Open knowledge: am I bothered?
Late-career academic switches to teaching focus role and enrols on PGCert. What does that have to do with open knowledge? “Not much”, I thought, even as I chose the module. Don’t get me wrong, I know what it is, I can argue the moral desirability of making publicly funded outputs freely available to all, I’ve published in PLoS One, and I’d heard of Jorum. But Jorum is drawing its pension
and, now that I’m not REF-returnable, the University doesn’t care where I publish. So, without any direct conflict between promotion and journal impact factors to blog about, this will be an off-kilter consideration of the current impact of Open Knowledge on me (as lecturer, examiner, and academic malpractice officer) and the students I teach.
Open Educational Resources
Firstly, OERs, which could be relevant to me as either a user or a contributor. As a wannabe consumer, I went to a presentation on OERs about 10 years ago and returned overwhelmed, bemused and eventually disappointed to find little in my (niche) content area. OER repositories were not easily searchable, and time-consuming to browse; it seemed it could take more time to identify and adapt resources than to create bespoke materials. In contrast, I was surprised by chance discoveries of relevant sets of lectures online, apparently posted by individual academics outside of institutional policy. It would never have occurred to me, 10 years ago, to share my own work in that way. All those hours of my effort? And what if other examples were more informed / inspiring / innovative than mine? In 2013, JISC were still telling us to get over this.
Clearly some people have got over it, as shown by the MIT Open Courseware site. Institutionally driven, “the idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.” . MIT provide not just the slides, but often video-recordings of whole lectures, assessments and the answers. (So many new MCQs to think up every year!) So, do I make use of these resources? I will do now I’ve found them. There’s nothing there that could replace my own teaching (it’s a niche area, remember) but there are relevant topics with which students could supplement their learning. And have I become a contributor to the OER pot? No, we are busy responding to pressure to create income-generating materials instead.
The impact of an Open ethos on students
Within the University, an open approach can benefit both students and lecturers via discussion, observation and access to each other’s teaching and learning materials.
Sam Aston’s blog describes the limitations of Blackboard as primarily a one-way transmission from a lecturer to a group of students. However, we do encourage student interaction via discussion boards and see them progress over three years from individual requests for a lecturer’s response to more genuine peer exchanges of information and support.
For lecturers, access to just your own units removes opportunities to learn by seeing other people’s materials. Peer review of teaching is an alternative opportunity to share experience and ideas — but not if reviewing is limited to a small team of ‘experts’. As peer review lead I organised an open system where all staff were equal participants in both reviewer and reviewee roles, but the need for scoring and reliability is winning, and our division is moving back to one-way judgements.
The impact of open access research on students is harder to judge as, arguably, they have no need of it while registered at a university with a well-resourced library. (In fact, the same is true for me as a teaching-focus academic.) There is an indirect impact if subscriptions to relevant journals are cut due to the increase in costs of Open Access. That’s more likely to matter to me than to undergraduate students; there will always be enough material to write an essay on.
It’s probably safe to say most students don’t fully understand OA. Jane Secker pointed out that the easy availability online of films, music and written publications undermines our recognition of the copyright underlying them. There is a confusing distinction between ‘in the public domain’ (i.e. I can easily find out the members of senate) and ‘In The Public Domain’ (“content that is not protected by any copyright law or other restriction and may be freely copied, shared, altered and republished by anyone”). The ‘free’ accessibility of so much material can seduce us into….
Plagiarism
which is a major consequence of Open Knowledge for my role as an academic malpractice officer. Following (or perhaps inspiring?) the fashion of curating, students don’t understand the distinction between information being open for use, and the fact that you can’t pass it off as your own. Curation “is about … organising, displaying and interpreting other people’s stuff” but the clear acknowledgement of where that stuff came from is sometimes lacking.
The misunderstandings are not surprising. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself, whereas the University defines plagiarism as “the presentation, intentionally or unwittingly, of the ideas, work or words of other people without proper, clear and unambiguous acknowledgement”. Students often reference the source of an idea. Adding the quotation marks that admit they’ve also used the author’s exact words would save me some work. Here’s a Turnitin example.
I’m pleased to acknowledge the source of extract one and the originator of extract six . The pdf plagiarised by the student in extract six has since been removed from the internet.
Conclusion
My personal work practice benefits greatly from ease of access to research and teaching materials. However, this is mostly enabled by the University’s VPN, virtual learning environment, extensive posting of documentation online, and huge library holdings or subscriptions. None of that is open information. The indirect threats of reduced journal subscriptions are more subtle, and the real threats to the education of healthcare professionals are not coming from OERs. I enjoy a privileged (but now precarious) position as an employee of a large University, with the rights of access to information that come with it.
However, I took the module to learn more about Open Knowledge and, like Carly Chadwick, I‘ve realised the breadth of impact of openness for research and teaching in both science and humanities-based topics. I’m looking forward to exploring those broader issues.
