Got an email from Dr. Tony Bates today that made me very happy as it illustrates wonderfully what openly licensed resources enable.
Earlier this year, Tony published his open textbook “Teaching in a Digital Age” on our Pressbooks platform. It has been a huge success, with over 32,000 unique visitors and 12,000 downloads since it’s release in the spring. It is in use in courses across North America.
Today we had our first report of an adaptation of the book. Tony came across a version of the book that has been translated into Vietnamese (PDF). We are not sure who exactly has created the translated version, but they have done it and posted it freely online for others to use. And we’re all thrilled.
This has always been one of the example use cases used when talking about open textbooks and other Creative Commons licensed OER’s. The CC licenses gives someone the ability to create a translated version for their own market without having to first ask permission to do so. I know this has happened with other projects, but this is the first translation I have come across for a textbook that we’ve been a part of.
Last week there was an important US court ruling that helps to legally clarify the freedoms and limitations of Creative Commons licenses. While it is a US court ruling, I think the ruling is still useful here in Canada as the global body of legal decisions involving CC licenses is fairly small, so any legal interpretation is a useful thing.
In essence, the court decided that a company that used a CC licensed photograph did not violate the photographers copyright to that photo because the photographer licensed their photo with a CC-BY-SA (Share-Like) license, and the company did not use the photo outside of what the CC-BY-SA license allowed. Or, as the TechDirt byline nicely states “from the but-I-didn’t-think-anyone-would-do-the-thing-I-told-them-they-could-do! dept”.
A photographer named Art Dragulis uploaded a photo to Flickr with a CC-BY-SA license. A company called the Kappa May Group then took that photo and used it as a cover image on an atlas they produced and subsequently sold. Dragulis said that Kappa May violated his copyright by using his photo on the cover of an atlas that they then sold. He also stated that Kappa May didn’t attribute him correctly.
The court, however, disagreed with the photographer, saying that the -SA license does not prevent his photo from being used for commercial activity, primarily because CC licenses have an explicit Non-Commercial clause that he could have applied instead of the -SA clause.
The court ruling also supports how I have always interpreted the -SA clause, and that the -SA clause only applies to derivatives of the original work, and not to a collection that the original work is used in. That is, the original licensed item must be modified in some way that makes it different than the original before it needs to be shared back with a CC-SA license. In this case, the original photo was not modified and was used without alterations, so there is no obligation for the atlas company to re-share the photo. Nor is there a requirement for the company to release the entire atlas with a share-alike CC license as the ruling states that the atlas is not a derivative of the photo simply because the photo was used in the atlas. Instead, the courts considered the atlas a “collection” and the cover image is simply one item in that collection, therefore the entire atlas does not have to be released with a CC-BY-SA license.
This is important because this case will help people understand how items licensed with the -SA clause can be used. This has always been a bit tricky for people working with -SA licensed materials; if I use something with an -SA clause, do I have to release everything I create with that -SA licensed material with an -SA clause? As this ruling shows, no, you do not.
Additionally, it shows that an -SA work does not undercut the financial incentive for someone to use your work, thus somehow “protecting” your work from being used for commercial purposes. For example, in this case, the photographer may have mistakenly believed that, by adding an -SA license to his photo, that he was removing the commercial incentive for anyone to profit from his work. That is, anyone *could* use his photo for commercial purposes, but they would then also have to freely make available a CC-BY-SA licensed version of their work, thus undercutting their own commercial use of his work. Why would a commercial organization use -SA content when it just meant they would have to release what they created for free? As this court ruling shows, this is not how -SA works when the -SA item is used in a collection and you can use -SA content for commercial purposes when used within a collection.
But more broadly (and more importantly) I think that this case hilights the general disconnect with how people expect (or hope) a CC clause works, and how that clause may actually work. Another recent example of this disconnect is the kerfuffle Flickr found itself in when it announced that it would sell wall art based on 50 million CC licensed photos that had been uploaded to the site by Flickr users. After the community protested, Flickr backed down even though Flickr had the legal right to use those photos under the terms of the CC licenses.
