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

Education and Social Mobility in Latin America United States

 Education and Social Mobility in Latin America United States

Latin America has witnessed an important expansion in educational coverage over the last two decades. On average, enrollment rates in primary (net) and secondary education (gross) increased from 85.9 percent and 49.6 percent in 1980 to around 94.0 percent and 89.7 percent in 2011, respectively. Many countries in the region are on track to meet or have already attained the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) in this dimension. Furthermore, this increase in educational coverage has been identified as an important driver of the observed reduction in earning inequality in the region (López-Calva and Lustig 2010), at a time when income inequality is rising within many developed and developing countries all over the world (see OECD 2011a and 2011b).

Despite this important progress, many challenges remain. In this note, I highlight two interrelated issues: 1) intergenerational mobility continues to be low; and 2) the quality of education is low, with significant differences across social classes in the opportunities of accessing high-quality education. Next, I will briefly discuss the empirical evidence relevant to each issue and outline some policies that could address these challenges.

Low intergenerational Educational Mobility

Social mobility is a multidimensional concept. Economists (e.g., Solon 1992) have traditionally focused on intergenerational income mobility, i.e., the link between a person’s permanent income level and that of his or her parents, based on the stream of income a person or household receives stripped of short-term fluctuations. Yet it is clear that other dimensions such as social status, often related to type of job or level of formal education, are also relevant. (For an interesting case study of Chile,see Torche 2005.) In what follows, I focus on educational mobility in terms of how parental education and family background affect educational attainment and achievement. This focus has an important practical advantage: relatively good-quality and comparable data for these variables are available for a significant number of countries in Latin America.

Several studies have addressed the issue of how family background affects educational outcomes of the next generation in Latin America. Behrman, Gaviria, and Székely (2001) present several alternative measures of educational and social mobility in Latin America and find that intergenerational mobility is much lower in Latin America compared to the United States. This finding is also confirmed by Daude (2011; 2012) and Gaviria (2007), considering the correlation between parental and child education outcomes using alternative data sources. Furthermore, in terms of correlation—that is, how much of the variation in the child’s education is explained by the variation in parental education—there are no significant changes over time (Daude 2011). In addition, a

study of a large number of developing countries also shows that Latin American countries rank poorly compared to other regions in terms of these measures of intergenerational mobility in education (Hertz et al. 2007). However, other studies find a recent improvement in mobility using alternative measures (Conconi et al. 2008). For example, they find that the importance of family background in explaining the “schooling gap”—defined as the difference between the years of education completed and the hypothetical years the child should have completed in the absence of repeating grades or dropping out—for children currently of compulsory enrollment age has declined between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s in several Latin American countries. In particular, they rely on a Fields decomposition (1996, 2003) proposed by Andersen (2001) that takes into account the household’s income per capita and the highest level of education between the mother and the father. However, these measures of mobility do not take into account differences in the quality of education, which are large in Latin America.

Low Quality of Education

Considering education achievement measures such as the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores, Latin American education systems tend to score poorly on two dimensions. First, the average achievement in terms of testable knowledge is low. For example, while on average within the OECD less than 20 percent of 14- to 15-year-old students do not reach a minimum level of  reading comprehension, in Latin America it is almost 50 percent. Second, the relationship between performance and aocioeconomic background is much stronger in Latin America than in the OECD (Figure 1). This shows that external circumstances—such as the household’s income level, parental education, gender, or geographical location—are key to student performance (Brunori, Ferreira, and Peragine 2013). In part, the lower levels of average achievement are due to a composition effect: as more poor students

with lower performance reach higher levels of schooling and stay for more time within the system (expanding coverage), in the short run performance falls. Some countries such as Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have shown significant improvements over the past decade in reducing the importance of family background in educational achievement outcomes. However, problems in terms of performance and inequality of opportunities are still prevalent. (See also Ferreira et al. 2012 regarding the evolution of social mobility and inequality of opportunities in Latin America.)Another interesting empirical fact from the PISA surveys is related to the social mix within schools. If one decomposes the variation in the index of socioeconomic status indicator and separates variation between and within schools, some OECD school systems (such as Finland) show that most of the variance comes from within schools, while for Latin America most of the variance is between schools. This means that schools in Latin America are socioeconomically very omogeneous. The poor go to the same schools asthe poor, while the rich gather only with the rich. Interestingly, the aggregate evidence shows that there is no trade-off between having socially mixed education systems and attaining high levels of educational achievement (OECD 2010a). Thus, education systems in the region continue to be an instrument for reproducing the current social order rather than a way to facilitate social mobility and opportunities for the poor

