Towards Open Education in the Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen

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1 Towards Open Education in the Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen Advisory report at the request of the Faculty Board in preparation of the University of Groningen Open Courseware Inititiative Authors: Dr Sake Jager, ICT in Education, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen Dr Steven L. Thorne, Applied Linguistics, University of Groningen [& World Languages and Literatures, Portland State University] October Background on Open Education Universities have as their core mission the creation of knowledge through research and the dissemination of knowledge through curricula, course materials, and teaching. The majority of elite universities world wide, and nearly all of the major universities within the European Union, are primarily or fully supported by public and governmental funds, a condition that evokes a tacit commitment to serve the needs of local communities as well as broader society. For approximately the last decade, a number of the world s top ranked universities have invited the public to freely access the very course content that previously had only been available to a privileged few. Under the umbrella term Open Education, this movement encourages universities to serve the greater public good through the sharing of video recorded lectures, topical and thematic learning objects, and complete intact course materials and curricula. a. Principles and philosophy: Democratic, open, supportive of the public good The availability of contemporary information and communication technologies has massively expanded the capacity of universities for sharing course materials with a potentially global audience. Making course materials publicly available does a number of things: 1) it supports higher democratic goal of serving human society at large, 2) it raises the national and international visibility of the universities and the individual scholars that contribute to the Open Education movement, and 3) the existence of Open Education course materials helps all 1

2 universities with the goal of keeping curricular offerings up to date and focused on the most contemporary and important research findings and pedagogical methods. b. International origins of Open Education The knowledge dissemination function of universities (teaching and course materials development) is time intensive and involves sophisticated linkages of knowledge emerging from basic research with pedagogically appropriate materials that enable successful learning outcomes. With an appreciation for the fact that curriculum development is a human and capital intensive process, the concept of Open Education has had from its inception an international focus that emphasizes the greater social good that is possible through sharing and collaboration. Many foundations and universities contributing to Open Education refer to the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen s work (1999), which called for redefining the term freedom as the enhancement of human capacities, as the conceptual progenitor of contemporary Open Education efforts (see Atkins, Seely Brown, & Hammond, 2007). A number of transnational processes have been established that contribute to Open Education, such as open source software efforts in a wide range of educationally related domains, open data initiatives, and Creative Commons licensing designed to increase the number of resources that are freely and legally available in the public domain. c. Exemplar projects and initiatives I. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology s Open Courseware now includes more than 2000 courses representing core offerings across all major disciplines. Also included are lectures notes, exams, video taped class presentations and lectures ( II. Connexions, initially sponsored by Rice University, focuses on smaller knowledge chunks or teaching objects that include more than individual contributions arranged into 1000 topical collections ( III. Carnegie Mellon University s Open Learning Initiative is particularly strong in its humanities content. CMU also attends carefully to the pedagogy and high production values of its online courses, with the motto open courses backed by learning research as the opening statement on their website ( IV. The OpenLearn initiative in the UK provides access to thousands of hours of learning materials produced by The Open University ( ). It is complemented by the social interactive Cloudworks site, where researchers, teachers and students can share and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences ( 2

3 V. In the Netherlands, Delft University of Technology is one of the forerunners in Open Education. Its Open Course Ware programme is committed to the principles and philosophy outlined above and is used to serve both the community at large and to interest prospective students in studying at the university. It has been particularly successful, for instance, in attracting student to the water management programmes. 2. Rationale: Why should the University of Groningen and the Faculty of Arts participate in the Open Education movement? a. Provides regional and international visibility Increasingly, institutions of higher learning are negatively assessed for not participating in Open Education activities. With many of the world s greatest universities freely sharing faculty expertise (videos of lectures, select publications) and educationally related materials and courses, there is no substantive rationale for those not currently contributing to continue withholding intellectual and educational resources from prospective students, other universities and professional colleagues, and the global public. An additional advantage to making educational materials openly available is the national and international visibility they provide, which also often include mention in the popular press and grass roots dissemination through social media. b. Shares RUG expertise with a global audience RUG will be better able meet its commitment to sharing its intellectual resources and expertise with regional and global audiences through participation in the Open Education movement. As we have described throughout this document, we strongly believe that publicly funded institutions are morally bound to improving regional and global conditions through the enhancement of human capacities (Sen, ibid). However, we are also aware that some faculty and administrators are hesitant about giving away intellectual property or fear outright appropriation by other institutions for their own commercial gain. In response to these concerns, which have been earlier raised by many institutions now participating in Open Education activities, history tells us that the very public visibility of an institution s unique online curricular materials makes them more, and not less, difficult to steal or imitate elsewhere. In essence, when everything is in the public view, ownership and point of origin becomes more transparent. Additionally, the Creative Commons intellectual property licensing agreements, which are frequently applied to Open Education materials, are specifically designed to maintain and enforce intellectual property rights while also maximizing the potential for distribution and public visibility. 3

