The Ed Techie

Whadya mean "openness has won"?

In my Battle for Open book (and article) I make the claim that openness has been victorious in many respects, and reinforce this by examining the success of open access publishing, OERs, MOOCs and open scholarship. However, to many working in higher education, this would seem a rather overblown claim. They may work in contexts where open scholarship is not only not recognised but actively discouraged, where the mention of OERs would be met with blank expressions and any proposed change to take advantage of the opportunities of open education is actively resisted. Any notion that openness has won seems like the fancy of a privileged few, perhaps operating within an open education bubble.

I have sympathy with this view, so wanted to explore what was meant by my claim. I think we can point to many examples that demonstrate the success of the open approach: the open access mandates; the numbers of learners and media interest in MOOCs; the impact and sustainability of open textbooks; the changing nature of fundamental scholarly practice as a result of open approaches.

To suggest that openness has been successful though is not to claim that it has achieved saturation or 100% uptake. Rather that all of these separate successes point to a larger trend – this is the moment when openness has moved from being a peripheral, specialist interest to a mainstream approach. To use that oft-quoted (and perhaps meaningless) term, it is at a tipping point. From this moment the application of open approaches in all aspects of higher education practice has both legitimacy and a certain inevitably. This is not to say that it will always be adopted, just as the open source approach to software is not always pursued, but it is an increasingly pervasive method. The speed of acceptance will be influenced by a number of factors such as disciplinary cultures, national programmes, policies, funding, the presence of champions and immediate benefits. 

The victory of open education then is that it is now a serious contender proposed by more than just its devoted acolytes, as a method for any number of higher education initiatives, be they in research, teaching or public engagement. And this transition is at the heart of this book, since inherent in it are opportunities and challenges, just as a small start-up business must face a whole different set of issues when it grows and becomes a larger multi-national corporation. In this transition there are many potential pitfalls – the whole enterprise can fail, it can be taken over by others, or the fundamental value and identity that characterised that embryonic stage can be lost.

What markets do to open access

I read Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy recently. It's not an anti-capitalist book, there are situations when the market approach is efficient and effective. But, he argues, the market driven mentality has become all pervasive, and that does strange things to society. An example is paying poor people to queue for tickets for rich people. Sandel argues this damages society, there is a loss of common experience:

"The most fateful change that unfolded in the last three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't belong"

The most famous example in the book is that of the Israeli day care centre. The staff were getting annoyed by parents picking their children up late, so they introduced a fine. And the number of late pick-ups increased. Whereas before parents had felt a social responsibility to pick their children up on time, and guilt if they didn't, by introducing a fine system, it had become a straightforward transaction. Parents no longer felt guilty about it because they were paying for it.

The argument here is that the marketisation of relationships fundamentally changes them. There are big questions to be asked about how this affects education, and we have complained long and hard about the concept of student as 'customer'. But I want to focus on some smaller aspects relating to open access, because we are seeing similar examples to the daycare there.

By adopting the gold route, we have changed the nature of the relationship between the author and the publisher. I am, of course, a big advocate of open access, so this is not an anti-OA argument, but I think it highlights some of the issues with the gold route. For example, in his 'sting' operation John Bohannon got his obviously bogus paper accepted by more than half of the 304 open access journals he submitted it to (unfortunately he didn't do a control submitting to traditional journals, but let us assume the acceptance rate would've been lower). We have also seen a wealth of predatory open access journals appear (Beall keeps a very good list), which are essentially vanity publishing, since none of the normal peer review or filters are in place.

By marketising the publishing process directly with the author, the relationship between the author and the publisher has been altered. This is not, I repeat NOT, a reason to abandon open access. But we should be aware of it. Rethinking the gold route approach might be appropriate, for example instead of research councils paying the researchers who pay the publishers, why not flow money to universities or not for profits to run open access journals? If there is no direct payment for the article then the incentive to lower quality is removed. There are many options I'm sure, but pretending that a market will exist and not change the nature of the process is not one of them.  

You don't get openness for nothing

<Warning, post may be a bit preachy - photo: https://flic.kr/p/8PRgdC>

This isn't a post about the financial cost of open education, but rather the reciprocal, moral cost. As I mentioned in my last post, I've been working through a lot of OER publications for the OER Impact map. I've also been reading a lot of MOOC, open access & open scholarship publications for my Battle for Open book.

One thing that surprises and irritates me is the number of such publications that aren't published under an open access licence. It is a tad ironic to say the least when you encounter an article along the lines of "How OERs will transform education" - please pay $24.00 to access the article.

I'm not usually one for the kind of Open Stalinist approach, outing people for not being open enough and dictating exactly how people should be open, I think it's counter-productive, unimaginative and not very pleasant. But on this subject I am a hard-liner.

Now, I think all articles should be open access anyway, but I think if you are doing any research in the field of open education (MOOCs, OA, OER, open data, etc), then as soon as you start doing that research you are morally obliged to publish results open access. I don't care which method (although if Green route, make it easy to find). You only get to do that research (even if you are critical of it) because others have been open. You are therefore beholden to reciprocate in a like manner. If you don't want to, or feel that the journal you are targeting isn't OA, then choose another subject area. Openness is the route that allows you to do that research and it also has value - people will want to read your work because it is about openness. And you don't get that for free - Open access is the price of admission.

Hits & thoughts ain't evidence

This week we've been populating the impact map for the OER Research Hub. The impact map (http://oermap.org/) has been developed largely by Rob Farrow and Martin Hawksey, and features lots of Hawksey-goodness. You can do the following on the map:

• Look at evidence for any one of our 11 hypotheses (eg. for hypothesis A regarding performance)
• Look at the flow of evidence
• Examine evidence by country
• Filter evidence by sector, polarity, hypothesis, country
• Explore the map for OER policies (a work in progress)

So, as well as putting our own evidence in there, we have been trying to add in the research of others that really demonstrates evidence for one of the hypotheses. And this has been an interesting exercise. I have been working through Rory McGreal's excellent resource OER Knowledge Cloud, going through papers and trying to add them in. The problem is very few OER papers actually give anything approaching proper evidence or research. Try it yourself, pick a few papers from the knowledge cloud at random. What you get are project reports about releasing OERs, lots of "lessons learned", a lot of beliefs stated as evidence eg "this will improve retention", quite a lot of download stats, but very little hard evidence that you could point at and say to someone "this supports (or negates) this hypothesis".

In some ways this is understandable - OERs had to be developed in order to do research on OERs. So the early phase of the field will always be partly driven by evangelism and implementation. But we've moved beyond that phase now, after more than 10 years of OERs. The field really needs to up its game in terms of research now and demonstrating impact and evidence. I think all OER projects should have a research strand built in that asks questions such as "what are the expected benefits of this work?", "how will we measure that?", "what happens if these aren't realised?" etc. (Our 11 hypotheses would be a good start for anyone).

I really believe in OERs, and I think in the early stage of their development you just needed to take a leap of faith and develop them. But they have reached a level of maturity now when we can ask tough questions of them, without fear of undermining the whole enterprise. Indeed, I think having such solid research to point to is essential for OERs to make that next push through into mainstream practice.

So if you've got any of this evidence lying around (and I do mean evidence, not something a bloke down the pub told you), please let us have it.