The Ed Techie

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.

Battle for Open webinar

As part of Open Education week, the OER Research Hub organised some webinars. One was around my Battle for Open idea/forthcoming book. It was my first attempt to condense the book into a presentation. The areas I covered were: the roots of open education; Open access publishing; OERs; MOOCs; Open scholarship; The Silicon Valley narrative; some warnings, and conclusions.

For the 4 areas of openness (OERs, MOOCs, OA and open scholarship) I tried to set out the success of the open approach and also the key areas of battle. 

You can watch/listen to the webinar here. The slidedeck is below:

The Battle for Open from Martin Weller

Art of Guerrilla Research workshop

On Monday I ran a workshop with Tony Hirst on the Art of Guerrilla Research. This was a vague idea I'd floated a while back, and Rhona Sharpe of ELESIG got in touch, asking if I could run one of their masterclass workshops on it. This was a good opportunity to think through the idea with others.

With tongue a bit in cheek I proposed a manifesto for Guerrilla Research which was: 

• It can be done by one or two researchers and does not require a team
• It relies on existing open data, information and tools
• It is fairly quick to realise
• It is disseminated via blogs and social media
• It doesn’t require permission

It is that last one that is most significant I think. This is stuff you can just do, it doesn't require funding, permission from IT services, access to privileged data, etc. It is thus more exploratory in nature, Tony used the phrase 'recreational research' (I hope Tony blogs his slidedeck soon). Another point I was trying to explore is one I've made before, that we have become enculturated into thinking about research in a particular way. What constitutes research is the 2 year funded project with a journal article at the end. Like much else to do with digital scholarship, it is not the case that this traditional approach is not valid, but rather that we now have a much more extended toolbox and set of possibilities. But culturally we still fall into a certain set of behaviours.

It was interesting that a lot of the people at the workshop classified themselves as being outside traditional academic roles, so couldn't engage in traditional research anyway as it wasn't part of their remit. For these people guerrilla research is all they've got.

The slidedeck is below:

The Art of Guerrilla Research from Martin Weller

 

[Update: here is the video of the session, it's a bit quiet]

 

Open research ethics - the puppy killer scenario

Yesterday I ran a workshop called "The Art of Guerrilla Research" for ELESIG, along with Tony Hirst. I'll blog it later but basically it was about what sort of research can you do without permission and funding, eg asking questions of open data (hence Tony describing the things he does).

One issue that was raised a few times was that of the ethics of it. The assumption has long been that anything openly available is fair game. So for instance there is a lot of research that uses travel blogs as its data source, and they don't require the permission of these people to analyse them or interpret them. In general, this is my stance too, but thinking through the types of things Tony does with data led me to come up with a scenario which would raise ethical issues. I offer it just as an example of how it isn't quite as clear cut as you may think regarding openly available data.

Let us imagine that there is a heinous crime we can all agree is very bad - puppy murders (I'm using a silly example so people won't get distracted by a specific crime, but you can replace puppy murders with a small or large crime/amoral act of your choice). Tony does a FOI request to find all the people convicted of puppy murders over the past decade. He then finds which of these have Facebook pages that are openly available. He creates an interest graph of their listed interests, and shows that puppy murderers tend to have a number of interests in common. He blogs this, just out of interest.

Someone else then comes along and finds all the people on Facebook who also have these interests, and publishes a list of 300 people who have 'puppy murderer' type interests. One of these, although entirely innocent of any puppy mistreatment, is attacked by a mob who accuse him of being a puppy murderer.

Now, this has used all openly available data, publicly and knowingly shared by the individuals. But by taking it and creating a new interpretation of that data, new knowledge has been generated which the original posters could not have foreseen. The new form of this knowledge then carries an ethical dimension. This is obviously an extreme example, but it illustrates the potential complexity of assuming all open data is fair game.

Open scholarship, social media & libraries

I gave a presentation to a conference of university librarians in Aarhus, Denmark last week. Social media and the role of the librarian was their theme. I won't pretend to be an expert on libraries, but taking Shelby Foote's quote that "a university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library" you could argue that the factors affecting higher ed are the same for libraries.

