The Ed Techie

The iceberg model of OER engagement

I'm pretty sure I'm the first person to ever use the iceberg analogy...

I've been pondering ways of thinking about open education awareness, and OER usage that might help shape OER policy. So here's one I want to try out.

Open education in general, and OERs specifically, form a basis from which many other practices benefit, but often practitioners in those areas are unaware of OERs explicitly. It is likely that these secondary and tertiary levels of OER awareness represent a far greater audience, than the primary “OER-aware” one, so one can view the sizes of these audiences like the metaphorical iceberg, with increasing size as we push into these unseen areas. The three groups of OER usage I see are:

Primary OER usage – this group is “OER aware”, in that the term itself will have meaning for them, they are engaged with issues around open education, are aware of open licences and are often advocates for OERs. This group has often been the focus of OER funding, conferences and research, with the focus on growing the ranks of this audience.
Example: Community college teacher who adopts, and contributes to open textbooks

Secondary OER usage – this group may have some awareness of OERs, or open licences, but they have a pragmatic approach to them. OERs are of secondary interest to their primary task, usually teaching. OERs (and openness in general) can be seen as the substratum which allows some of their practice to flourish, but they are not aware, or interested in open education itself, rather in their own area, and therefore OERs are only of interest to the extent that they facilitate innovation or efficiency in this.
Example: Flipped learning teacher who uses Khan academy, TED talks and some MERLOT OERs in their teaching.

Tertiary OER usage – this group will use OERs amongst a mix of other media and often not differentiate between them. Awareness of licences is low and not a priority. OERs are a ‘nice to have’ option but not essential, and users are often largely consuming rather than creating and sharing.
Example: A student studying at university who uses iTunes U materials to supplement their taught material.

 David Wiley has talked of Dark Reuse, that is whether reuse is happening in places we can’t observe, analogous to dark matter, or it simply isn’t happening much at all. He poses the challenge to the OER movement about its aims:

“If our goal is catalyzing and facilitating significant amounts of reuse and adaptation of materials, we seem to be failing. …
If our goal is to create fantastically popular websites loaded with free content visited by millions of people each month, who find great value in the content but never adapt or remix it, then we’re doing fairly well.”

By considering these three levels of OER engagement, it is possible to see how both elements of Wiley’s goals are realisable. The main focus of OER initiatives has often been the primary OER usage group. Here OERs are created and there are OER advocacy missions. For example, Joanna Wild suggests three levels of engagement for HE staff that progress from piecemeal to strategic to embedded use of OER. The implicit assumption is that one should encourage progression through these levels, that is, the route to success for OERs is to increase the population of the primary OER group.

Whilst this is undoubtedly a good thing to do (assuming one believes in the benefits of OERs), it may not be the only approach. Another approach may be to increase penetration of OERs into the secondary and tertiary levels. Awareness of OER repositories was very low amongst this group, compared with resources such as the Khan Academy or TED. The focus on improving uptake for these groups is then to increase visibility, search engine optimisation and convenience of the resources themselves, without knowledge of open education. This might be realised through creating a trusted brand to compete with resources such as TED.

There is evidence that openness has a virus like quality, in that once people are exposed to it, awareness grows and they seek opportunities to expand open practice in other areas. If this is the case, then emphasising effort on this initial exposure should be a high priority for funders in the OER world.

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.

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.

Politics of openness

[The following is an adapted extract from the upcoming Battle for Open book, which I'm bouncing off you lot first].

I am not by nature an overtly political person, in that I don't interpret everything through a political lens. So, rather like Clay Shirky and higher ed, writing on politics is not my strongest point. Which is by way of saying, sorry of what follows is a bit rubbish.

I often avoid given a tight definition of open education, because I want to admit degree and variation in practice. Whilst some areas, such as OERs, have a very clear definition, others such as open scholarship, represent more of a general approach and set of beliefs. Finding one definition would exclude some elements of the open education story that are interesting, hence I prefer to think in terms of a set of coalescing principles. This approach however does allow for a vagueness in the term which potentially renders it meaningless, or subject to abuse.

