Drowning in content but what we need is community

CC0 Image created by Catherine Cordasco by @unitednations on Unsplash

Over the past year teachers all over the world have recorded and stored millions of videos, from short instructions to long lectures. Most of them can only be used once but are seldom deleted and as a result many institutions' servers are bursting with terabytes of video content. Storage is not as cheap as many think and as servers fill up we need to think of ways to free up space for more valuable content. Many institutions including my own compress and save seldom used content in archives but as production levels continue to mushroom we need to start asking why we need to produce all this. Why do teachers put so much time and effort into content production? 

One obvious solution is sharing such material as OER (open educational resources) and allowing others to reuse and adapt the material. Why record a lecture when there are hundreds of similar lectures already freely available? I'm sure you can be a good teacher without ever recording a lecture of your own and spending time focusing on facilitation, tutorials and feedback. But sadly OER has still not become mainstream despite greater awareness, according to a American recent survey reported by Campus technology, Faculty Awareness of OER Has Increased for 5 Years Straight, Yet Adoption Is Flat.

While OER awareness went up, for the first time in the past decade, adoption of OER as required course materials did not increase. Why? The researchers hypothesized that with last year's pandemic-induced shift from face-to-face to online instruction, faculty time was monopolized by pedagogical concerns. "[Flat OER adoption rates] may have been the result of the considerable amounts of time faculty had to put into converting their courses, leaving them no time to invest in the exploration and evaluation of new materials,"

Teachers feel bound by tradition to deliver content and the students expect the teacher to deliver content and it's very hard to escape from this mindset. Even if we know there is open content available we feel that we are not doing our job if we use other's material. If it's fine to recommend other people's books and articles it should be okay to recommend their recorded lectures.

This is reinforced in a recent article by David Kellermann in Times Higher Education, Academics aren’t content creators, and it’s regressive to make them so. The pandemic has forced everyone to become video editors and generally not very good ones.

Suddenly academics became video editors – mostly bad ones – and our students turned to YouTube, because on YouTube you can get a better explanation of the same thing (for free I might add). Universities turned from communities of learning and collaboration into B-grade content providers. This is the death march of higher education. Universities are not content providers. Somewhere along this unplanned journey we lost our way.

The main point of this article is that instead of producing vast volumes of content that already exist the university should focus on creating communities, providing context rather than content. The campus itself creates a sense of belonging with spaces that facilitate meetings, discussions and networking as well as having a strong identity in its architecture and setting. The article quotes Eli Noam: the strength of the future physical university lies less in pure information and more in college as a community. 

Today's online spaces lack these advantages and tend to be a collection of closed silos. The lessons of the pandemic must include the need to develop more social, interactive and engaging digital spaces that can complement the campus spaces. The endless production of video content is a distraction from this crucial challenge.

The case of the disappearing journals - open is not forever

"erasing" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by mbanere6

Printed documents from hundreds of years ago are still accessible and stored in museums and library archives. Digital resources can simply disappear forever if the site is taken down and no-one has thought of making a copy. This includes many scientific articles according to a new article, Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals. Open access publication has significantly widened access to scientific research articles and offered alternative channels for many researchers around the world. However, open access journals are often run on a low budget within universities or by organisations with little funding but high levels of enthusiasm and dedication. Unfortunately, some of these organisations eventually run out of steam and have to close down, leaving their journal unprotected and vulnerable. This study has examined the fate of these journals.

We found 192 OA journals that vanished from the web between 2000 and 2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world. Our results raise vital concern for the integrity of the scholarly record and highlight the urgency to take collaborative action to ensure continued access and prevent the loss of more scholarly knowledge. We encourage those interested in the phenomenon of vanished journals to use the public dataset for their own research.

The authors claim that there are over 1,000 open access journals today that are inactive and whose material risks disappearing if nothing is done and this trend is likely to continue. Journals published by scholarly societies or research organisations are at most risk since they operate on low budgets. There are a number of international preservation services that save copies of journals but the article shows that a large number are not preserved and the risk is that if a journal closes down then all articles are lost.

If there is no general agreement whose responsibility it is to preserve electronic resources, no one will be responsible, and we risk losing large parts of the scholarly record due to inaction. Exactly how much digital journal content has already been lost is unknown since the data needed to assess the gravity of the situation is not collected anywhere, which also complicates assessing the risk of journals vanishing in the future.

Presumably there are similar concerns for the many repositories of open educational resources that have been established, often thanks to project funding. If the responsible organisations close down what will happen to these collections? I wonder if there are schemes to preserve even OER collections. The article closes with a plea for more collaboration.

As we have highlighted throughout the discussion, open is not forever, and so we close with a note on the urgent need for collaborative action in preserving digital resources and preventing the loss of more scholarly knowledge.

Reference
Laakso, M., Matthias, L., Naiko, J. (2020) Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals. Cornell University. arXiv:2008.11933.

Online learning - unplugged

"No Internet" (CC BY 2.0) by Graciolli Dotcom

How can digital educational resources benefit those without internet access (about 3.2 billion people according to Internet World Stats) or even without electricity? Open educational resources (OER) are available in hundreds of languages but they don't help those who cannot access that material. The real potential of online education is making it accessible for all - even offline.

There are many examples of this around the world where online material is downloaded where bandwidth is available and then used offline in remote regions, but one particularly interesting example I found is described in an article in Campus Technology, Distance Learning Without Computers, It describes a project called Education for Humanity run by Arizona State University in collaboration with a number of humanitarian agencies where online higher education is offered to students in refugee camps in Uganda. These camps often lack both electricity and internet access so the solution involves a device called a Solar Powered Educational Learning Library (SolarSPELL - see film below). This device stores downloaded educational resources from the university (or any other source) and uses the open source learning management system, Moodle, for course delivery. It is powered by solar energy and can support up to 17 mobile devices on its local wifi network. The device is cheap and portable and has been used in many projects around the world including this one in Uganda. The solution allows students to access material, interact and navigate an online course in the same way as they would with internet access. Where possible, online interaction can take place using mobile devices and Whatsapp.



There are some interesting conclusions to this project. Firstly, students who studied ASU's course on agribusiness performed much better than average with some getting extremely high grades. Motivation was of course extremely high since the students all depended on agricultural business and had immediate practical use for what they learned. Being able to immediately test what you have learned in real life situations contributes enormously to completion rates.

