OOPS, Turning MIT Opencourseware into Chinese: An analysis of a community of practice of global translators

Abstract

Keywords: Open educational resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW); communities of practice (CoP); global education; Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS); opensource; volunteer translators; reification; mutual engagement; joint enterprise; shared repertoire; MIT; global translation; asynchronous discussion threads; Chinese; China; Taiwan Introduction During the past decade, online collaborative technologies combined with a shift in educational practices toward sharing educational contents, have created global educational opportunities never witnessed before in the history of human civilization. Trustworthiness was established mainly through the following measures: 1) data triangulation that included data sources such as interviews, online postings, and newsletters from project website, 2) peer debriefing that included discussions of interpretations and conclusions between two authors and with other researchers, and 3) member checking that included sharing documents with the participants.

An all-volunteer organization called the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), headquartered in Taiwan, was initially designed to translate open source materials from MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site into Chinese. Given the recent plethora of open educational resources (OER), such as the OCW, the growing use of such resources by the world community, and the emergence of online global education communities to localize resources such as the OOPS, a key goal of this research was to understand how the OOPS members negotiate meanings and form a collective identity in this cross-continent online community. To help with our explorations and analyses within the OOPS translation community, several core principles from Etienne Wenger's concept of Communities of Practice (COP) guided our analyses, including mutual engagement, joint enterprise, shared repertoire, reification, and overall identity of the community. In this paper, we detail how each of these key components was uniquely manifested within the OOPS. Three issues appeared central to the emergence, success, and challenges of the community such as OOPS: 1) strong, stable, and fairly democratic leadership; 2) participation incentives; and 3) online storytelling or opportunities to share one's translation successes, struggles, and advice within an asynchronous discussion forum. While an extremely high level of enthusiasm among the OOPS members underpinned the success of the OOPS, discussion continues on issues related to quality control, purpose and scope, and forms of legitimate participation. This study, therefore, provides an initial window into the emergence and functioning of an online global education COP in the OER movement. Future research directions related to online global educational communities are discussed.

Keywords: Open educational resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW); communities of practice (CoP); global education; Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS); opensource; volunteer translators; reification; mutual engagement; joint enterprise; shared repertoire; MIT; global translation; asynchronous discussion threads; Chinese; China; Taiwan

Introduction

During the past decade, online collaborative technologies combined with a shift in educational practices toward sharing educational contents, have created global educational opportunities never witnessed before in the history of human civilization. These opportunities have supported a change in dispositions to share among renowned institutions and established educational scholars. This shift has already resulted in innovative learning possibilities for every connected citizen on this planet. As individuals and funding agencies recognize some of these opportunities and events, even more far reaching global exchanges and learning outcomes can be developed, tested, combined, and promoted. In partial response to these trends, we examine an Open Educational Resources (OER) community, with the goal of understanding how members negotiate meanings and form a collective identity in this cross-continent online community.

This study focuses on an all-volunteer organization called Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS). The OOPS community was a brainchild of Lucifer Chu, whose passion and vision for providing Chinese/ Taiwanese version of opencourseware made OOPS possible (Phipps, 2005). Lucifer, known simply as 'Luc,' represents the strong leadership felt by members of the OOPS in that most of the community's major events are initiated with his ideas. As the Chinese translator of The Lord of the Rings and the founder of Fantasy Foundation, Luc has been a well known entrepreneur and promoter since 2002; his stated purpose is "to promote fantasy arts in the Great China area, cultivate our own Tolkien and J.K. Rowling, and encourage the sharing of knowledge and creative thinking" (Lin, 2006, p. 24). For example, the Fantasy Foundation has been promoting activities such as annual fantasy art competitions and summer fantasy art camps. In addition, it has been hosting several online forums where fantasy arts fans and creators can interact and exchange ideas. Luc's life story shaped his motivation and inspiration for creating OOPS. His diverse experience also provided him with the ability to start and spread the OOPS project.

In OOPS, we were interested in understanding how the members negotiate meaning and establish their sense of identity through various members of this organization. Using the participant dialogues from the OOPS's electronic bulletin board followed by participant interviews, we explored many characteristics of this unique community through the theoretical framework of Communities of Practice proposed nearly a decade ago by Wenger (1998). Our analysis of the OOPS data presents an example of a unique application of Wenger's framework to a growing and vital segment of the global education field. As such, we detail specific aspects of Wenger's model that apply to the OOPS setting. The OOPS project was initially designed to translate open source materials from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare (OCW) site into Chinese and Taiwanese. The most unique aspect of the OOPS is that it originated as a group comprised solely of volunteers of Chinese and Taiwanese speakers from various regions of the world. In the conception of the project, the participants' collective identity as a 'grassroots movement' and the technology enabling the formation of an online network amongst diverse groups of 'Chinese' speakers played a key role in its success. The emergence of a community of practice (COP) composed of volunteer members for the purpose of global education is highly unique, but will likely become increasingly common as access to the Internet, and the plethora of open educational resources within it, increases around the globe. This particular study, therefore, is significant in providing an initial window into how such a global education COP forms and later thrives.

