Meeting #1: May 21, 2019

Open 2020 Working Group convenes at MIT Open Learning

600 Technology Square - 2nd Floor - Jupiter Room

Cambridge MA

Here is a printable version of the agenda.

Slides for 1pm "Open Yesterday and Today" (PDF)

Here is a webinar recording of the meeting.

Access, Equity, and Inclusion

Team: Angela DeBarger, Ben Vershbow, Brianna Schofield, James Glapa-Grossklag, Philipp Schmidt, Richard Sebastian

Key Questions

• Open learning for whom?

• How do we create more equitable systems for publishing and participation in research and curriculum so that more voices and perspectives can be shared?

• How do bridge awareness gaps among higher education institutions that represent different sectors and content users/producers?

• How do we portray ourselves as part of the reform movement in higher education, so that when institutions/funders prioritize equity/teaching & learning, etc., they can point to this work in open learning? How do we describe open as a mechanism to address needs and priorities of education systems?

• Access to what? We have always assumed access to content. What about access to people, institutions, teaching practices, experiences?

• How do we develop accessible learning resources that meet the needs of every student?

Who’s here?

• Research libraries

• Elite institutions

• Organizations that lead and support key open networks

• Funders

Who’s missing?

• Learners- formal and nonformal

• Faculty

• Public libraries

• Non-elite institutions

• Middle and south US

• Global maybe - but will require a much larger working group

• Students from CSU and CCCs

• National Federation for the Blind

• National Federation of the Deaf

• Inclusive Design Research Centre

Potential Work Products and Project Ideas (define/evolve in consultation with missing participants and find out what is valuable to them)

• Open to coming up with concrete projects that reflect the issues highlighted in this working group ... 

• Learning circles at community libraries to bridge the gap from nonformal to formal education

Infrastructure, Tools, and Sustainability

Note: The original scope of this theme was Infrastructure and Tools. Sustainability was a separate theme, but the recommendation of the Sustainability and Incentives team was to integrate it with Infrastructure and Tools, 

Meeting #1: Define key questions/considerations on this theme which the Open 2020 Working Group should address.

Team: Nicole Allen, Nichole Saad, Peter Suber, Ross Mounce, Amy Brand, Mark McBride, Sharon Leu, Brianna Schofield

Who else should be part of the infrastructure conversation?

• Voices from the global south

• Funders, especially if they understand interoperability

• Coders, such as CoKo (Kristen Ratan), and someone with history in major open ed tech developments (e.g., Kim Thanos)

• Students/users

• People who specialize in robust preservation

What are the work products?

• We need an inventory of existing OER tools and platforms, including licensing. This could be included as part of the IOI census.

• Best practices in contracting with proprietary platforms

• Value proposition for why you should use open infrastructure

• Outline of consortial ownership model for relevant infrastructure

• Openness metric/index

• "Almetric" styles indicators of OER usage/uptake

• Standard format for syllabi (e.g., to support Open Syllabus Project and interoperability)

What are the core questions?

• Sustainability: what is the role of the academy? How to move beyond well-meaning volunteerism? How to weigh and the pros and cons of proprietary alternatives, and service providers for open source solutions?

• How do we learn from the failures of the past in open infrastructure? When should we be willing to compromise?

Definitions

• What do we mean by infrastructure, which is a layered stack? Platforms, software, tools. standards, metadata. What about pure content – is it infrastructure too? Not clear, need to distinguish "particle" and "wave" forms of content. Perhaps we're really talking about digital infrastructure here.

 Examples of OER Sustainability:

SUNY OER Services campus sustainability project

Sustainability and Incentives

Meeting #1: Define key questions/considerations the Open 2020 Working Group should address. Who is missing? Work products?

Team: Diana, Ryan, Willem

Recommendation: Should these two topics be part of a future meeting, and our general deliberations?

A: We think both of these topics are important, but sustainability and incentives don't seem to go together. We think sustainability likely overlaps with the infrastructure group in whole, or in part.

= notes =

Sustainability

• Models for generating, updating, maintaining content

• What are the real costs of preparing an open course, open materials?

• The content of the commons is often hosted on platforms that may or may not be sustainable

• How to sustain the operations of programs and infrastructure we rely on: tools, licenses, services, platforms

• How to create sustainable publishing models that remunerate authors and/or create ethical publishing models

Note: Before engaging for-profit partners in discussion, we should establish our values, goals, and any no-go options (e.g., algorithmic bias, data collection and re-use, privacy or third-party tools).

