Open Assessment

Someone had to watch the two-hour video, so I thought I'de spend my Monday evening useful.The video shows the announcement of:

The Digital Media + Learning competition 4 - Badges for lifelong learning

Sponsored by HASTAC, MacArthur Foundation, and Mozilla Foundation.(Don't get too excited about competing, the winners have already been announced.)

The MacArthur Foundation looks at how digital media are changing and affecting daily life. The competition aimed at bringing assessment specialists, technologists, researchers and designers together to design examples of badges.Badges are emerging as a new way to encourage and acknowledge learning.

The Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla are creating the infrastructure that will make badges available across the Internet.How can we use this idea to drive learning, to drive creativity and to help people get jobs. The open badge infrastructure, will provide a set of standards and some building blocks that will help educators to build badges. Why?
Badges (and other certificates and NVQs) are scattered around the web (and drawers); Putting them in one place can help people to find them.
It creates buy in to the whole idea of badges, when people start using it.

First versions of the software to play with and to contribute to are available on http://openbadges.org/

Arne Duncan - Secretary of education. 

The administration want to prepare the children for their future role in the workforce (JB: to be good [tax paying] production units.) The importance of technology is emphasised. Badges can help engage students in learning.
Emphasises the role of educational institutions and teachers in addition to alternative methods of assessment, informal learning, and other initiatives that promote learning that spark economic development.

Charles F. Bolden - NASA

Digital learning is the way kids are learning these days. He makes the link to older forms of recognition in the boy/girl scouts (badges) the army and even nasa, where different long term accomplishments earn staff pins. NASA's challenge is to ignite excitement in STEM. And they have a lot of cool content to support that. They are committed to formal and informal education.

Note: Actually, it is interesting to hear the announcement of this competition, but it's over already. Check out the winners of the competition at: http://dmlcompetition.net/Let me spend my Monday evening more useful and find out some more about open assessment.

Badges systems
Barry Joseph with help of many (in an open document type overview) reviews different goals people have with using badges; different approaches, the different frames people have in mind. The current overview includes:

• Badges as alternative assessment; a vehicle for providing evidence-based assessment and correcting key flaws in the formal K-12 learning environment through a model of alternative assessment. 
• Gamifying education with badges; to increase engagement. 
• Badges as learning scaffolding; to reveal multiple pathways that youth may follow and make visible the paths youth eventually take. 
• Badges to develop lifelong learning skills; a tool for developing the metacognitive skills required by today’s youth to succeed in the classrooms, workforce, and civic spaces of the 21st Century. 
• Badges as DML drive; praxis to undermine the deficiencies within current learning environments and spread Digital Media & Learning practice. 
• Badges to democratise education; to change who does the assessment and what affect the learners have over their learning environment. 

P2PU Another way to demonstrate learning in a different (than conventional) way is offered by Peer 2 Peer University, a "grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. " 

People work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.

"A challenge is not meant to teach you what you need to complete it, but rather to provide a means for you to demonstrate (and practice) important skills through guided exercises. Some people have already picked up these skills, while others are using the challenge to guide their peer-based or personal study."

Note: enough for now.  
Now I should really start looking into how I can create some badges for learning within my organisation! 

Open Teaching

David Wiley in a keynote on Open Education at Penn State University states that the idea that one can do the same things online as one can do in the classroom is ludacris.


Things are changing rapidly. From analogue to digital, from tethered to mobile, isolated to connected, generic to personal, from consuming media to designing media, and from closed to open. David argues that education falls behind in these changes.


Can education be more personal, just-in-time? Not just online, can it be for face-to-face education?
Research shows that students who listen to a pod-cast of a lecture perform better than those who attend the lecture. They can rewind, and speed up the lecture.


Why should education respond? The monopoly of (higher) ed is being challenged. The access to content is not limited to schools anymore. Asking support can be done online. Social life has expanded to the online realm. What about degrees? Perhaps that is the reason why students have to come to school. No, certain vocational credentials compete equal or better to college degrees. Everything universes provide, is being provided by someone else.