Another valuable result of the project was that they developed their digital literacy skills, despite being unplugged. The offline environment was as close to the online version as possible and this gave them confidence for the future.The students clearly saw the benefits and motivation rose accordingly.

Besides the improvements in students' marketing and financial analysis skills, an unexpected outcome was a boost in digital literacy, Bauer noted. "Although the facilitators were actually in charge of powering up the boxes and being in charge of the technology, they really gave students the option to learn how it works, why it works that way and how the WiFi [in SolarSPELL] was different from the one that they may use to access the internet. We saw their confidence in their digital literacy levels improve, in terms of feeling comfortable in working with technology. And the facilitators were telling us about how excited students were to come in every day.

Because of the limited number of devices that can share the local wifi capacity, many students had to share a laptop or tablet. This proved to be beneficial because it added an element of collaboration that would have been lost if there had been one device per student.

One area of particular interest is the way people who were forced to share a computing device in the pilot project were also forced to work together. "We'll see what the data says, but it will be interesting to [find out] exactly how that collaboration might have improved grades and helped people's understanding.

In developed countries we often fail to discover the benefits that can arise from relative scarcity of resources. Sharing devices forces students to share their ideas and negotiate a solution to the problems they are trying to solve. This could easily be implemented in more connected classrooms to foster better collaboration skills and mutual support.

The course literature had to be revised and adapted to the local situation and OER was the solution. The publisher of the textbook used for the regular course at ASU did not allow the book to be distributed digitally, so the teachers replaced it with OER which they adapted to match more closely the target group's needs. This is another good example of the vital role that OER can play in widening the reach of education, especially through adaptation.

Maybe another success factor for offline digital education is the absence of distractions, allowing students to concentrate on the task in hand rather than be tempted into checking the latest messages. Even in our always connected world we need to learn how to focus and this can be done by temporarily disconnecting or limiting connectivity. Sharing devices with limited or no internet access could have some benefits. Less is more as they say.

Open online learning in local face-to-face groups - revisiting P2PU

I love the idea of combining the advantages of open online education with local support and social context? Maybe we have to separate the roles of the course/content providers at the macro level and the teachers/facilitators at the micro level. One way to do this is allowing local groups to take and adapt course material from major providers like universities and then run local on-site study groups to work through that material and add local context. This is already happening using MOOCs with local support in the form of MOOC meet-ups and refugee support initiatives such as Kiron.

Another interesting example that I have recently rediscovered is P2PU (Peer-to-peer university). At first the idea was to allow people to create short open online courses based on collaborative learning and without a strict syllabus. Learners had freedom to investigate and share ideas and in many cases some or all of them even arranged physical meetings at a mutually convenient location. Those physical meetings proved so powerful that they have now become the core of P2PU's activities.

Today, P2PU focuses on fostering local physical study circles and the online element is for the course material. Over the years they have built up a repository of online courses and more are being added. These courses then form the resources for local study circles that meet regularly in libraries or community centres. You can start a local study circle and choose to study one of the existing online courses or create your own online course in the free open source P2PU platform (thus adding it to the common repository). Study circle facilitators can learn how to run a circle by taking part in an online training course and there are also regular training sessions in a number of major cities, mostly in North America and Europe.

P2PU has three core values: peer learning, community and equity, and their mission statement is:

P2PU is a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education.

We work towards this vision by creating and sustaining learning communities in public spaces around the world. As librarians and community organizers, we bring neighborhoods together to learn with one another. As educators, we train facilitators to organize their own networks and we develop/curate open educational resources. As developers and designers, we build open source software tools that support flourishing learning communities. And as learners, we work together to improve upon and disseminate methods and practices for peer learning to flourish.

This model seems to combine open online education with local support and context and allows for study circles to use the online resources in different ways, adapting the concepts to their own situation and discussing in their own language. Today's MOOCs tend to be top-down approaches with a fixed schedule and little room for adaptation at local level. An alternative is to create the courses, leave them open and add facilitator guidance modules to help people start study circles who base their meetings on the online course but where the interaction is mostly face-to-face in a trusted group. By designing MOOCs for local adaptation and delegating responsibility the courses can gain greater impact, increased diversity and higher completion rates. But it also entails giving up control and daring to delegate.

Trends in education - erratic development

"Direction" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Maurin_S

List articles are very popular but as soon as you draw up a list you give the impression that it is comprehensive. Any time I have been tempted to make a list of ten golden rules for doing something I realise that there are probably lots of other rules equally or more valid than mine. It's probably best to treat most lists as a basis for discussion and take it from there. One such article that interested me recently is on EdSurge, 6 Key Trends to 21st Century Teaching. The background is very USA-oriented but the points show that development in this field is far from linear. Here's a summary with comments and questions to consider.

More professors are shifting from textbooks to OER.
According to recent US statistics there is a clear rise in the number of university teachers using open educational resources, in particular open text books, in their courses. OER is especially used on introductory courses with 22% of teachers admitting to using them last year, a significant improvement over the past three years (only 8% for 2015-16). The advantages are not simply financial. Of course the students save a lot of money by using open textbooks but the main educational advantage is that the material can be easily updated and also reused and adapted by the teachers and students. A spin-off article on EdSurge, Does OER actually improve learning, concludes however that there is little or no evidence so far that using OER has any significant effects on students' actual learning. For students without internet access from home the use of OER can even be a handicap compared to a print book. However it is not the content that is so important when it comes to learning outcomes, it's what the teacher and students do with that content and how they build on it that really matters. The key must be to make the content as accessible as possible, in multiple formats if necessary, and then work collaboratively and creatively from there.

Flipped classrooms seem to be growing exponentially.
Evidently the volume of published articles on this subject is doubling every 16 months as more and more teachers discover the benefits of using valuable classroom time for active learning rather than content delivery. Old habits like lecturing die hard but all indications are that active classrooms are here to stay. However there is more to flipping the classroom than simply pre-recording your lectures. It's about finding the right mix between synchronous and asynchronous learning spaces and working out what activities fit best in which space.

More professors are looking to experts to help them teach. (Though some resist.).
This change concerns the rise of new professions at universities, in particular instructional designers and educational technologists. A major barrier to the adoption of educational technology has been the teachers' fear that not only do they need to be subject experts they also need to master a bewildering range of technologies. Course design and delivery today must be the result of teamwork where the teachers' subject mastery is complemented by expertise in digital platforms, tools and course design. Once it is clear that the burden of digitalisation is no longer solely on the teachers' shoulders and that support is available, then progress becomes visible.