4 c. Encourages RUG faculty and students to utilize, repurpose, and/or otherwise benefit from Open Education materials RUG faculty and students will be encouraged to become of aware of the immense resources available to them through Open Education sources. With proper acknowledgement of the creators of the OEC materials, RUG faculty can perennially ameliorate and update their own course offerings and activities. Seen in this light, Open Education is a globally distributed resource for the improvement of academic excellence here on the RUG campus. 3. How could the University of Groningen and the Faculty of Arts enter and participate in the Open Education movement? Making a successful move to Open Education requires the development of a consistent vision, the setting of realistic targets, and the implementation of an appropriate organizational infrastructure. To enhance the chances of success we propose the following steps: a. Invite leaders in OE to help develop the vision and work plan for our university Leaders in Open Education, particularly experts who have been successful in setting up Open Education elsewhere, should be invited to help the University of Groningen develop and implement the work plan for its Open Courseware initiative. These external colleagues will work interactively with local experts and management to formulate a vision and work plan in which all the relevant elements for setting up a successful Open Education project are dealt with. Although local conditions and goals will be carefully taken into account, experienced leaders in the field of Open Education will be highly instrumental in helping RUG to create its Open Education vision, engineer a work plan for building and sustaining Open Education visibility, and in helping to decide which kinds of support units should be put in place for the implementation of OCW. These invited external experts will be asked to contribute to the initial version of the vision document and work plan and to review subsequently developed implementation plans. In addition, they could give presentations to the university administration and invited faculty on the philosophy and vision that drives OE worldwide and how their institution addresses the challenges that come with it. In the true spirit of OE, some leaders (namely Cole Camplese, Director, Education Technology Services, and Keith Bailey, Director, e Learning Institute, at the Pennsylvania State University) have shown an interest in sharing their ideas, experience and expertise with us. b. Create a culture of participation among faculty and instructors The success of OCW will depend almost entirely on the willingness of faculty to participate. This 4

5 requires strong commitment from the university and faculty administration from the start. The university should make it clear that they want OCW to be successful and that they are willing to invest in it. They should be explicit about how OE is in the interest of the university, faculty and departments concerned. Creating a culture of participation involves emphasizing the advantages of making use of OE courses and materials produced elsewhere as well as the benefits of making our own courses and materials available to others. The present culture fosters the intellectual value, rare expertise or academic prestige of various educational programmes, obviously associated with specific programme leaders and instructors, but it has perhaps insufficiently emphasized the need to share this expertise with others colleagues in comparable programmes elsewhere, prospective domestic and international students, and curious and eager secondary school students. In particular, the predominant Intellectual Property model, and a publishing culture dominated by commercial interests, have worked against the idea of openly sharing the intellectual and instructional materials produced at universities. In the light of growing international competition in Higher Education, such concerns about sharing unique expertise or educational programmes should be taken seriously. As we described above, it is essential to raise awareness of open rights publication models, in particular Creative Commons, and the use of these should be promoted to alee some of the fears that faculty may have about sharing their materials and the intellectual effort that they have expended in creating them. c. Create symbolic rewards for contributors More than anything else the Faculty and University should make contributing to the OCW project an academically prestigious and rewarding experience for participating faculty. Teaching is often less rewarded in academia than research. In addition, previous efforts at making materials publicly available have not always been successful (e.g. publishing recorded lectures). There should be both material and symbolic capital incentives for faculty to participate. For example, contributors to OCW could receive from the Faculty or University Board a recognition of excellence in teaching. Links could also be made to the annual teacher of the year competition. d. Create the appropriate infrastructure Without the appropriate infrastructure and adequate support it will be difficult to win over faculty to the initiative. Faculty should remain focused on teaching, designing the course outline, gathering and writing required learning materials and delivering the course. The OCW initiative should challenge them to re think course content and course methods while also providing support for this work. Funds for course re design and improvement should be 5