The negotiation of meaning in this community takes place on two levels: 1) the act of translation of the MIT contents, and 2) the act of 'interpretation' of their practice of translation. Much of this negotiation is centered on understanding the process of translation as well as sustaining the OOPS as an effective volunteer organization. Focusing on the formation of and the activities within the OOPS community, this paper presents a story of the efforts and work behind this unique community and how the participants make sense of their work as a part of a larger open courseware initiative. As indicated, we utilize Wenger's (1998) ideas related to communities of practice to frame our analysis and discussion.

The paper is organized in the following way: first, a selective overview of the theoretical discussion around communities of practice is introduced. Second, data from the study is presented where the analysis shows the key components of community of practice as manifested uniquely within OOPS. Third, the interpretations on these findings are presented along with future implications for both the OOPS and other similar communities.

Framing the Study

Communities of Practice

Recent learning theories emphasize the importance of collaboration, interaction, and discussion in learning. In social theories of learning, which ideas related to communities of practice are based on, learning is best understood from analyzing participation in social enterprises (Thomas, 2005). These social enterprises need not be physical ones, however. In fact, with the emergence of online communities, scholars have increasingly focused their attention on the variables impacting the effectiveness of virtual communities (Bonk, Wisher, & Nigrelli, 2004; Castells, 2001; Jones, 1997; Rheingold, 2000; Smith & Kollock, 1999). Wenger's (1998) Communities of Practice framework has been employed to better inform studies of such electronic communities. Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion or concern for something they do. They learn by engaging in the practice and improving it through interactions with others in the community (Wenger, 1998).

A significant amount of studies have been conducted on various aspects of communities of practice. For instance, some scholars in the COP field have provided overviews of the research (Johnson, 2001) and delineated key principles or components of a COP (Bonk, Wisher & Nigrelli, 2004). In a recent book chapter, Bonk and colleagues (2004) listed ten key principles of a community of practice (e.g., sharing goals, trust and respect, shared history, identity, shared spaces for idea negotiation, influence, autonomy, team collaboration, personal fulfillment, and events embedded in real world practices, and rewards, acknowledgements, and fulfilling personal needs) and the associated online technologies and activities that can support their development. For example, a sense of shared goals, purpose, and mission can be facilitated through activities to create team or community logos and mottos, or vision statements as well as technologies such as help systems, online calendars, site announcements, and streaming videos from community leaders discussing the mission of the community. The development of community identity, sustaining diverse membership, and the growth of expertise in the community, might be fostered through celebration of individual and team accomplishments in that community as well as global chats among the members and other special events. To help develop such identity, there might be synchronous group meetings as well as a designated website or portal for the community to which members could contribute as well as get needed information and knowledge from.

As indicated earlier, since Wenger's landmark book, there has been much research in the field of virtual online communities. Other COP-related research has addressed issues and typologies of virtual communities of practice (Baek & Barab, 2005; Barab, Kling & Gray, 2004; Dubé, Bourhis & Jacob, 2006; 2005), motivations for participation (Wasko & Faraj, 2000), aspects of voluntary communities of practice (Donaldson, Lank & Maher, 2005), components of global knowledge sharing (Pan & Leidner, 2003; Donaldson, Lank & Maher, 2005), and COP success factors (McDermott, 2001). Still other COP scholars have begun to offer a critical discussion related to designing online communities of practice (Schwen & Hara, 2003).

Schwen and Hara (2003) mention that COPs foster the articulation of "everyday problems of dilemmas of practice" (p. 167). Hara and Kling's (2002) study of two public defender offices revealed that communities of practice display a sense of shared vision, a supportive culture when problems or issues arise, a great deal of worker autonomy, professional identity, a common practice or set of work procedures, and opportunities to share meaning and collectively build knowledge. Importantly, as will become clear later in this paper, many of these same principles, activities, and technologies are evident in the OOPS community. As everyday practices are often used to exhibit the formation of communities, we will focus on the three dimensions of practice: 1) mutual engagement, 2) a joint enterprise, and 3) a shared repertoire as they are manifested in the community of OOPS (Wenger, 1998). In the following section, we provide an overview of the Opencourseware movement and a brief history of the OOPS project.

OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement

Initiated by MIT and its faculty in their effort to provide free and open educational materials to learners around the world, the Opencourseware (OCW) movement represents the new movement to help advance education at the global level. In the case of MIT, the OCW provides visitors with course syllabi, lecture notes, and course calendars for over 1,000 courses. Most of these courses include supplemental materials such as multimedia simulations, problem sets and their solutions, past exams, reading lists, sample student projects, and a selection of video lectures. With its first announcement in April 2001, the MIT OCW pilot site opened to the public in September 2002 and offered 32 courses initially. The site was officially launched in September 2003 with 500 courses online. In 2004, the site received almost 120 million hits from visitors in more than 210 countries, territories, and city-states around the globe.

