The other day I attended a Moodle developers’ co-op group at USQ. Over lunch we were kicking around ideas for what USQ could do to improve our learning and teaching.
Two things I said sent one long-standing member of staff into gales of laughter.
First, I said, we should let all the students access and search all the courseware (with the exception of course readings that are licensed for enrolled students only). That way they (a) might find answers to their questions (b) catch up and revise, even if they didn’t study the prerequisite subject with us and (c) find new courses they’d like to do. Hilarious, apparently. (This was in the context of people wanting to add access to pre-requisite materials into courses, for students who needed to revise or catch-up, which apparently involves lecturers bootlegging course materials instead of the rational approach, which would be to just link to the other course).
Second, encouraged by this comedic success, I said that we should also offer a bonus to any staff member who could source and adapt open courseware instead of writing and/or maintaining a USQ study book, thus saving USQ money. Same reaction.
Getting a few laughs is good, as I play to a very tough audience at home, and there’s very little levity in the serious business of writing software1.
I’m interested if others think this is funny. Here it is once more:
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I reckon if the default search in our Moodle learning management system showed materials from other courses than the ones you happen to be enrolled in then that should help drive return business (and it if helped a student to decide NOT to enrol then that’s probably better than having them show up and discontinue or fail). This would be dead simple to implement, and would have the added benefit that our own staff might be able to areas of overlap or synergies between courses. (My team is working on a proof-of-concept repository which would be able to support this).
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And while we have been very slow as an organisation to publish our own materials under open licenses, surely the benefits of cutting course development costs would be worth looking at. After all, our main business is not selling courseware. USQ has (or should that be ‘is’?) a ‘relationship brand’, Yes we’re famous for our courseware, but more famous for Providing the highest quality educational experiences to students irrespective of their location or lifestyle. It’s the experiences that matter, and the less we spend writing the same Basket Weaving 101 course as every other distance educator on the planet the more we could devote to the experiential side.
(Depending on how this post goes I might see if I can work up a one-man show on USQ and Open Courseware).
Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>
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Hi Peter
The only reason I can guess they are laughing at your suggestion is because they would think opening the coursework would be embarrassing for many staff members about the quality of it, or that much of it contains ‘borrowed’ or copyrighted material. I’m not saying USQs produced material is any better or worse than any other universities, but opening it makes it available for scrutiny and criticism that right now they are all protected from while its hidden. As a potential student I would definately try to compare the learning material each course offers to see which university or electives I would choose.
Am I talking about the elephant in the room? Perhaps I should not be doing that.
Stanfords iphone development open courseware was a great example of how to do it right, and gave heaps of good press to them (not that they really need it).
I would say – go forth and open!
Peter
I have very seldom locked up my USQ course materials, preferring to leave them in a simple website to which I can link from whatever LMS is in vogue and do clean updates by editing single pages rather than tangling with more complex arrangements. I’ve done that partly for my own convenience, partly for convenience of (prospective) students – so easy to say to a student asking about a course, “Go, take a look and decide”, and partly in recognition of the fact that I’ve borrowed from others by linking to materials they have made available on the web.
Of course my position has been made easier by a decision I took in 2000 or 2001 never to fill out another copyright form because I could not cope with the ergonomic travesty that was the 3 column form being used by USQ at the time. I simply link to source materials on the web or in databases available to USQ students rather than hold copies. Nothing illegal and no need to complete those accursed forms. It helps that materials for the areas in which I teach are current and mostly available on the web.
I’ve thought about using OCW materials but haven’t as yet though I have pointed to other courseware that has been ‘de facto’ OCW.
Your complete search idea would take us back toward the halcyon days of 1996 when USQ online course materials were not open to the world but could be viewed by any member of USQ staff. That was a useful way of learning about different approaches and helped with knowing what related courses did, or did not, cover.
If you want to float these ideas more widely around USQ I’ll happily come along and cheer.
Thanks Peter – that sounds like a sensible approach to third party materials; we could help drive the global open access agenda by making copyright forms less usable (actually we have a computer program for that now of which the library are quite proud). Or maybe we could help lecturers to find open access versions of readings in institutional or discipline repositories via our course-management software.
I’m curious as to how you handle the copyright aspects of your own material – I think that USQ’s employment contracts state that they hold the (c) in course materials you write.
I think it’s always best when putting stuff on the web to be clear about who is the copyright holder and then assign a clear license – even if it’s ‘all rights reserved’ at least that’s clear, although obviously a CC license or similar is preferable to promote sharing and re-use.
I don’t mean to imply that our current copyright process is unusable – just that we have a system for that now that means no more forms – to drive the OA all we have to do is make it less usable.
I’ve been a bit lax about declaring copyright on course material. The page footer usually includes an edit date and my name, sometimes with a link to my USQ website on the page but where that is not on the page it is somewhere in the materials. Less frequently, where I picked up from a template with a copyright message, it may be explicit.
The material sits on a USQ server so there is no doubt that it is USQ course material. The little I understand of Australian copyright law would suggest that copyright exists from the moment of creation without need for registration or declaration. I’ve been trusting enough to assume that anybody wanting to use the course material I have written would treat it as I have treated material I have borrowed from with appropriate attribution. I doubt that an explicit declaration would deter anybody who wanted to use the material from using it (or simply linking to it) but it would offer some convenience for anybody who might want to know who owned it.
I agree that it would be best to make the provenance clear and to have an explicit licence. I’d be happy with a CC licence but I expect it might take time for USQ to get its collective head around that idea.
Now cast your mind back …
In their 1999 book, The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore discuss the evolution of commodity to experience to transformation in the delivery of ‘service’.
“The easiest way to turn a service into an experience is to provide poor service – thus creating a memorable encounter of the unpleasant kind. And the surest way to provide poor service is to treat individual clients via rote, impersonal activities that do not vary no matter who they are or what they really need. Customers have received such treatment ever since service providers embraced the very same principles of mass production that manufacturers used to dramatically lower costs. And it’s become even worse as the forces of commoditisation that hit manufacturing now attack services as well.
But the inverse principle holds true: mass customising a service can be a sure route to staging a positive experience.”
This crappy diagram (http://www.tourismcafe.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/progress1.gif) highlights the interrelationship between the competitive position of an organization and how it fulfills the needs of its customers.
Someone smart explained it this way:
Economic activity and the progression of economic value start with raw commodities that are transformed into goods, which are then wrapped in services and finally transformed into experiences. Experiences then move to the top level of value as transformational experiences, experiences that permanently improve the consumer, such as education. Each level increases the total value to the customer, and accordingly, the total price the customer is willing to pay. Generally, price sensitivity decreases, profit margins increase and competition decreases as you move up the progression of economic value.
So if creating unique content from scratch isn’t an absolutely essential ingredient in our quest to deliver the transformational experience (which we might postulate it isn’t becuase it’s everywhere) then we need to focus on what is, and how we do that. Or someone else will … and in the immortal words of Mr Hilsberg the shirt will be stolen off our back.
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