Open Teaching & Distance Learning: Opposed or Compatible?

Open Teaching

Image: opensourceway, CC BY-SA, via Flickr

Can you do the same things online that you can do in the classroom? Aren't there different pitfalls, different affordances, different opportunities?

With the pace of technological change in the world being so fast and only gathering momentum, the variety and types of change we are constantly adjusting to often get mulled together in one strange conglomerate we like to call modernity. In the last 10 years alone, there have been huge paradigm swings taking place all around us, with technology at the nexus. For example, the move from analog to digital in terms of our entertainment (books, music, data), or the shift from isolation to connectivism in our relationships with people, content and systems - there is this massive and expanding interconnection at play, tethering us to other people, things, and ideas all the time, essentially through the touch of a button (so cliche, I know).

With all of this available, why are students going to colleges with physical campuses? Can't they get everything they need from distance education? According to David Wiley in his keynote at an Open Education hosted by Penn State in 2009, the primary reasons students are still electing to attend physical college campuses ahead of distance learning programs are the academic content, the support services, the social life, the institutional reputation or familial associations, and the degree in-hand.
But, he argues, each of these needs/reasons can be met online with existing and open resources - as degrees are merely "credentials" we all get and take with us through life.

Wiley claims that everything traditional, face-to-face universities provide to their students is already being provided by someone else. And, he adds,  "universities do what they do well, but the cost to consumers is higher now than it has ever been, accompanied by steep budget cuts for institutions and their programs" (Wiley, 2009)

He even goes one step further to say that web-based courses are no longer innovative enough to keep up with the pace of change in today's student's world. Wiley characterizes e-learning as generic, isolated, and closed.

Image: opensourceway, CC BY, via Flickr

Distance Learning


The rest of his keynote is spent explaining how openness underpins those values missing in distance education. Wiley also mentions that learning management systems should work the same way as social networks - making the consumers the creators.

This is about the only part I agree on, not because I think he's wrong, or uninformed, but because I'm a working student taking online classes and it also happens that I work in designing distance learning curriculum. There is certainly something to be said for the value of openness in education, and teaching, and I have valued nearly all of Wiley's talks and writings to some extent.

The trouble I have with them is their impracticality. I can't see how we make the next step in education today, or why we should. While learning is a personal endeavor, and making students active participants in their own learning is great pedagogy, I don't have as many problems with the traditional delivery methods of education as Wiley seems to.

I realize the great utility in driving down cost -  I'm someone who is still paying on educational loans and is paying for current credits. And yet I still can't follow the path Wiley is walking - at least, not all the way.

That's because I don't see distance education as an isolating mechanism with closed, generic content tucked away behind a firewall. Just like anything else in education - or in any context, really - the information you get is only as good as the source. And I like to think that in my job I play an important role in infusing the source, i.e. the LMS we use, with information that is useful, relevant, and designed for the working adult learner.

Furthermore, I don't see Open Teaching and Distance Education as oppositional. They can complement each other. If the Open Movement is everything it claims to be, and its proponents really believe in empowering learners by providing them with choice and value in their educational endeavors, then let's work together.

Let's take what's great about traditional classroom learning (because there are a lot of great things), what's exciting and new about open teaching and openness in education, and blend it with the power and robustness of online education technology and pedagogy.

Open Data: The Science of Relationships

Typically, I find the majority of Wiley's resources useful and relevant, but at first pass, the first video in the Open Data section of the course was neither, for me. As a learner, I'm trying to understand conceptual relationships between all things "open," as described in each section. The TEDx video of Tim Berners-Lee fast-talking about "linked data" and leading the audience in a chant of "Raw Data Now!" really had me feeling less informed about open data, after watching it (The Next Web of Open, Linked Data, TEDx March 13, 2009).

Part of the problem was that I couldn't keep up with him - he's clearly a technical wizard - and his wildly excitable gestures and his intermittent use of tech-savvy terms were distracting at best. After watching this video I wasn't convinced a) that I had a clear understanding of  "open data" or 2) that it would matter to me at all even if I did understand it.