Another aspect of this not mentioned in the article relates to the use of OER. The practice of using recorded lectures from other institutions is also increasing. In a flipped classroom there's no rule that you have to offer your own pre-recorded lectures. If someone else conveys the same message well and the recording has an open license then why waste time recording your own? This is an excellent way to bring expertise from different sources into your course. maybe even offer a playlist of short lectures from academics from different parts of the world to offer a more global perspective than you ever could on your own?

The classroom isn’t the only place to learn.
It never was really, but today we see more institutions acknowledging the fact by investing in flexible and stimulating learning spaces on campus where collaboration and creativity are in focus. Assessment is moving from the formal exam hall to real-life projects, work experience and simulations. Maybe it's soon time to scrap the term classroom and talk about different types of learning spaces, both physical and digital and how we use these different spaces to facilitate learning.

Colleges are still struggling to find the best fit for online education.
This point seems to conflict with many of the others here but is still valid. Online education is still in its infancy compared to the traditional model and we have only started examining its potential. The problem is that many institutions still view online education as a threat rather than a complement and full mainstream acceptance is still elusive. The power of tradition is extremely strong and there is widespread reluctance to accept new forms as equally valid. Despite the growth of MOOCs, OER, flipped classroom etc there is still a long way to go.

What does it mean to teach an age of information overload and polarization?
In a world where conspiracy theories, spam and fake news are abundant and some sections of society (including governments) openly reject scientific research, the teacher's responsibility weighs more heavily than ever before. But it is not simply about teaching media literacy and fact-checking. That can help of course but curiously if we teach students to question and challenge everything, that tactic might backfire and lead them to believe sources that really do question scientific findings (climate change deniers etc). This is one of the themes of an extremely thought-provoking keynote speech by Danah Boyd at last year's SXSW EDU event, What hath we wrought? That lecture is worth a whole conference of discussion and this post will not even attempt to summarise it. Just watch!

Many interesting threads here but no revolutions really. Educational is changing due to technology but not in a steady progression. Development is erratic and unpredictable. New ideas are constantly being tried and tested. Some are instant successes and are adopted, others fails and disappear from sight whilst some failures are reworked and reappear later in a new and more successful guise. The winds blow in different directions and thus change the landscape, slowly but surely

New models for higher education in rural areas

UHI Inverness campus. CC BY-SA Alastair Creelman

I am currently working in a Swedish project (Nya vägar - information in Swedish) that is investigating new paths to higher education for all who live in rural and sparsely populated areas. The problem today is that people move away from rural areas to study and very seldom return. This means that local businesses find it increasingly hard to find qualified staff and the local authorities also have difficulties finding teachers and health care staff. Even if there are many online courses and degree programmes available from Swedish universities, the range is nowhere near as wide as that offered on campus and so the brain drain continues. Some larger local authorities have set up local campuses or learning centres that try to match the needs of the local private and public sector with the courses and programmes offered by the higher education institutions. They also offer a meeting place as well as support and guidance to students and this has proved crucial to the completion rates of degree programmes. For many small local authorities the ability to access higher education without having to move from home is a simple matter of survival. Without this the population will dwindle and it will be difficult to maintain services. Our project aims to answer the following questions:

• How can we provide higher education to all, wherever they live? 
• How can we collaborate to optimize and assure the quality of the individual’s study situation? 
• What can municipalities and other key actors do to create a local context that favors access to higher education? 
• What is the role of industry and the public sector (employers)? 
• What is required from the HE sector to increase access to HE for individuals and groups far from university sites? 
• How can all actors collaborate to strengthen skills supply and life-long learning throughout the country?

UHI Inverness campus

One university that seems to have come a long way to answering these questions is the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Scotland and this week we paid them a visit to learn more about their unique approach to offering higher and further education to students spread over a large and sparsely populated region. Their development has been impressive and rapid; established in 1992, becoming a higher education institution in 2001 and a full university in 2011. Previously all universities in Scotland were concentrated in a central corridor between Glasgow and Aberdeen with nothing to the north and west; well over half of the country's area. UHI identifies strongly with its region aiming to be “locally based, regional in structure and have national and international reach.” They do this in an original way since the university's physical presence is in the form of a network of 13 colleges and 70 learning centres spread all over a region considerably larger than Belgium. Each college is an autonomous organisation with bilateral agreements with UHI, what they call a collegiate federal model. The teachers and researchers are based at the colleges, each of which has its own specialities and local focus, but the students can study most programmes from their nearest college or even learning centre and all have a personal academic tutor. The university faculties and support units operate horizontally in a matrix organisation. Then there are over 70 learning centres in villages, community centres, supported directly by UHI but fully rooted in the local communities. UHI is also a bilingual university with all information and support available in both English and Gaelic though this does not cover the education provided and although there are many courses in Gaelic, the vast majority of the education provided is in English.

What is particularly interesting about UHI is the fact that so many of its courses are accessible whether you study at college, a learning centre or from home and this enables people to access higher education wherever they live and don't need to leave their community. They proudly claim that students have access to about 30 degree programmes within a 30 mile radius of home (distance to nearest learning centre or partner college). Not all courses are available everywhere but as many as possible. Students work from home and come to their learning centre and local college when necessary. All students have a personal academic tutor, usually based at their nearest college. Most courses have students who study from different locations and the boundaries between campus and distance (whatever that means) seem to have been erased.

The same applies for the teachers who can be based at a college or run their courses from small remote learning centres. We met one such teacher who teaches music and even runs week-long virtual music residencies from her base on the tiny island of Benbecula. The use of digital media is of course central to everything that UHI does. A Cisco video-conferencing system links all nodes in the network and UHI is biggest user of video conferencing in Europe. It is therefore essential for all staff to be proficient in using digital media.