Now, I agree that just because you have the legal right to do something doesn’t mean you should just rush ahead and do it, especially if you are a major corporation. Flickr could have handled this better and rolled their program out in a way that would have benefited both Flickr and the community. I mean, c’mon Flickr, why not compensate the photographers who have their photos used?
But commercial use, like the -SA clause, is one of those clauses that has always been a bit tricky because what is “commercial” is often interpreted in different ways. For some, releasing content with a non-commercial (-NC) clause means absolutely no commercial activity whatsoever. For these purists (for lack of a better term), anyone using their content for any reason where money changes hands is not ok. For those purists who licenses with an -NC license, this may mean even using their photo in a way that might say, raise money for a charity or a non-profit, or offset legitimate costs, like the cost of printing is a no-go.
For others who choose the -NC clause for their material, they may define -NC more closely to the phrase “non-corporate” than “non-commercial” in that they don’t want something they create being used by a private company, but would be ok for a charity or another educator or a non-profit to use for something like fundraising. Still others use -NC to mean “not for profit” but would be ok with charging for a cost recovery. To the point, -NC is an attribute that is open to interpretation, and people often interpret it through their own lens and context.
While there are certainly prevailing attitudes within the CC community as to how to interpret the different CC clauses, the fact remains that working with CC licenses is theoretically simple, but practically complex because we are dealing with law and law is complex. And while CC per se is not law, it does have legal implications because it is so closely tied to copyright law.
Which is why I think that this court ruling is important. The wider CC community needs more legal decisions like Deagulis vs Kappa May to help bring greater certainty and clarity to the many nuances of working with CC licenses. More clarity through legal decisions helps to clear up some of the ambiguity, which ultimately makes it easier to work with the licenses because the community then has something very clear to point to and say, “this is what -SA means”.
Kevin Smith at Duke University has an excellent post about this specific case.
I’ve been tuning into the #crappyconf15 hashtag off an on this morning. As I wrote about yesterday, I’m working with David Wiley on organizing the OpenEd conference in November in Vancouver. So, timely. At the same time, funny…
….and highly educational on what details I need to pay attention to.
So, I want to take the learning one step further and ask you to flip this from #crappyconf to #awesomeconf. In your opinion, what makes a great conference great? And before you say “the people”, let’s take that as the given starting point.
Thinking of the many, many conferences you have attended, what are those things that made it stand out? Maybe it were little touches that the organizers put in place that kicked the conference up a notch for you? Was it a cool extra-curricular event? Something that made the event easier/better/smoother for you? Was it an added event before or after the main conference that made the trip worthwhile?
What do you need/want that would make OpenEd15 a worthwhile conference for you?
For the past couple months I’ve been working with David Wiley on planning the November 18-20 OpenEd conference in Vancouver, and things are kicking into high gear as we head into the fall.
We’ve been working on organizing a social event. It likely won’t be of the same scale as the epic sea cruise of 2012, but, like 2009 and 2012, our location is uniquely Vancouver; the legendary Roof Restaurant on the 15th floor of the Hotel Vancouver. For you radio buffs, the Roof spent 20+ years as the Saturday night broadcast home of CBC radio back in the jazz days when radio used to broadcast off the floor live jazz and big band concerts. I don’t think we can secure 97 year old Dal Richards for a gig (although, amazingly, he still performs), but the venue will still be a great social space at the end of day 1.
The Roof circa 1940A more recent photo of The Roof from 2014
Other than that, we don’t have a ton of planned social activities for the conference, knowing that many of you will be eager to use the time to reconnect with your own groups. We will be providing some ideas of things that you might want to do while in Vancouver – restaurants, clubs, events and such. But for the most part, we’ll leave that up to the people coming to plan how they want to spend their time.
Accessibility and OER will be highly visible at this years conference with a number of accessibility organizations in attendance. The Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD (developers of FLOE), the Centre for Accessible Post-Secondary Educational Resources (CAPER-BC) and CAST are working on an interactive accessibility station that will be set up and running for the duration of the conference.