6 budgeted as part of the project. Participating faculty themselves, however, should not have to deal with putting the materials online, archiving and readying them for publication. A dedicated support unit, consisting of educational technology experts and librarians, should be made responsible for actual online delivery of the materials. Additional capacity should be freed up for recording and editing video recordings (live lectures and recorded instruction). A university wide repository of OCW materials will need to be established. The design and visibility of the repository is crucial to the success of the project. Materials should optimized for search engines and linked to portals of (open) academic content and should also be highly accessible through a carefully designed interface. The RUG OCW repository should be built on principles of social software, with sharing, rating and crowd sourcing features. The site will need to conform to technology based standards so that content can easily be exchanged and used in different modes of delivery. The current resource set up for HE in the Netherlands, Lorenet (in which the University of Groningen has minimal representation), falls short for realising the University s ambitions in these areas. More appealing are the sites of the exemplar projects listed above. Although the scale of some existing OCW sites may be beyond our capacity, the principles upon which these are built serve as exemplars of what we should aspire to. 4. What will the Faculty of Arts contribute and produce? a. Number of participating courses The Faculty of Arts will be invited by the university to submit candidates (courses, professors, lecturers) for participation in the OCW project. The university has set a quantitative target of 400 courses by the end of the project period (2014). Although partly symbolic (to celebrate RUG s 400th anniversary), the number is estimated to be realistic by the ICT strategy team, comprising approximately 10% of the total number of courses in the university. It is left to the Faculty to decide on courses that are most suitable for RUG s proposed OCW programme. It is our estimate that 10% of the targeted university total (which is well below 10% of the number of courses taught in the Faculty) would require a major effort. The feasibility of meeting this target depends on the investment needed per course and the support for this initiative among teaching staff. A realistic estimate of the investment needed and the span of the project in the faculty is difficult to estimate at this early stage. In fact, the Faculty might well consider whether, for the time being at least, it should not also allow for the publication of exemplary parts of courses, rather than fully 6

7 intact courses. In many cases, this would suffice to generate interest in participating in the course. In the first year the project should be oriented to establishing a small number of OEC courses (or representative parts of courses). This would provide more definitive information on the average cost per course and the interest of departments and teaching staff to participate, so that a more realistic target for participation by the Faculty could be set. b. Which courses should participate? Increased online visibility is a primary university objective. Groups targeted are international students, prospective Dutch students and secondary school students. Openness, transparency and increased interaction in Open Education contexts will enhance the quality of the learning materials and courses over time. Good candidates for participating in the project, particularly initially, are courses of excellence in the Faculty such as Research Master courses. For international profiling, English taught courses are obvious candidates, but with regard to increasing the influx of Dutch students, we suggest that the Faculty not restrict participation to courses taught in English. Linking up with the recently established Honours College (HC) should be explored together with the other faculties participating in HC. In addition, disciplines where the Faculty can boast exclusive expertise in the Netherlands or beyond, including those where the number of students is decreasing, also may be good candidates for participation. We also suggest that languages present in the initiative should extend beyond English and Dutch and should potentially include less commonly taught languages. During initial stages of RUG s participation in Open Education, we recommend focusing on select individual courses, or possibly even parts of courses, to whet the public s appetite for RUG s official campus course offerings. This approach would also help to alee concerns that have been voiced by the Director of Studies in relation to the Erasmus Mundus programmes. c. Review process Participation is by invitation of the Faculty or the University Board. This should not mean of course that departments or individual faculty initiatives to participate should be discouraged. However, in view of the promotional aspects of the initiative, high standards should be set for the quality of the materials that will be put online. Preferably the selection of suitable courses should be accompanied by a formal review process in which decisions are guided by criteria set by the Faculty or University. A working and 7

8 implementable version of criteria and the review process should be in place at the start of the project. d. Proof of concept phase Only a small number of courses (maximum 3 to 5) should be involved in the first year to test and incrementally develop the procedures and organizational framework before expanding OCW to more disciplines. This will facilitate the budgeting and planning of the project as a whole. The courses selected should be from different disciplines and include courses taught in different languages, to help us better estimate the human and financial resources the project will require. e. Project outcomes The primary targeted outcome is the online publication of Faculty of Arts courses (or parts of courses) in the University of Groningen OCW project. As described above, after a small number of courses are put online during the first year, we will move with greater alacrity toward the goal of 40 online courses by Materials to be included for each course are course descriptions, syllabi, notes, and lecture recordings. This target can only be met if the project contributes to producing the following outcomes as well: I. Realistic development model (early on in the project) covering cost, funding and the sharing out of tasks between different parties involved; II. Open Courseware portal, an attractive interactive site, built on the principles outlined above; III. Awareness raising events and activities (publicity, meetings, conferences) among staff; IV. University and faculty support structure (OCW expertise, technology, digital rights management, archiving and storing). 8

9 5. Budget a. Allocation A university budget of 1,000, is available for setting up and running the OCW project in the years It is anticipated that the budget would have to be allocated for 1) setting up the enabling unit (vision leader, steering committee, course design, web support, publicity, video recording), 2) staff release (student assistance, temporary release of other duties), 3) hardware and software investments (web portal, other publishing facilities), 4) travelling budget (visiting experts to Groningen, visits to OE expertise centres / institutions). b. Budget required for Faculty of Arts Targeting 40 courses, it is estimated that the Faculty of Arts would need k 200. to finance its share in the project (c. k 5. average per course). The initial investment is likely to be higher. For financing 5 courses in the initial stages we recommend setting aside k 50. This assumes that the most of the required infrastructure and support is funded centrally by the university. 9