Inverness

For me the most interesting aspect of the university's work is its Learning and Teaching Academy (LTA) that supports the professional development of all teaching staff with a particular emphasis on the effective use of digital media. An integral part of their strategy is ALPINE (Accredited Learning, Professional development and Innovation in Education), a framework that offers professional development leading to official recognition in terms of fellowships of the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA). Staff are expected to first become associate fellows and then progress to full fellowships with the option of later becoming senior fellows. Qualification involves compiling a portfolio of learning resources, course plans and digital courseware with the amount and nature of evidence depending on the level of fellowship. Teachers are encouraged to create digital portfolios of their teaching material for recognition. The development of digital skills is integrated into all professional development but comes into focus in activities such as an annual Digital Education Week, mentorships and regular lunchtime webinars. In addition, there are seminar days involving student representatives and teaching staff to discuss for example implementation of learning analytics, course design, curriculum development etc.

Effective use of the learning management system (at present moving from Blackboard to Brightspace) is supported by their benchmarks for the use of technology in learning and teaching that maps teaching and learning criteria with functions in the LMS and offers best practice examples. This is done in terms of their 3E framework: enhance, extend and empower.

The benchmarks and associated guidance and exemplars defined and provided here are aligned with the university’s Learning and Teaching Enhancement Strategy, and will enable the embedding of the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Values in how we use the learning environment and other technologies to support learning, teaching and assessment.

Digital scholarship in terms of sharing scholarly practice and increasing research visibility is encouraged through schemes such as an annual fund to encourage research or study that must result in a paper submission to a journal as well as arranging a workshop or webinar. Three day writing retreats are arranged to help staff write their first scientific papers and this includes adjuncts and educational technologists.

Finally there is a clear strategy for openness, working towards a policy of open as default. A lot of course material is already open and they are planning to develop open textbooks and have joined the OERu partnership where they will offer open courses and validation of other partners' open courses.

I see a clear need for a model like this in Sweden, either by existing institutions in partnership or by a new institution. The key is that there is a university that focuses on providing inclusive and flexible higher education for all, no matter where they live, and sees "distance" as no object and the pedagogical use of digital media as default. The technology and methods already exist, what is often lacking is the will to change.

Finally my thanks to everyone at UHI for their hospitality and excellent discussions.

Offline digital resources - connecting the unconnected

In many parts of the world the idea of online education is still only a dream. Rural communities lack internet connectivity and even if mobiles are used, the networks can only offer basic services like voice and text. Refugee camps around the world are full of children who need to learn but lack books and educational resources. There are plenty of initiatives that offer education based on low bandwidth text and voice services but how can people learn basic internet skills that may be so vital for the future?

One inspiring solution to this is a non-profit initiative called KIWIX that allows you to download Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimed, WikiVoyage, Project Gutenberg, and Stack Exchange as compressed content packages and then be able to browse and read them offline on virtually any device. The teacher first needs to be able to download the packages but once that is done the material can be distributed to, say, pupils in a school, using a specially designed wifi hotspot. All the software and content are all free to download and use.

KIWIX provides free software to bring free knowledge even to remote places. This may be a school on the countryside in a developing country. This may be you on a plane or in the wilderness. Wherever you go: KIWIX gives you access to Wikipedia, WikiVoyage, Project Gutenberg, and a lot more free content from the Internet – even if you don’t have an Internet connection.

Since Wikipedia is available in so many languages this solution offers schools in rural areas or refugee camps access to valuable educational resources when printed school books are either unavailable or too costly. Access to this type of online material can be vital for speakers of "smaller" languages and there are many cases of educators collaborating on developing their language's Wikipedia content. School books may be impossible to afford or even non-existent but by developing Wikipedia and using solutions like KIWIX teachers can give children access to educational resources and help them gain basic internet skills without even internet access.

The website describes successful applications of KIWIX in places like Ghana and Cuba where internet access is limited. Another option suggested is to provide access to sites that are blocked and censored in some countries, such as North Korea, though the risks of doing that may outweigh the benefits.

Sharing MOOC resources - whatever happened to open?

CC0 Public domain on Max Pixel

Several years ago there were strong connections between MOOCs and the field of open educational resources (OER). By using OERs you could design open courses that could be offered to large groups of learners - and so the MOOC was born. However, the relationship between the two concepts has become rather complex in recent years, especially since most of the content in MOOCs is anything but open. Indeed, the whole idea of the word open has become elastic.

An example of this is an interesting article in Inside Higher Ed, How MOOC Collaboration Could Aid On-Campus Teaching and Learning. It discusses the problem that most MOOC content is locked into the various MOOC platforms and cannot be reused, not even by the members of the consortium. It seems that not even the institutions within EdX, Coursera or other consortia are able to access each other's course material and this means that some extremely valuable and costly educational resources are locked down. The article looks at a current initiative within Open EdX to share resources among partner institutions and thereby allowing for some level of reuse, especially in regular campus courses.

Sharing MOOC content among partner institutions for the purposes of residential instruction could substantially increase the value-add of participating in a MOOC consortium. The challenges to MOOC providers involve unbundling content from course models, providing interoperability pathways between MOOCs and residential learning management systems, and formulating governance for sharing as more initiatives move toward sustainable -- for-pay and/or for-credit -- models.

Being able to share resources with other member institutions in what is labelled a collaboration economy sounds like an obvious and attractive benefit of belonging to a MOOC consortium. The difficulty at present is being able to search effectively within the platform and easily add content directly into your learning management system. A project at Harvard University,  DART: Digital Assets for Reuse in Teaching, aims at integrating the university's MOOC content with their LMS, Canvas, and providing effective search and recommendation services. This is so far restricted to using the university's own MOOC resources in their own regular programmes, something that I had assumed was already normal practice. The concept of sharing within a consortium is seen as the next big step but presumably with a price tag.

As edX and other MOOC providers continue to chart paths to paid, for-credit courses, it is an opportune time to more boldly reimagine the benefits participating in a MOOC consortium brings. Institutions of higher education are beginning to more deeply strategize about how they view the digital learning landscape. And at a time when so many institutions have committed to open online courses, it’s natural to ask how these materials can be used to explore new pathways in both existing and nascent learning settings.

At the same time the solutions proposed in the article would be irrelevant if everyone simply put a Creative Commons license on all the material and shared it openly. But since many high profile institutions have invested heavily in their MOOCs, they are wary of simply opening up to the world and want to protect their investment to a certain extent by restricting the openness to consortium members. But is sad to see that the MOOC movement, built on the concept of openness, has resulted in silos of locked content that may in the future be unlocked to those willing to pay for membership. I really thought the whole idea was to share expertise and make education available to everyone.