Early bird rate is $349 US (and the way the Canadian dollar is tanking these days, if you are in Canada and planning on attending, you may want to lock in sooner rather than later). After September 30th the rate is $499 US.
In the past couple of years I’ve really been grabbed by the issue of “disposable assignments,” as discussed by David Wiley here:
These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world.
A non-disposable assignment, then, is one that adds value to the world beyond simply being something the students have to do to get a grade. A similar idea is expressed by Derek Bruff in a post on the idea of “students as producers”–treating students as producers of knowledge, rather than only as consumers: Bruff talks about students creating work for “authentic audiences,” beyond just the teacher.
Wiley gives an example of a non-disposable assignment: students taking instructional materials in the course (which are openly licensed) and revising/remixing them to create tutorials for future students in the course. Other examples can be found in this growing list of examples of open pedagogy. One that I often hear about is asking students to edit or create Wikipedia articles. Or students could post their work more locally, but still have it be publicly visible, such as what Judy Chan does with her students’ research projects at UBC (click on “team projects” in the various years). Simon Bates has his physics students create learning objects to help their peers (see this story for more).
Students as producers in philosophy courses
I have already started to ask students to do some activities that could add value to the world, whether to their fellow students and/or beyond.
In a second-year moral theory course I asked them to sign up for 1-2 days on which to do “reading notes” on the class wiki page: they had to outline one of the main arguments in the text assigned for that day and write down questions for their small group to discuss. You can see those here (organized by group number).
In a first-year, introduction to philosophy course I have asked students to:
blog about what they think philosophy is, both at the beginning and end of the course–this, I thought, could provide some interesting information to others about what our students think “philosophy” is. I don’t have those blog posts visible anymore because I didn’t ask students if I could keep them posted after the course was finished (d’oh!!).
write a blog post describing how they see philosophical activity going on in the world around them, beyond the class–I thought this could be useful to show the range of what can count as philosophical activity. I do still have those posts up (but not for long, because again I forgot to ask for permission to keep the posts up after the course is finished…I will do that this term!): http://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102 (click on “philosophy in the world”)
But now that I’m working on my Intro to Philosophy course for Fall 2015 (see planning doc here), I’m trying to think through some other options for assignments with authentic audiences and that add value to the world. Here are some ideas (not that I’m going to implement all of these; I’m just brainstorming).
Editing Wikipedia articles on philosophy
This is a big task; it requires that students learn how to do so (not just technologically, but in terms of the rules and practices of Wikipedia), plus determining which articles need editing, etc.
I would prefer to start with students creating Wikipedia-style articles on philosophers or texts on the UBC Wiki first. Then other students (in future classes) could edit those, and then maybe eventually we could move to doing something on Wikipedia itself (the content would be good, and maybe students would be motivated to move some of it over to Wikipedia at that point).
Creating tutorials or other “learning objects” for their fellow students and for the public
As noted above, Simon Bates does this in his Physics 101 course, and I can pretty easily see how one might ask students to do so for basic physics concepts. But why not do so for some basic philosophy concepts too?
e.g., find something you find difficult in the course, and once you feel you have a handle on it, create something to help other students
could be done in groups (probably best, with a large class like Intro to Phil (150 students))
could be text based, but better if also incorporates some other kinds of visual or auditory elements (e.g., a video, or incorporating images, or slides or something)
Creating study questions or suggestions of “what to focus on” for the readings
students often get lost in reading primary philosophical texts, and I haven’t yet managed to write up study questions or suggestions for what to focus on for each reading. This would definitely be useful to other students.
But wouldn’t it be cruel to ask students to do this for later students when I haven’t done it for them myself? and do I have time to do this before the Fall term this year? Unfortunately not.
Creating lists of “common problems” or advice for writing, after doing peer review of each others’ work and self-reflecting on their own
I do provide quite a lot of writing advice to students, but I wonder if advice coming from students’ direct experience in my courses might be helpful to later students?
Creating possible exam questions
I ask students to do this informally, in groups, as part of the review for the final exam. But why not formalize this somehow so their suggestions are posted publicly? The course page on the UBC Wiki seems like a good place, at least to start. Then students could see them from year to year.
