Instructional Effectiveness of OCW

I've received several communications from persons asking about the pedagogical approaches that are used in OCW projects, so here's my response:

There are benefits of the OpenCourseWare projects. Some were anticipated from the beginning at MIT, some are just now being discovered. The three main recipients of these benefits are (1) the institutions (university and commercial organizations mostly), (2) the end users, and (3) those who contribute their materials to OCW (individual instructors mostly).

My dissertation is a study on the benefits that come to the third group. The question being: what do instructors get from participating? Pedagogical approaches and instructional effectiveness involve the second group. The question being: what do learners who use OCW material get out of it and how well does the material work?

This second question makes an assumption that is incorrect, that OCW material is inherently instructional. This is not the case. Yes, the material comes from educational courses and thereby is often referred to as "educational material" or "course content" but it is just digital material. To refer to OCW content as "courses" is actually incorrect.....as a "course" implies that there is some form of instruction going on.

OCW began with no intention of being instructional. The goal was to just put course content online and make it available to the world. What the world did with it was up to them. Many have tried to come up with ways to make the content instructional....and that's a great quest, but no one knows how to do it yet...we are still investigating. Just remember, that, as OCW is now, it is not instructional...it's just content. So, no, MIT and every other OCW did not begin with any pedagogical approach in mind.

So the question of instructional effectiveness of OCW material is actually left to other projects that are making use of the content that OCW projects provide.

Cancer Patience

Though some might feel it off topic, my thoughts in this post do fit into education and open content thinking. Besides, I feel it urgent to add my story to the current conversation. What I share is not the full story, but some quick thoughts on the topic.

Cancer Patience, or—accordingly, using the pun—Cancer Patients, is the title of a book I began writing while under the euphoric drizzle of chemotherapy some six years ago. It was clear to me then that I had not been properly educated nor prepared for the battle with time I would have, within and without, while undergoing cancer treatments. I wished someone had written a book on the specifics of how difficult it is to have to wait, and wait, and wait for everything, mostly because you hardly feel like doing anything else.

You have to wait for the barium solution to settle in your stomach before you can wait in line to get a CT Scan, which then is waiting for the scan to be over; you have to wait days from the time your blood is drawn after each chemo round to see how the markers are doing, and if the red blood count is too low, you have to wait until a drug raises your cell count before you can schedule and wait for the next chemotherapy appointment, which, again, is waiting for the dripping solution session to be over; and, you have to wait for the steroids to take effect, which shorten the wait for the anti-nausea medication to take effect, which helps in the wait for the chemo to run its course. Not to mention you had to wait until having recovered from the initial tumor-removal operation to have begun any of this waiting in the first place.

One day I asked my dear oncologist, Doctor Regina Klein, "Tell me, generally, are the treatments going to advance until they cure cancer, or is there some other solution?" I will never forget her reply. She said, "No, what we are doing now is just the best we currently have. These treatments are barbaric, but we have nothing better. The cure for cancer will be something else, something like genetic engineering or stem cell advances." Again, more waiting, I thought. More patience.

Lance Armstrong is tired of waiting, tired of being patient....and frankly, so am I. We both recognize that we survived our battles because of recent scientific advances. We also both recognize that it's time for us to advance to that next level and end the barbarism.

I still give people the same answer I did six years ago when asked, "What does chemo feel like?" I reply, "Like just completing a marathon while sick with the flu and drinking paint thinner." I want that answer to feel like something of the past, something people hear and think, "Yeah, well, I'm glad we don't have to do that anymore."

But it takes money, time, talents, and dedication. This is Lance's cry....to put these resources together. He gave me hope six years ago, he gives me and many others renewed hope now. I remember my doctor who initially diagnosed me on June 9, 2000, saying, "You know, it's the same cancer that Lance Armstrong had and he beat it." I said, "Who's Lance Armstrong?" That was the beginning of my education, a simple question.

In the subsequent weeks, not only did I become an expert on inguinal orchiectomies, chemo cocktails, and metastasis, but I also became a Lance Armstrong expert. His second Tour de France win that summer directly paralleled my fight with cancer, my first of four successful rounds of chemo. It seemed when he finished a daily stage in his race, so did I.

I never would have been able to become so educated had it not been for medical institutions, news agencies, and experts openly putting their information online to be read by the world. And Lance's current cry could not have been heard by so many had the same not been true now. Lance wrote an article for CNN.com that soon became one of the most rapidly accessed articles for them. It links to a brief video of Lance that became one of the most rapidly downloaded and viewed videos for CNN.

These, in turn, spawned many people, like me, to share their stories, which have been placed on CNN.com or elsewhere. And now, it's our turn for action. We can all respond by giving what money, time, talents, and dedication we have to advancing science in order to eradicate this plague.

This mission will happen. And, in my opinion, has only been furthered by the use of open content thinking: releasing some of your rights to your digital content, not only because it is altruistic, but also because of the benefits that come to you and others for doing so….measurable benefits. I'll bet the Lance Armstrong Foundation sees an upswing in donations, and it cannot all be attributed to the renewed marketing campaign. Some must be attributed to the fact that rights to the digital content (text, images, videos) were given away for others to use.

Hurray for Open Content. Now let's see some results.