What about e-learning? Used to be advanced in 1995. Yes it is digital and mobile, but still old-fashioned on the other change factors mentioned above. Openness bridges the gap. Why? It facilitates access to content. Open licenses allows for personalisation. Sites like YouTube provide an outlet for creativity.


How can higher ed go about opening up then? Open 1.0: Currently some universities share open courseware. They are not very sustainable. It costs a lot.

The focus was on 'them'--sharing something with the world--with some benefits for the universities. Open 2.0 will focus on the 'us' first. And because they are open, there will be benefits for people out there.

Note: so that is how I benefit from this course!? 

Examples how to insert openness in the classroom (with mixed results):
- Public blogs instead of handing in assignments; success
- Syllabus in a wiki, open to change; none ever did it.

Note: Jonassen often would walk into the classroom, sitting down on the table and say 'so, what do you want to learn today?' While we joked about it over coffee, none ever stood up to suggest a topic or a lesson outline. 

- 'Sitcom script' in a wiki, to substitute for real time discussion from different perspectives; Students inserted characters.

Unintended things are often the most interesting.


What can we do to be even more open?
Course in Openness in education, in a classroom, and all materials and blogs openly available; students from other institutions registered as independent studies in their own schools and participated. And it was opened up to the world. 60 participants in total. While it seemed a daunting task, students start to self manage and respond to each others. The international perspectives were considered a benefit in this experience.

Note: Somehow I feel the interaction is lacking so far in the current version of a similar experiment. 

The foreigners asked what completing meant for them ... no credit from the university, but they got a certificate. People appreciate that, and some even list it in their resume.

How to create more student support without putting too much strain on the the professor? Wiley redesigned the course in the form of a Massive Open Online Game/Course. Different characters have different quests to develop expertise. The quests get more and more complicated, so that students must work together. For example students developed their own additional character.

What is in the future? Disaggregation (separating [something] in it's component parts).
New model university, for example Western Governors University uses a competency based model. They do not offer courses, only assessments. They do not care where you learned it; they don't care how you learned it. When you feel ready to take a test, you can come and do the test. Credentialing piece is pulled away from the content.

So, what is the value of keeping these things integrated?

In a blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education David Wiley defines open teaching as "freely allowing people outside the university to view course materials and informally participate in the course" and appeals to professors moral obligation to make their teaching efforts as broadly impactful as possible. 

MOOC
The second part of the Open Teaching topic discusses Massive Open Online Courses aka MOOCs. 
Wikipedia defines them as: 

"[..] a course where the participants are distributed and course materials also are dispersed across the web. This is possible only if the course is open, and works significantly better if the course is large. The course is not a gathering, but rather a way of connecting distributed instructors and learners across a common topic or field of discourse."

A variety of examples of MOOCs and their predecessors are listed in the Dowes' MOOC Guide. It tries to show and a historic overview of MOOCs so far and elicit major design elements from them. Which is not exactly coming out yet. 


Note: perhaps for someone to analyse as part of their OpenEd Researcher badge...?

In their 2010 article, The MOOC Model for Digital Practice, McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, and Cormier study the opportunities of MOOCs to develop the digital savvy citizens Canada will need to flourish in the digital age. They describe what a MOOC is, how it could model digital practice, how knowledge is created and how it might contribute to a digital economy. 

Question: How are these MOOCs different from previous Communities Of Practice?

Open Data

In his TED presentation, Tim Berners-Lee first talks about how he invented the World Wide Web 20-some years ago. He was frustrated with all his colleagues' different computer systems and software and data formats. There was so much unlocked potential. Linking documents on all these computer together. He asked us to put all our documents on the Web and we did. That went pretty far no?

Now Tim wants us to put data on the Web. There is still so much unlocked potential. He refers to another TED presentation by Hans Rosling, who uses boring data to combine it into something more interesting and presents it in interesting info graphics. The basis however is a large amount of data.