A number of instructors at UBC use PeerWise as a tool for students to ask and answer questions. It seems like an interesting thing, but:
It’s not public; but it could be used to generate questions and then the best ones could be made public somewhere
It’s limited to multiple choice questions, which I hardly ever use (and never on exams)
Those are my ideas for now. Have any others? Or comments on any of this? Please comment, below!
It happens often enough that I think we in the open education community need a special copyright irony icon for those times when you come across research articles about open education locked away behind copyright paywalls.
Here is another one (U.S. accounting professors’ perspectives on textbook revisions, Journal of Accounting Education) that contains a great suggestion on how the accounting education community can create & sustain open accounting textbooks.
The paper is a research study on publishers textbook revision cycles, and while it contains some interesting information about how publisher textbook revision cycles are too aggressive for most accounting faculty, the real meat of the article is at the end where the authors present a potential sustainable open textbook community publishing model along the lines of the NOBA project.
The study was done through the lens of textbook cost and how textbook revisions are one of the major contributing factors to high textbook costs for students. Quicker textbook revision cycles benefit publishers as new editions undercut the used market. The quicker new editions of a popular textbook are released, the greater the opportunity publishers have to sell new books. Since publishers make no money off of used textbooks, there is a strong economic incentive for them to have new editions hitting the market every few years.
How often? The researchers looked at the revision cycles of 69 accounting textbooks over the course of 28 years and found that the time between textbook revisions is shrinking from a mean of 4.2 years in 1988, to 2.4 years in 2016.
While there are changes that need to happen to textbooks over time, it appears that faculty who teach the subject think this cycle is too aggressive. The researchers conducted a survey of 998 accounting faculty, and showed that 54.3% of faculty felt that this revision period was “too short” or “far too short”, preferring a 3.15 year revision cycle. As the authors note, “there is a disconnect between publishers’ current practices and faculty perception of the frequency with which new editions are needed.”
But the recommendation at the end of the paper for accounting educators to establish a Free Textbook Initiative is a fantastic one.
The authors would like to suggest another version of open-source textbooks, a Free Textbook Initiative (FTI) whereby a non-profit entity is created (led by a university, a major accounting firm, the AICPA, or the AAA) to oversee the collection and distribution of funds for writing textbook materials. This would be accomplished primarily with summer writing grants which would be awarded on the condition that all materials created would be put into the public domain and distributed electronically to students and teachers free of charge. For instance, five different professors might write chapters on accounting for leases. Teachers could then choose which chapter they prefer and assemble textbooks on a chapter-by-chapter basis with one chapter authored by professor A and perhaps another by professor B. Those professors with high usage rates for their material would be prime candidates for additional future funding. In this way, the FTI and the absence of frequently revised commercial textbooks would materially lower the cost of education for accounting professionals and create a role model for other disciplines.
Initially, the FTI model could be maintained and periodically updated by faculty in lower-level, static courses, such as principles of financial and managerial accounting, as our survey results indicate that professors teaching in these disciplines prefer longer periods between revisions. Many of the concepts covered in accounting principle courses have changed very little over time (e.g., transaction recording, preparing budgets, etc.), and any initial efforts to develop and compile new course material will potentially be useful for many years.
This does strike me as very similar to the model that NOBA uses in psychology, with individual faculty authoring and submitting openly licensed chapters on specific topics of expertise that other faculty could then mix and match to make their own custom textbooks.
Where the models are different is in the funding structure. NOBA is also a non-profit with sustaining funding coming from the Diener Education Fund. The authors in the accounting example propose a different source of funding.
Accounting education is uniquely placed to be at the vanguard of change in the creation and distribution of textbook materials because of the unique funding opportunities that are available from the profession. The AICPA (American Institute of CPA’s), individual accounting firms, and many businesses are capable and interested in funding initiatives that benefit accounting education. This is almost unique in higher education.