So I move ahead, reading through the other resources. And lo and behold, what do I find? I find this, from the Wikipedia entry Wiley links to: :"The concept of open data is not new; but although the term is currently in frequent use, there are no commonly agreed definitions..." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data). Oh, goodie! Another completely unformed concept to learn about. I can't say that hasn't been a trend in this particular course of study, so I'm not surprised.

A little puzzled, I went back to the video with Berner-Lee. He said something early in the talk about the differences between data and documents,  and that's been helpful - data is something you typically can't use by itself, in isolation. It has relationships to other things, other data. I wanted to revisit that, to see if I could get something more from that. I did.

According to Berner-Lee, documents on the web are usually stand-alone items that you can (if they are open) use, repurpose, share, all of which can inform you and others. Data has to be related to something else  - or put in context, if you will - to be useable, relevant. So I start to think about data the way Berners-Lee recommends: as relationships. He mentions social networking. So I friend someone on Facebook, for example. Okay,  well, that's data, he says. That's data about me, about my friend, about the networks I'm in, about the things I'm interested in, and so on. So the connection itself is data, but it's not meaningful unless taken all together, as in, looking at what/who I'm connecting to and why that gives the world of Facebook some information about me. And that information, when 'linked' with other users' information, is powerful and can provide a comprehensive portrait of who I am online. Interesting! That is an explanation I can relate to.

So the sum is greater than the value of each part. Got it. But with that metaphor we're wandering dangerously close to another subject I find uninteresting, at best, which is math.

So back to relationships. I like data better when I think about it as relationships. So the "linking data" Berner-Lee is talking about is basically like taking little bits of information produced by and about people, and then connecting it to another person's little bit about them, and so on, and so on, until there is a huge network of relationships/data available to, by and for everyone. Neat. Don't get too overwhelmed, now, but that 'network' of relationships, ie data, looks something like this:

Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net

There are other resources from Wiley that paint a descriptive picture of what open data might be, and how it might be relevant or useful. The United States government is working with open data and providing it to anyone in the world, via their website, data.gov. This is a cool project, I think, because aside from data that could compromise or influence issues of national security, the government puts information about projects, initiatives, and all sorts of  other things being paid for by tax dollars, out on the web for anyone to see and use and reuse. That kind of transparency is arguably one ingredient of a successful democratic process. That is a pretty big implication about open data and the value it can provide. And from what I can tell, it's one of many more yet to be discovered.

Open Science: A Fundamental Tension

The module on Open Science in Wiley's course seemed to me an amalgamation of all the other "open" topics and concepts covered in the course thus far.

There are also some very familiar and consistent themes in the conversation about Open Science: there are many and varied views about what, exactly, is meant by "open science;" there are many different applications of "open science," and there are quite a few barriers to the implementation of "open science."

Open Science was the first module in the course during which I started to feel really unsure about this whole "open" thing. Up to now, everything sounded just great. Yes, let's share resources and educational content! Yes, let's allow each other to build on and improve our work! Yes, let's make resources cheaper and more accessible to anyone interested!

And then I read about Open Science. To be clear, I still very much appreciate the idea of openness as it applies to science, but this topic seems more complicated than a few of the others Wiley approaches. For the first time in the course (for me, anyway), the concept of  "openness" is transposed over a really specific topic, and that's when things really start to fall apart. There seem to be more questions than answers when it comes to Open Science.

As with any other community of experts, scientists belong to a culture all their own. The culture of science promotes some fairly conservative values about sharing information. In fact, according to Michael Nielsen in his speech at TEDx Waterloo in April, 2011, traditional scientists actually look down on sharing. There is no prestige to be had from sharing your data with someone else. Data is considered a highly personal, sometimes even secretive aspect of scientific exploration. As a result, science tends to occur in isolation, with scientists hording sets of data for their own use, and hiding their work from each other.