In his thoughtful critique of open source publisher Tim O’Reilly, Morozov argues that this vagueness around the term has been deliberately constructed by O’Reilly to create good PR:

“Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as “open.” And after O’Reilly’s bombastic interventions—“Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins,” he once proclaimed in an essay—its luster has only intensified. Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech. “Open” thus could mean virtually anything.”

For Morozov, O’Reilly’s co-option of the term allowed him to ally it to economics, which the market found more palatable, allowing O’Reilly and many in the software movement to “look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics”.  Openwashing suggests that there is market capital now in proclaiming open credentials, and ambiguity around the term facilitates this.

Stephen posted a piece last week about the OU, history and MOOCs (we had a bit of a misunderstanding about it), which highlights that history has political connotations. Many accounts of open education usually have one of two starting points. The first is the founding of the Open University, for instance Andy Lane contends that “The discourse around the role of openness in higher education can be said to have seriously started with the inception of the United Kingdom Open University (UKOU) in 1969”. The second, alternative, starting point for history is that of the open source movement, which is what Wiley & Gurell use, while admitting that “Histories are difficult to write for many reasons. One reason is the difficulty of determining where to begin telling the story – for there is never a true starting point to a tale woven of people, events and ideas.” The choice of starting point will have an influence on the type of interpretation of open education put forward: the OU based one may suggest a university and student focused approach, whereas the open source one might indicate a more technological and license driven perspective.

Peter and Diemann propose a longer historical perspective, highlighting aspects of open education in the Middle ages with the founding of universities which “contained in them the idea of openness, albeit by no means comprehensive. This period highlights “open” as learner driven, resting on a growing curiosity and increasing awareness of educational opportunities.” Open education can be traced through the 17^th Century with coffee-houses and then into the industrial revolution with schools and working clubs. Their overview of this broader history of openness is shown below:

 

 

A history of Openness From Peter, S., & Deimann, M. (2013). On the role of openness in education: A historical reconstruction. Open Praxis, 5(1), 7-14. ) released under a CC-By license

This longer historical perspective has some illuminating lessons for the current debate. The authors conclude that “Historical forms of openness caution us against assuming that particular configurations will prevail, or that social aspects should be assumed as desired by default. … After a period of open movements many times there have been slight but important shifts from “pure” openness towards “pretended” openness, i.e. some aspects have been modified to offer more control for producers and other stakeholders.”

This illustrates that openness has always been perceived as problematic, and one of its principle difficulties is that it operates against an individual’s, and more significantly, an organisation’s need to control. And to return to my original subject, where there are issues of control then there is undoubtedly a political aspect. Peters and Britez are blunt about this in their book on open education, opening with the statement “Open education involves a commitment to openness and is therefore inevitably a political and social project.” It is possible to argue, as the open source community do, that openness is simply the most efficient way to operate, and there is some truth in that, for instance the argument for learning objects and OERs makes this case. But even if that is so, a degree of politics follows. This can be a set of assumed beliefs, in democracy, altruism, sharing, and a general liberal perspective for instance, or more directly, it can be political lobbying, for instance to introduce open textbooks into a country or a region.

There have been explicitly political criticisms of aspects of open education. For instance MOOCs have been seen as exploiting academic labour, and of having a neoliberal agenda. The Silicon Valley narrative can itself been seen as embodying a form of neoliberal capitalism, and so there should be no surprise that MOOCs can be seen from the same perspective. For others, the open education movement is not being radical enough in its reconceptualization of the role of universities. Joss Winn asks “Is Open Education being used as a method of compensating for a decline in the welfare state? Is government advocacy of OER a way of  tackling resource scarcity in an expanding system of higher education?” Winn and others favour a more social interpretation of openness, which draws on some of the historical trends mentioned above,  as well as the strong ethical basis of Stallman’s free software movement. In this interpretation, open education leads to a cooperative university which is “a free association of people who come together to collectively produce knowledge. It is also a political project.”

