OpenEd: Week 15

Blog your overall feelings about the course. On the content side, what did you learn? How will you use it after the class is over? What did we not cover that you realize now we really should have? On the process side, how could the class be better next time it's taught? What would you change? What would you keep? Is there anything we as a group can do after the course is over? (Stian Haklev)

Overall, I like this course. It is kind of special to experience learning by blogging. It is my first time to have this kind of class, without meeting teachers and students, but we read the ideas of students around the world through blog technology. It is interesting to read people who are not in the same place as where you stay, and get the responses from them sometime.

I learn more about open education through this class. In the first week we read regarding the right to education. I got a brief overview of the educational systems in different countries. The necessity of mandate education is also discussed. From the second weeks a serious of open-education related readings are provided. They help me have a better understand about the open education. The issues related to open education come from a variety of aspects, such as the motivation of sharing, the business model, the barrier of management of OER, the quality of OER, the sustainability of OER, different types of license, and their overlay, etc.

The links of five open education projects are good examples for us to know the current trend of OER movement. I am really with these websites which offer free learning materials. I find most of them have really high-quality learning materials. Audio, video, or interactive learning software are helpful for learners to engage in the learning processes. There are lots of meaningful and valuable materials are provided though this websites. It is beneficial for learners to have the opportunities to have free access to them without costing money. These free materials will bring more learning opportunities for people who live in poor areas if there are enough technologies offered for them to access these valuable learning materials.

Peer production is a model based on the idea of decentralization. Centralization provides explicit support, but the cost is expensive. On the contrary, decentralization allows more control over the courses, and explicit support is available through a group of participants. Decentralization is helpful for the sustainability of OER. Developing course contents by the modules is better for the long-term management of the websites.

I think the class covers most of important contents of OER. Reading other students’ blog is a good way for learning. Sometimes I couldn’t not grasp the main idea of the readings, what I did was to visit other blogs to see what had been posted, and read their postings. It really helped me to understand the main idea of the readings. In addition, by reading posting from other blogs, you could read some stories about the experiences of OER, and know the points of views of people from various places. Therefore, I think we can still keep the way for following students.

OpenEd: Week 14

Greg talked about some issues about getting tenure in higher education. He indicated that “faculty will increasingly become more exclusive, wealthy and childless. These "virtues" will be taught to all new students who go through the education system and higher education will soon become even more of an ideological mass production factory than it already is.” The life for professors to get tenure is very struggling if the tenure is judged mainly based on publications or grants. It makes me think more about the academic life.

He also indicated that “Higher education becomes more open to change, allows more time for faculty publications and grants, gets more money, and tenure becomes open to more diverse values than just publications and grants. Teaching in higher education becomes more open to techniques besides lecture and powerpoint, allowing students to "trib" a lot more.” Yes, I agree with that open education will help the tenure and job problems. Listening to students and understanding their needs are more important than just delivering all the knowledge to them.

Jessie talked about what she thinks that the effect of open education on the education system of China. It is interesting to read her article about if open education can prevail over China. I learn the history of China, but as for what’s happening for education in China now, I might not know, and have never experiences the education there. From Jessie’s point of view, “she feels like it is too difficult to change the traditional system of higher education. We talked about words like democracy and open for years, but hard to move on.” Yes, I agree with what her points. Open education will probably be hard to move on if there are some factors intervened, such as politics, policy, etc. And I also agree that in Chinese culture, parents have much more control over their children, compared to America. Convince parents to accept the benefits from open education will be important, and usually they pay tuition for their children.

It is fun to read Rob’s post. He had five predictions toward open education in the future. The first one is “we will have compatible versions of the GFDL and CC licenses by 2010,” second “as new collaboration and communication tools are created and distributed over the next 10-15 years, more virtual schools like WGU will pop up, and the jucos, tech schools, and for-profit institutions will embrace collaborative education methods.” Third “textbook industry will go away as we know it.” Fourth, “young professors will adopt new teaching methods that leverage student and alumni knowledge and information-gathering skills to develop their lesson plans, giving them more time to complete their research.” Fifth, “my children will not remember a time when you had to pay for long distance phone calls.” I am impressive those five predictions, and agree with what he said. It makes sense to me, and it shows us the possible life in future open education. The license issues of OER will be solved by make a policy which makes different license rules more compatible in some situations. The compatibility of licenses is very important because it happens when people want to gather different information or resources from various websites which are licensed differently. The textbook is an issue that happens now. As we know, people would not like to pay much for just textbooks. The textbook industry might be aware of this, and might discover some other tasks they can do in the future.

OpenEd: Week 13

QUESTIONS: What will the future of higher education look like? What impact will the open education movement have? How will we get there from here? What will be the effects of open education movement upon K-12 education? (alessandro giorni) What will be the effects of open education movement upon high school education? (emanuela z.) What role can OERs play in developing countries? (Stian Haklev)

Due to the advent of technology and the emergence of the OER, there are more ways to achieve higher education. I imagine that people probably can get their degree through free materials besides entering to university the normal way. Courses in University are more flexible and broaden than course in K-12. Most of time, students in university not only read textbooks that are required for class, but they also have much more chances to look for other related learning materials.

