There was a lot of talk at Learning Impact about “open content”. Open content in the IMS context means freely available online teaching and learning materials (course notes, books, resources, media, etc.).
Charles Severance from University of Michigan, of Sakai fame, made an interesting analogy between “open source” and “open content”. 10 years ago there was difficulty getting institutions and corporations to release their code under open source. Everyone was holding on to their IP under the assumption that one day they might make money off it, somehow. When people realised this just wasn’t happening open source became more prevalent. Open content appears to be at a similar stage to where open source was 10 years ago. Educational institutions are reluctant to release their content.
Stephen J.Bradley, Technical & Production Director of OpenLearn, from The Open University UK made an important point. Often in content is considered the key issue. It is important but we also need people to communicate and collaborate. Open content should lead to or facilitate communication, collaboration, feedback and ultimately better education. Look out for his presentation on the Learning Impact web site soon.
Overall comments about Open Content:
The technology and even some content creators prefer the model of open content. However, institutions are still struggling with the business model for this. The Open University and MIT are examples of business models where open content has led to real student registrations. When an institution asks “how do we share content?”, the technology and even content standards are no longer the problem. Social networking tools (folksonomies) were raised as valuable ways for communities to discover content and facilitate communication around content.
Personal thoughts:
Governing and funding organisations might help with the issues of open content. In Australia most educational content is produced by organisations that receive public funding. DEST’s Accessibility Framework is addressing openness in publicly funded research output. The Framework for Open Learning Programme addresses sharing content for education but still seems to lack traction in higher education.
A large part of education is turning students into professionals, academics, researchers and educators. With that in mind, what role do we assign to students to create open content? Should we be helping them to participate in the information world? They are probably consumers of the information world already. To be proactive, shouldn’t the higher education sector be developing individuals to solve the so called google danger? (google danger = all information is perceived to be equal and valid)
What is the practical role that ICT systems and SOA will play? SOA is really about creating core ICT services that support agile flexible business processes and policies. So the applications we build under a SOA can be driven by policy and not the other way around. The open content example would be: using services and standards that allow us to be closed content today and open content next week, to any extent that an institutions wishes or needs to be.