Openness: Fostering Sharing, Collaboration, and Open Access to Knowledge and Resources - Notes

Openness: Fostering Sharing, Collaboration, and Open Access to Knowledge and Resources

Notes from a discussion session held at the EDUCAUSE Southwest Regional Conference Feb 25, 2009.

Notes provided by Jeremy Donald, Trinity University.

Speaker(s)

    * Cynthia Golden, Vice President, EDUCAUSE

    * Rebecca L. King, Associate Vice President for Information Technology, Baylor University

Abstract

A central pillar of the academic community is its commitment to the free flow of information and ideas through open standards and interoperability, open- and community-source software development, open scholarly communication, open access to research data, and open access to, and open derivative use of, content. How can we actively encourage open environments with collaboration, customization, and experimentation to leverage our resources and contribute to the creation, transmission, and preservation of knowledge? What technologies, applications, or approaches catalyze sharing and collaboration? How do we develop knowledge and respect for openness with for-profits and nonprofits, individuals, and institutions? Join this lively discussion regarding where open technologies, applications, and approaches are needed and how best to achieve them.

Notes:

Topic overview: Educause values statement: what openness means to higher education. Value extends well beyond 'open source.' Open scholarship, scholarly communication, access to research data.

Three kinds of openness addressed: open course content, open technology standards, open source tools.

Open course content:

Faculty attitudes towards open course content run the gamut.

The administration is the one (at one institution) who doesn't want to be open. For example, distance students pay an extra fee to access the kinds of course materials that would be free under an open model. Berkeley, MIT, provides videos, whereas some schools put it all behind a password.

Business model...theoretically, it can be worthwhile gesture for any school to share their content. Many smaller schools, however, feel their brand is much more about the on-campus/in-classroom experience. The other end of the brand is the idea that it could be diluted by providing open course content. Alums for instance would benefit from open course content (lectures).

Does open course content really compete with enrollment? The entrenched idea is that a particular learning experience has only one end point (being the enrolled/credit-seeking students)--this is really different now, because of a variety of audiences and methods of distribution/access.

Standards (in Europe), serve to create a content/curriculum that uses open course content to select the ‘perfect’ class for a given curriculum, threatening to undermine the value of individual institutional brands.

Open standards:

Standards are hard to arrive at via consensus/committee with lots of constituents, including higher ed and vendors. Do vendors on standards boards seek to promote their own profitability? Do customers also benefit by vendors learning and improving their products in response to open source improvement cycles?

Orgs that do interoperability standards: PESC,  IMS Global--higher edu, corporate, publishers, K-12, how to make learning management, content, etc,  be competitive. IMS Global is not free to participate--high end schools to pay to join, devote staff to standards.

Open source applications:

In-house costs for adopting open source solutions keep market options more cost-effective. When commercial products have to be considerably modified already, how does open source, which requires more, offer something better? Financial side is where the tradeoff is--staff constraints, lack of programmer support, is scary--big purchase and maintenance fees always sound better to admin than three new staff members.

Due to business failures, etc., vendors also leave you high and dry. It's a gamble on either side.

Do hosted services provide a great way for universities to leverage open source capabilities without the risk?

Is the idea that open source is an idea whose time has arrived just hype, or do the threatened parties just want us to think that? Is the rise of open source culture going to change to the market for expertise?

Open source can mean anything in terms of scale and size of the supporting community--the small scale of the nature of development means that some great applications won't be supported because of a lack of relevant documentation and expertise.

Cultural differences between institutions are different, and these have real impacts on business decisions. But don't we all (hopefully) benefit, because open source innovations get picked up by vendors? Original impetus behind open source adoption was to find an alternative to unhappy transactions with vendors. This is still a potent reason for considering open source options. 

Educause has many corporate members--Educause has a big internal effort to come up with better ways to provide feedback to corporate members to improve teaching and learning. Corporations do value the input from the community, and seek to offer improved value to clients.