Even if one ignores such politically explicit aspects of open education there is an unintentional (or maybe intentional) form of cultural imperialism associated with exporting the open education beliefs which are inextricably aligned with open education resources. Dave Cormier suggests that OER can be viewed as a means of exporting an educational model. The power of an global institutional brand, such as MIT, combined with free (as in cost), makes it difficult for local providers to compete, both in terms of cost and voice. As Dave puts it “How are local professors, debating the relative value of their curriculum against the standardizing power of a major university, going to be able to forward their own ideas?”

So even in our definition of open education (or lack of one), our history and practice, there are political dimensions. When it was just straightforward open vs closed the fine differences between these perspectives may not have mattered, but if I had to make a prediction, I'd say that we will see more explicitly political arguments about the direction of open education over the next decade.

The Battle for Open

<This is how we do protest in Wales>

We have a new issue of JIME out, which is a special issue on the OER 13 conference. There are some excellent papers, so go read them. Then, when you've read all those, read my opinion piece, The Battle for Open.

I'm going to write a book about this over the next few months, so if you think it's an awful idea, please let me know. The article is effectively the first chapter of that book, which sets out the overall argument. My argument goes something like this: Openness has been victorious in many ways, but at this point of victory the real struggle begins. If you look at openness in research, teaching, publication scholarship, then it's hard to argue that openness hasn't been successful over the last few years in establishing itself as a core approach in higher education. It isn't something just a few oddballs bang on about now, it has moved to the centre of discourse (and, more importantly, funding).

And yet it doesn't feel like it should. We aren't seeing David Wiley leading triumphant processions down Wall Street. The MOOC invasion and backlash is the most visible part of all this, but I think that is just representative of a wider story. I try to articulate why I see it as a 'battle', giving three reasons:

1) There is real conflict between different visions

2) There are considerable spoils to be won

3) The victor writes history, so there is a battle for narrative taking place

What I want to do then in the book is explore this victory/battle dilemma for a number of areas, and then come to some conclusions. My main hypothesis is that open education isn't an interesting subset of education now, it is education. And so if you care about education you should care about the direction that openness takes. We have made mistakes in the past by outsourcing issues, such as selling off university presses or buying in LMSs. This meant education no longer controlled or had much of a say in core parts of its key functions. We are repeating this mistake with MOOCs and commercial companies. Openness cuts across all of these and so I see it as the key principle that educators and universities need to engage with.

As you can probably tell, it'll be a struggle to control the polemic, but I hope it will be a reasoned, well argued book with plenty of research and evidence, and I'll keep the spitty, table-thumping to a minimum.

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before

 

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanuman/1860273153/>

No doubt most of you will have read the (unintentionally hilarious) interview with Udacity founder and the media's poster child for MOOCs, Sebastian Thrun. If you haven't the short version (minus the ego fanning and competitive cycling) is that Thrun has realised that not many people complete MOOCs, and that making them pay is a good incentiviser, so he's making Udacity an elearning corporate training company.

And there it is. After all that hype. All that "Napsterisation of higher education", the "end of universities", the "10 global providers of education" nonsense, what do we have? A corporate elearning company. As TS Eliot observed, the world ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

Everyone will blog about it (I expect there will be a wave of "the end of MOOCs" pieces by the very people who wrote "the end of universities" ones), and I can barely bring myself to add to the noise, but if you take a step back, it really is a fascinating, and telling case study in what happens when companies try to do openness. 

What is both interesting and depressing about it is the sheer predictability of it all. I commented a while back that FlatWorld Publishing provided a good warning. When the going gets tough, openness is the first casualty. Only last week George Siemens was railing against how people had opted for the easy option because openness was complex and messy. Thrun says it's because he is worried that the Udacity product was 'lousy', but you can bet those venture capitalists were whispering in his ear "where is the return on our investment?".

A couple of points worth noting: Thrun seems to have 'discovered' that open access, distance education students struggle to complete. I don't want to sound churlish here, but hey, the OU has known this for 40 years. It's why it spends a lot of money developing courses that have guidance and support built into the material, and also on a comprehensive support package, ranging from tutors, helpdesk, regional study centres and so on. But of course, none of the journalists and certainly not the new, revolutionary people at Udacity wanted to hear any of this. They could solve it all, and why hadn't higher education thought of this before? As Audrey Watters said to me on twitter:

 

@mweller "disruptive innovation" means never having to say 1) you're sorry 2) you're wrong 3) you're ignorant 4) all of the above

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) November 14, 2013

(Audrey has an excellent post on the Thrun interview that you should read)

I also like the way the article depicts Thrun as bravely digging into the data: "he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about the power of new forms of free online education: the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes". That's right, no-one had noticed. If only someone had, say, plotted all of the MOOC completion data...