Open learning - back to basics

CC0 Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

The term open in education can mean almost anything today and should always be taken with at least a pinch of salt. Some MOOCs are now disappearing behind paywalls as described for example in Class Central's post First Look at edX’s Paywall Experiments. Many commercial platforms thrive on selling our data to advertisers and most online tools depend on the freemium model and if they cannot convert enough free users into paying customers they may go bust or ditch the free option completely. Many resources and courses have become dependent on commercial platforms that can quickly change their business model with very little advance warning or use the data they collect to earn money. I wonder therefore if it is time for a renaissance for the open non-commercial platforms and communities run by educators that have fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Stephen Downes wrote an excellent defense of the principles of open education a few months ago:  The Fabrication that is OER. The post is an answer to critics who claim that the OER movement has not been able to find a viable platform or business model and has not become mainstream. The counter claim is that it's all about educators who want to share their work, form communities and create a culture of sharing using whatever tools and platforms that best serve their purpose. It's not about creating an all-embracing platform for the world or to trying to institutionalise openness.

I'm not interested in collecting, institutionalizing, and marketing educational content as a product. Maybe there are some people in OER who are really interested in this aspect of it (and they tend to collect together, write manifestos, work with institutions, and collect all the funding). But I'm not, nor are, I think, the vast majority of people who actually produce and share free and open learning content.

I'm rather comforted by this since I have spent many years arguing for government initiatives, open education strategies including the creation of national and international repositories. This is happening in some places but is mostly a painfully slow process. Should we be trying to change the world or simply focus on building reliable and non-commercial arenas for those who want to share and collaborate?

In recent years the spotlight has been on high-profile and increasingly commercial platforms such as Coursera, EdX, FutureLearn, Khan Academy, iTunes U and so on. However many of the open communities and platforms that we used to use are still running, though very much under the radar of the media and most educators. I mean spaces like Wikiversity and WikiEducator as well as more focused platforms like the World Health Organisation's OpenWHO or the open courses hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning, to name but a few. I admit that I have not paid much attention to these spaces in recent years but I wonder if it's time to return to platforms that we have more control over and are run by open educators for open educators. They may not have the attractive features and intuitive feel of the commercial platforms but they are ideal places for collaborative projects and are not driven by advertising. 

I wonder if we really should be aiming at converting the skeptics and trying to win government approval and instead focus on helping those who do want to share, developing truly open platforms and communities. It's not a battle against traditional practices; it's about open educators "doing what they do" (to paraphrase Downes again). 

What is a lecture worth?

"WIDER Annual Lecture 20: Direct interven" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by UNU-WIDER

Today you can watch millions of university lectures in all disciplines completely free and in many cases download them to your mobile or tablet. In addition, many universities offer course content as open courseware. For the past 15 years we have seen that content is no longer king and since it is openly available for free the real value of a university lies in providing the context through teachers who can lead discussions, put issues into perspective, inspire, challenge and support their students. However most institutions still protect their content, locking it away from public view, as if it was a valuable commodity. Of course there is content that may be sensitive but since so many universities in the world are state funded it seems strange to hide content that has been publicly funded.

An article by Joshua Kim in Inside Higher Ed, An Incredible College Lecture Is Now Worth 40 Cents, highlights this issue through the example of an online course on the history of London. This course is not open or free but the cost says something about the value of even high quality content.

I purchased this course from the Amazon owned Audible.com. As a Platinum Annual subscriber, the cost for the course was $9.56. The course has 24 lectures of about 30 minutes each. The cost per lecture, therefore, is about 40 cents. 40 cents.

Despite the line-up of leading authorities in the field and high quality production the course price is extremely low. Even in a commercial setting the price is 40 cents per lecture. Of course if you take a MOOC or other open course the cost is precisely zero. At the same time quality content is extremely valuable for the learner in terms of their learning and is also expensive to create. I'm not sure how sustainable this model is and in the end we may see a system whereby micro-payments per user can finance content production in some way. Those who produce good content deserve some reward and incentive to continue.

However in a world where so much content is free and often licensed for reuse and adaptation then why do so many institutions still spend so much time and money on making their own content? If content is easily shared then institutions can reuse and adapt content at low cost and focus their attention on adding real value in terms of fostering learning and supporting students. Do many universities still base their courses on content delivery and their examinations on content recall? Shouldn't teachers be encouraged to use more open content and spend their own time helping students to make sense of them? Kim ends his article with these two questions:

Is your school transitioning from a teacher/content focus to a learner/learning focus?

How do we keep what is wonderful about the lecture format, but fold in elements of active and relational learning in to the DNA of higher education?

Open education in Palestine

Bethlehem campus

Open universities all over the world aim to offer higher education to non-traditional students, often in rural and underprivileged areas of the country. The challenge is to create learning communities where students are spread all over the country and seldom, if ever, get the chance to meet physically at one location. This challenge is particularly acute at Al Quds Open University (QOU) in Palestine which I visited last week as a guest speaker at their conference Digital Transformation in Continuing Education (30 July). The university offers education throughout the West Bank and Gaza where travel between towns is either difficult or, in the case of Gaza, virtually impossible. The multiple campus university is united digitally and all courses combine online studies with on-site meetings and support.

Al Quds Open University was founded in 1991 and today has around 55,000 students, 8 faculties and 19 campuses/study centres (14 in the West Bank and 5 in Gaza). All courses mix online learning with classroom teaching at the local study centres. The courses are delivered through a variety of platforms: the learning management system Moodle, the academic portal, a media platform, QTube, with a wide range of lectures and information films, a portal for sharing slideshows, the open repository OSOL for scientific journals and other publications and various mobile applications. The university is committed to open educational resources and the vast majority of material has a Creative Commons license and they publish five open access scientific journals. Fees are kept as low as possible (around $350 per term) but are the major source of funding together with donations. As well as the standard e-learning platforms the university also has its own satellite TV channel, Al Quds Educational Channel, broadcasting both academic content as well as educational documentaries for general interest as part of their outreach strategy. The channel is free and reaches households all over Palestine and the programmes are also freely accessible worldwide via the website. I visited their studios where a dedicated team of media professionals produce an impressive range of programmes with many live discussions and lectures from their studio as well as documentaries.