Many other OCW initiatives have been inspired by the success of the MIT OCW initiative. Utah State University (n.d.) launched its OCW in March 2005, followed by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in April 2005. These two institutions added additional course materials to MIT's offerings, making the current OCW collection unique around the world. Internationally, six of Japan's top schools also announced their OCW in May, 2005, expanded to ten in June 2007. Other international institutions such as Paris Technology, Universia (i.e., a consortium of universities in Spain and Portugal) have begun their involvements as well (Atkins, Brown & Hammond, 2007). The growth of the OCW movement has been so fast and far reaching, that the 'OpenCourseWare Consortium' was established in summer of 2006 to keep track of all of OCW developments underway and facilitate the communication and international development of OCW. Its mission statement (OCW, n.d.) reads, "The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware" (¶ 2). The OCW Consortium's website tracks the rapid growth of its members, emerging issues, hot discussion topics, and the latest OCW related news. According to an MIT report in June 2006, over 350 of the online MIT courses had been translated and at least 70 mirror sites existed globally. In addition, the MIT course materials had already been translated into at least 10 different languages, including Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese.

OOPS project

OOPS is an independent grass roots project, headquartered in Taiwan, designed to translate and adopt Opencourseware OCW for the Great China Region, referring commonly as China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The most distinguishing characteristic of OOPS is that the project is mainly run by volunteers in various disciplines, recruited from all over the world (see Figure 1). These volunteers choose ('adopt') courses and translate them.

[Figure omitted, see PDF]

Figure 1. The Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS) volunteers

In February 2004, the entire MIT OCW site was copied to a local server hosted in Taiwan, signaling the beginning of OOPS (see Figure 2). Through media coverage, bulletin board postings, and forwarded emails, OOPS quickly attracted volunteer translators in cyberspace. After more than three years of operation, OOPS currently includes materials from MIT, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Utah State University, Tufts University, Paris Technology, Japan OCWs, Harvard Extension Schools' podcasts, Public Library of Science, and a unique collection from Professor Harry Bhadeshia's (n.d.) education materials from the Phase Transformations and Complex Properties Research Group. In addition to adding more materials for translation, in late 2006, OOPS successfully secured a two-year grant from the Hewlett Foundation, one of the major funding agencies in the OER movement. This funding clearly acknowledged OOPS' contribution to and growing influence in the global education community. In June 2007, OOPS hosted its first international conference on OCW and e-learning in Taiwan. In this conference, OOPS not only invited OER pioneers to share their first-hand experience with the Taiwanese educational community, it also functioned as a showcase for the three-years of progress and contributions related to OOPS.

[Figure omitted, see PDF]

Figure 2. MIT OCW mirror site in Chinese

As shown in Figure 3, as of September 2005, of the 1,100 MIT OCW courses, 660 had been adopted for translation at Level One (text), 305 were adopted for Level Two translation (text, video, and audio), 55 courses were completed, and 80 had yet to be adopted. By January 1, 2007 the translation of nearly half of the 1,100 courses had been completed by a network of over 2,200 volunteer translators from more than 22 countries (Lucifer Chu, personal communication, July 18, 2007).

[Figure omitted, see PDF]

Figure 3. OOPS course adoption and completion of MIT OCW courses

Data collection and analysis

For this paper, three data sources were used: 1) the OOPS online discussion forum, 2) the project website (see Figure 4), and 3) interviews with five participants. This data was originally collected by the second author, and the analysis was later conducted by all the authors using content analysis and story-thread analysis (Lin, 2005) as well as coding methods used in reconstructive analysis (Carspecken, 1996). Content analysis was conducted for online conversations posted between February 2004 and January 2005. A total of 734 threads, or 2,977 responses, were categorized into emerging story lines. These story lines formed the basic understanding of the ecology of this community, which was used as the starting point for participant interviews.

[Figure omitted, see PDF]

Figure 4. List of MIT courses adopted by OOPS volunteers and progress updates

Participant interviews were primarily conducted between April 2005 and December 2005, with some follow-ups via emails or online chats. Participants were invited based on: 1) the second author's first-hand involvement and observation with the community, 2) the second author's contacts with some of the participants during the volunteer activities, and 3) the understanding gained in the above mentioned content analyses. The number of interviews and the duration of each interviews varied, depending mainly on the availability and enthusiasm of each participant. Some participants were interviewed via Skype (a free online phone service). Such online conversations typically lasted over two hours. Other participants communicated mainly via emails during the research period. A series of interviews with two of the participants were conducted mainly through online chats, some of which lasted a few minutes and some lasted more than an hour.

Trustworthiness was established mainly through the following measures: 1) data triangulation that included data sources such as interviews, online postings, and newsletters from project website, 2) peer debriefing that included discussions of interpretations and conclusions between two authors and with other researchers, and 3) member checking that included sharing documents with the participants. As noted, Wenger's ideas regarding communities of practices guided our analyses. In the following sections, we explore the issues related to mutual engagement, reification, joint enterprise, shared repertoire, legitimate participation, collective identity and harmony, sustaining membership, and leadership in the OOPS community. As will become increasingly evident, each of these respective principles is a vital component of the productivity and livelihood of the OOPS community.