Incentives

• Authors: To generate content, to share it openly

  • Grants available only for making open content

• Educators: To use open content

• All: Rewards and recognition of efforts

• Interim issue, because it fills in an area that is currently unsupported

• Institutions: From governments to encourage them to adopt open practices; accreditation organizations; Enhanced reputations

Via Willem van Valkenburg:

University: Reputation, quality, innovation

Students: Cost reduction, accessibility, quality, flexibility, modern learning methods

Teachers: Career perspective, possibility to innovate, recognition for education effort, impact

Trust and Truth

Meeting #1: Define key questions/considerations the Open 2020 Working Group should address. Who is missing? Work products?

Team: Peter B. Kaufman, Ryan Merkley, Hal Plotkin

Who is missing:

As possible guests / members:

• Larry Kramer, President, Hewlett Foundation (perhaps we can time the third WG meeting at Hewlett with an invitation to him to visit with us!)

• Safiya Umoja Noble, author, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

• Jay Rosen, NYU - also for the journalism connection - https://journalism.nyu.edu/about-us/profile/jay-rosen/

• Charlie Nesson, Berkman Klein Center & Harvard Law

• Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jelani-cobb

• danah boyd - Data & Society - Her amazing talk on trust and the media  

• Anasuya Sengupta - whoseknowledge.org (or anyone of her colleagues there)

• Nancy MacLean, Duke University - author of Democracy in Chains 

• Maciej Cegłowski, Pinboard 

• Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School - http://www.benkler.org/

Work products:

Perhaps:

• Case studies on massive untruths that correlate to university knowledge that could be made available to counter them

• White papers on the challenges this group can help address and some solutions

• Interviews with members/possible guests on video or audio or in text

• A kind of public commission down the road on the future of truth, akin to the Carnegie Commission launched in the wake of Newton Minow's 1961 "vaste wasteland" speech

Value Propositions and Incentives

Team: Chris Bourg, Curt Newton, Hunt Lambert, John Willinsky, Loic Tallon, MJ Bishop, Cable Green

Meeting #2:

Breakout discussion 9/30: Cable, Curt, MJ, Willem

MJ: Why produce Open? Faculty really need good incentives and infrastructure to support this. e.g. OER analog for citation tracking, Willem's study of 10 schools with 39k students; e.g. "my OER simulation was adopted by ## classes impacting ## students" taken into account for Promotion and Tenure cases

Cable: OLI presentation by Candace, for 39 WA school presidents and provosts got leadership support; but when they take it back to their schools and faculty, not a single instance was implemented

Open Textbook Library - paid $250 for faculty to review these submitted books - $$ incentive!

Change in Higher Ed requires persistence more than anything else.

Willem - he's done an analysis of blended learning success / challenge factors, at micro- (faculty course) meso- (institute) macro- (national policy), could be relevant 

MJ: On the ground perspective: for most faculty, the key Open Value Prop is “free textbook.” As the comm’l publishers appear to drop costs (via lease model etc), it gets harder to make the cost case. So we need a Big Bold Statement about Open Is More Than Just Free.

• Language translation 

• Etc...

“You’re not interested in copyright until someone takes it away from you.”

Cable: pointing out how bad the status quo about curriculum development, was pathway to add CC BY requirement to all $5B of Dept of Labor funding of materials

Why so hard to make the case for Open is more than Free?

• MJ: functional fixedness - we don’t see the oppty in this new tool

• Messaging about remix, reuse, building the commons, ML analysis of open stuff, continuous improvement

• Academic freedom disincentivizes top-down direction

Cable: OER reduces the “technical latency”

Tuning the Value Props to audiences

• Governments - commonwealth

• EDUCAUSE - faculty

  • Community colleges

  • Research institutions, oppty to create

Can we enlist, train, support, a network of ambassadors really good at having 1-1 conversations with faculty and decision makers? Meet each person where they are, understand what they value, scaffold it up toward understanding. Cable is doing something similar for 1000 members of the CC Open Edu to lobby their gov’ts for OER policy - support meetings, buddy system to help out

Willem: Embed (??) model - different levels of aspiration, and support for leveling people up

MJ: see EDUCAUSE Maturity Index

https://sparcopen.org/our-work/howopenisit/ [below]

BTW - Smithsonian person who attends edX Global Forum is very interested in Open (Jacquie Moen, VP online education - edX MOOC on Superman), could be a great contact and collaborator for this work.

GMMB hired by Hewlett to boil down nuanced OER comms into easily understood hooks → Free

How to message the Open Value Props?