Map showing the study centre areas

I was particularly interested in the study centres (branches) and how they support the students. The study centres host lectures, seminars and examinations but are also places where students can come to use computers, get academic and technical support as well as meet each other. Each study centre has academic staff who can teach on-site and there is also a network of part-time teachers who teach and work with course development. Blended learning is default since students need a social context for their learning and the regular meetings at the study centres helps to keep them on track even though most of the course work is online. They also offer courses on learning how to learn with a focus on learning online.

I visited the centre in Bethlehem which hosts around 4,000 students (78% female) and has 24 full-time teaching staff plus administration, a library and educational technologists. Last year 400 students graduated in Bethlehem and this year’s ceremony say 450 graduate. As well as these centres the university has two mobile educational centres; lorries equipped with laptops, generator, satellite wifi and teachers that drive to outlying rural areas and offer ICT training to remote schools. This is part of the university's commitment to continuing education, coordinated by the Continuing Education and Community Service Centre and offering lifelong learning, digital literacy and professional training all over Palestine via the study centres. At present there are even plans to start a study centre in Syria to serve Palestinians there.

Poster advertising the mobile educational centres

A particularly interesting new development is the range of non-credit self-learning open online SMART courses that are specially adapted for mobile delivery and are available via Google Play and similar platforms. These courses offer basic training in subjects like English, Arabic, digital skills and now the first Arabic open course on OER (Open Educational Resources). These courses are available to anyone for free and interaction between students takes place on Facebook groups. QOU are also active contributors to the pan-Arabic OER community, ALECSO OER.

Combining online learning with on-site support in every region offers students both the flexibility they need to study and the sense of community that will support them through their studies. With travel between many of the regions challenging and time-consuming the digital spaces provide a common meeting place for all.

Open educational resources - still waiting for the breakthrough

"Brigham Young University faculty survey" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by opensourceway

Open Educational resources (OER) has been on the verge of mainstream breakthrough for the past ten years or so but, despite many convincing arguments and excellent research, it never manages to cross that threshold. Right now, UNESCO is inviting comments on its draft UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) that will result in a new set of recommendations to all member nations on the promotion and development of OER. This can be seen as a refinement of UNESCO's 2012 Paris OER Declaration which provided important top-level support for OER and raised the visibility of the field but failed to convince the majority of member nations to commit to the cause.

The question is whether OER will ever manage to go mainstream or whether it will remain a field for a committed minority of educators. This is discussed in an article by Tom Berger on Edutopia, The Uncertain Future of OER. The Achilles' heel of OER is the still time-consuming task of finding the right material. There are many repositories and search tools but it still takes time to find what you want and this, for the already stressed teacher, is the crucial factor. The traditional text books as well as the polished online resources available from the major publishers offer a fully structured set of quality resources, together with lesson plans and extra activities. Most teachers rightly wonder whether the time-consuming, do-it-yourself approach of OER is worth the effort compared to following the ready-made packages from the publishers.

Unlike Wikipedia, Yelp, and Airbnb, most OER websites have failed to attract a large and active audience, have no widely adopted mechanism for ranking or maintaining the quality and timeliness of the materials, and lag behind industry standards of design and usability. The resulting systems can be frustratingly complex and often spit back listings that are hard to make sense of—a nonstarter for busy K–12 teachers struggling to keep their heads above water.

OER is however a very sustainable approach if fully implemented. Teachers can share their resources and allow other teachers to adapt and repurpose as necessary as long as they follow the terms of the Creative Commons license and credit the author accordingly. However, many studies indicate that although there is a wealth of resources, very few teachers are actually adapting them and the risk is that repositories are flooded with ever more one-off resources. For OER to really take off teachers need to learn not only to find resources but also how to adapt them and share responsibly. 

With textbook costs soaring there is increasing interest in producing open textbook, see for example the excellent example of the University of British Columbia's BC Open Textbooks. maybe this is the way forward for OER since open textbooks offer an attractive alternative that is easy for teachers to use and extremely popular with cash-strapped students. 

But the problem remains of persuading teachers to learn how to find, share and adapt other people's resources instead of relying on ready packages from the publishers. A further complication is the quality issue; how do I know that this resource is trustworthy? Maybe blockchain technology can provide some kind of quality guarantee or link resources from diverse locations into sequences of related material. I don't know enough about this field to say any more on this but maybe some aspect of this technology can apply to OER.

The Edutopia article ends on a rather pessimistic note. I have a suspicion that the big breakthrough for OER will have to wait a while yet.

So will we ever get to a Wikipedia-type model of teaching resources, with teachers freely giving and taking textbooks, lesson plans, and tests, refining and improving them, and sharing their improvements? There’s no clear path right now to achieving that model—you can’t will the proper ecosystem into existence, and overburdened teachers haven’t built it up from the grassroots. Should we even want them to?

How open? How flexible? It's not so simple

"Flexible Woman" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Kurayba

We use words like open, free, flexible and personalised and assume that are positive and desirable. Who doesn't want to be described in those terms? The problem is that in practice these concepts can prove to be very complex and the effects can sometimes be counter-productive. Moving from the highly structured world of traditional education to flexible, open and learner-centred education based on digital media is a rather daunting process that requires a complete overhaul of your practice and theoretical base.

A new post by Martin Weller (possibly the most cited person on this blog), Maybe more isn't better, questions the concept of flexibility. It sounds great but the question is when does flexibility turn into chaos.

The second assumption is that “People want more flexibility”. Again, this seems obvious, and indeed may well be correct in many instances. But at the EADTU conference I was struck by a presentation from Rieny van den Munckhof, from the OU Netherlands. They found that, echoing some of the sentiment around personalisation above, that their previously highly flexible model (start any time, take exam when you want), was in fact, too flexible. It worked for highly independent learners, but they’ve switched to a more structured approach. This has improved retention and allowed for more interactive pedagogy.

Flexibility depends on perspective. Increased flexibility for the learner may cause headaches for the teacher or the administrator and has to be balanced between the different interested parties, otherwise it can backfire. Flexibility must be introduced in small measures and everyone needs to learn to deal with it. I've also experienced courses where we tried so hard to offer full flexibility that most learners simply didn't understand the course structure (or possibly the lack of it). A certain degree of flexibility, but within a given overall structure, would seem to be the answer. Total flexibility generally results in confusion.