Certainly, there have been some changes and shifts in the culture of science over the centuries. Again, back in the 15th Century, the printing press comes on to the scene and changes everything, even science. For the first time ever, scientific endeavors can be widely communicated and acknowledged.  But even with that information revolution, the mores and values of the community of science didn't change much. Typically, scientific results are shared by way of professional publications and academic journals. Results are achieved when specific data or sets of data are manipulated in specific ways (can you tell I'm not a scientist?).  So, while there is value to the results of scientific exploration, what's not being shared is data. Scientists do not like to share their data, and there's is no incentive for them to do so. In fact, there are drawbacks, which must be obvious at this point - they must not like to share for a good reason, right? Right. If they share their data, they give someone else - a peer, a competitor, a colleague - the opportunity to change, mix, or even damage their work (Bissell and Kirn, Open Science and OER: Where Do They Intersect? 2011).

In order for science to begin to entertain the idea of sharing, Nielsen says we need to make scientists see sharing as part of their job, and we need to reward them for it. Providing incentives to share, promoting conversations about the values of sharing - these all need to happen in order for science to look upon "openness" as a truly worthwhile endeavor.

According to the Science Commons, there are several dominating principles that must be followed by institutions or individuals, in order to participate in Open Science. Institutions, organizations and people must:

1. Provide Open Access to Literature from Funded Research,
2. Provide Access to Research Tools from Funded Research,
3. Put Data from Funded Research in the Public Domain, and
4. Make Investments in Open Cyberinfrastructures.

Retrieved from: http://sciencecommons.org/resources/readingroom/principles-for-open-science/

What's most confusing and thought-provoking to me about Open Science is the global relevance of science in general. Science affects every aspect of our lives as human beings. It shapes our world in very specific and influential ways. So, in that sense, the culture of science as it is now, is a global problem. Scientists all over the world are potentially duplicating each others efforts and results, redoing each others' work and research.  Wouldn't it make more sense - to everyone, not just scientists - to share? Share the work, the data, the results; share the prestige, the fame, the failure? Without sharing the work, how much time are we losing, in the battle against things like cancer, diabetes, HIV? These are diseases that affect everyone, everywhere. Why wouldn't the scientific community want to contribute to each others' work and knowledge? Wouldn't societies as a whole stand to gain more through that type of sharing than any one scientist could lose?

Well, it might make sense, and we might gain more as a society if science were more open, but it's not happening - not now, and not for a while - if ever. The other troubling part of implementing Open Science is the sub-concept of "Open data."  Data, in and of itself, drives much of what science is and means and does. And it's the data - what it can do, what it can mean, and what it can change - that's so controversial in this context.  Let's say, for example, an experiment leads to the discovery of a biological warfare method. If we are applying the principles listed at the Science Commons,  and this data is in the public domain, accessible by way of technology, what harm can then be done if the data were to be found and used by someone who, let's say, isn't a scientist, or someone who doesn't have an altruistic purpose in mind? If this data were to fall into the hands of someone who wants to cause other people harm, using this data to recreate the biological warfare method is a possible outcome. Application of the result may be detrimental to society - how much of society, I can't say, but one or more people/places could be negatively affected. So clearly there is an ethical concern to "open data," as it's understood in the context of open science.

However negative I may sound towards Open Science, in some ways I do support it, and I do understand its value. And I think behind any and all of these movements towards being open, we do recognize that technology affords us connections to a global community that we can all participate in if we choose to, and that's something that was never possible before. Technology can remove all sorts of barriers, but it can also raise a lot of questions.

While technology advances at a rapid pace, obviously the evolution of humanity moves at a  slower clip. All these ideas and concepts are great, but when taken in context, are pretty radical. Sure, we have the technology and the desire to see what's possible to achieve with it, but really, we are trying to change longstanding cultural norms. That will take time, and it will require fundamental changes to the culture and professional field of science.

