Open Learning on the rise in USA - Open Education at Tufts University, the United States

OER and Open Learning on the rise in USA

Online learning enthusiasts could get a windfall of federal money under a $2-billion grant program that the Obama Administration described on Thursday. But how big the windfall will be—if it comes at all—remains unclear.

One thing is for sure: The four-year program, designed to expand job training at community colleges, signals a major endorsement of the movement to freely share learning materials on the Internet.

That movement took hold a decade ago with MIT’s plan to publish free online syllabi, lecture notes, and other content from all of its courses. With this program, run by the Labor Department, parts of the federal government are now embracing MIT’s radical idea as official policy—dangling what could be an unprecedented amount of money for more open courses.

“With $500-million available this year, this is easily one of the largest federal investments in open educational resources in history,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement e-mailed to The Chronicle. Mr. Duncan’s agency is working with the Labor Department on the program.

So what specific tech goodies might the government invest in with all that money? Official announcements from the Labor Department and White House were short on details. But here’s what we can glean from a close look at the 53-page document that lays out the grant guidelines: The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with  simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to 

individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves.

And it demands open access to everything: “All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, via an online repository for learning materials to be established by the federal government.”

In other words, if a community college in Washington State gets a grant to build an aerospace program for workforce training, it would have to deposit all its digital stuff in an online library. Anybody who wants to use it would be able to download the content, and they would have full legal rights to reuse, revise, remix, or redistribute it, explained Cable Green, director of eLearning and open education at the Washington State 

Board for Community & Technical Colleges. That’s because the government is requiring that all work supported by the grants be made available under what’s known as a “Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License,” which Mr. Green described as “one of the most open content licenses that exists.”

Beth Noveck, a professor at New York Law School and former White House technology official, wrote that the openness requirement represented “a fundamental and laudable shift in how grants are made in government.”

If all of this discussion of openness and free online courses sounds familiar, it is. The Obama administration outlined a similar great course giveaway in 2009, a $500-million proposal influenced by work done in the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. The online proposal was part of a $12-billion plan to improve community colleges, called the American Graduation Initiative, but that plan collapsed during negotiations over legislation to overhaul student aid and the nation’s health-care system.

The prospect that similar ideas could survive through this Labor Department program thrilled openness advocates like Mr. Green. To save students money on textbooks, his state is working on an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for community and technical colleges. The federal 

money could mean more choices of content that his colleges could review for adoption in their classes.

“That’s a windfall,” he said. “The sheer volume of openly licensed content is going to expand dramatically.”

How dramatically is unclear. Creative Commons fanned excitement online with a blog post headlined, “U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Education commit $2-billion to create open educational resources for community colleges and career training.” And Dave Cormier, a proponent of open education based at the 

University of Prince Edward Island, seized on that story to argue that the money “could end the textbook industry as we know it.”

But when The Chronicle forwarded the Creative Commons story to Sara Gast, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, she doused a little cold water on all the excitement. “The headline is inaccurate,” she said in an e-mail. “But at this point, as the solicitation phase is just beginning, we don’t know how much of 

Open Education at Tufts University, the United States

Please give a brief overview of the scope of open initiatives at your institution.

 

Tufts University’s leadership in the open educational resources movement includes a broad spectrum of initiatives that span disciplines (health sciences, social sciences and humanities), infrastructure (digital libraries, enterprise platforms), and tools. Starting with the Perseus Digital Library (classics) that began in the 1980’s, and Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK, health sciences) in the 1990’s, Tufts has been at the forefront of developing comprehensive digital resources that benefit scholars, researchers, and students around the globe. Since the early 2000′s, the number of open projects has grown rapidly—now involving over a dozen major initiatives from every Tufts school with hundreds of faculty, student and staff contributors. To serve our diverse global community of users, we have indexed these resources on the Open.Tufts portal for easy reference.

What motivated your institution’s involvement with open education? Why did you get started?

Tufts’ core values support active citizenship and trans-institutional collaboration with our domestic and international partners. Our community’s involvement with open educational resources has been a natural evolution from applying these aspirations.

How would you describe the level of commitment from faculty, students, and administration?