He proposes 3 rules for linking data: 

1. http names not just used for documents but also used for things that are documents are about: people, places, numbers, etc. 
2. when looking up such an http thing, important data in a standard format are fetched
3. data have relationships; the other things it is related to are also given http names

The more they are linked the more powerful they become.

Christian Bizer, Freie Universität Berlin, discovered that there are lots of interesting data in wikipedia. He developed some software to extract information from wikipedia and put it in a database--dbpedia. And the data are linked to other sets of data, "and so it starts to grow" ...

Diversity of data - Some examples

• Government data. Barack Obama said he would make government data available on the Web. Important for transparency, and it also shows a lot about how USA ticks. 

• Raw data now!
People hug their data, even if it was paid by tax payers. 

• Scientific data. Curing cancer and Alzheimer's, and the worlds economic problems for example. Scientists who are going to solve these problems are having their data hidden on their computers. Scientists start to discover the power of sharing data. 
• Social networking sites. Every time you do something, add a friend, like something. The network uses it. And the different social web sites do not link their data (JB: at the time of the presentation) 
• Open street map. Everyone does their bit. 

And that is how open data are going to work according to Tim; everyone does their bit and if everyone does their thing, power will be huge. 

Data.gov/Open Data

This is a (US based) community of policy makers, technologists, and data owners, who want to get information from governments around the world to the people who need to make decisions every day. 

JB: And as any community of practice, it needs people with drive to keep it going. Which appears to be missing at the moment  .... 

Open Data Commons
As with other 'Open' topics, one thinking has gone into a legal framework for the sharing of data. And this has been pulled together under some commons licenses. There are three licenses: 

1. Public domain for data
2. Attributions for data
3. Attribution and share alike for data

Where to find open data on the Web?

Sarah Perez, in the popular technology blog 'Read Write Web', summarises a long list of places on the Web where we can already find open data. For example: 

• CKAN - A registry of open knowledge packages and projects. 
• Infochimps - assembles and interconects raw data. 
• Freebase - An user build and maintained shared database of the world's knowledge. 

The New York Times

This newspaper boasts they have maintained one of the most authoritative news vocabularies ever over the past 150 years. And since 2009 they started to publish this vocabulary as linked data. The Times uses approximately 30,000 tags to power their topics pages, and all these tags will be published. 

JB: And I have yet to find an example that shows what this means ... anyone?

Linked data

This is about using the Web to connect related data, or to lower barriers to linking data that are using different methods. Basically the result of Tim Berners-Lee's vision for linking data. 

JB: It is obvious to me that I have entered realms that are further and further away from my bed (as we say in the Netherlands). The concepts in this topic are very far away from my experience and knowledge base. So on one hand, a lot to learn, on the other hand, very hard to grasp. Let's see what I can pick up in this course :) 

Open Science

Michael Nielsen
In the TEDx presentation "Open Science" Michael Nielsen tells several stories about successful and less successful open science projects. 


First he talks about Tim Gowers, a UK mathematician, who posed the question on his weblog if massively collaborative mathematic is possible. He posted a difficult mathematical problem on his blog, and his ideas, inviting others to post their suggestions in the comments of the blog. After a few hours people started to contribute. In 37 days, 27 people posted more than 800 comments, building on each others work, to solve the problem. 


This so-called polymath project shows, according to Nielsen, that we can use the Internet to build tools that expand our capability to solve difficult intellectual problems. For science in general, this could mean an expansion and acceleration of the way we attack a larger variety of problems. 


Another example Nielsen uses shares is the Qwiki, the Quantum Physics Wiki. This was supposed to become a repository of specialist knowledge in quantum computing. Written by the users. And although there was excitement when it was announced, no one was all that interested to contribute to it. Everyone hoped someone else would contribute. 


Many similar science wikis wave failed. Also social networks of scientists have not brought what people expected of them. As reason for these failures, Nielsen argues that young scientists have to compete for jobs, and are forced to write scientific (i.e. peer-reviewed) papers. This is valued higher than the most brilliant contributions to an open science web site. The polymath project might have had an innovative method, the result was still a scientific paper. 