Openness is another concept that sounds so good but becomes complex when you try to implement it too quickly. I believe that the use of open educational resources and practices can radically improve teaching and learning as well as making quality education accessible for all. However the road is bumpy and traditional practices are hard to break, especially when they offer the comfort of trusted structures and routines. An article from the Norwegian public service TV channel NRK last week (Norge kaster bort millioner på noe elever og lærere ikke vil ha - Norway wastes millions on something neither pupils nor teachers want) gives plenty food for thought for those of us who promote OER and OEP. Since the article is in Norwegian I will paraphrase the main points.

Norwegian schools have for several years collaborated in building a national OER repository, NDLA, where teachers' resources are tagged, linked to the national curriculum and used in schools all over the country. This has lead to many schools using NDLA instead of traditional course books. Now an increasing number of schools and local authorities would like to revert to course books and are critical that the open platform has to a certain extent become a monopoly that marginalises publishers and other suppliers of digital resources. Some teachers and pupils see a clearer structure in traditional course books and find them more reliable than collections of resources created by teachers.This is very understandable and a weakness with OER is that teachers need to be very skilled in finding the right resources for each lesson instead of simply moving on to the next chapter or module of a published course book. Pupils too need to learn how to find and use these resources and this process takes time. Maybe the Norwegian model needs to be revised and there must still be a role for professionally produced course literature (printed and digital). Hopefully the two models can find a happy medium.

So we maybe have to be more careful with words that sound so beautiful but have many hidden consequences. It's a question of how open/flexible/free is appropriate in any given situation and realising that there are many layers in each concept. In certain circumstances it may even be best to be closed, restricted or rigid.

Intimacy at scale

CC0 Public domain by Kaboompics on Pexels

If you want to learn something today the opportunities are almost endless. Whatever the subject area you can find a wide range of free open educational resources (texts, lectures, films, podcasts, tests, simulations) and full courses (MOOCs and other forms of open education) in many languages from universities, colleges, schools and organisations. The trouble is that you need to know where to find them and you need to have the digital literacy and study skills necessary to learn in an online environment. You also need to have the confidence and self-belief to learn independently. People with these skills are the ones who are benefiting from open education today. Those who lack these skills are generally not even aware that such opportunities exist. 

The evolution of MOOCs is largely an experiment in scaling online education; how massive can a course be? The answer would seem to be that a course can be very massive under the assumption that the learners are highly motivated, confident, independent and digitally skilled. Everyone else needs support, encouragement and a feeling of belonging to a caring community and that is hard to achieve in a massive environment. Combining scale with a feeling of community and personal support would seem to be an impossible equation. 

Lisa Nielsen takes up the issue of class size in a post called It’s Class Load, Not Just Size, That Matters. She describes how teachers often have to deal with many large classes and an unrealistically high number of students making personal contact and support for all simply impossible. Students who lack confidence need lots of encouragement and feedback and study skills need to be actively developed. Teaching and counselling generally go hand in hand but the latter is seldom recognised in an age obsessed by results. For Lisa the solution is clear. 

If we want students and teachers to succeed, increase the time students spend with their teachers and limit the load. It’s a simple solution where everyone wins.

This is an important discussion for all educational institutions. Large classes in lecture halls are certainly impersonal and lack support and recognition. I once heard the remark that if you sit more than five rows from the front you can call it distance learning. But how does this apply to online learning and in particular the massive variety? Once the teacher student ratio goes above 1:150 the load becomes impossible and the course becomes increasingly self-directed study. There are, however, a number of possible solutions:

• Involving more teachers and teaching assistants. This can often become prohibitive in terms of costs but one solution can be a network of teachers and former students. One example of this is a course I work with called Open Networked Learning. This is an open online course run in partnership between a number of universities and which also welcomes open learners. We have a core team of four who manage the course and then a large number of facilitators and co-facilitators (volunteer former participants) who support the learners during the course. This means that the learners can be divided into many small study groups where they support each other and get the support of assigned facilitators and co-facilitators. This model works very well but is not massively scalable and relies very much on the goodwill of the co-facilitators..
• Local support groups. Libraries, adult education colleges or community learning centres can offer a meeting place to help people discover and follow open education courses. By offering a physical (or also online) space as well as support staff the learners can discuss their courses in their own language and get the encouragement and feedback they need to keep going.
• Peer support. Many MOOCs now offer learners the opportunity to form their own study groups where they can discuss (often in another language than the course language) and get the recognition and feedback necessary to maintain their motivation. The problem here is that most people need clear guidelines on how to build an online group and provide effective peer support.

All of these avenues are being explored today and the answer for massive courses may be a combination of all of them. The key element however is that whatever the scale there must be personal connections. Automated self-study can only take us part of the journey.

Turning learning into credit

"lubbock_track_regionals_2010146" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by joeduty

Turning skills and knowledge gained from work experience and non-formal learning (including MOOCs) into recognised credentials is the Gordian knot of the open education movement. Universities offer recognition of prior learning but the process can often be complicated and time-consuming for both student and university. Most people simply don't know that they can get credit for prior learning and therefore never get the recognition and career opportunities that credits could bring. We need to increase awareness of this opportunity and then provide guidance on how to take advantage of it.

Converting knowledge and skills gained form various forms of open education requires verification and getting the learner to demonstrate that they have achieved the right level of proficiency. One very interesting approach to this has been developed by the Open University in the UK with a pilot course called Making your learning count. The course involves helping students to review what they have learned from open educational resources (OER) and course modules in, for example, the Open University's own OER platform OpenLearn and being guided stage by stage through a process of review, adding extra modules of study, peer review and reflection to finally convert their learning into 30 credits at Open University. This can then be a springboard to further studies.

A blog post, A USB port for informal learning, by a member of the course team, Martin Weller, briefly describes the course concept, .

The approach the team have taken then is to base it around 9 tasks. These focus on developing a learning plan, producing a means of communicating your learning to others, making interdisciplinary connections between subjects, and developing peer assessment and digital communication skills. They’ll be guided by their tutor in this, but I think it’s hopefully one of those courses where the diversity of knowledge people bring is a key benefit. You get to see connections between your subject and by explaining your own one to others, consolidate your own understanding. (Martin Weller, 150817, CC BY)

The key to this approach is guidance. Students take a journey where they have to put their previous learning into perspective and are helped by course leaders and peers to build on that knowledge and link it to other skills and disciplines. By going through this process the university can much more easily assess whether the student has met the criteria for credit than a traditional recognition of prior learning approach. Furthermore it helps the students to become more aware of what they know and learn to build on it in a more systematic way. It will be interesting to see the results of this pilot course but if more universities could adopt a similar approach we could have a model for converting open learning into formal recognition that would benefit both learners and the university. I suspect that satisfied participants will be most likely to choose the Open University for further studies before other institutions.