Tufts’ commitment to open academic resources has deep University-wide support, including formal endorsements from:

• Senior leadership, who have also committed core financial support
• University Committee on Teaching and Faculty Development (standing committee since 1994 with representatives from all Tufts schools, including many academic deans)
• University Library Council (directors from all our libraries, including Digital Collections and Archives and its open access Digital Library)
• Scholarly Communications Team (provides ongoing open access education to the Tufts community, including National Science Foundation data management)
• Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) Steering Committee
• Tufts Technology Services

In addition, we have been a Charter and sustaining member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC), where Associate Provost Mary Lee serves on the Board of Directors. Tufts just completed a pilot Provost Open Access Fund that supports faculty manuscript submissions to journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Active discussions are underway on lessons learned and how to move forward to continue to support faculty in open publishing.

In what ways has open education impacted institutional practice, reputation and/or culture?

Tufts’ open educational initiatives contribute to sustaining a culture and structure that enables and fosters creative collaboration across the university, our local communities, and the world. For example, Tufts has been developing TUSK, Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase, for 16 years. In April 2012, having shared the code with other schools under a no-cost evaluation license for many years, we released Open TUSK to GitHub, at http://opentusk.org. A growing number of schools in the USA, Africa and India are using TUSK at individual schools, at multiple schools within an institution, or at institutions across a network. For instance, several East African institutions are using TUSK to share educational competencies and content across their entire region. Challenges related to managing an open source software require a steep learning curve such as learning how to manage open code, keeping the open version updated, developing virtualized and cloud-based environments, and supporting schools that ask for help. The opportunities afforded by creating a community of developers are large. TUSK has been internationalized so that it can be used in our partner French Congo institutions, and can be translated precisely into any other language. East African institutions can share pandemic training content across the region, while still customizing locally.

Perseus, a trailblazer in the digital humanities, provides dynamic open content and tools that enable learners, including undergraduates, to contribute to scholarship on primary resources in the classics.

Our Scholarly Communications Team provides essential education to our faculty about copyright, open access, open publishing, and related issues.

The Tufts Digital Library is our university’s Fedora-based digital repository that continues to evolve within the developing repository landscape. Originally developed to support access and use of special collections held by Digital Collections and Archives, the TDL is transforming into an open institutional repository that can accommodate publications, research data, and unique collections as it becomes a shared service to support all of the University’s libraries and collecting units.

Many organizations and institutions are developing large spatial data repositories. Discovering and accessing these data sets pose many challenges. As a result, Tufts is leading an effort along with Harvard, MIT and others to collaboratively develop an open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from disparate sources, called the Open Geoportal. It is comprised of several universities and organizations and makes thousands of geospatial data layers available through a single open source interface.

What motivates you to continue?

Four foundational values at Tufts–knowledge, inclusion, innovation, and impact– are directly tied to Tufts’ development and sharing of our open educational resources.

Knowledge results from the core of our work—research and teaching—that Tufts has always been committed to share. Inclusion speaks to the diversity of local and global voices that we engage in our work. The thirst for innovation motivates everything we do, while impact is a major measure of the value and effectiveness of our work. Using an open framework significantly enhances each of these values by engaging a global audience that both uses and contributes to our work.

Most of our open initiatives have evolved naturally from faculty’s scholarly work, and “openness” in turn has expanded that scholarly work in innovative directions. The University provides support, but the faculty provides the substance. The result is that Open Access is now woven into the fabric at Tufts.

What are the most positive outcomes from your institution’s involvement with open initiatives?

We’ve developed a very rich environment for faculty and students to work within that involves partners around the globe. Open Access goes beyond sharing information: it stimulates and enables collaboration and innovation around new methods to organize, personalize, and contribute to the explosion of information our students, educators, and researchers face.

In your assessment, what were some of the most significant challenges your institution had to overcome regarding your involvement with open education?

• Education of faculty, including around intellectual property rights
• We have a “travelling team” to integrate education into departmental meetings and university events to raise awareness and point to resources.
• Funding mechanisms
• We identified core university resources, but external funds remain a challenge.
• Providing sufficient infrastructure support for faculty
• This is linked to funding. Core infrastructure is there, but as awareness and demand grow, we need to be able to scale.

If you had to describe open education at your institution in 5 words, what would they be?

• faculty-driven
• innovative
• collaborative
• inclusive
• impactful