Anyway, where does this leave us? Does it mean MOOCs are dead? Not really. It just means they aren't the massive world revolution none of us thought they were anyway. And it also suggests that universities, far from being swept away by MOOCs, are in fact the home of MOOCs. You see, MOOCs make sense as an adjunct to university business, they don't really make sense as a stand alone offering. One wonders if the likes of Shirky will be writing about how wonderful the university model of open education is. So in the end, far from being a portent of doom of the university model, MOOCs are a validation of universities and their robustness.

It's not the end of MOOCs, they just make more sense when you view them as part of the OER continuum. Actually I don't think Udacity's product is lousy - they have some really fine open material. It's their business model that's lousy. To quote the Smiths song of the title: "Nothing's changed, I still love you, only slightly less than I used to."

What sort of open do you want?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/42386632@N00/8528725328/ >

I've been thinking about openness in education a lot recently (my plan is to write a book on this, more on that later). And I've slowly, probably years after everyone else, come to the conclusion that it's a mistake to talk about openness as if it's one thing. There may have been a time when it was, when all the forms of openness blended easily into one indistinguishable lump, but that's not the case now. Not only are there different aspects of openness, but I'm beginning to feel that some may be mutually exclusive with others, or at least prioritising some means less emphasis on others. 

What do I mean by this? Well I could list the different types of openness in education: OERs, MOOCs, open access, open scholarship, etc. But instead it's more useful to consider the motivation for openness, why has someone adopted an open approach in the first place? Here are some possibilities:

Increased audience - you want as many people as possible to be able get at your resource, be it an article, book, course, video or presentation. The main aim here is to remove barriers to people accessing it. This means it has to be free, easily shareable, online, and with easy rights.

Increased reuse - related to the above, but slightly different, you want people to take what you have created and combine it with other elements, adapt it and republish. The same considerations are required as above, but with an extra emphasis on minimal rights and also creating the resource in convenient chunks that can be adapted. Whereas the first motivation might mean releasing your song online, the second motivation might lead you to sharing each of the tracks that constitute the song separately under a CC-BY licence.

Increased access - this is different from the first motivation in that you want to reach particular groups who may be disadvantaged. You have open access in that you do not require formal entry qualifications. You may decide that free is also the best way to gain increased access, but that may not follow. If you want to work with learners who often fail in formal education then simply making a resource free doesn't really help. What they need is material aimed at this audience and specific support. Open access is not just about price.

Increased experimentation - one of the reasons many people adopt open approaches is that it allows them to do different things. Whether that's use different media, create a different identity, or experiment with approach that wouldn't fit within the normal constraints of work, an open method allows this. If this is your goal, then the emphasis is on getting an audience that will feedback on this and maybe participate in this experimentation.

Increased reputation - being networked and online can help improve your, or your institution's, profile. Openness here allows more people to see what you do (the motivation of increased audience) but your main aim is to enhance your reputation. If you were an academic who really wanted to be on the keynote circuit then operating in the open, publishing openly, creating online resources, being active in social media and establishing an online identity might be a good way to achieve this. Here openness is a method by which you realise a different goal, but it could be anything. The emphasis here then will be on networking and using openness to establish identity.

Increased revenue - while we may have suspicions about open washing and using openness as a route to commercial success, it's true that an open, or part-open model can be an effective business model. The freemium approach works this way, where a service is open to a large extent, but some users pay for additional services. If this is the goal then openness works by creating a significant demand for the product.

Increased participation - you may need input from an audience, but can't pay to access them. This could be crowdsourcing in research, or getting feedback on a book or research proposal. Being open allows others to access it and then provide the input you require. Openness here can be quite targeted, you want to reach a particular audience and get them involved, not necessarily as large an audience as possible.