While I am not as keen about having commercial enterprises fund the development of educational material (see Canadian Geographic), I do think that professional organizations like AICPA (or CPA Canada here) who already have an established interest in maintaining training and credentialing for their profession are well positioned to take on the task of financially support the development of open educational resources specific to their profession. Indeed, the AICPA in the U.S. already supports students through a scholarship program that gives $32,000 in scholarships to 4 students each year. While $5000 and $10,000 scholarships makes a definite impact for those 4 students, imagine the thousands of students who would be financially impacted with lower textbook costs if some of that scholarship money was turned into sustaining an open textbook initiative?
Source: Hammond, T., Danko, K., & Braswell, M. (2015). U.S. accounting professors’ perspectives on textbook revisions. Journal of Accounting Education. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccedu.2015.06.004
Well, the title kind of says it all. I referred to a teaching award I had applied for in an earlier post, and I am now posting the entire application. I applied for the Brightspace Innovation in Teaching and Learning Award, granted by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. I didn’t get the award, unfortunately, but having this record of all my work in open education so far is helpful for other things, such as a teaching and learning portfolio I’m working on (still under construction!).
In the interest of open sharing, and because at least one person found the “what is open education” part of this application useful, I thought I’d post the whole thing. It’s got some references to research on open education, OER and open textbooks towards the end, in case that’s useful for anyone.
Three completed days of the UDG Agora, and while I don’t expect to “relax” until it is over, I feel like we have our footing and overall the vibe is great. I don’t have the energy or focus to attempt a proper update, but I’ll pass on a few positives:
What a blast to work with this team. It feels as if everyone brings distinct strengths and perspectives to the table, and even under conditions of fatigue and no small sense of pressure we’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve learned so much already.
In addition to helping to facilitate “foundational” studios on topics such as collaborative learning and course design, I also have developed and facilitated studios on open educational resources, and “meme media”. I have been gratified by how well-received these sessions have been so far. The open-minded and very focused attitudes of the participants has been an incredible thing to experience.
Una meme con Pedro
I also got lucky when Pedro Ortega Gudiño offered early on to co-facilitate with me. Pedro brings an insane amount of knowledge and a very groovy sensibility, and the way we work together has allowed the sessions to proceed in Spanish about 80% of the time. (It also helps that our participants are unbelievably generous and understanding, and possess an almost supernatural ability to decode my mangling of their beautiful language.)
The facilities are quite impressive — most of the rooms have Apple TV enabled, so you can do live demos of processes off the laptop or the iPad (untethered, walking around the room), or swap in the screens of anyone in the room — I am still getting my head around what this makes possible. The UdG Center for the Arts, Architecture, and Design is set alongside a stunning set of cliffs (picture above). And the near-perfect weather has allowed us to have our meals and many of our activities outdoors (the wifi works there too).
* The food, music, energy in Guadalajara is off-the-charts amazing. I need to do more to capture that. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more headspace to do so.
Early on, Nancy White introduced our group to the concept of “confusiasm” (confusiasmo), a portmanteau of confusion and enthusiasm. It seemed to resonate with everyone right away, and if I had to choose one word to describe our current state, that would be it.
Near the end of May I worked with Jon Festinger and Will Engle to do a 1.5 hour workshop on how using and creating Open Educational Resources (OER) can have pedagogical value in courses (beyond saving students money, which is also important). You can see the basic abstract for the session in the wiki page embedded below.
Click here to see our slides for the workshop, on Google Slides (or see below).
We also created a wiki page for the event, which has numerous link to resources. We also tried to get small groups to post answers to discussion questions on the wiki, but as the event was held in the late afternoon, a bunch of people left when it was time to do the small group activity (I guess many instructors, like many students, think the “real action” is in the presentation rather than the group discussion!).
"Increasing Student Engagement through Open Educational Resources" is a workshop held during the CTLT Institute in May 2015.
Abstract
Open educational resources are educational materials (text, video, audio, and more) that are licensed to allow others to reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain them free of cost. There are numerous pedagogical benefits to both using OER and creating OER in courses; this workshop will focus on a few of them, including the following.
