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Week 9 Activity 10

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Activity 10: Applying sustainability models

Models

All information from Wiley (2007)

MIT Model

  • Publishes its own courses – republishes new versions, archives old
  • Massive undertaking
  • Has time limit
  • At least 29 staff
  • Large budget – cost per course is roughly $10,000

USU Model

  • Publishes its own courses
  • Removes all third-party owned content from courses
  • One full-time member of staff, 5 part-time (students)
  • The model appears to be sustainable for USU and could be replicable by other universities/organisations.
  • Cost per course roughly $5,000

Rice Model

  • To enable the collaborative development of educational modules and courses by authors from around the world.
  • Minimal staff - site is self-organising
  • Course cost – more or less nothing

Organisational configurations can range from large and highly structured (MIT) to medium-sized and less formally structured (USU) to almost fully decentralised (Rice). Wiley (2007)

 

Open Education Initiatives

Coursera

Coursera seems to fit the Rice module as they do not provide their own courses. It is a for-profit educational technology company founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University meaning it is US based. They currently offer 571 courses.

“Coursera provides universal access to the world’s best education, partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses for anyone to take, for free.” (Coursera, 2015)

They partner with dozens of universities and organizations from around the world which offer courses under the Coursera banner. They are a for-profit organisation but I am not sure where their money or profit comes from. I would assume universities and organisations pay to ‘advertise’ or run their courses through Coursera with the view of promoting their university/organisation through these courses possibly considering the courses as ‘taster courses.’

FutureLearn

This is very similar to Coursera but is owned by the UK based Open University (OU). They do not seem to offer US university/organisations courses, presumably because of Coursera. Unlike Coursera, they do offer courses from their own organisation.

FutureLearn also follows the Rice model and more clearly than Coursera because it also develops its own courses.

Note: Both Coursera and FutureLearn now offer certificates for $49 or £29 respectively. This does not include P&P so probably some profit is being made from these.

Jorum

“Jorum is the UK’s largest repository for discovering and sharing Open Educational Resources for higher and further education and the Skills sector.” (Jorum, 2015)

Jorum offers resources rather than full courses and so doesn’t really fit into any of the models but the Rice model would be the closest if we ignore the fact that they offer materials and not modules or courses.

References

Wiley, D. (2007) On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education, Paris, OECD. Also available online athttp://www.oecd.org/ edu/ ceri/ 38645447.pdf (last accessed 31 March 2015).

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Week 9 Activity 9

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I would go for:

Attribution-NonCommercial

CC BY-NC

I am happy for others to share and build on or adapt my work but as it is originally my work I would want to be acknowledged for my work and as I put in the work I wouldn’t want anyone to make money off work that I had created without first asking for my permission.

The blog posts on this site are my thoughts (ramblings) but they are my intellectual property so I would want that to be protected in some way but also shareable. Creative Commons seems to make the legality of share information much clearer and is trusted by a great deal of reputable and well known organisations including OU.

Finally, CC seems to simplify what can be done and focuses less on what can’t be done which has to be positive in a digital environment, such as the OU, that facilitates and encourages sharing and collaboration.

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Block 2 Activity 7: Exploring OER issues

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Sustainability

“Sustainability in relation to OER is closely linked to the business model or approach that an individual, group or institution adopts to release, manage and support OER. It is not just about sustaining existing OER but about embedding processes and transforming practices to support ongoing OER production and release.” (McGill, 2013)

While the sharing of materials and OER seems to have definite financial benefits for students it is yet to been seen or ’proved’ that there are financial benefits for the institutions and this could pose a problem for smaller institutions that do not have the financial resources of larger institutions. For smaller institutions to justify giving away materials for free there must be some benefits for the institution and a way to make this sustainable. Stakeholders can be wary when an organisations decides to freely give away course content, learning objects or making entire courses free and open because they believe this makes no sense from a financial perspective. Additional costs such as staff/student training can also be a cause for concern. Adding OER to the institution's policies, budget, business plan could alleviate some of the financial concers or issues that can hinder sustainability.

The quality and respectability of OER

Who monitors what courses and materials are freely available to students or potential students? Will students/organisations only want materials or courses from certain universities, the Oxfords, the Cambridges, the Harvards, the MITs of the world? Are materials designed by a ‘big’ university in a certain field ‘better’ than materials designed by a new up-and-coming organisation?

Badges could go some way to solve this as could a standardised OER credit valuation and transfer system like the ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) but on a global scale.

Anecdote

I introduced my friend to Coursera and after having a quick look he decided it was “amazing”. He then proceeded to look for courses in his areas of interest and discovered he could pay $49 to get a certificate. His method of search quickly changed and he asked “Is xxx a good university?” He was now only interested in getting a certificate from a good/well known/Oxbridge/Ivy League organisation. At one point he started to look at courses that weren’t even remotely connected to his original area of interest but were run by good universities.

Assessment and accreditation

Accurate and transferable assessment and certification is an issue for OER globally as well as in each individual country. Many certified courses have no actual value when it comes to credit transfer outside of the university giving the certification. This becomes an even larger issue when the credit needs to transfer over borders. Again, a global version of ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) could be useful or a monitoring body that evaluates the assessment but who would do the monitoring? Also, badges are gaining popularity and respectability in the elearning and OER world so they are, at the very least, a big step in the right direction.

Some further issues, answers and solutions are suggested in the following articles from January 2015

http://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/paper/assessment-certification-and-quality-assurance-open-learning

References

McGill, L. (2013) Sustainability [online] Available at https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/26789871/Sustainability (Accessed 29 March 2015)

Open Education Europa (2015) eLearning Papers ISSN: 1887-15429 [online] Available at http://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/paper/assessment-certification-and-quality-assurance-open-learning (Accessed 28 March 2015)

Permalink 1 comment (latest comment by Blair Frame, Tuesday, 31 Mar 2015, 08:37)
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