo of Mumbai
university)