Learning About Open Access, or, Finding Out That I Have Something in Common With College Students

I found the following video on the Open Access Week website, and when I did, I watched it, hoping it would help me understand what Open Access is and means, in the context of higher education. It did help, but it also made me think about a few other things. Spoiler Alert: It's not until the final seconds that a student answers the question "What is Open Access?" correctly. However, I think this entire video - not just the last few seconds - is useful for a couple of reasons. In our OER work group we talk a lot about all the things that will need to change before "openness" is really embraced in the field of higher education. I think it's important to note that as of right now, there are lots of misconceptions about openness, not just open access, and there is also a clear lack of familiarity with the terms. This video highlights that, and it evokes a sense of disconnection that I can relate to. I work with computers all day at my job, and I have one at home that I use a lot. And I work in the field of higher education. And yet I didn't know what Open Access was/is/means. But, I'm not ashamed, because this personal admission makes my point: There isn't a huge market out there for Openness right now. There could be, some might argue that there should be, but the primary consumers of the movement are folks in the fields of technology and education or some combination of both. And for the movement to really BE a movement, we'll need to reach audiences outside of that. So, now that I watched that video and read the Open Access resources, I know that Open Access is digital material that is free and available to anyone, for any use (unless otherwise specified in the licensing restrictions provided). And this, again, is a great idea, with great value and an even more admirable goal. I just think a lot more people will need to be asked "What is Open Access, and What Can it Do For You?" before its value can really be understood.

To Bee or Not to Bee: Open Educational Resources

David Wiley sure is convincing. He just has a way of making me agree with him, regardless of the consequences. And in this case, one consequence of agreeing with him is a rather unwanted revelation about the nature of education and what it means to me. Why unwanted, you ask? Well, because inherent in the revelation is the realization that I don't really walk the talk on "Openness." As a learner, I don't actively participate in the growing movement towards openness in education. I am still very much a product of a traditional education, having gone four years to a liberal arts school where I 'learned' much of what I 'know' from lecture attendance, vigorous note taking, and filling in the tiny circle next to one of four answers on an exam sheet, number 2 pencils only, please.

What Wiley works toward and believes in are the same thing. I envy him that. I believe in what he's saying, but I don't work towards it, necessarily. Sure, I'm taking the Open Course, and sure, I'm reading along and finding it interesting and admittedly, it does relate to my work as a professional, but it also calls to question much of what I know about being 'educated,' and experiencing 'education.' This is uncomfortable.  Maybe that discomfort is exactly what Wiley seeks to elicit. Maybe he thinks it will take us being uncomfortable with the way things are in order for us to change them.

The change I refer to is this idea that education, as we all know and love it, must evolve to meet the rapidly increasing and dynamic demand of learners worldwide. The internet has the influence to help education evolve, but in very specific ways. And lots of folks in higher ed are resistant to any kind of change - via the internet or any other channel. And without their willingness to shift some of their traditional - and yes, still valid - ideas and norms about education, the system is going nowhere fast.

"Education is inherently an enterprise of sharing" says Wiley, in his speech at TEDx, an independently organized event held in 2010. Furthermore, "without sharing, there is no education," he asserts. He is talking about the benefits of Open Educational Resources (OERs) - both in the context of technology and of sharing. New technology plus demand equals a new era of education. Just how well that era will go is still unclear.

"You can give something away without losing it," he says, to all those nonbelievers out there (there are none in his audience, by the way, but they do exist. And there are lots of them.) "You can't lose your knowledge by sharing it." (Wiley, 2010) He works in this amazing metaphor of the honeybee. He asks us to picture ourselves as honeybees - buzzing around. Our stinger is our knowledge. How realistic is it that metaphor? How is our knowledge anything like a honeybee's sting? Once delivered, gone forever? That might be how it works for the honeybee, but it's not how it works for the human mind and its capacity. You can't just lose your knowledge to someone else by sharing it with them.  In fact, according to Wiley and many other pioneers in the open movement, the more we share with each other, the better educated we become.