Learning through free materials with high quality will be feasible in the future. However, there are still things that we need to deal with to make OER sustainable, such as licenses of OER, the mechanism to make sure the quality of OER, peer production, etc. Localization is also an important factor which influences the dissemination of OER. Languages, cultures, the availability of technology, and so on also have a great impact on the development of OER. For those people from poor areas, the access to technology will be a problem. If they are not provides enough technology facilities, those abundant online free materials might be useless to them. Besides, most websites are English-based, but not all learners are English-native speakers. Hence, extending the idea of OER and have local places to produce their own free materials based on their cultures, languages, etc. would be a better way to sustain the development of OER.

As for the effects of OER on K-12 education, I think it will be a trend in the future. OER will influence not only the learning ways of K-12 students, but also the teaching styles of instructors. Instructors are able to utilize more free learning materials based on their own needs to make their teaching more interesting and diverse. Some free interactive online materials provide students chances to operate some experiments and get feedbacks directly from the software. Problem-based learning environments will be able to be provided with the assistance of the interactive software. It helps students engage in the learning processes.

Similarly, high school education will be also influenced by OER movement, but I am not sure how much of the effect that OER brings to high school students in other countries besides USA because different countries have different education systems. In terms of my experiences, I think OER can make learning easier especially for math and science subjects. There are lots of equations or rules used in math or science. Usually, students may probably just memorize them and do not know the underlying meanings of those formula. Generally, teachers are hard to draw the picture that corresponds to the formula. If there are free materials that can show the results of the formula or equations, it will help students to understand abstract concepts more easily.

As for what role OER plays in the developing countries, I think OER can bring more learning opportunities for those people in poor areas. But before they access to those free materials, they need to have a basic technology facility and know how to use those technology. Even in the developing countries, the digital gap between cities and the suburbs is high. Students growing up in the city might know how to use since they are 3 or 4 years old, but students in the suburbs might get chances to know when they enter to elementary school or junior high school. Students in the city might have their own computer, but the students in poor areas might know what computer it without chances to have their own computers. Overall, I think OER bring lots of advantage to people in developing countries, but the availability of technology will be a great issue.

OpenEd: Week 12

Jessie said that “I think the open educational resources and learning objects are very similar, leaning objects seems just a newer name of open educational resources in most cases as the time passed.” Yes, I agree that it seems a little hard to distinguish open educational resources from learning objects. In the definition of open educational resources, learning objects are mentioned. However, I think that compared to open educational resources learning objects are more limited for the present online learning environments.

Elisa compared the definition of learning objects from wikipedia, Wiley, and the UNESCO, and mentioned that “one can assume that open educational resources should include, among other things such as full courses, course materials, content modules, collections etc., learning objects as well.” I agree with her, and think that open educational resources bring a broader meaning than learning objects. As I indicated in Week 11 in my blog, learning objects have more limits than the open educational resources.

Elisa also indicated that “Openness, localization and technological improvements are the paths to follow for the future to solve the problems of the state of the art of learning objects.” The idea is great. Keeping learning objects open to users can make them more useful and help the sustainability. Localization makes learning objects more adaptive to people from different cultures.

Greg talked about Artificial Intelligence, and indicated that “the costs right now are too expensive to create such a system for the average instructional design group. When the cost of production is less than the value of what is created, then these systems will be a good idea.” I agree with what he said. If it costs too much to build an artificial intelligence system and doesn’t get many rewards when learning through it, then maybe we will consider another kind of training methods which utilize pieces of learning objects which cost much more less, and probably can bring more to learners.

Houshuang pointed out that “just plugging in quizzes and sections into your course is unlikely to generate a course that is very pedagogical or interesting, it will take reworking and refashioning either way - and the important part is lowering the barriers to reuse, whether those barriers are intellectual property, or file formats, or lack of easy tools.” I agree with him. It would be nice to have the chances to refashion learning objects based on the needs of instruction. Then the learning can be improved.

OpenEd: Week 11

QUESTIONS: Some people believe that open educational resources "fix" many of the problems experienced by those who work with learning objects. Why do you think they would say this? Do you agree? Why or why not?

There are lots of different definitions for learning objects so far. Those definitions differ due to different purposes. Though there are dozens of definitions suggested, slight difference existing in them. Merrill prefers the term knowledge object, Gibbons prefers the instructional object, etc. Wiley suggests the definition that “any digital resource that can be reused to support learning.”

Learning objects can be used for quick instruction or incorporation into an online education curriculum. Learning objects that are digital, re-usable pieces of content can be used to accomplish a learning objective. A learning object could be a text document, a movie, a mp3, a picture or maybe even a website. Describing why something is a learning object and in what context a person might learn something from it will be important.

I agree that open educational resources fix some of the problems experienced by those who work with learning objects. I think people think that the concept of OER supplement the weak parts of learning objects, and make learning objects much more fit into the online learning environments we have today. As we understand, Open Educational Resources are defined as “technology enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes.” OER include learning objects such as lecture material, references and readings, simulations, experiments and demonstrations, as well as syllabi, curricula and teachers’ guides. From the definition we can find that learning objects are viewed as part of OER.