Doctorate of Education in USA Doctorate of Education United States

Doctorate of Education in USA United States

In the United States, the Ed.D. tends to be granted by the school of education of universities and is a terminal degree in education. Majors within the Ed.D. may include: counseling, curriculum and instruction/curriculum and teaching, educational administration, education policy, educational psychology, educational technology, higher education, human resource development, language/linguistics or leadership. The Ed.D. is recognized for appointment as a professor or lecturer in a university. It may also be recognized as preparation for administrative positions in education and human development field, such as superintendent of schools, human resource director, or principal.

Colleges and universities in the United States that offer doctorates in education choose to offer only the Doctor of Education,[citation needed] only the Doctor of Philosophy in education (e.g., Stanford University), or both (e.g., UCLA, University of Missouri, and University of Pennsylvania). The distinction between the Ph.D. and the Ed.D in this last group can take different forms. At the University of Illinois, for example, the Ph.D. in education dissertation requires an original contribution to academic knowledge, whereas the Ed.D. dissertation "is intended to demonstrate the candidate's ability to relate academic knowledge to the problems of professional practice."[18][19] At Teachers College, Columbia University the Ph.D. is designed for students who wish specifically to pursue an academic career, whereas the Ed.D. is designed for broader aims including educational administration and policy work.  In St. Louis University's Educational Studies program, the Ed.D. requires "successful completion of a culminating project dealing with a problem in educational practice" and the Ph.D. requires a dissertation and an "oral defense of the dissertation proposal and [of] the final dissertation  Finally, some schools frame the Ed.D. specifically in terms of applied research, such as New York University, The University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California, Berkeley.  

Criticisms[edit]

Lee S. Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, stated that the lack of distinction between the Ed.D and the Ph.D has meant the Ed.D. has come to be seen as little more than "Ph.D.-lite," and the Ph.D. in education has likewise suffered  Moreover, it has resulted in "the danger that we achieve rigorous preparation neither for practice nor for research  Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, said that the Ed.D. degree is granted to both scholars and administrators and as such makes the degree ambiguously defined, that the programs in educational leadership specifically suffered from low standards, and that "There is absolutely no reason why a school leader needs a doctorate 

Suggestions for reform[edit]

Some scholars in the United States have suggested future reforms for both the Ed.D. and Ph.D. in education by calling for a new doctorate for the professional practice of education, which would be for principals, superintendents, policy coordinators, curriculum specialists, teacher educators, program evaluators, etc.; and the distinction between the Ph.D. in education and the Ed.D. would be analogous to the distinction between the Ph.D. in biomedicine and the M.D This new degree might be called the Professional Practice Doctorate (P.P.D.), or it might retain the old name of Ed.D. but be severed from old associations 

Arthur Levine argued that the current Ed.D. should be re-tooled into a new professional master's degree, parallel in many ways to the MBA.

Comparisons of the Ed.D to the Ph.D. in education[edit]

As mentioned above, there is controversy around the Ed.D. in the United States with regard to how it compares to the Ph.D in education. In theory, the two degrees are expected to constitute overlapping but distinct categories, where the Ed.D. is a degree that prepares educational practitioners who can solve educational problems using existing knowledge, and the Ph.D. in education is the more theoretical of the two as a traditional social science research degree that prepares students for careers as scholars and academics, often from a particular disciplinary perspective (e.g., sociology of education  In reality, however, distinctions between the two degree programs are generally minimal in both curriculum and dissertation requirements  One study on dissertations submitted between 1950 and 1990 indicated that there were no differences between the two degrees regarding basic versus applied research or the significance of the findings. Nonetheless, that same study indicated that "PhD dissertations contained more multivariate statistics, had wider generalizability, and were more prevalent in certain areas of concentration," whereas "EdD dissertations contained more survey research and were most prevalent in educational administration research 

