Oh, for a GitHub for T&L Materials…
I work in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) and do so because I really didn’t enjoy my own educational experience: secondary to Higher Education (HE). I thought it was bland and, for the most part, unengaging. In the digital age, lack of engagement really is a thing of the past and now we’re spoilt for choice in finding the best way to bring a curriculum to life.
The courses and experiences that I build are rich blends of video, imagery, interactive multimedia and text. Video explains complex concepts better than any other medium; images provide stimulus and meaning, interactive multimedia allows for visual storytelling to unpack and scaffold ideas and text weaves the experience together through linear thought. These combinations coupled with solid instructional and visual design has served me and my students well over the years.
My problem though is that I want to share what I do with the rest of the community. Not just the practice, but everything.
Making some of the resources Open Educational Resources (OERs) is an option. However, the individual resources that I build (interactive content especially) aren’t standalone. They are collections of mediums which only together form the learning journey. It’s a problem I have experienced when I have gone to use other peoples OERs in the past. I think they look good and think “I really should find a way to use that” but then that starts to put a square peg in a round hole; the learning meaning begins to lose focus. Really what I need to do is to be able to publish the entire module, or at the very least the chapter, online up to the OER Commons or equivalent with a Creative Commons license.
Personally I would have no problem in throwing the entire thing online and allowing the masses enjoy it, critique it or contribute to it to improve it in a Teaching and Learning (T&L) version of GitHub…an open source space where educators from around the globe could fork a lesson for their own purposes, or commit changes to the master branch to enhance the discussion further. Wikipedia is a good comparable open platform, but really for the T&L purposes, it wouldn’t do the job justice.
Regardless though, the problem with that grand idea and platform is that work I would like to submit is not mine. It doesn’t even belong to the team of academics or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) I worked with. We all contributed to the work on our employers time and therefore it is they who own the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to that content.
My institution’s guidance, p2 section3, clearly states that “The University will automatically own any copyright created by its employees in the course of their employment…[with] some exceptions to this…such as academic journal articles and conference papers”. It is the same across the industry.
Over the course of my career I have repeatedly had had the same argument. “Let’s make this resource / course open to everyone so they can use it”. In 14 years I can count on one hand how many times I have won that argument.
Why? Quite simply Higher Education is in a market and more recently has been suffering from extreme marketisation with the introduction of £9k pa fees. There are those who will wish to ensure that our T&L materials are better than our rival institutions as this means we can offer the best courses, we get the best students in, keeps our staff numbers up, our student numbers up, keep improving our student experience, improving our campus, making the institution more and more attractive to the next potential cohort.
We are in constant competition with every other institution, nationally and internationally. Looking up the table, trying to climb every higher. And this marketisation unfortunately is at odds with openness in terms of T&L materials. It is very hard to have one and the other.
When I have attempted to put T&L OERs out into the community, whatever I have been able to put out there have only been smaller standalone resources, which don’t do the subject justice. Trying to put and entire module out is a much bigger thing to seemingly give away for free for others to benefit from even though they haven’t done any of the work for it. Even if it were loaded with the harshest of the six Creative Commons licenses, the CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license), the answer would always be no.
When Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) arrived on the educational scene in 2008, a product of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, many hoped that they could change education: making it more accessible to all and more inherently open. It was encouraged that all materials were made available on Creative Commons licenses. Justin Reich said it best that “if they weren’t Open in terms in being able to share and were for proprietary gain, then they perhaps should be called MOCs (and perhaps they should be mocked)”.
All too quickly though they became the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) exercises of some institutions or marketing tools of others, built specifically to attract students to their courses. Providers changed their business models: FutureLearn and Coursera, two big players on either side of the Atlantic, altered their terms and conditions to say they own all the copyright of the materials posted on their platforms, and just like Facebook owns a persons images if they are posted on their platform so too do FutureLearn and Coursera own your comments in their courses.
Today they also offer specialisms and degrees as well, partnering with HEIs from around the world. If I were writing for the Financial Times, my tone would be more optimistic rather than sad. However I am writing about my wish of making T&L materials more open, for people more to benefit from; whether it’s another institution using that content for reading material for a course they offer or whether it’s just for a kid from the south coast whom had a poor educational experience and wanted to find something to bring the curriculum to life.
There is obviously some good work going on out there and there are some great things being done. Not all MOOCs cost money, the OER Commons (amongst others) are fantastic resources to share and find OERs and OEPs. However, getting to my dream state of a GitHub for T&L is a long way off because as long as there is competition, institutions will be keeping their T&L cards close to their chest. Unfortunately for openness, courses = capital.