Learning objects have some weaknesses which do not fit the modern approaches to teaching and learning. As we know, the more context a learning object has, the more a learner can learn from it. However, the smaller learning objects are, the more likely it is that only humans will be able to assemble them into meaningful instruction. That is, the internal context of learning objects impact the way that they are used. The more specific the internal context of the object, the fewer instructional contexts into which it will fit. Decontextualizatio is one of the weaknesses behind learning objects. Wiley suggests the use of learning object use is better described a “contextualization.” Context should be taken account into learning because decontextualized educational resources does not produce a meaningful context for learning though it seems decontextualized learning objects work more well for economically sensibly. OER pays attention to the influences of cultural, historical, and institutional settings. Contextualiztion is embedded in the idea of OER, and it supplements the weak part of learning objects.

Usually, learning objects are used as content chunks or information containers. Wiley indicates that learning objects are just like a megaphone with large information, not mediator. It is useless for learning objects just to provide lots of information or knowledge. What more important during learning is how to use learning objects as semiotic tools that are able to mediate and shape learner actions. That is, learning resources can not be isolated from the online learning environments. Learning objects should not be used out of context, and should be part of mediational actions, just as OER pay attention to properly utilizing educational resources which satisfy the needs of learners and fit the context with a variety of cultures. Similarly, as the concept proposed by Wiley that “any digital resource that can be reused to mediate learning,” it is better for learning objects to be mediators.

Learning objects are designed for learners in independent use or learning. Little chance of communication or interaction is delivered. Learners are just like passive receivers of a large amount of information or knowledge, but don’t know how to grasp them efficiently or effectively. No worldview can be observed in this kind of the isolated learning processes which preclude learners from other learners. In contrast, OER emphasize the importance of collaborative learning, and it encourages interactive dialogues among learners. Under this ideal of OER, learners are not oppressive to accept any learning information provided by learning objects. Conversely, learners can understand how these learning objects make sense to them, and connect them to the life experiences during communication with other learners.

Copyright will be another vital issue for learning objects. OER are licensed with open-source-style licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses or GFDL. Under the concept of OER, each of millions of learning objects “everything from modules to textbooks to courses” is licensed with CC or GFDL. The use of learning objects will be aggregated or adapted by users without worrying about the license or transaction costs. So the idea of license of OER also fix the copyright problem that might happen in learning objects.

OpenEd: Week 10

ASSIGNMENT: Catch your breath, read your classmates' blogs for Week 9, and post your interlinked thoughts on what everyone is saying.

I read some posts, and there are some ideas that attract me. I will write them as follows:
1.
Argomenti indicated the concept about globalization. I agree with that globalization is am important issue. It is vital to recognize the potentialities of people around the worlds. Globalization influences the development of OER. With the advent of technology, learners around the world who have the internet access are able to achieve a variety of learning resources, and create their own learning materials based on their own needs, or build on the learning objects that have been created by someone. People from different places can exchange ideas and work on the same learning materials collaboratively to make more wonderful learning stuff. Through online interaction and ideas from different persons, the construction of knowledge is underway.
2.
Greg indicated that most OER are from a rich and powerful places of the world because those rich places have the money and enough resources to create them. Those places are usually the creator of the OER, and it seems that they have a lot of influence on the direction of OER. However, we can not neglect the voices from the minorities. For instance, we need not only to listen to the voices from teachers, we also need to listen to the voices from students. Though teachers are the one who can decide the teaching style, the learning results of students may reflect if this kind of teaching method works. The voices from students can not be neglected even though they are not the policy makers. Similarly, people who use OER may come from different countries with different cultures. People may have different needs for OER. Localization would probably be the way to satisfy different needs of users from different worlds.
3.
Elisa pointed out that Lessig thinks that the extrems of "all rights reserved" and "no rights reserved" are disruptive of creativity. The most proper way will be the idea "some rights reserves" of the Creative Commons with which both rights of authoers and users are safeguarded. From my point of view, I also think "some rights reserved" would be proper for both authors and users. But I don't think "no rights reserved" is that bad. I think it is ok if an author who just wants to create some useful contents beneficial for world, and he allows other people to modify, remix on what he creates, or use them even for business purpose. But probably most authors will not choose this way for their own works. They may want to keep some of rights of their works. If the contents are put in the public domain, then any user can do anything they like on the contents. They do not need to worry about if there are any restrictions for the use of the contents. It provides users more freedom on the utilization of free contents or materials.

OpenEd: Week 9

QUESTIONS: What can the open education movement learn from the book you chose to read? Elaborate on at least three points. Which of the ideas presented in the book did you find hardest to believe or agree with? Why?

I choose the book “Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm.” “Peer production” is an important concept which is addressed in this. I think peer production has a profound influence on open education movement, especially on the issue of sustainability. “Peer production” is a model which is better than market-based model or firm-based model because it allows larger groups of individuals to look for larger groups of resources in search of materials, projects, collaborations, and combination. Peer production relies on decentralized information gathering and exchange to reduce the uncertainty of participants. Just as the reading of last week indicates that the degree of decentralization will be a factor of long-term management for OER, peer production is a model which includes the idea of decentralization. Centralization provides explicit support, but the cost is expensive. On the contrary, decentralization allows more control over the courses, and explicit support is available through a group of participants. Unlike market or firm models, cooperation and coordination among participants are easier to be achieved in peer production model.

