The Battle for Open How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory Martin Weller ubiquity press Te Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory Martin Weller ]u[ ubiquity press London Published by Ubiquity Press Ltd. Gordon House 29 Gordon Square London WC1H 0PP www.ubiquitypress.com Text © Martin Weller 2014 First published 2014 Cover Image: ShutterStock ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-909188-33-4 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-909188-34-1 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-909188-35-8 ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-909188-36-5 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bam Tis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. Tis license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Suggested citation: Weller, M 2014 Te Battle For Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: http:// dx.doi.org/10.5334/bam To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bam or scan this QR code with your mobile device: Author details Martin Weller Te Open University Martin Weller is Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. He chaired the OU’s frst major elearning course in 1999, with over 12,000 students, and has led several major elearning initiatives. He started blogging in 2005 and became interested in the impact of new technology on academic practice. He is currently the Director of the OER Research Hub project and holds the ICDE Chair in OER. To three pioneers of modern open education: Stephen Downes, George Siemens and David Wiley Contents Acknowledgements ix Chapter 1. Te Victory of Openness 1 Chapter 2. What Sort of Open? 27 Chapter 3. Open Access Publishing 45 Chapter 4. Open Educational Resources 67 Chapter 5. MOOCs 89 Chapter 6. Education Is Broken and the Silicon Valley Narrative 117 Chapter 7. Open Scholarship 135 Chapter 8. Openness Uncovered 153 Chapter 9. Resilience and Open Education 171 Chapter 10. Te Future of Open 189 Bibliography 203 Index 231 Acknowledgements Te discussions around openness in its various forms take place in many diferent forums and with people who have diferent pri- orities. Te following have been particularly infuential in shaping my thoughts in this area, in providing feedback on blog posts and engaging in conversation both online and face to face. At the Open University, the OER Research Hub team have pro- vided much of the basis for this work, so my thanks go to Patrick McAndrew, Rob Farrow, Leigh-Anne Perryman, Bea de os Arcos, Beck Pitt, Claire Walker, Simone Arthur, Natalie Eggleston, Gary Elliott-Cirigottis and Martin Hawksey. Tose in the UK who have been infuential in many of the argu- ments in this book include David Kernohan, Sheila MacNeill, Richard Hall, Josie Fraser, Joss Winn, Doug Clow, Katy Jordan and Cristina Costa. I am fortunate to have a global network of peers and friends who regularly leave me feeling inadequate with the insight they x The Battle for Open bring to many topics; these include Audrey Watters, Brian Lamb, Jim Groom, Bonnie Stewart, Dave Cormier, Laura Pasquini, George Veletsianos, Michael Feldstein, Phil Hill, Valerie Irvine, Mike Caulfeld, Cable Green, Alan Levine, Catherine Cronin, Alec Couros and Wayne Mackintosh. Tis book draws on much of the work of the OER Research Hub which was funded through the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and I would like to ofer my thanks to them, in particular Kathy Nicholson, TJ Bliss and Barbara Chow. Te opinions expressed herein are my own, how- ever, and should not be interpreted as the views of any particular organisation. CHAPTER 1 Te Victory of Openness It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever. —Jack Kerouac Introduction Openness is everywhere in education at the moment: in late 2011 a free course in artifcial intelligence had over 160,000 learners enrolled (Leckart 2012); in 2012 in the UK the Government fol- lowed other national bodies in the US and Canada by announcing a policy mandating that all articles resulting from publicly funded research should be made freely available in open access publica- tions (Finch Group 2012); downloads from Apple’s iTunes U site, which gives away free educational content, passed 1 billion in 2013 (Robertson 2013); British Columbia announced a policy in 2012 to provide open, free textbooks for the 40 most popular courses (Gilmore 2012); the G8 leaders signed a treaty on open data in June 2013, stating that all government data will be released openly by default (UK Cabinet Ofce 2013). Outside of these headline fgures there are fundamental shifs in practices: academics are 2 The Battle for Open creating and releasing their own content using tools such as Slideshare and YouTube; researchers are releasing results earlier and using open, crowdsourcing approaches; every day millions of people make use of free, open online tools and resources to learn and share. In fact, openness is now such a part of everyday life that it seems unworthy of comment. Tis wasn’t always the case, nor did it appear inevitable or predictable. At the end of the ’90s, as the dot- com boom was gaining pace, there was plenty of scepticism around business models (much of it justifed afer the collapse) and similarly with the web 2.0 bubble ten years later. And while many of the business models were unsustainable, the traditional models of paying for content have also been shown not to map across to the new digital domain. ‘Giving stuf away’ is no longer an approach to be mocked. Nowhere has openness played such a central role as in educa- tion. Many of the pioneers of open movements have come from universities. Te core functions of academics are all subject to radical change under an open model; from the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that are challenging teaching to pre- publication repositories that undermine the traditional publish- ing and review model of researchers, openness afects all aspects of higher education. Openness has a long history in higher education. Its founda- tions lie in one of altruism and the belief that education is a pub- lic good. It has undergone many interpretations and adaptations, moving from a model which had open entry to study as its pri- mary focus to one that emphasises openly available content and resources. Tis change has largely been a result of the digital and network revolution. Changes in other sectors, most notably the open source model of sofware production and values associated The Victory of Openness 3 with the internet of free access, and open approaches have infu- enced (and been infuenced by) practitioners in higher education. Te past decade or so has seen the growth of a global open edu- cation movement, with signifcant funding from bodies such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and research councils. Active campaigners in universities have sought to establish pro- grammes that will release content – including data, teaching resources and publications – openly; others have adopted open practices through social media and blogs. Tis has been combined with related work on open licences, most notably that of Creative Commons, which allow easy reuse and adaptation of content, advocacy at policy level for nation- or state- wide adoption of open content and sharing of resources, and improved technology and infrastructure that make this openness both easy and inexpensive. One might therefore expect this to be a time of celebration for the advocates of openness. Having fought so long for their message to be heard, they are now being actively courted by senior manage- ment for their experience and views on various open strategies. Open approaches are featured in the mainstream media. Millions of people are enhancing their learning through open resources and open courses. Put bluntly, it looks as though openness has won. And yet you would be hard pushed to fnd any signs of cel- ebration amongst those original advocates. Tey are despondent about the reinterpretation of openness to mean ‘free’ or ‘online’ without some of the reuse liberties they had envisaged. Concerns are expressed about the commercial interests that are now using openness as a marketing tool. Doubts are raised regarding the benefts of some open models for developing nations or learners who require support. At this very moment of victory it seems that the narrative around openness is being usurped by others, and the consequences of this may not be very open at all. 4 The Battle for Open In 2012 Gardner Campbell gave a keynote presentation at the Open Education conference (Campbell 2012) in which he out- lined these concerns and frustrations. ‘What we are seeing,’ he said, ‘are developments in the higher education landscape that seem to meet every one of the criteria we have set forth for open education – increased access, decreased cost, things that will allow more people than ever on a planetary scale, one billion individual learners at a time … Isn’t that what we meant?’ But as he explored diferent successes of openness his refrain was that of T. S. Eliot: that’s not what I meant at all. Why should this be the case? Can we dismiss it as just sour grapes? Are the advocates of openness merely exhibiting chagrin that others are now claiming openness? Is it just a semantic argu- ment over interpretation that has little interest beyond a few academics? Or is it something more fundamental, regarding the direction of openness and the ways it is implemented? It is this central tension in openness, that of victory and simultaneous anxiety, that this book seeks to explore.