Let's take an example in education and consider it from these different motivations. Let's imagine your university (or a university you know) wants to create a MOOC. They've heard all about them and think they should be doing something in this area (this actually covers about 90% of university's approach to MOOCs). They seek your advice, so you go around to a bunch of different stakeholders and you ask them "what is the aim of the MOOC? What do you want from it?"

Now, the person from marketing says they want to increase the university's online profile and reputation. From this perspective you propose a MOOC in a big hitting subject, featuring a big name academic. The subject will be "Life on Mars". It'll be expensive, high end production, acting as a showcase for the university and getting it in the press.

When you speak to the Dean of the Science faculty they say they are concerned about student recruitment on their post grad course. They want it to bring in high fee paying overseas students. The model that might work here is one that makes the first 6 weeks open, and target a specific audience, who can then sign up. You suggest offering badges and allowing people to build up to taking the full masters.

You then speak to an academic who is really keen to try a student-led approach. They feel frustrated by the customer-led focus of conventional teaching and see in MOOCs an opportunity to try some more radical pedagogic approaches that they have been blocked from implementing. They don't see it as particularly massive in terms of audience, but it will be a rich learning experience for those who do it, as they will be creating the curriculum. You propose a MOOC based in Wordpress, and featuring a range of technologies with learners co-creating the content.

Later you have a conversation with a funding council who want to bring under-represented groups into science. They will need a lot of support, but they are willing to fund the provision of mentors and support groups in the community. You suggest a MOOC based on adapting existing materials, with carefully targeted support and minimal technical barriers.

And so on - you can see that from each of these perspectives the resultant MOOC would be a very different beast. It would be open in each of these scenarios, but with a different emphasis on the form that openness should take.

So, now that openness has to a large extent won out as an approach, the question is no longer 'do you want to be open?' but rather 'what sort of open do you want?'. 

Open media and the new Stasi

"Trust me, I'm a journalist..."

I came across a disturbing story last week, particularly for academics in the UK who use social media. A UK academic who blogs and tweets as Plashing Vole reported that a journalist from the Sun on Sunday had contacted him, telling him they were going to run an article about him. It concerned a few anti-government tweets he had made, in one jokingly making a Nazi comparison. An MP was calling for him to be sacked. In the end they didn't run the piece, but it must have been a stressful few days.

This worries me on a number of levels. Firstly, I often encourage academics to establish an online identity, and that part of that identity is to give a bit of themselves, not just bland broadcast. If we are now entering a phase when any opinion or joke will be used against you then this advice might be harmful.

Secondly, I think most of us will have a 'there but for the grace of God' moment on reading his account. I am mindful of being offensive in any online communication, but I've made jokes & expressed opinions so if someone really wanted to I'm sure they could construct a negative story about me and use a few carefully selected tweets to prove a case. The same is true for any of us I think - a friend of mine was berated by someone because they tweeted about biscuits during work hours.

But the thing that bothered me most of all was the sense of surveillance and suppression of opinion. The East German secret police used to have people in every workplace reporting to them, and they would drill holes in walls to spy on citizens. Any anti-state sentiment that was expressed would be recorded and that person would find their life difficult, or they'd just be disappeared. The consequence was that no-one would express any dissenting view in public, which was, of course, the aim. It is the same here, it doesn't matter that they didn't run the story, they only need to threaten to often enough to make academics scared of expressing an opinion publicly. And that is a very dangerous society to live in.

The possible saving grace is that I would hope universities are strong enough to stand up to this nonsense, and also, I think it's such a non-story, and would be of so little interest to their readers that it's not a practical policy. But who knows?

Surviving the Day of the MOOC

I gave a keynote for Simon Walker at the University of Greenwich for his Academic Practice and Technology Conference. My talk was entitled "Surviving the Day of the MOOC". I borrowed David Kernohan's image as the front slide, because it seems to me that with all this sudden external interest (MOOCs were even on Newsnight), it feels like an alien invasion.