The granularity of the modules is important for maintain a project. When a project of any size is broken into little pieces, each of pieces can be independently performed by an individual in a short amount of time. It will be amazing if pooling the efforts of different people with different capabilities. A low-cost integration which consists of quality control over the models and a mechanism for integrating the contributions is necessary. Peer-production is a service-based model which utilizes volunteers who are willing to contribute their intelligence, knowledge, etc. Usually, the responsibility is among the group of participants.

Relevance, accreditation, distribution are three vital concepts in the book. Relevance and accreditation are complementary. and they put together users' understanding for a specified purpose. Relevance is subjective to individuals because individuals will map an utterance on the conceptual map for a purpose defined by them. Credibility can be examined by an objective measure that the individual adopts for purposes of evaluating a given utterance. Relevance and accreditation are just like gatekeepers of content quality. Participants will be assigned different tasks to judge the degree of the relevance and accreditation for contents. Take Slashdot, for example. Different kinds of Moderators are given different levels of power of content judgement. Rather than using full-time professional experts, moderators who just need to make trivial effort to any small judgements. The aggregation of small judgement equals to the result of judgement by experts, and the reducing of cost is apparent.
Peer production model can motivate behaviors better than markets or firms. Monetary rewards (M), intrinsic hedonic rewards (H), and social-psychological rewards (SP) are three types of rewards which affect the motivation of contributors. For OER, the value of monetary return will be small compared to the value of the hedonic and social-psychological rewards. Most volunteers make contribution to contents because of their personal interests, not money.

Granularity is a good way for peer production. A project can be broken down into smaller components. Each module is independent, and users can maximize their autonomy over the editing of contents. However, I am wondering if modularity can be applied to any kind subjects and if there is some pitfalls that it will bring. Take cookbooks, for example. It is good for users to add any contents for specific topics. Each cooking skill can be a unit, and users can be responsible for a small part to decrease the mistakes which probably will happen during editing. Each cooking skill is independent from each other, so we don't need to worry about the consistency of the contents. But what if there are a series of scientific concepts which will be edited in different units? Since each concept is related to each other, I wonder if each segment is consistent with each other. If related contents are not consistent, learners must feel confused during learning. Hence, to decrease this problem, participants who take charge of the consistency for some contents are necessary.

OpenEd: Week 8

QUESTIONS: How can you build a sustainable business around giving away educational materials? How can you build a sustainable business model around giving away credentialed degrees? Should governments fund open education? (Do they already?)

Before building a sustainable business model, it is imperative to know the goal of giving away educational materials. We need to consider the potential users because the participation will be a factor which influences the sustainability of OER websites. Hence, we need to have to assess the needs of participants at the outset. There are some models proposed by Downes and Dholakai. I might support a volunteer-support model by which everyone is allowed to modify the contents. The commercial use of the contents is also allowed. Funding is important for the basic operation of OER websites. Users who use contents for commercial use will need to contribute at least 5 % of what they have earned from those contents. Cooperation with corporations is also necessary. Any corporation can contribute some money to OER websites based on the reasons of the access of free education materials to a vast amount of users. Probably a donation model of MSN can be adopted for the sustain OER websites. MSN has implemented a program that some companies will donate money to some charitable organizations based on the amount of the conversations that you have with others. I think maybe corporations can also donate money based on the number of courses provided, the number of participants, etc. As what is indicated in the articles, most people who contribute their time to the editing or maintenance of OER have find some value that is beyond money. And a decentralization management method which allows users to do whatever they like to the OER to fit their needs is also an important way to sustain the running of OER.

As for giving away credential degrees, I may not very sure about this because it may involve the processes or original system acceptable by the ministry of education of the countries. I think there is one way that we might take to try to give degrees through self learning from OER. Learners who want to get degree can pay less if they learn though OER websites by themselves. Their money will be just used to sustain the basic running for the management of the virtual school. The school will provides syllabus for each class, and related contents links for learners to learn by themselves. A couple of evaluation processes will be utilized, which include tests, projects that the learners finish, etc. For instance, the virtual university might provide online multiple choices for each section. If learners can get 70% right on average for all the session, then they can pass the class. Different evaluation methods can be used based on the nature of subjects. Besides, I think that at the beginning the way of providing credential degree can be implemented in some universities because universities can utilize their exiting teachers or resources to help those self learners. Teachers can get payment when they take charge of the provision of course direction, related course links, the editing of test questions, etc. It is kind of like distance education. The difference is that students will be just provides some guidelines which let them know what concepts they should learn for passing the course, and some recommended OER websites for them to learn. The passing of courses will all depend on the evaluation methods which are designed for different subjects.

I think government should fund for the open education to enhance the learning opportunities for everyone no mater what those learners are students or not. The idea of life-long learning emphasizes that people should learn through their whole life, and it is never late to learn. The provision of OER allows people more flexibility to manage their learning pace. The abundance of OER is praised. The trend of OER can not be neglected for the next generation since we are in era of the explosion of information. There are new ideas created every moment. Learning is ongoing when people present their knowledge or create their ideas based on previous knowledge provided by someone. The collaboration of creating any learning education resources is awesome. Hence, the government should provide some funding for those OER-related projects to carry out the objective of learning at every age, everywhere.