Wiley claims that the era of OERs is here, but more importantly, that signals the start of a more defining cultural era, a modern reformation of educational systems worldwide, where a collision between the status quo on how information gets offered, the affordances of new technologies, and an international, savvy learner will create a whole new world for education. Education will be provided to more people, more often, more generously, and faster than ever before.

Working in online education, I can see how technology has already alerted the delivery of education. But Wiley takes it even further. Currently, Learning Management Systems (LMS) like ours are only working against themselves, he says, because they restrict their own capabilities to share information by hiding said information behind passwords, firewalls and credentialing software. "How is that education?" he asks. Or think of the professor who sued his own institution in 2008, claiming his students were violating copyright and unlawfully using his intellectual property for their own gain by taking notes during his classroom lectures. "Why did you become an educator?" Wiley says. This professor was working against himself, as Wiley sees it, and working against his students and their rightful ability to access education and translate it into knowledge.

But this idea that information should be freely available to anyone, anywhere,  is controversial at best, in higher ed today. Faculty want credit for their work. They want to publish - they must publish - and to do that they follow the paths set out before them by administrators and publishers and peers. Their knowledge is their professional currency. Without it, they can't get anywhere or go further in their careers. But again, if they share their knowledge, do they lose it?

No matter how much we all appreciate the power of the internet, and no matter how much we all use it for the myriad of reasons that we do, and no matter how many times we benefit from the information we find there, the internet is still somehow considered a "less-than" medium in the field of higher education. Faculty don't want to publish their research online - they want to publish at Oxford press. They want (and need) the prestige, the honor, and that's how they are rewarded for their efforts.

I still remember working with a student through the CDL Connects program, a few years ago. This program paired up faculty or professionals working at CDL with one or more students who were either on academic probation or were interested in getting guidance from a CDL staff member on any number of issues - where to buy books, who to call about financial aid, etc. This particular student confided to me that she was applying to law school, but she was worried about how it would "look" to the schools she was applying to that she had a diploma from "an online school."

Although I reassured her that since CDL is part of Empire State College and as such part of the State's University system, she would be receiving a diploma from the New York State Department of Education, and nothing on the diploma would reference that she got her diploma "online," I felt weird about how this conversation went. I just wondered why she was going to school here, if she herself had such a low opinion of an online education that she thought she might be overlooked for graduate admission as a result of graduating from CDL. She had acknowledged on several other occasions how rigorous she felt the curriculum was at CDL, and she admitted to struggling through some of her coursework. So if her experience with an online degree had been as challenging and rewarding as she said it had been, why was she questioning the validity of the diploma she would receive at the end of it?

The only thing I can come up with is the same sort of conclusion I come to when I think openness, and open resources and why so few folks in higher ed today see and understand how powerful they are, how influential they are going to be. The world of higher ed isn't ready yet. It might never be ready to appreciate or embrace "openness" in education, just like this student - having experienced first-hand a quality education at an online institution - couldn't appreciate the diploma she would get as a result. In sum, the benefit isn't worth the risk.

Wiley has convinced me that OERs are worthy of our time and attention, and they - combined with a growing demand for less restrictive forms of information sharing and the technology to provide them - could be in a position to change the very nature of educational systems and delivery everywhere. He just hasn't convinced the rest of the world yet.

