Open Access, Open Content, OER: Towards the future of scholarship and research

This week is the 'Open Access' week, a movement which has started few years ago to raise the importance of openness and free sharing of information and content. This is to highlight the significance and the potential of open/free educational resources in academia in different disciplines from science to humanities and for the global society on the whole. Open/free access promises for more democratic opportunities to “the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – and has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted” (OC page; http://www.openaccessweek.org/).

There are various activities and events this week to promote open access in a global level. Some of them are listed in the page above which is a network dedicated to enhance this movement. Of which there are some webinars by the Athabasca University in Canada that I am following:  October 24, 2011: Fun and Fear in Open Spaces, October 25, 2011: Post Secondary Leadership and the OER Movement , October 26, 2011: Making Sense of Complexity in Open Information Environments , October 27, 2011: Panel on Moving to Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University , October 28, 2011: OER's and Sustainable Innovation: Low Cost, Low Risk but High Impact.

David Wiley , an open educator who has been contributing a lot to the promotion of open content and openness in education had also lately a discussion week on this topic in the #change11 MOOC.

This week of #change11 MOOC is about OER facilitated by Rory McGreal , UNESCO/COL Chair in Open Educational Resources at the Athabasca University.

I found an interesting article of Wiley here in EDUCAUSE Review 2010: Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation  which is worth reading.  It is part of the EDUCAUSE Review V. 45, N.4 on "openness".

Here is David Wiley's talk in TED2010 about open education and the future.

Open Movement; Openness and Transparency in Education

   Week 9 of CCK11 was about openness and transparency. There are huge discussions and debates nowadays about open movement: open source, open content, open access, open educational resources (OER) and so on and especially what they can bring to our educational and learning practices. How all content and information could be freely accessible to all? Who pays for them? What are the roles of educational institutions in moving towards openness and are there any benefits for them to make contents and materials closed or make them open?

  On Wednesday live session on Elluminate (March 16^th),   Zaid Ali Alsagoff  talked about: Sharing to Connect, Interact and Learn . He was an active participant of MOOCs (PLENK2010, CCK11) whose insightful reflections and perceptions of openness and connectivity were shared in the session with other participants of the course. The discussion was all great and inspired me to ponder more about these issues in my research also.  Here is his presentation on Slideshare and the entire session as Elluminate Recording and as MP3 Audio.

This quote as a conclusion of this discussion makes us think of the value of openness in education:

“Embrace openness because it’s a great way to connect and interact with amazing people and experience awesome learning”!

 

   I think for being open and transparent in learning and collaboration, some tools like blogs, Twitter, Slideshare, YouTube, Google, Bookmarking tools  etc.  can help us for aggregating, organizing, remixing and sharing our content and artifacts. Perhaps Twitter and blogging have more values for openness and visibility and to promote connectivity.

   On Friday, the facilitator’s discussion continued by Siemens and Downes on the history open movement in education. Siemens referred to the first initiatives of open source movement and how they were reacted at the time. It was in 1998 that the ‘Open Content License’ was introduced: http://www.opencontent.org/opl.shtml

Here are some links related to open movement and openness in education:

George Siemens, Free and Open Source Movements

George Siemens, Open Source Content in Education

Stephen Downes, Open Education: Projects and Potentual (slides and audio)

George Siemens & Kathleen Matheos, Open Social Learning in Higher Education: An African Context (video)

Stephen Downes, The Future of Open Educational Resources (video)

Alan Levine, Amazing Stories of Openness

Stephen Downes, Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources

Stephen Downes and David Wiley, Downes-Wiley: A Conversation on Open Educational Resources

Open Education: Moving From Concept to Reality by G. Siemens: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/OE_presentation.htm

Budapest open access initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

It was mentioned in the discussion that there are three phases of open learning:

-          Open Content, e.g. open educational resources (OER) , open course ware (OCW)

-          Open Courses, e.g. CCK11, PLENK2010, EC&I831, PLEK12, DS106,  …

-          Open Assessment, which is also very important among topics of openness in education.  What does that really mean? How it can be applied in the context of open education. Who can assess learning? Who are the stakeholders in the process of open assessment?

The Elluminate recording of the session will be soon available.