OpenEd: Week 7

QUESTIONS: Can you think of license options that CC is currently missing that would benefit the open education movement?
There are sixteen combinations of CC. Under eleven valid combinations, there are five licenses which have been phased out due to the lack of the attribution. Currently, there are six CC licenses are used. Besides these six licenses, I can not think one combination which is missing, but would be beneficial to open education movement.

QUESTIONS: As the CC and GFDL licenses are incompatible, how can OCW content be legally remixed with Wikipedia content?
OCW and Wikipedia use incompatible licensing models. Wikipedia uses the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL); however, OCW uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. Because by-nc-sa and GFDL are not ocmpatible, it seems impossible to copy contents between articles on Wikipedia and articles on OCW. I may think about there one way to make remixed contents work out though I am not sure. One way is to have the original author relicense their contents to make them compatible or if you can get the permission from the author.

QUESTIONS: Some people claim that the Creative Commons ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. What do you think these people mean, are they right, and why?
I am not sure about this. But I think it means if you choose the Creative Commons ShareAlike, then you can exempt from the limits of noncommerical purposes in the the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. That is, the Creative Commons ShareAlike allows users to remix, tweak, and build upon the original even for commercial reasons. I think they are partly right because based on the contents of "ShareAlike" , your new work should carry the same license as the original work. If your original work is allowed for commercial purposes, then your derivative work will be also viewed as being allowed for commercial purposes. But if your original work is not allowed for commercial purposes, then your derivative work will not be permitted for commercial purposes.

QUESTIONS: Is copyleft good for the open education movement? Why or why not?
Yes, I think copyleft is good for the open education movement. Unlike copyright, copyleft allows an author to keep some rights and give every person with permission to reproduce, adapt, or distribute the work. The licenses of open contents are an important part for the enhancement of open education. Reuse, rework, remix, and redistribution are four types of activities enabled by open contents. Copyleft which borrows the ideas from open source software, provides users the chances to modify, transform, recast the work without infringement of copyright. The concept of Copyleft corresponds to the four activities of open content. However, as Dr. Wiley indicated in one of his articles, there is one problem that open source software focuses on reworking while the open educator is concentrated on remixing. According estimation, there are over half of the open contents is copylefted. Works with copyleft are asked to keep the same license as the original. Remixing works from different copylefts is not legal. This will be a problem that copyleft brings to remix. It impedes the remix activity. Hence, I might say that although copyleft is good and plays an important role in open education, it also bring some obstruction that we need to overcome in the future.

OpenEd: Week 6

QUESTIONS: Understanding the importance and value of the public domain, how much (what percentage) of this value would you estimate is realized when works are licensed with a Creative Commons or GFDL license? To what degree would the open educational resources movement (and therefore the world) be additionally benefited if OERs were simply placed in the public domain? Please explain.

I may estimate 40% of the value of the public domain when works are licensed with a Creative Commons or GFDL license. A copyright is a right of intellectual property, whereby authors obtain, for a limited time, certain exclusive rights to their works. In United Stated, copyright includes the reproductive right, the adaptive right, the distribution right, the performance right, and the display right.

Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses, and comprise a selection of four conditions: Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative, and ShareAlike. There are sixteen possible combination if you mix the four conditions. Six licenses are regularly used so far. Creative Commons set up different level of restriction of the usages. Generally, Creative Commons requires users to announce the original author. Some of the Creative Commons also forbid the selling of works for commercial purposes, or limit the ways of changing the original works if users want to re-share what they have created.

Copyleft is a form of licensing. Through a copyleft licensing scheme, people who receive a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme. A widely used and originating copyleft license is the GNU General Public License. Similar to the GNU General Public License, The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) is also a copyleft license that gives readers the same rights to copy, redistribute and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Share-alike in Creative Commons has similar licenses as GFDL.

Compared to Creative Commons, copyleft, GFDL, etc., public domain consists of the body of knowledge and innovation. No one has the right to possess the works in public domain. The body of information body of information and creativity is considered to be part of a common cultural and intellectual heritage. Anyone is able to use or exploit for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If works licensed with a Creative Commons or GFDL license are used for commercial purposes, I think very little value of public domain can be found because: 1. All of six Creative Commons licenses require uses to tell the original author of works, and it will not attract the companies which care about the profits. 2. Three out of six Creative Commons don’t allow users to use works for making money. Two out of the left three licenses without the limits of commercial usages prohibit users from altering, transforming or building on works; that is, derivative works are not permitted. For these two reasons, I don’t think works with Creative Commons or GFDL licenses can bring lots of value from the perspective of business. In contrast, if the works are simple used for educational purposes, some restrictions from Creative Commons or GFDL licenses won’t matter that munch. Generally, those works with Creative Commons or GFDL licenses might bring almost as much value as the works in public domain. However, I may reduced the value a little due to the No-Derivative restriction of Creative Commons with which users are not granted rights to re-built original works.

Open contents include four features of Rs, including Reuse, Rework, Remix, and Redistribution. I think if OERs are placed in the public domain, then they will bring more benefits for education. OERs with No-Derivative limits in Creative Commons licenses will impede reworking and remixing on works; however, in public domain, a work can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without some restrictions that exist in Creative Commons licenses.

OpenEd: Week 5

QUESTIONS: What do these representative open education projects have in common? What differentiates them? In the context of open education projects, what does "quality" mean?

These representative open education projects all offer online free materials for learners and instructors. All of them provide summaries or outlines for courses to help users get a quick picture of the whole contents. Creating free online materials is the goal for these projects, and their central idea is bring something good to human kinds. Those projects are all engaged in designing higher-quality materials to fit the needs of a variety of learners. In addition, helping users learn by their space and get the highest learning performance as learners expect would be the objectives for these projects.

Although all of the courses from different projects are offered through internet, they have different designed interfaces. As for the format of course cotents, most of the projects, such as Open U., Rice Connexions, Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, MIT OCW, and NROC, provide web-based course content; that is, you can read the contents directly through the internet. UNESCO, instead of providing web-based contents, mainly offer pdf. documents for learners to download. Printable documents are also provided Rice Connexions and MIT. In addition, almost projects have their own uniform format for the layout of course except for the Rice Connexions. As we can observe, each project presents their courses in the same uniform. However, it seems courses in Rice Connexions don’t follow the same format sometimes. For instance, some of Rice Connexions courses, instead of presenting contents directly on the webpage, provide links to other websites designed by the instructors.

As for the online course number, MIT OCW and UNESCO have the most amounts of courses. MIT OCW provides about 1800 courses which are categorized by department. UNESCO has about 1243 courses which are categorized into 21 subjects. 306 courses are created by Open, and they are classified into 11 areas. Rice Connexions has about 244 courses from 6 subjects. It seems that Rice Connexions is focusing on providing science & technology related courses. More than half of the courses, 155 courses, are regarding the contents of science & technology. No education courses are found in Rice Connexions. Similarly, NROC also provides more science-related courses that are categorized by the level of college, advanced placement, and high school. Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative has 9 courses.

As for the search engine, most of projects provide this function except for CMU and NROC. Rice Connexions search engine allows learners to search by titles, courses, or authors. Basic search and advanced search which focus on the search of units are both provides in Open U. Most projects are English-based websites. Rice Connexions and UNESCO have some courses which are translated into different languages. Rice Connexions support for about 17 languages, but not for all courses. UNESCO has some printable pdf. learning materials for other languages, such as French, French, Spanish, Arabic, etc. MIT OCW materials have been translated into at least 10 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian.

Learner-centered design can be observed in these websites. Rice Connexions also emphasizes on how to help instructors create an online material. It provides detailed directions for instructors. As for assessment mechanism for learners, most of their assessments are based on activities, quizzes, tests, etc. Assessment is found in each course in NROC. As for other courses in other 5 projects, not all of them include assessment.

Most of learning websites presented static learning materials, not filled with lots of interactive multimedia. Compared to other 5 projects, NROC provides more interactive multimedia learning environments which help students engage in learning processes. NROC provides audios/videos for each course. Similarly, CMU also provides some interactive learning tools to enable instructors or students without programming expertise to create simulation-based learning activities. Generally, all of these OER projects provides feedback or chances for discussion through discussion forum, email service, etc. Learner can find a ways to solve their problems by contacting course instructors or though collaborative discussion with learners around the world.

In the context of open education projects, I think the quality means the way in which those learning materials are presented through the internet, the depth of contents, the clearness of contents, etc. Basically, quality of open education projects can be spilt into two parts: 1. the content: profession, depth, clearness, abundance, correctness, feedback, interaction, etc. 2. The functionality of the course websites: user friendly interface, the arrangement of color, the way of presenting courses, search engine, the resolution of graphics or videos, etc. The quality of contents of OER can be assured by professionals in specific areas. The present of learning materials can be worked through the collaboration among course designers, professionals, instructors, and learners. Sometimes, professionals do not know how to present their learning contents appropriately to learners. Course designers can provide strategies to help professional to arrange course contents in the way by which learners can easily grasp the central. Learner can provide their learning experience to professionals or instructor to help them modify the description of contents which is more understandable to learners. To sum up, OER with good quality means not only having professional contents which meets the learning needs of learners, but also having an appropriate way to present the course contents.

OpenEd: Week 4

QUESTIONS: What do these overviews of the field have in common? What do they emphasize differently? What are the aims of the authors of each report? Do you see a bias toward or against any ideas, organizations, or approaches in any of the reports? Which report spoke the most clearly to you, and why do you think it did? Based on where the field is now, and these initial ideas about where it might go, what part of the open education movement is most interesting to you? Why?

These overviews talk about open educational resources, and try to give readers an brief picture of OER based on descriptions from different areas, such as the basics concepts of open educational resources, the teaching and learning issue, technology availability, copyright, the model, etc. Those overviews bring readers a variety of sub-issues in relation to OER, and it seems OER is broken down to a variety of pieces. However, we may find that the central idea of these overviews is that doing something good to people, and OER was initiated based on this good idea at the beginning.

Based on the central idea, basically, each part of the overviews is trying to exploring new ways or methods to improve the development of OER, the availability of OER, and the sustainability of OER from the perspectives of education, society, technology, and humanity. In addition, how to overcome difficulties and challenge some tough things is also an important concern. In general, the central goal that how to continue OER and makes it sustainable and brings more benefits to human kinds is the common part for the overviews.

As for the different emphasizes, I think it will be the way that they talk about OER. OER is addressed from different perspectives. For instance, you will consider how OER would have an impact on instructors and learners, what functionality should be improved for technology, what is the role that the government should play, what kind of copy right issues that OER comes about, what the influence of OER for global learning, what is the impact of OER to science learning, etc. We can find that those reports are written in different ways which lead readers to a broaden views of OER. Each chapter that focuses on different topic is part the issue of OER. It talks about OER from the concerns of society, education, technology, humanity.

Week 2 reading entitled giving knowledge for free mainly talks about the emergence of OER, and bring readers to a brief overview of OER related issues. Week 3 reading talks more about OER. It pointed out the necessity for OER to move on, and the competences that OER can bring to us in the knowledge society, especially for life-long learners. In addition, it indicates some models of OER, and recommendations for learners, teachers, policy makers, etc. This week focus mainly on the challenges and new opportunities for the future.

What is interesting to me is about the influence of OER on life-long learning. The article indicated OER will be a future trend for life-learners. I am curious about this topic. I think OER will be a good benefit for life-long learners since it is free and most of them have high-quality. People who have left school or are in the workplace have more opportunities to get more free resources from OER based on their own needs. Self-directed learning will be dominant in this kind of learning situation. Learners can learn by their own steps, and it will be more flexible for them to learn something that they are interested in. However, I might wonder if there is enough feedback for learners since there are no instructors who need to answer your questions. Similarly, there are no instructors who will push you to finish some contents based on the schedule that has been arranged. So how can we adjust the learning performance from learners? I am wondering, but maybe it's not the main point. What we must concern is that how OER can bring more benefits to people.

OpenEd: Week 3

In this week reading, the content is focusing on how OER has an influence on teaching and learning, and provides a set of activities in the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project to help readers understand what kind of role that OER should play in the knowledge economy and society. OER not only leverage education and life-long learning, but it also emphasizes the importance of promoting innovation and change in education practices.

Teacher-centered or subject-centered learning usually exists in the traditional learning environments. Generally, in such an environment, students often follow the teaching steps from instructors, and do what the instructors expect. As we can imagine, the opportunities of interaction between teachers and students are not noticeable. I have experienced lots of teacher-centered learning when I was in Taiwan. I remember that in high school, most often my classmates and I just paid attention to the address of the instructor, and kept on writing down or copying contents on the blackboard. We accepted what teachers taught without suspicion. That is, we seldom try to think some concepts deeply or understand what those concepts mean to us. Instead, we grabbed knowledge as soon as possible, and hoped to get high grades in the exam. I think that most Asian people may get used to this kind of passive learning environment.

Compared to teacher-centered learning, student-centered learning pays more attention to the needs of students. Students are viewed as main subjects during learning processes. Teachers will adjust their teaching styles and observe the actions of students during class. Usually, interactions and collaborative learning practices are the methods to bring students to engage in the learning processes. Through discussion, students express what they understand and listen to different opinions from a variety of people who have different ways of thinking. Teachers would be like facilitators for individuals, and provide proper assistance.

As indicated, the open learning environments would like to promote learning based on the concept of student-centered learning. Unlike the dominant concept of educational contents as canned products that are produced by a few educational providers, OER concentrate on content creation, sharing, and re-use among teachers and students. Collaborative ideas are deeply embedded in the creation of free contents. Although teachers are usually viewed as the main providers of editing, organizing contents, students’ participation in editing is also important because OER highly values the knowledge which is created and modified by teachers and learners.

Constructivism is inherent in the Open learning environment. Teachers and learners are participants of learning communities, and have an equal right to modify contents. Discussion is a way for those online users to construct new ideas or solve problems collaboratively. A constructivism environment gives lots of room for students to think deeply and construct their own learning schema through the interaction with other participants. Any ideas are welcome to share, and new comments will be provides by different persons to help idea creators to think things in a broaden way.

Since we are in a dynamic society where new knowledge is generated in any seconds, open contents provides us with more flexible way to develop competences, knowledge, and skills that are required in the modern society. What important is the collaborative learning processes which are constructed by active learners who maybe professionals, novices, etc. Those people from inter-disciplinary areas contribute new ideas to the same topic to make the whole contents more meaningful.

OpenEd: Week 2

This week reading provides abundant related information about Open Educational Resources (OER). It brings me to a deeper understanding about the initiation, implementation, and current development of OER from a variety of angles. I am impressive with almost all the contents addressed in the reading.

Last week, I brought up a question about the quality of free educational materials, and was wondering about how we can promise high-quality free materials due to the lack of enough professional gatekeepers. I think that I find some answers from this week reading. Taking a look at the ongoing projects of OER, most of them are initiated by prestigious institutions, such as MIT, Open University, etc. Those professionals are viewed as a guarantee of high-quality materials. In addition, since those famous institutions are pioneers in some areas, the free materials from them are supposed to be more insightful or inspirational to learners. Hence, here I think as for the quality of contents will be less problematic. What we are concerned about the quality will be how to present those contents in a more readable way in the internet, and what kind of instructional design or arrangements of webpage will accommodate the needs of learners.

As was indicated in the reading, open educational resources are digitalized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research. With a central idea of bring people good things, the initiatives launch OER project. “Sharing” is the main concept which underpins all other related projects. Along with the rapid development of information technology, learning over the internet has become a mainstream. Many undergraduates utilize the internet to search for extending contents as a supplement to their course which is addressed in the traditional classroom. Given there are more free materials available online, more students can receive more knowledge without the limit of time and geographical constraints. Besides, what is attractive to most users is that you can get those valuable materials without any cost.