• GMMB: lead with the positive, and stay there

• Cable w Govt’s: here’s the status quo and how inefficient it is

• Cable w K12 school: here’s status quo, curriculum way out of date with no rights for remix update, low income families won’t sign the textbook cost responsibility so increases inequality

• Dave Ernst at MN OTL is a master at this, with data about specific school(s) he’s talking with

Report-back discussion

Talking points:

• Access and Equity is a key value proposition

• Faculty incentives and support

• Messaging requires nimble 1:1 conversation - trained ambassadors that can meet people at what they value

• Investments in people, in the support infrastructure (e.g. CC certificate)

Hal: OER product placement in a movie, Kanye tweets about free textbooks, documentary about Paywall - can we get OER on Hasan Minhaj? Or John Oliver?

Sharon: Lofty goals, top # of high level goals that are like the SDGs? Colorful, simple, direct 

How about something like Bill McKibben's Time Magazine climate essay - imagine looking back from 2050 at the decisions we made to get here, what the pathway was like

Preparation (MJ & Curt conversation before the meeting): 

Do we have all the big questions on the table? For example, to what extent is Open a thing in itself, vs. an affordance or facilitation for bigger goals? And what are those bigger goals, that could motivate deeper engagement in Open?

• Is this an either/or ... or a both/and?  We can (must?) open as a base to accomplish our bigger education / knowledge goals.

We should consider value propositions by use case:

• Why produce Open? 

  • Open what? Content, research, data, policies, practices?

  • Because open is the best way to do science, education, data analysis for the public good.

• Why use (teach / learn) with Open?

  • With open content (OER) or open practices? I think both - and there are different reasons for each.

• Why support the Open movement / field?

  • Because: enter vision statements here.

See the comments after Meeting #1 for breakdowns of constituencies (for whom), flavors of open, timing (tiers)

Some suggested deliverables

• Project list or agenda, like a research agenda. For example: better discoverability infrastructure to support professional incentives for faculty to create OER

• Strong statements of "This is what we believe." 

  • We should look to existing documents that have tacked similar questions:

    • http://www.oerstrategy.org/

    • Cape Town Declaration

    • UNESCO 2012 OER Declaration and UNESCO OER Recommendation (final vote in Nov, 2019)

    • Commonwealth OER Brief (rationale for why Governments (as funders) should require open)

    • 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Content - https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/6/7-things-you-should-know-about-open-education-content

    • 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Practices - https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/7/7-things-you-should-know-about-open-education-practices

      • 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Policies - https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/8/7-things-you-should-know-about-open-education-policies

Meeting #1: Define key questions/considerations the Open 2020 Working Group should address. Who is missing? Work products?

Team: Chris Bourg, Curt Newton, Hunt Lambert, John Willinsky, Loic Tallon, MJ Bishop

Also fold in here the Incentives content from the original Sustainability and Incentives team.

** **

Value Propositions definitely good; what value propositions work for each constituency, where do they conflict vs. align?

Team also wants to include incentives that support behaviors toward the value propositions. Need to resolve overlap with Sustainability + Incentives group.

Definitions of Open, not worth working on - use the Budapest Open Access definition? (ask Nicole, Peter S)

• Budapest is a solid definition for Open Access.

• Creative Commons has a good definition for Open Educational Resources.

Who is missing? Keep it from being too elite

• Meetings not just at MIT and Hewlett. MJ will help arrange Meeting #2.

• Engaging state and public ed leaders - e.g. SUNY, CUNY (Mark McBride), ASU global freshman academy

• Faculty who are actually doing it

• Norman Bier

• Richard Sebastian / Achieving the Dream, cc initiative

• Google - Jamie Casap

• Quality Matters - Deb Adair, OER process for quality control

• ISKME

• Employers - they can contribute to the content, or they'll go around higher ed

• Publishers - various types, comm'l journal, textbook, university presses, OAJournal

Metric: public ed wants access and outcomes 

Some value propositions for Open

• Cuts the tether to time and space - learn when, where, how you want

• Modularity to custom ordering to stacking into solid credential 

Questions of scope:

• Higher ed only, or include high school also?

• Expand beyond US-centric to a global perspective? How might that happen given time and resources?

Incentives

• Authors: To generate content, to share it openly

  • Grants available only for making open content

• Educators: To use open content

• All: Rewards and recognition of efforts

• Interim issue, because it fills in an area that is currently unsupported

• Institutions: From governments to encourage them to adopt open practices; accreditation organizations; Enhanced reputations

Via Willem van Valkenburg:

University: Reputation, quality, innovation

Students: Cost reduction, accessibility, quality, flexibility, modern learning methods

Teachers: Career perspective, possibility to innovate, recognition for education effort, impact

Work products:

• Map of incentives: key places, groups, and people