My talk follows an inverted funnel pattern - starting with my own experience and broadening out to consider the wider design implications and then the general higher education context. The point I end on is that MOOCs are really the most tangible and visible aspect of a broader debate/battle/tension - which is around the role of openness in education. You can see the same thing with open access for instance. And this battle for openness is itself really a proxy for a battle for the future or nature of education. 

At the end of my digital scholar book I made a plea that academics should take ownership of digital scholarly activities otherwise they get taken over by external parties. This was before the big MOOC push and I was referencing publishing as an example. But it was (if I may say so) prescient - it is exactly what is happening with MOOCs, and the very worst thing we can do is ignore it.

It all ended, rather unusually, on a table thumping, go forward kind of note. Anyway, here is the slidedeck:

 

Surviving the Day of the MOOCs from Martin Weller

Open scholarship as resolution to the academic dilemma

There is something of a tension at the heart of the relationship between academics and the institutions that employ them. Institutions want to have academics with a high profile and external recognition. But they also want them to do work for them, as they're paying the wage. Academics want to have a high profile and external recognition, but also recognise that a good proportion of their work may need to be for the institution in roles that don't attract much of this.

Usually this balance is fairly easy to maintain, but the problem is that much of the work involved in scholarship doesn't directly benefit the institution. Consider these examples:

• Examining PhDs
• Giving keynote talks
• Being external examiner on a course
• Sitting on project advisory boards
• Reviewing papers for journals
• Being an editor, or sitting on a conference committee
• Writing journal papers

Performing many of these can come under the type of work you need to do to stay current in your field (examining PhDs is a good way of being up on research I've found), but others less so. Giving the same keynote for the tenth time might help the individual do some networking, and could possibly lead to a joint research bid, say, but the direct benefit for the institution is rather tenuous.

As an aside these are also the type of 'glue' functions that keep scholarship functioning, and operate on an unspoken reciprocity basis - eg if you don't examine PhDs then you can't expect people to do the same for you. There is a strong element of game theory here. You could indulge (or an institution could demand that its staff indulge) in selfish behaviour. This might lead to gains for you, but only if others continue to be benevolent. If everyone opts for selfish behaviour then we get the familiar tragedy of the commons - the whole system becomes unsustainable because it would be foolish to be anything other than selfish.

When times are good, this tension is less evident. But when times are tough, and staffing levels low, then this tension comes to the fore - "you can't attend this committee meeting that you're now on, because you're in Cyprus giving a keynote? But you didn't attend the last one because you were in Edinburgh doing a PhD viva."  Or, "you're teaching load has doubled, John has retired, can you take on his PhD students as well?"

Maintaining an external profile is still important to the individual (indeed, when job security is low, it becomes an increased priority as you may find yourself looking for a new post). So, how to do it when there are competing demands on your time? There are obviously lots of negotiations and ways of stressing academic credibility, etc which will vary from person to person and institution to institution. But part of the answer is also to engage in open scholarship.

This came to mind as I struggled to manage my own workload the other day (yes, time to break out the violins). In doing my workload planning for the year it became apparent that I was (as all good footballers say) committed 150%. We pretended this wasn't the case to make the figures fit, but it means there is no slack in my diary, and that's before new things such as FutureLearn come along.

I currently turn down about an invitation a week to speak at various events because I've invariably got meetings for the various OU projects I'm leading on already in the diary (ramp up the violins). I managed to write a paper before Christmas but I'm struggling to produce another one. It is a good paper I think, but I need 3 to 4 days uninterrupted to write it and put the data into order. Traditional scholarship is just very time consuming. This is a good thing, it means the outputs are (hopefully) of a high quality. 

But you may get squeezed on this, and this is where open scholarship comes in. While I haven't managed to write my paper, I have managed to produce a couple of blog posts. I can do these in a lunch time, or on a Saturday morning when I'm trying to avoid watching James Martin misuse the word literally on Saturday Kitchen. MOOCs may play into this also, if your teaching load is increased, then making courses open at least gains some external profile (although, as I am learning, it does involve a lot more work too). The same might be true of presentations shared via YouTube or Slideshare. 

So, the question that is usually asked of open scholarship type activities is "how do you find the time for all this extra stuff?" We may be seeing this inversed - how do you find the time for the traditional stuff?