The talk was kind of a cross over between my Digital Scholar book and the new Battle for Open one. My argument was that openness represents a key direction for libraries, and that social media plays a vital role in this. I then set out four such areas: MOOCs, OERs, Open Access and Open Scholarship, and the role of social media in each. You can view social media as the glue binds these, or the substrate, that underlies them. For instance, social media creates a pressure for open access, since people want to share articles, and there is no point tweeting a link to an article that asks someone to pay $50 to view it.

The talk went well (I think) and provoked some good discussion. Anyway, the slidedeck is below:

 

Open scholarship, social media & libraries from Martin Weller

Pity the austerity natives

Mike Caulfield has a post on how automation of middle-class jobs, increases competition for poory paid job, which removes the incentive to innovate in technology for those jobs. It made me think how many postgrads going into an academic career now don't really expect it to be well paid, or secure. They approach higher education career with a very different mindset than I did. When I came into academia it was with the hope of getting the "cushiest job on the planet". Professors used to be part of the prosperous middle class, now they hover just above the precariat.

This chimed with another thought I'd had which was that for my daughter she has mostly only ever known living in a post-financial crisis world. She was born before 2008, but most of her formative memories will be of the age of austerity. Going on the principle that a bad naming idea worked once, so why not try it again, we could label her and her generation "austerity natives".

What will be the attitude of austerity natives to money and government? There was a report out today about teenagers in the UK (basically, they're a lot nicer and care more than the media give them credit for). But what of the generation after, and specifically their relationship to money and economics? Will they be fearful of credit, having seen the damage it caused? Will they be like children who were brought up in a strict household who go a bit wild when they are suddenly let loose at uni? They may have a frivolous attitude to money, because hey, it's all screwed up anyway. I suspect there is an interesting longitudinal study in there somewhere...

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.

Build it and they might come

Some of you will have seen a report about a survey conducted on the use of Open Course Library (OCL) free, open textbooks. The findings were that use was "extremely limited". Over the 42 courses that could use the textbooks, this amounted to 98,130 possible students, but only 2,386 did, some 2.4%. All that is rather disappointing to say the least, and it left me a little puzzled. Why would uptake be so low? Given the question "do you want to buy this $100 textbook or have this free one?" one might expect more than 2.4% to go for free.

Tony Bates posted a very good response to it which captured much of my feelings. The survey itself raised a number of questions he suggests: 

• who commissioned the survey? If it was the college stores, would students necessarily go through college stores to download free online materials? If it was the college stores, is not there a conflict of interest here? Who benefits from the sale of high-priced textbooks?

• is this survey too soon to draw any real conclusions? How long were the materials available for instructors to review them? These kinds of decisions are likely to be taken several months before courses open, and it may take another year at least before instructors start to accommodate to these materials

• since the report concluded: ‘the question remains as to why so few of the sections for these 42 OCL courses actually used any of the free or lower-priced materials’, why did the Chronicle of Education, when reporting this, NOT get a comment from the people running the project in Washington State?

 Let us for now, accept that the survey is a true reflection of the state of uptake (although I agree with Tony, using stores as a measure seems an odd way to approach it). This raises other questions about OER adoption. Simply existing is not sufficient for a number of reasons:

• Faculty have established practices, if they are unaware of the resources, or see no reason to change, then why disrupt their curriculum? 
• Existing publishers will not go quietly into the night and spend a good deal on marketing existing provision that open textbooks have to compete with. In online chat someone said Pearson had been on their campus 3 times that week.
• Students will create a momentum if they are aware of the content and it is relevant. The question I posed at the start regarding cost becomes a no-brainer if the material performs the same function

What this mostly comes down to is awareness. Given time enough students may pass around knowledge about this material, but to really make an impact OERs have to be competing with large marketing budgets. This represents the next phase in this particular battle for open I would suggest. Having created the content, getting into the system is now the challenge.