Policy, Practice, and Pragmatism
From iCommons wiki
Session 3. Policy, Practice, and Pragmatism
This session allowed participants to break into small groups to discuss licensing models, moving legacy materials towards openness, and best paths to to reuse of materials.
Day 1 - 17.00 – 18:30
Contents |
Group 1 - Open Education Ecosystem
Questions to start with:
- What are the elements of the ecosystem?
- What are the places where we can make changes to enable open education?
Some aha insights:
- Open education ecosystem is actually not that different from the closed education ecosystem, but with some roadblocks limiting the flow of knowledge and collaboration. Next goals is therefor identifying the roadblocks and then removing them.
- We split the ecosystem into nodes of creators and facilitators, and when we spoke about tools and infrastructure we realised that there both active and passive roles in these categories.
- Important node was the institution, clarifying who owns the materials in the first place, then figure out who can decide what can be open or not
- A missing parts of the ecosystem is closing the loop * that creators are also users. The people who get involved in open education, are already doing education (and they have all the incentives in place) and just need to open it
- The policy level offers important leverage that could influence this ecosystem in an important way
- Change might have to happen in different places of the ecosystem at the same time
Ecoystem
Creators
- Authors
- Artists
- Learners
- Students
- Teachers
- Parents (maybe use parents to put pressure on schools)
- Parents are teachers, and many get very enthusiastic about programs they can be a part of (SJ KLEIN)
- Parents like to work on things with their children
- Researchers
- Commercial publishers
- Define new business models and introduce them to it
- Existing print on demand projects
- OLPC project helped a publisher become open source, use the publicity we get from this to make the software a community project and provide services
- Print on demand services
Facilitators
- Policy makers / Dept of Education
- Policies (within institutions)
- promotion mechanisms in higher education include incentives
- clarify ownership of materials produced (by students, lecturerers, researchers)
- students not allowed to apply a license to a mini*thesis (Catalunia)
- Grant making institutions (can require certain licenses)
- Technology projects
- Commercial publishers
- Guilds
- Tools (passive contributors)
- Commercial publishers
- Accreditation
How to shape, support, influence the ecosystem to achieve homeostasis
- Capture stories and share them widely within the ecosystem
- Funding
- Contribute to curriculum discussions
- Produce missing content to support curriculum
- Digitisation
- Duplication
- Provide tools for sharing: licenses, computers, repositories, connectivity
- Awareness raising
- Training
Group 2 - Licenses
What sort of licences do we need for eduction open access?
Lot of open courseware- copyright stripped of third party content
Fair use and educational exceptions should be understood by teachers and need to be broader.
Current sharing open access projects. including databases and learning object and identifying ways of licensing and encouraging teacher to share and be once comfortable with licencing regimes and permitted use.
Interested in identifying obstacles that prevent departments of education and other education authorities/bodies participating in open access initiatives and licences and perhaps drafting an appropriate licence that addresses and/or minimizes these risks.
Teachers keen to share but only willing to give materials out in open access enviroment that is education specific; very anti work being used for commmercial purposes
What does education sector needs – are the existing tools or additional tools.
US fair use for documentary makers best practice guides developed-
Education copyright compliance officers rely on gettting permission from copyright owners rather than rely on fair use. Education is very risk adverse. Need to develop education fair use guidelines as well as education open access.
Non-traditional educational providers eg deadly mob need to be included in any open access education initiatives.
Publicly funded material should be provided under education open access to
Schools, universities etc plus non-traditional education providers
Will creating a licence that allows cost recovery in repackaging material be permitted under a current CC NC licence.
Should educational institutions be allowed to make a profit selling repackaged materials? Eg non for profits that are required to make money re sustainabilty
Are teachers willing to share? On what conditions?
Are institutions/ admininstering Ed bodies willing to allow teachers to create and share materials on an open access basis?
How do we deal with third party material?
Some suggested outcomes
Develop education specific US fair Guidelines … see www.smartcopying.edu.au
Providing practical guidelines to teachers re copyright, fair use and creative commons and other open acccess intiatives.
Work with Creative Commons - One size may not fit all – current CC licences may not the only answer but we need CC as part of evolution- Need the CC movement to understand education sectors unique needs and local culture and context on global and local basis.
Cheers
Delia, Lisa, Catherine and Isabelle.
Group 3 - Quality
Eve Gray eve.gray@googlemail.com, Silvia Panzavolta s.panzavolta@indire.it, Jerzy Celichowski
Reliability vs richness of information
"good enough" is often enough and perfect is not necessary
cultural issues: peer review assumes that there is no disparate views
ensuring quality: authority or community
knowledge vs experience - both can be sources of expertise
difference in sciences and "political" social sciences particularly history
quality vs recognistion of quality among the general public
quality of content vs quality of teaching process
peer review vs p2p: meaning of word "peer" is different, peer review is not really peer as it almost always more senior than the author of given work
the smaller group of peer reviewers the less objective the outcome
can users contribute to the learning material? legal journals are produced by students
what is the objective of education: encyclopedic knowledge or skills, the what vs the how
branding: MIT opencourseware must be good because MIT is famous
quality of educational material vs quality of educational outcomes
quality when hiring: some professions need skills not certificates
COVERAGE BY: Asheesh Laroia (text), Werner Westermann