The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) states that "the professional doctorate in education prepares educators for the application of appropriate and specific practices, the generation of new knowledge, and for the stewardship of the profession  To wit, although the CPED describes the Ed.D. as a professional doctorate, it also states that it prepares students for the generation of new knowledge, and this is corroborated by the fact that both the Ph.D. and Ed.D. degrees are considered research doctoral degrees on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which is a survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, sponsored by six federal agencies, and solicited, under the National Science Foundation Act, from graduating doctoral students at all accredited institutions 

David Imig described reforms to the Ed.D. as including more collaborative work involving the analysis of data collected by others. Rather than generating their own data and hypothesis-testing, as Ph.D. students would, a group of Ed.D. students would analyze a specific pool of data from a number of different angles, each writing an individual dissertation on a specific aspect of the data which, when pooled together with the other dissertations, would combine to offer a comprehensive solution to a real-world problem

The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate is currently working with over 50 institutions to collaboratively redesign the Ed.D. and "to make it a stronger and more relevant degree for the advanced preparation of school practitioners and clinical faculty, academic leaders and professional staff for the nation’s schools and colleges and the learning organizations that support them

Reforms have already been implemented at some institutions. For example, in 2013 the Harvard University Graduate School of Education enrolled the final Ed.D. cohort The school now offers the Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) and Ph.D. in Education

Doctorate of Education in United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the Ed.D. has equal parity status with the Ph.D. It is a research degree that requires students to make an original contribution of knowledge to the field. The Ed.D. thesis may be shorter than that of the Ph.D. because the doctoral student will have done other research work as part of their coursework, whereas Ph.D. students only write a doctoral thesis without coursework. The Ed.D. thesis differs from a Ph.D. thesis only in length and scope but not in quality. As with Ph.D. candidates all Ed.D. candidates undergo a viva voce examination.

The Ed.D. is generally presented as an opportunity to prepare for academic, administrative or specialised positions in education, placing the graduates for promotion and leadership responsibilities, or high-level professional positions in a range of locations in the broad Education industry. Both the Ed.D. and Ph.D. are recognised for the purposes of appointment as a lecturer or professor in universities.

One study comparing the Ed.D. to the Ph.D. found that admissions requirements formally equaled or exceeded those for Ph.D. admission Research by Scott, Lunt, Browne and Thorne (2002) has found that the difference between an Ed.D. and a Ph.D. can be somewhat overstated as students of both tend to follow similar courses of study and to research similar topics.

The University of Cambridge's Faculty of Education provides a useful comparison between the Ph.D. and Ed.D. programmes for their particular university. 

An ESRC-funded report found that there appeared to be little impact of the development of professional knowledge on employment culture for Ed.D. participants, though there was "frequently considerable impact for the individuals themselves," and many of the Ed.D. students were employed in the public sector.

In 1991 the Doctor of Education programme at the University of Bristol began and was the first taught doctorate outside of North America. The Ed.D. is delivered through a balance of taught units including research methods, theory, argumentation and evaluation skills as well as a major research thesis that must make an original contribution to knowledge. As with other doctoral candidates, participants of the Ed.D. are encouraged to publish articles and books based on their research. An excellence in doctoral level research is the main aim of the Bristol Ed.D.

Similarly, at Durham University, the process of earning the Ed.D. consists of 6 courses (quantitative and qualitative research methods, thesis proposal, and four elective concentrations) that require 5,000 word research papers at the doctoral level and a doctoral thesis of 60,000 words that must also make an original contribution to knowledge.[9] The Ed.D. dissertation must reach the same level and be judged by the same criteria as the Ph.D. thesis. As such, the Ed.D. and Ph.D. degrees have exact parity of degree status

At the Institute of Education in London, the Ed.D. "is for experienced professionals from education and related fields who would like to extend their professional understanding and develop skills in research, evaluation and high-level reflection on practice" and the Ph.D. "is intended to enable [students] to produce [their] own thesis and to develop a range of research and other more generic skills