Open LMS versus Closed LMS

I think this is a fascinating discussion and I'd like to enter my two-bits in the Blogosphere. A recent article rekindled my thinking:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/08/27/e.learning.dispute.ap/index.html

It's about Blackboard Inc.'s announcing a patent last month to some of the basic features that facilitate e-learning. Some say they are trying to claim ownership of e-learning itself. There's also an interesting statement that Blackboard supports Open Source rivals like Moodle and Sakai (hmmm, really). And, here's the link to the Wikipedia article mentioned:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments


Blackboard gobbled up WebCT, looks like Desire2Learn is next (in one way or another).

The basic Open Content premise here, I think, is the most interesting. Here we have a large digital Content Producer (Blackboard whose content is a Learning Management System) who is protecting its Intellectual Property (by suing its rivals). Now, I'm not against protecting Intellectual Property, as its protection in fundamental in a thriving, progressing, capitalistic society. What I'm against is the high amount of discussion occurring (usually in the print and broadcast media, supported by large corporations/lobbyists) and the comparatively low amount of discussion about alternative Open Models (although the discussion has been gaining steam in recent years).

I, for one, believe that any digital Content Producer who spends more time and money protecting its Intellectual Property than it does in innovating is employing a losing model. Open Business Models are beginning to prove themselves viable and I believe they are the lasting digital content models of the future. Consumers want them. These are the customers of digital content producers. Let's make them happy and give them what they want. We (as content producers) can even make money doing so. This is even and especially true in the realm of Learning Management Systems (LMS).

Good luck Blackboard. Better luck Moodle and Sakai.

Open Content and the Open Domain

So here I am thinking about Open Content and Educational issues not because of my course work, not because of reading some modern academic’s writings, but for the strangest of reasons. I found myself reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan (yes, the famed late Physicist better known by some for his later book Contact which was made into a movie by Bob Zemeckis). He weaves an ongoing theme in Cosmos that if it weren’t for the stifling of thought years ago in many civilizations, we humans could well have progressed by now to have created technologies allowing us to travel to the stars of other galaxies.

This argument climaxes with a quasi-case study involving the Ionians and the Pythagoreans. The Ionians created the great library of Alexandria, a center of modern thought in its day. They focused on the practical, what could be examined through the senses, what we would consider today to be the beginnings of true scientific inquiry. Then along came Pythagoras (yes, the self-same mathematician known for his trigonometric theorem). He taught that the world could be understood not through experimentation and observation, but through thought and thought alone. By thinking through a problem, a solution would present itself. This solution needn’t require experimentation to support its veracity. So believed the followers of Pythagoras. Though to us this way of understanding the world may seem naïve perhaps even unbelievable, many were drawn in by the persuasiveness of Pythagoras. So many, in fact, that the Ionians soon became a memory. Their writings, many returned to the dust from which they sprang. Human advancement, estimates Sagan, was delayed about one thousand years. And this is but one example of the stifling of thought throughout history.

So now, I apply this to our day. I fully believe we, as a human race, have reached another moment in time where the stifling of thought can cause a major turn of events for the future. With the dawn of the digital age, we now have an opportunity to embrace new understandings and policies regarding Intellectual Property protection, or we can hover under an out-dated copyright seal. Great entities, powerful, persuasive, and prodded not in the pursuit of progress, but in the push for profits, lobby to protect their precious property. Original constitutional copyright law was meant to help human progress. Incentives were only a mean to achieve this end. Unfortunately many view copyright protection as a way to capitalize upon these incentives.

But there is a light, there is hope shining forth from this darkness. We call it Open Content. This is content that is protected not by copyright alone, which stamps its seal of “No Trespassing” upon all fixed content, but by other supplementary agreements which allow others to use the content. Permission does not need to be sought because it is already given.

Sadly, the public is largely unaware of such agreements. To them, there is only the Copyright Domain and the Public Domain. There is nothing in the middle. For this reason, I propose the Open Domain. This would be a clear area where content could reside and with which the public would become well acquainted. “All Rights Reserved,” well that’s obviously for the Copyright Domain. “Free for the world to use with no conditions,” that would be for the Public Domain. But anything in between, governed under a supplementary copyright agreement (Creative Commons, General Public Licenses, etc.), these would be placed in the Open Domain.

Of course, congress would need to enact some piece of legislation, call it the Digital Open Content Copyright Act (DOCCA), to create such a domain. Certain other loose ends of Intellectual Property would be fairly easily incorporated into this Act. But imagine the possibilities.

For example, several leading lawyers, such as Larry Lessig, in this movement are pushing for is a newer way of handling Orphan Works. These are content that might have copyright ownership but that are too difficult to track down who that owner is. Currently, (tying into education) if an instructor uses an Orphan Work, even after making a good faith effort of locating the owner, they do so risking copyright infringement. Many do so anyway, hoping they can claim Fair Use should a copyright holder make a claim. But the DOCCA could alleviate the difficulty. In fact, it could serve as a conduit for locating copyright holders. Just think, an instructor could find an Orphan Work, make a good faith effort to locate the copyright holder, and then use the work without worry. If a copyright holder comes forward, wonderful, then an agreement can be made as to the use of the content. If not, then human progress can move forward, because an instructor has been allowed to improve instruction even more by being unencumbered in the use of content.

And that’s what it’s all about, human progression and advancement. Here’s to hoping that we are not delayed another thousand years in reaching the stars.