MIT Ushers in New Era, 11 Years Ago

I can plainly see why Wiley includes the video from a 2001 press conference at MIT as the first resource in the OpenCourseWare section of his Open course.  Within the first five minutes of watching, it's clear that not only has MIT been versing themselves in 'all things open' for much longer than anyone else, but they also understood OpenCourseWare and it's value well before anyone was talking about "openness" in the context of offering curriculum.
According to then MIT President, Charles Vest, OpenCourseWare (OCW)  is a "natural marriage of American higher ed and the capabilities of the world wide web" (April 2001)
According to faculty at MIT, OCW combines two things: the traditional outreach of American education, and the internet.  Together, they make vast amounts of information readily available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Since the video was filmed in 2001, I can't exactly use the words "revolutionary," or "cutting-edge" to describe OCW, but that's exactly what MIT is, both then and now.
According to the faculty panelists at the press conference, MIT views the OCW project as a solution to an engineering problem they've been struggling with for some time: The problem, or question, is how to  create and disseminate new knowledge openly, under the MIT name, and using the MIT brand, without upsetting those who pay to use that brand, ie, tuition paying students and families.
In response to questions like that, the faculty on the panel drew several analogies that I found helpful in terms of understanding OpenCourseWare in general and the concepts that drive it. According to one faculty member, "raw material is not true education."  OCW isn't replacing traditional course work at MIT. According to the faculty panelists, a "true" MIT education comes from the interaction of the students with faculty, students with students, students with lab work and equipment, facilities, community, etc.
Another way to think of OCW is as a publication, rather than a form of distance learning. It's material; not instruction.
By the end of the video, the concept of OCW was clear to me, but so was the benefit of it - not only to MIT, but to any institution willing to offer it. The benefit is intangible, and therefore, arguable, but I see the benefit (and so does MIT, and they are all pretty smart folks) in the relationships that a place like MIT can forge, solidify, and gain from, with OCW. By offering it, they are enhancing their relationships with a larger educational community, both within the institution and around the globe.
In summary, the recognition comes at a cost much cheaper than tuition.

Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me... Open Content is....?

At first glance, the unit on Open Content in Wiley's course looks like it's the shortest, in terms of the list of readings and assignments. I looked at it and thought "Okay, cool, a shorter unit!" Um, not so. Total Wiley/ Jedi mind trick: While reading the shortest of the short readings, I found myself more confused than I was in the first unit, back when I was working on sorting out all these different topics and ideas and how they apply to and mean something to my work.
Before even starting this unit,  I understood the concept of "open" in the context of education, and I also thought, since I blogged on it already, that I understood Open Source and what that means. I'm admittedly less comfortable with the Licenses;  maybe that's why the Open Content unit gets me all turned around, because understanding "open content" requires a pretty solid understanding of copyright, licensing, and what it means to make something free and useable to the public.
To begin the unit on "open content," Wiley offers us his definition. The first part of it asks us to revisit the definition(s) of "open" and "openness." This is a helpful refresher not just in substance but also in spirit - he's reminding us of the continuous nature of the concept. He uses the example of an open door to explain - A door can be open all the way, or part of the way, or even just a wee bit, and it's still not closed, right? So, even when it's not wide open, it's still open.
At this point, I'm on board. I get that. I read a little further into Wiley's definition: "Open content, then, is content that is licensed in a manner that provides users with the right to make more kinds of uses than those normally permitted under the law - at no cost to the user" (Wiley, 2011).
Aaaaand I'm lost again.
I keep reading: "Put simply, the fewer copyright restrictions are placed on the user of a piece of content, the more open the content is"  (Wiley, 2011).
Okay, so content being considered "open" relates to the use of said content.  So the more publicly accessible the content, the more open? That seems obvious. So why was I so confused? Because I kept reading. That's why.
Again, the manner of usage of content is what makes it really open, less open, or not open - any variety of open is still open. To provide a framework for content use, Wiley provides the 4 Rs.

• Reduce
• Reuse
• Recycle
• that's only 3 Rs.... oops. Wrong list.

Sorry. Seriously, though, Wiley's Rs are pretty similar:

1. Reuse
2. Revise
3. Remix
4. Redistribute

This framework provides a much needed context. Whenever I'm trying to understand something super conceptual, I love some scenery to go with,  some type of setting I can apply the concept in. So I like the 4 Rs, because by using them, I can come away feeling a wee bit more clarity about something really difficult to pin down: Open Content is less about the content itself and more about the manner and style of its use. If it's content that's public, accessible, and free (cost)- then it's open. Simply put, the activity that takes place around any given bit of content is really what decides the degree to which it's open.