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Meeting #7, December 12, 2023

@ Carnegie Mellon University, Open Learning Initiative

Published onApr 09, 2024
Meeting #7, December 12, 2023
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Meeting #7: December 12, 2023

The Fall/Winter meeting of the Open 2030 Working Group was held as a hybrid session on December 12, 2023, at Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative in Pittsburgh.  The meeting began with tours for in-person participants of CMU’s Emerald Cloud Lab, Center for Transformational Play, Automated Science Lab, and Sustainability Initiative, and a special screening of a new climate-change documentary in CMU’s Tepper Hall.

Tuesday, December 12Working Group meeting 

8:30 AM Breakfast and coffee

9:00 AM Meeting opens 

The Open 2030 Working Group met as advances have accelerated in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) but as progress around equity in education still requires more catalytic efforts from this group and others, and as the dynamism required of world leaders around other existential issues like global warming remains underwhelming.  Among the points of context for the Group were the recent release of MIT white papers on AI (https://news.mit.edu/2023/mit-group-releases-white-papers-governance-ai-1211); events on AI at CMU (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/generative-ai/events); sets of principles coming out about AI from Group members, including Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/2023/10/07/making-ai-work-for-creators-and-the-commons/); and new media productions appearing that highlighting the importance of action toward our sustainable development goals (https://youtu.be/fhNSKcL-YLs?si=Sremj-iPN4tr3OUX).  The Open 2030 Working Group meeting at CMU in December dove deeply into five topics.

9:30 AM AI and Open Education - SPECIAL FOCUS: AI, Equity, and OER 

Topic #1 was AI and Open Education with a special focus on AI, equity, and OER.  CMU’s Carolyn Rose described the university’s Generative AI Innovation Incubator (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/generative-ai/), among other initiatives.  Discussion points included the challenges posed by Gen AI for copyright and traditional forms of citation and attribution; the manifold challenges and opportunities of AI in teaching and learning; and also the countervailing interests of private corporations and educational and cultural communities keen to develop a new kind of public-interest AI.  Tennessee State University’s Robbie Melton spoke to the work now necessary on the part of educators to insure that work with AI in and around the classroom does more than perpetuate longstanding biases around race and gender.  MIT’s Sarah Hansen and Shira Segal presented MIT’s progress on working with community colleges including College of the Canyons and the Maricopa Community College District in our new Sloan-Foundation-funded initiative, which includes a Canvas course on OER and open pedagogy: https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/M6J3CK. This initiative supports community college faculty in adopting and adapting OER from MIT OpenCourseWare into their teaching – with an emphasis on learning from the faculty how to make MIT OCW more useful to educators.  Hansen and Segal and Monique Earl-Lewis of Morehouse College discussed the Culturally Relevant Pedagogy speaker series (Fall 2023) as an informal continuation of last year's Hewlett-Foundation-funded initiative with TSU, MERLOT, and MIT that focused on contributing to the HBCU Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) Community Portal.

10:15 AM From Access to Equity 

11:00 AM Exemplar Courseware 

Topic #2 was CMU’s work with its equity-entered Exemplar Courseware project, supported by the Gates Foundation and others.  Exemplar Courseware is heavily invested in making online education of use to learner populations of Black & LatinX first-generation students, and brings together experiments in learning science, immersive education, and learning engineering to reduce the size of equity gaps in gateway courses in higher ed.  The licensing around Exemplar Courseware platforms and materials (as with MIT OpenCourseWare’s now) is under the microscope; and different knowledge creation practices (evident among tribal colleges, for example [https://localcontexts.org/]) are of great interest to the project.  Among the papers referenced: An astonishing regularity in student learning rate” (PNAS 2023).

11:30 AM Diamond Open Access –> Diamond Open Education 

Topic #3 was Diamond Open Access / Diamond Open Education, described as in need of a better name (“Community Owned and Operated” Open Access, for example) because of the extractive association with diamond mining.  Creative Commons’s Cable Green made his slides available with the usual Cable-ish alacrity.  The MIT Press’s Nick Lindsay described the Press’s work with Direct2Open (https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open), supported in part by the Arcadia Fund. 

12:00 PM CMU’s Year of Open Science 

1:00 PM Replacing Automatic Textbook Billing 

Topic #4 was the challenge of Automatic Textbook Billing.  The Michelson Foundation’s Cailyn Nagle decried the methods of some commercial publishers using the language and key terms of the open movement to serve their private interests and the need for empowering students and faculty with the right to opt-out of predatory billing plans for educational material.  Working Group members Joe Karaganis of Open Syllabus and Chris Capozzola from MIT described the general challenges remaining around OER textbook adoption and flipping the journals of scholarly publishing societies to more open models.  Nagle made slides available and is assembling a new task force on the topic this year.

1:30 PM Open Climate initiatives - Community updates

Topic #5 was Open Climate initiatives and updates on climate action from the community (including news about CMU’s Year of Open Science).  Melanie Gainey from CMU Libraries led a discussion about the Open Repositories conference (https://or2024.openrepositories.org/) and group member Richard Sebastian discussed how best to form new communities of practice in this area.  Cable Green discussed three of the Open Climate projects that Creative Commons is leading / participating in (https://openclimatecampaign.org/; https://creativecommons.org/about/open-climate-data/; https://www.norad.no/en/front/funding/open-earth-platform-initiative-openepi/); the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science: https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/about; and new open education climate communities (http://bit.ly/oeglobal-climate-community).  MIT’s Curt Newton presented on MIT’s work – a key focus of the Institute’s new president – and efforts to build a stronger community of practice at the intersection of climate and open knowledge (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/116wez-iZJjxgTa3Oo9WuoRRDXLLeIY2DFTVCz6ewekg/edit?usp=sharing).

2:15 PM Breakouts & Breakthroughs: Next steps

In the closing discussion Working Group members and hosts and guests spent time expanding on the issue of open infrastructure more generally, the opportunities presented by large amounts of funds in donor-advised funds, and the challenges to open knowledge posed by current legal threats to the Internet Archive and others. Discussion returned to the issues around AI, with reminders of the accelerating velocity of change in AI-generated textbooks (including those built from MIT Open Courseware syllabi [https://owencolegrove.substack.com/p/ai-can-write-near-human-level-college?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2] and responsible AI licenses (RAIL, at: https://www.licenses.ai/).

Forthcoming meetings of the Working Group will focus more on these issues and the opportunities ahead for building more open infrastructure.  Ithaka S&R’s Mark McBride and others pointed to the leadership work of Invest in Open (https://investinopen.org/); we’ll be certain to invite them to forthcoming sessions.

3:30 PM Meeting ends

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