Asking students to create OER in courses means, in part, asking them to create things that are available to and of use by other students in the course (both past, present and future) and by people beyond the course. Assignments that are read only by an instructor and/or teaching assistant can seem to be what David Wiley calls in a blog post “disposable”: “assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away” (Resource here). If, instead, student work is adding value to the world, contributing to a larger body of knowledge that can be used by others, it is much more likely that they will be engaged in working on it and try to make it as good as possible. Examples of such assignments could be student blog posts, student-created web pages or wiki pages, videos, and more that others can see/hear/interact with and learn from. Another example that will be discussed in the session is having students edit an open textbook and share their edits openly.
Using OER in courses means asking students to read/watch/listen to/interact with educational materials for the course that are publicly available and licensed for reuse and (often) revision. Finding and assigning OER can allow for presentation of material in different ways: e.g., a textual resource can be augmented through finding and using a diagram, an image, a video, another text that explains things differently, etc. This can help both engage students and improve their understanding of course material. Further, if the OER are licensed to allow revision, students can edit them or mix them with other resources to create something new, both helping their own leaning and contributing OER for others to learn from.
In this session we will all discuss together the various kinds of open educational resources, including open textbooks, how to find OER for your courses, and several of the pedagogical benefits of creating and using OER.
Facilitators
Will Engle is a strategist for open education resources at UBC's Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology. He engaged with projects that are leveraging emerging technologies, approaches, and pedagogies to support open learning. With a background in library science, Will is interested in understanding and supporting the removal of barriers that limit access to education, information, and knowledge.
Jon Festinger, Q.C. (LL.B., B.C.L. 1980 McGill University) is a Vancouver, British Columbia based counsel and educator. He is an SFU Professor of Professional Practice and a faculty member of the Centre for Digital Media. Jon has taught media, entertainment and communications law topics at the UBC Faculty of Law for over two decades, as well as teaching at various times at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism, the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law and the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. He is the author of the first edition of “Video Game Law” published by LexisNexis in 2005, co-author of the 2nd Edition published in 2012. The open and on-line components of his courses can be found here & here. Jon was named a member of Creative Commons’ “Team Open” in 2014.
Christina Hendricks is a Sr. Instructor in Philosophy at UBC, and she also regularly teaches in the Arts One program. She has been a proponent of open education for several years, having participated in and few open online courses and been part of the design and facilitation team for others, including one with Peer 2 Peer University called Why Open?, and a course on Teaching with WordPress. She uses as many open educational resources in her teaching as she can, and posts many of her teaching materials as open educational resources herself.
Agenda and session outcomes
Agenda
Introductions--to us, to you
Defining openness and open educational resources (OER) in groups
Discussion of openness and OER
Presentation on pedagogical benefits of OER and open courses
Groups: take a "traditional" assignment and discuss how you might use what we've talked about today to transform it (and why)
Conclusion
Session outcomes
By the end of the session, you should be able to:
Give a definition of “open” and/or open educational resources
Explain at least two pedagogical benefits to using and/or creating OER in teaching & learning
Explain one or more courses/projects at UBC using/creating OER
Say how you might adapt an activity or assignment to make it more "open," and why this would be pedagogically a good thing to do
Group activities
Click on your group number to go to the page where you can type in your answers to the questions in the group activities during the session.
Introduction to Openness in Education - An open course from David Wiley that provides a broad overview of the ways in which openness impacts many areas of education – curriculum, instruction, learning, policy, technology, research, and finance, among others.
Creative Commons license chooser that adds helpful metadata for those attributing you, if you add the code generated to your webpage(s), blog, etc.: http://creativecommons.org/choose/
A video that explains the basics of the licenses, and some of the specific differences between them (it's focused on New Zealand, but the rules apply elsewhere too!): http://creativecommons.org/videos/creative-commons-kiwi
True Stories of Open Sharing
Watch some amazingly true stories of open sharing--the great stuff that can happen when we share our work openly: http://stories.cogdogblog.com/
Here’s a quick (well not that quick) screencast I put together as part of the Teaching with WordPress course. In the video, I highlight some of the different approaches and use cases of how WP is being used for teaching and learning at UBC. Here’s the specific courses and plugs-in that I mention:
