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.