How relevant is open education for refugees?

Group work in progress on-site and online

As part of my involvement in the ongoing European project MOONLITE, examining the use of MOOCs and open education for social inclusion and employability, we arranged a hybrid webinar workshop at the recent EDEN 2017 conference in Jönköping, Sweden. The workshop asked the question "How relevant is open education for refugees?" and comprised a combination of input from project members with group discussions both on-site and online. All the results from the session, group work, slideshows, link to the recording and links to other projects are gathered on a common Padlet page.

Padlet page with collected notes, slideshows and links from the workshop

We provided an overview of current projects and initiatives that offer MOOCs as a pathway to cultural and linguistic integration, higher education and employment and then asked the participants to answer questions assessing how relevant this form of education is for such a target group. I blogged on this topic recently, MOOCs for refugees - work in progress, and the ideas from this post very much reflect the workshop discussions. The benefits of using open online courses (massive or not) were clear to all participants, namely:

• Easy access, always available
• Mobile-friendly courses
• Large variety of courses in many languages
• No fees
• Flexible
• Preferably combined with on-site support, face-to-face groups with own language support

Obstacles to using open courses with refugees were more numerous and some have not really been resolved:

• Do refugees accept MOOCs as being culturally acceptable and relevant?
• Very heterogeneous group and hard to find any common denominator
• Lack of awareness of open education
• Lack of digital skills and experience of online education
• Cultural adjustments take time and many suffer from stress, preventing them from focusing on learning
• Are open education solutions addressing the right problems?
• Lack of recognition of open education in the host country
• Poor infrastructure in refugee camps
• Recognition of prior learning
• Provision of support and mentoring (both face-to-face and online)

We also asked whether existing initiatives had succeeded in meeting the needs of refugees. The general feeling was that although there were many success stories the use of open education is still largely fragmented and with very limited impact. The vast majority of refugees are still not aware of open courses or are unable to take advantage of them for the reasons noted above. MOOCs are only one of many options to address the challenge of integrating refugees into their new countries and top priority for most of them is recognition of their skills and getting hold of credentials that are valid in their country of residence. If open online courses can lead to such educational hard currency then they will be popular. They must be seen as a pathway to higher education and to employment, very much the focus of our project!

MOOCs and other types open education should focus on the most essential skills: language, socio-cultural integration and online study skills. However, in almost all areas a combination of digital and face-to-face solutions is essential. Refugees need to make personal contacts in their new homeland and online education can therefore only be part of the solution. The group discussions offered many examples of services and solutions that offer a smoother pathway to integration. Matching refugees with people working in the same profession is one method already in use in many countries. A Swedish initiative called Welcome is an app that enables refugees to make contact with Swedish volunteers to chat online or to meet up for a coffee and discussion. Another Swedish initiative, Minclusion, is developing mobile apps for learning Swedish and facilitating intercultural communication. The key is putting the refugees in contact with local people who can help them with everyday questions, language development, legal problems, coaching/mentoring, job shadowing and just everyday human contact.

Online learning can be very effective for people whose lives are otherwise full with career. family and friends. For refugees human contact, building up a new identity and regaining broken confidence are the main priorities. They can benefit from online education but always combined with physical meetings and support.

Watch the edited recording of the workshop.

Lessons for sale

CC0 Public domain on Maxpixel

Although open educational resources have still not really gained mainstream status around the world there is a vast amount of quality resources available in numerous repositories with Creative Commons licenses allowing reuse and adaptation. I was therefore surprised to read an article in Education Week Teacher describing how teachers are making considerable amounts of money by selling their resources, Million-Dollar Teachers: Cashing In by Selling Their Lessons.

At sites like Teachers pay teachers, Teachwise and Teacher's notebook you can browse a wide range of lesson plans and resources and buy the ones you like the look of. Evidently the members of Teacher pay teachers have earned over $100 million and several have become millionaires from selling their teaching resources. Most of the resources cost very little and I assume most people only earn small amounts each year but some teachers have become major players offering an extensive range of resources as lesson or course packages.

Despite worries from some educators, such online marketplaces are booming, driven by rising standards and the willingness of teachers to pay out of their own pockets for classroom-tested materials.

What amazes me is that so many teachers are willing to pay to get resources that are probably comparable to those available completely free in OER repositories like OER Commons or Sophia.org. This raises many questions that would be interesting to investigate. How do users of these commercial sites judge the quality of the resources and how does that differ from how they judge the quality of open resources? Many teachers are wary of OER simply because they find it hard to believe that something of value can be free and indeed one of the most commonly raised objections to openness is a perceived lack of quality assurance (even when it is present). Many international initiatives have been launched to define quality criteria for OER and there are several excellent reports available (eg State of the Art Review of Quality Issues related to Open Educational Resources, Quality Assurance Guidelines for Open Educational Resources). Does payment somehow create a sense of quality and credibility? Certainly the incentive to earn a little extra from your work is attractive and maybe some kind of micro-payment system could entice more teachers to share resources. However as soon as a price tag is added you create a competitive market and barriers go up between teachers who are more focused on selling than sharing.

But Bob Farrace, spokesman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, says taking "proprietary rights over ideas and lessons" could disrupt the traditional collaborative atmosphere of schools. "You want teachers to collaborate and share ideas freely."

The article also raises the issue of whether teachers should be able to monetize their resources since in many countries the school, as employer, has copyright on material developed during working hours. Even in institutions that recognise the teachers as copyright holders it still seems strange that they can profit from selling material that they have developed as paid (and often public) employees.

I believe that education should be for the public good and as such should be open to all and not turned into a commercial market. Teaching should be about creating context, inspiring, challenging, questioning and mentoring, not simply producing content. We need to work harder to encourage open sharing of ideas and resources so that they benefit all levels of education and the whole spectrum of society. Sharing can lead to better use of resources, minimising the need to reinvent the wheel every day, and foster a community of practice among all teachers. This commercial development may be because so many teachers are completely unaware of the abundance of OER available but it could also be a sad backlash against openness. I hope it is not the latter.