Open: on reaching ‘everyone, everywhere’
“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose”
‘Open definition’ by Open Knowledge International CC BY 4.0
Open: How far have we come?
Open as an idea has come of age, with more educational resources and research findings in the public domain than ever before. Now would seem a good time to gauge from a higher education (HE) perspective how far the definition of open has come to being fully realised, or whether there are yet obstacles to overcome in our efforts to:
· generate content that is free and open to use — in principle
· make content discoverable, available and accessible
· democratise access — making content truly open for use by everyone
First, let’s look at the generation of open content.
Who pays for open content and do we have the right to give it away?
‘Many struggle to understand why there are those who would take the time and effort to craft educational materials only to give them away without capturing any monetary value from their work.’
‘Why openness in Education?’ David Wiley and Cable Green, CC BY 3.0
‘The majority of research in the humanities remains unfunded except through institutional time.’
Such beliefs overlook that fact that we in UK HE are fortunate in that we do receive monetary value from our work, through our employment by the university. For the sake of simplicity, researchers are often granted authorship of their work by their higher education institution, but the situation is not so clear-cut when it comes to who should have authority over open resources for teaching.
Since teaching materials developed in the course of employment are in most cases owned by the employing university, clarity is needed as to when it is permissible to share open educational resources (OERs) — by means of granting access under a Creative Commons (CC) licence or similar — and when it is preferable to retain copyright so as not to concede any commercial advantage.
In the US, where the bulk of education and research is taxpayer funded, findings such as NASA discoveries tend to be shared with the public. In the UK the overall funding picture is less clear.
According to Universities UK, around 18% of teaching income comes from government grants and 54% from student fees. Fees themselves remain a grey area, since a proportion of these are funded via student loans, underwritten by government. A recent article (paywall) states that with fees now at their highest ever level, the taxpayer contribution to students’ fees and living costs is rising to around £24,000 per student.
As regards research, a 2016 report showed that around 66% of funding to UK universities comes from government sources and is therefore, in essence, publicly funded through either borrowing or tax-take.
It is no wonder confusion abounds as to who owns content and whether we have the right to make it open.
Clarity of ownership and freedom to publish
For OERs in particular, there is a need for transparency on the part of higher education employers about when it is appropriate for us to release outputs into the public domain.
Creative Commons’ CC FAQs state:
‘Do you own the material you want to license? If not, are you otherwise authorized to license it under the specific CC license you are interested in using? You should not apply a license to material that you do not own or that you are not authorized to license’.
This issue of authorisation has led higher education institutions to begin to develop OER policies, which aim to alleviate uncertainty and maximise outputs.
However, this excerpt from Glasglow Caledonian University’s OER policy (which is freely available for others to adapt) demonstrates that navigating legal considerations of ownership and authorisation can prove onerous when it comes to making decisions about whether to release content:
‘Should staff wish to create a whole course their Head of School, Department or Service should be consulted on whether there is any reason to restrict publication, based on the protection of GCU’s commercial interests for example. Staff may also wish to consult the university RIE* team at this stage.’
*Research Innovation and Enterprise
It should be possible to simplify this process, so that rather than a Head of School or unit having to make a decision on each individual OER proposal, the university might instead make a sweeping declaration to the effect that all OER cases are authorisable, on condition that certain conditions are met. A heuristic could be drawn up to assist contributors in understanding the correct course of action and advising them to contact heads only if they are unsure. This heuristic could look something like:
- if there are no implications such as commercial conflicts of interest (or other specified constraints)
- if you are sure you won’t wish to withdraw the licence at a later date
- if it is clear [the university] own the copyright
- if the contribution of the OER would further the social responsibility agenda
:then publish (and log or report to whoever collates the data), or if you are unsure seek advice from head of unit.
The specified constraints would need to take into account special cases such as collaborations with partner institutions, Health Education England, industry and others who may be jointly funding or otherwise contributing to programmes or projects.
Who is open for?
Let’s revisit that definition of open:
“freely used [..] by anyone, for any purpose”
Anyone? As in, potentially everyone?