However, from another angle, it seems that sometimes it is hard to push more teachers to share their materials in the designed format of OER. As indicated, most of them point out that the lacks of time, rewards, skills, etc. are the factors that impede them from producing and then sharing them freely. Besides, enough funding is also necessary for those teachers to produce free materials. What can we do to improve the participation of teachers? I think if an institution is interested in OER, and would like to promote the idea of sharing materials with rewards and enough funding for professors, then there will be more valuable courses provided online.

America is the leader of OER related projects, and most projects are English-based. As for non-English speaking countries, language barriers and differences of cultures are two main issues which prohibit them from more active participation. This phenomenon will result in a less expansion of knowledge. As indicated in the reading, not just get translation from English versions of materials, non-English countries now are encouraged to provide their own materials in their languages. In this way, those materials can meet the needs of local people and the problem of culture difference will be solved. I can not deny the way of encouraging people to create their local materials. But if those local materials can also be translated to be English, it will draw more people around the world, and it will be more exciting to know what’s going on in different countries though it may take many efforts to make it possible.

So far, all OER are concentrated on providing the materials of higher education. I am wondering if this idea can be expanded to primary or secondary education. It will be also beneficial to both teachers and learners in primary or secondary schools. Maybe it could be a potential for future expansion of OER? I am not sure about it. Besides, learning from online free materials would be a trend for life-long learning. Yes, I think it is. Those free resources can help self-learners who are in a wide range of ages, no matter they are workers or retired people, to receive useful information that is helpful for their work or knowledge or sparing the time in their rest of life.

OpenEd: Week 1

Part I: In your opinion, is the "right to education" a basic human right? Why or why not?

In my opinion, I think the “right to education” is a basic human right. There are many human rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), such as the right to life, the freedom of speech, the right to work, the right to rest and leisure, etc. Just as the reading indicates that many human rights can only be accessed through education, particularly rights associated with employment and social security, the right to education plays an important role to other human rights. The right to education is compatible with other human rights, and it can also be viewed as a foundation to other human rights.

To individuals, without education, they may fail to have a good quality of living standard. For instance, adult illiterates would find they have difficult in the present society in which words are used frequently to maintain their daily life. By knowing words, people can obey the traffic regulation, follow the directions to withdraw money, fill out the application forms, etc. Since illiterates may loose some ability to live in the society, not to speak of good jobs, they may also loose the potential to compete with other people to get a good job. They might have a chance to be employed to do some labor-based works with very little income. In general, most illiterates live at the bottom of the society, and may need more assistance from others to maintain their daily basic life, not to speak of being treated equally in some human rights, especially the right of employment because they are much less competitive than others due to their lack of a basic skill of recognizing words.

To our society, education is an investment of human capital, and it can supply qualified people to meet the economic demands and promote the progress of the society and the development of a country in many ways. The government is just like a mediator between individuals and society who can set up a well-organized educational system for individuals, such as compulsory education, to help them get the basic skills and knowledge necessary for maintaining basic life. The number of educated people can be a useful indicator to identify if a country is prosperous. In addition, people with education can be much easier to achieve other human rights inherent to each individual.

Human rights are for all the people regardless of race, sex, religion, etc., and people are born free and equal in dignity and rights. However, the right to education plays a critical factor to help people attain other human rights belonging to them. Educated people stand in the same criteria and have the basic skills to meet their needs of life. In other words, education provides us a basic understanding of freedom of thought and expression, the rights to cultural, health care, etc. which are indicated in other human rights. Hence, right to education not only can be viewed as a human right, but it also plays as a promoter role to arouse our attention to other human rights.

Part II: In your opinion, is open *access* to free, high-quality educational opportunity sufficient, or is it necessary to *mandate* education through a certain age or level?

I think it is still necessary to mandate education through a certain age or level although due to the advent of technology, we get lots of opportunities to get access to free educational materials.

For now, I don’t think free educational opportunities can completely replace the mandated education. The main reasons include:
1. How do we know if free educational opportunities have high-quality? What is the standard for high-quality free education?
2. Are there enough people who can be the gatekeepers to judge the quality of any free educational opportunities and let learners know what kind of level or learning background is necessary before you plan on learning through these free education by yourself?
3. Are free, high-quality free educational opportunities abundant enough and include a serious of contents with the level from kindergarten children to life-long learners?
4. Is there enough evaluation mechanism for learners to know their learning result, and what kind of level of courses that he or she should take after they are done with some free courses?

Compared to free educational opportunities, compulsory education sets up the timeline for children to receive the basic skills or knowledge necessary for their future life. Though the compulsory education may not consider much about the individual differences, it still provides a basic model for people to follow. At least, people can be sure that they can receive a certain amount of knowledge that is suggested or under evaluation by some experienced scholars who are responsible for the educational systems in a country.

Free, high-quality educational opportunities can be the assistant roles and provide lots of learning resources for the normal education. People can take advantage of these free educational opportunities and lead themselves to any advanced level of the knowledge that they are really interested in. However, I can not deny that if the mechanism of running free educational resources is mature enough someday, then it probably can replace the normal educational systems which is mandated by the Ministry of education.