The Bermuda Principles
An example from the 1990s where a different approach was successful was the human genome project. Data were openly shared on the Internet. They had similar problems at first. After a meeting in Bermuda, leading scientists discussed this problem and came up with the Bermuda Principles: 

• Once human genetic data is taken in the lab, it should be immediately uploaded to a web site; and
• The data should be in the public domain. 

So anyone working on human genetics, had to sign up to this and it was baked into policies of large funding institutions. And now the human genome is completely known. 


Culture change
Nielsen and other people in the 'Open Science Movement' suggest there is a need for a culture change in science so that scientists become much more motivated to share. Sharing should part of a scientists job. There should be rewards for this. Also, any publicly funded science should be open science. Everyone has a role in this, by spending at least a little bit of their time in open science projects, and be generous in crediting colleagues for their contributions in open science projects. 


Definitions definitions definitions
The suestion what exactly is open science has kept many people awake. So time for a standard! Science Commons published a set of principles for open science: 

• Open access to literature from funded research; 
• Access to research tools from funded research
• Data from funded research in the public domain
• Invest in open cyberinfrastructure

JB: So I guess this focusses on the fact that something that has been funded by the tax payers money should be accessible to the taxpayers. 

Science Commons

In their 'Introduction to Science Commons,' Wilbanks and Boyle paint the picture of a talented researcher who with all the talent, access to literature, grants, commercial tools, and all the best will in the world, would only be able to study the tip of icebergs of potential leads to study. That, combined with the argument that not everyone is that lucky to have all this access to resources, drives them to suggest a science commons, based on the creative commons principles, with 

"[..] the ambition of achieving for the world of science and data, what Creative Commons had begun to achieve for the world of culture, art and educational material: to ease unnecessary legal and technical barriers to sharing, to promote innovation, to provide easy, high quality tools that let individuals and organizations specify the terms under which they wished to share their material."

 The article further describes some of the projects the organisation started to work on to address the challenges that have been encountered in the process so far (JB: to be continued ... .) 


Creative Commons - Science
Since 2004 (CC) has been focussing their efforts to extend the Creative Commons licenses to scientific and technical research. The Web page lists several links to resources that serve different audiences in the Scientific realm with publications, repositories, and open data. 


OpenScience Project
This project is dedicated to the development developing open source scientific software. A group of scientists want to encourage a collaborative environment where data and models can be analysed and shared. 


Open Notebook Science
To prevent scientists from sitting on their data and only sharing what is convenient to them and for all kinds of other good reasons, an extreme form of open science is that where the entire primary record of a research project is made available online as it is recorded. This involves putting the researcher's notebook online together with all raw data, hence Open Notebook Science. 


Benefits
It ennobles other scientists to compare with their own work or to build on it. This can speed up the process. It enables more effective communication. Also one can refer to the exact instances of the experiments used to support arguments. And research is being reported on, on an ongoing basis without much delay or filter. 


Arguments against
Data theft or being scooped. Difficult to publish in traditional peer reviewed journals. And there might be too much data for anyone to handle. 




Personal reflection
Not sure how it works practically, but I must say that Open Notebook Science was something completely new to me. Quite col actually that there are researchers out there doing that, no?!

Open Access

Am I a very linear person? Or just fixed in traditional ways of working? In anyway, the next topic down the list op Openness in Education topics, Open Access!


SPARC (2009) developed a neat little animation, explaining the principle of open access. It simply refers to free, unrestricted, online access to scholarly papers. It challenges the old business model where faculty hand over their writing to publishers for free, who then collect subscription fees from others to allow them access. At the time of creation of this animation, there were over 4200 peer-reviewed open access online journals.


For a more detailed description of what Open Access entails, have a look at Peter Suber's overview of open access (last updated in 2010.) In his definition, 'Open-access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.' Not all open access literature goes as far as to lose the copyright restrictions. Suber therefore distinguishes between 'gratis open access' removing the price barrier only and 'libre open access' removing price barriers and at least some permission barriers as well. 


Suber states that open access is compatible to any other form of service associated with conventional scientific publications. The difference is that the bills are not being paid by the readers, thus not acting as a barrier to access. Open access literature can be peer-reviewed, copyrighted, be profitable, career advancing, be of quality and prestige, etc. 


Open access can be published in peer-reviewed online journals and in repositories. 


Global Open Access Portal
UNESCO hosts this portal to provide the necessary information for policy-makers to learn about the global OA environment and to view their country’s status, and understand where and why Open Access has been most successful.

I notice that The Netherlands are doing pretty well ... 

An impressive overview of funding mandates, thematic areas, key institutions, communities and contributors!

IJPE
Heather Morrison approaches the economics of scholarly communications from a poetic viewpoint, as we can read on her blog. In the article of 31 December 2011, she looks back on a successful year for open access journals. The counter for refereed OA journals stops at 7,000. There are 32,000 free journals in total. In addition there are 2000 depositories linking to more than 30M articles, growing with 21K articles a day! The worlds largest journal, PLoS ONE, doubled their number of articles in a year. And Bielefeld University developed a search engine called BASE especially for academic open access web resources. 


(A Title-search for "Open Content" shows 111 results ...)

Open Educational Resources

This part of the 2012 Introduction to Openness in Education course discusses Open Educational Resources. A video presentation and a variety of readings are used to introduce this topic. This blog summarises some of my learnings from and reflections about them. 


Reformation
David Wiley, in a 2010 TEDx presentation discusses openness in education. 
He defines open (in this context of education) as referring to resources that are freely shared, and come with permissions to reuse, redistribute, revise and remix. 

Openness is about sharing and generosity, it is about giving. 

Successful educators are those who share the most thoroughly with the most students. Luckily, expertise is non-rivalrous, not competitive; an educator can give something away, without loosing it him- or herself. Wiley calls this a good thing, else 

"[..] teachers would all be like honey bees, who can sting one time and then die."

Where knowledge in books generally can be shared with one person at the time, in the digital world, hundreds/thousands of people can access the same materials at the same time. 


Looking back to the time of the invention of the printing press, David sees a comparison with the advancement of new technology now. There is a collision between the huge demand for this new technology and outdated thinking reinforced by law. 
In the 16th century, this led to the 'Reformation'. Now, education is on the brink of its own Reformation. Openness is what is missing. New media and technology increase the capacity to be open. Through giving feedback, sharing materials, and getting into discourse and collaboration. The more we give, the more education will be open. 


Common Wisdom
Yochai Benkler, in his 2005 paper 'Common wisdom: Peer production of educational materials,' gives two reasons why peer production makes sense: 

1. Quality of education everywhere; and
2. Access to educational materials in poorer countries. 

Internet enables educators to quickly create collections of existing discrete learning objects into new meaningful educational experiences. He paints a picture how billions of people with a little spare time can produce so much more than a group of professionals working 40 hours a week on similar things. And the new technologies, and their applications come with their own new mechanisms for quality control. 


Challenges and opportunities
A 2006 OECD report by Jan Hylén, discusses challenges and opportunities of OER.


Challenges

• Awareness of copyright issues (lack thereof)
• Quality assurance
• Sustainability of initiatives 

Opportunities
Why institutional participation? 

• Altruistic: Sharing is a good thing and in line with academic r=traditions
• Institutions should leverage on taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources
• Cost-cutting
• Showcasing thus attracting new students
• New business models

Motivation for individuals?

• To gain access to the best possible resources
• To have more flexible materials
• Assisting developing countries and disadvantaged communities
• Bring down costs for students. 

A year later, the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation of that same OECD, in a flashy report titled 'Giving knowledge for free. The emergence of open educational resources,' discusses sustainable cost/benefit models, copyrights, incentives and barriers, and access and usefulness of open educational resources. 

Note: Where Jan Hylén's report is licensed under a Creative Commons License, this report has a firm and strict © statement in it. Probably even illegal to link to it in the course (unless you got permission #DavidWiley?) I will not go through the trouble of asking permission, go look for it yourself in the OECD database... (where it states you can download the report for free ... .) ;) 

 This report is a more detailed report based on Jan Hylén's data. And discusses the money side more. 


Roadmap 2012
The Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project that ran from 2006 to 2007 published their results in the form of a roadmap. While not obviously explained, the title Roadmap 2012 might suggest a five-year outlook. Given it is not 2012, did their map help us?
The work was conducted to provide decision makers with an overview of current and likely future developments in OER and recommendations on how various challenges in OER could be addressed. It covered the following areas:

• Policies, institutional frameworks and business models;
• Open Access and open content repositories;
• Laboratories of open educational practices and resources. 

For each of these area enablers and inhibitors are identified and described. Some of the (solutions to) most important inhibitors that the researchers felt that needed to be addressed are: 

• Appropriate systems for recognition and rewards for researchers and educators working on OERs; 
• The right mix of income streams; and 
• Support to communities of practice. 

And the most important enablers: 

• The urgency of the lifelong learning agenda; 
• New generations of Web tools providing more effective OER; and
• The Creative Commons License as an international standard. 

Based on the results, the project provided comprehensive recommendations for a variety of target audiences. 


Other resources
Similar enablers and inhibitors are described by other authors, for example the 2007 article by the Hewlett Foundation (working link: http://www.hewlett.org/uploads/files/Hewlett_OER_report.pdf)
On the other hand resources to tackle some of these inhibitors start to emerge. 

• Gurell & Wiley's 2008 OER Handbook for Educators, is an open resource providing information on how to find, compose, adapt, use, share and license OERs. 
• Plotkin's Free to Learn Guide focusses on higher education governance officials and leaders, to support policy development. 
• UNESCO comes with a comprehensive guide in 2011. 
• Finally, there's the FAQ Section of the Open Education Week Web-site. 

Conclusion

A lot has been researched and written about Open Educational Resources. Earlier works have laid out the challenges and opportunities. More recently the community has started to tackle the challenges, in general by providing support and information for educators, academic, policy makers, and other target audiences. The handbooks and guides will make it easier for educators who just now start getting into OERs to get a jumpstart. 

I do wonder how users of OERs are experiencing these support mechanisms ... 

Open Courseware

The resources for this topic include a recording of the press conference in which MIT announces their open courseware project. On April 4, 2001, Kenneth Campbell, Charles Vest, Steven Lerman, Harold Abelson and Dick Yue appear in front of the assembled journalists.

A council on Ed Tech was established; a sub group was charged with coming up with a creative cutting-edge way to reach beyond the boundaries of the MIT campus. And the administration had somewhat expected some sort of revenue generating initiative.

Open courseware (OCW) was to provide free access to primary content of virtually every course at MIT. Not to provide an MIT education on the Web. But core materials. Real education involves interaction between Faculty and students.

MIT as a leader. Hope that other institution will do the same.

And these days, in 2012, as the list of members of the open courseware consortium shows, hundreds of higher education institutions, organisations and associate consortia have followed the initiative. Please note, not all institutions offering Open Courseware are member of the consortium. 

How did faculty respond to the suggested idea? One would expect concerns about intellectual property, and there were some. But the majority of discussion was around the ability to implement this with sufficient quality. And if services to support faculty in the process would be available.

"This resonated with what many of us believe is the core business of this university [..] it is very much about how do you disseminate and create human knowledge."

Reflections

When MIT first went public with this news, I remember being quite amazed and excited about it. And Then I went and looked at these resources (in the beginning they were rather limited, and I must confess I have not been back recently until now) and realised that indeed, you do not learn from looking at a syllabus and reading the description of an assignment. Someone needs to bring this to life somehow. Better start saving for that tuition fee ...