Despite a plethora of OERs being generated in the UK, it has been found that:
‘only in a small number of cases was the global audience declared as the intended beneficiaries.’
Kelly Terrell
Who then does open benefit?
‘Open teaching provides individuals who might otherwise never have the opportunity to experience postsecondary learning a free and open chance to participate.’
Professor Martin Weller, the Open University
Open education is a laudable aim and so the when massive open online courses (MOOCs) were introduced a few years ago, the intention was to bring the benefits of a university education to everyone. But as is well known by now, uptake of the first wave of MOOCs in 2013 was by people who already had a degree (70%). Similarly, a demographic analysis of all MOOCs delivered by the University of Manchester revealed that 84% of participants had already achieved either further or higher level education before taking part. “Not really what we wanted to see”, as the MOOC manager put it.
What we have learned in the intervening years is that the MOOC format works exceptionally well for people seeking professional and career development, and so MOOC providers have begun to cater for this sector.
Core MOOC content for the time being remains open but is being gradually locked down and by the end of the year it is thought that assessments, participation certificates, completion certificates and even possibly continued access to MOOCs will require payment. So having opened up free education for the masses, this source of OERs is starting to be closed off again.
As for open research, the RCUK (Research Councils UK) Open Access policy incorporates a similar statement to the effect that research they fund must be made openly accessible to everyone, everywhere. The process of making research open is often a trade-off between cost and timeliness (useful definitions of gold and green access can be found here). Open research, as with education, doesn’t necessarily always equate to ‘at no cost’.
RCUK’s stated intention is furthered through the amassing of journal collections such as the Public Library of Science (PLOS), while Knowledge Unlatched seeks to secure open access by attracting crowdfunding from both libraries and individuals. Pre-print repositories such as arXiv attempt to circumvent publisher monopolisation which sees university researchers giving away their outputs only for them to then be sold back to universities.
According to the definition of open, the benefits of these endeavours ought to be the full spectrum of users: researchers, practitioners and the public at large.
But is open access alone enough to make open resources available in a form that everyone, everywhere can use?
It is clear from the MOOC experience that people are more likely to be capable of accessing OERs if they have previously experienced higher levels of formal education.
As Professor Martin Eve, Birkbeck, University of London has stated:
The University is an elite space — once you leave you lose access
..and as for those who never have entered into that space?
How can we reach the wider public?
In the 1970s the Open University brought education to the masses with their 2am BBC2 slots, radio programmes, audio and video cassettes . Decades on, the OU continue to provide free courses through Open Learn.
One of today’s most widely available sources of podcasts and other learning materials, with in excess of 800,000,000 accounts worldwide, is iTunes. In 2013, Apple announced that course downloads from its educational arm, ITunes U, had topped 1 billion, in 155 countries.
Another approach we can and do take as a sector is for enthusiastic experts such as Professor Brian Cox or Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock to digest research findings and deliver them as entertainment.
However:
‘In order to make things truly open you need to provide support structures, to specifically meet the needs of the audiences you feel might benefit from open’.
So what might this support to make things truly open entail?
How might we democratise access to OERs?
‘Simply making something ‘open’ itself does not lead to equality or democratisation, and in fact may increase inequality.’
Professor Martin Weller, the Open University
If we are to democratise access, open content itself needs to be not only available (out there) and readily discoverable but usable and relevant to the context in which the user would wish to utilise it.
Grassroots
Community development worker Ernie Stringer, has worked with marginalised communities in Australia, the US and East Timor. He believes that in order to bring about positive change what is needed is for us to build links between our research, the academic work that we’re doing and the communities that would be the ultimate beneficiaries of these. He says that forging these links:
‘..starts with the people and the issues that concern them. It is framed in their own terms and uses their own concepts and their own interpretations of their experience to take action.’
Providing support for take-up and utilisation is important if we are serious about social responsibility and making open resources accessible by everyone, everywhere.
Censorship, cultural, and infrastructural impediments
In the course of bridging the gap that exists between communities and our teaching and research outputs, we as universities need to be mindful of local social and cultural sensitivities.
It is written that fears about threats to national security have led some countries in south east asia to block access to sources of otherwise freely available open content, such as YouTube, as well as to social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
On the other hand, the Egyptian government has opened itself up to global knowledge through the Egyptian Knowledge Bank project (EKB), having purchased a four-year ‘Big Deal’ . Under this initiative, anyone with an Egyptian IP address and national identification number may access, without subscription, online publications from providers including: Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Sage, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, Emerald, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and the Royal Society of Chemistry. At the press conference heralding the launch, it was said that the project hoped to revive the “civilization that exist under the skin of every Egyptian farmer” [sic] and provide the means to enable Egyptian people to excel in education and research.
A couple of years ago, a visiting Egyptian academic gave some of us an insight into life since the Arab spring. Describing how campus was out of bounds for periods of time, the need to keep curfews and internet services dropping out intermittently, the academic illustrated how online access had sometimes proved difficult, though when connected it had proved a lifeline and helped keep a community together. Given such obstacles, together with the fact that over 70% of EKB content is in English and government estimates of illiteracy stand at over 25% of the population, it is unclear how connections between the EKB and the larger proportion of non-academic people can be made.
What is meant by ‘an education’? Surely there is value in usable knowledge that helps keep people free from disease, enables them to learn another language or to support themselves and others?
There is a case for taking open content down to grass roots level, first understanding what people need and then providing it in a way that is utilisable, relevant and beneficial for them — on their own cultural terms.
It has been said that open research is about changing minds, yet open access and OERs can be about changing lives.
By getting to know target communities and discovering the kinds of knowledge that people out in the world would find useful, we can make connections on issues such as healthcare, as one of our Professors (who for the moment wishes to keep the initiative under wraps) has begun to do.
After all, what would be the point in retaining and commercialising knowledge about aseptic technique, preventing cross infection and knowing how to prevent oneself from becoming contaminated by lab samples?
Having made connections and elicited requirements, we might then plan and design educational resources and research outputs for reuse, going on to customise them for the local context of the community we are working with. Perhaps, once implemented, usage would be viralised at grassroots level, and through local networks those resources (to use the example above) would then be taken up by other communities’ hospitals, pathology laboratories; and beyond, to neighbouring countries.
Both our Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (CSC) and Equity and Merit scholarships eligibility criteria contain clearly worded statements demonstrating the ultimate intention of bringing about a positive impact on the development of candidates’ home countries. These scholarships are the perfect vehicle for embedding acquired knowledge within the target communities, even if in some cases infrastructural requirements may mean we provide these resources offline on DVD, on paper, or using the oral tradition.
Back in the ’90s, ‘empowerment’ was a buzzword for those of us working in community development. The idea was to go forth and propagate ideas, knowledge, skills, and have these replicate and evolve throughout the communities we worked in. One lasting lesson that came from my experience of working with communities on housing and regeneration projects over 10 years — by going out into those places where ‘forgotten’ people lived, initiating communication, earning their trust, persuading them to work with you, developing their confidence and skills little by little.. was the sheer waste of the untapped potential residing within them. I was lucky enough to see this potential unlocked in a couple of people, who were transformed through their participation in community involvement projects, and who went on to develop and initiate ideas and projects of their own and even to find work as a result.
If we could reach people so that they might adopt the resources we in HE have developed in a way that is relevant and accessible to them, we could help bring to life these stagnating, overlooked communities whose residents have such poor life chances. But we would first need to understand these local contexts, not remain in our exclusive bubble in which we put stuff out there and then wonder why it is not being taken up by people who have not already benefited from higher education.
To do this we first need to consider the business of open from the end user’s point of view. We need to consider the ways in which people ordinarily go about finding things they wish to use or learn about and then go about facilitating that uptake. As Eddie Stringer says, communities already possess the necessary potential, because of:
‘..the resources that they’ve got, the experiences they’ve got, and the perspectives they’ve got. They have the richest resources within them, and that’s where you start: with the people’.
