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Today, most computing software is created and owned by a single company and the software code is a closely guarded and jealously protected secret. However, the open-source movement uses the opposite approach and is a more recent example of cooperatives being formed to serve a common goal.
Sally M. Johnstone is the founding director of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET), the cooperative advancing effective use of technology in higher education. Johnstone has served on the boards of AAHE and the U.S. Open University. Russell Poulin is the associate director of WCET. He is also the head of the Technology Costing Methodology project and co-director of the Institute for Managing and Developing E-Learning. Poulin was founding director of the North Dakota Interactive Video Network.
When the lure of profit is not a great incentive, one alternative is forming a cooperative effort to serve a common goal. Miles of open farmland were necessary to grow prosperous crops, for instance, but it also put so much distance between neighbors that wiring for electric and phone service was a money-losing proposition. The solution? Rural residents banded together to form telephone and electric cooperatives that brought these 20th-century amenities to farm country.
Today, most computing software is created and owned by a single company and the software code is a closely guarded and jealously protected secret. However, the open-source movement uses the opposite approach and is a more recent example of cooperatives being formed to serve a common goal.
Open-source software means a piece of code is distributed in an openly accessible format so that anyone can use it and distribute it to others. However, anyone using the software is also asked to contribute updates and improvements. Collectively, a stronger product is created. Some examples include:
The IBM PC--In the early 1980s, IBM decided to openly release the details of the architecture of its new entry into the personal computing field. The software developed by many third-party companies created a strategic advantage for the IBM PC.
Shareware--Jim Knopf, under the alias Jim Button, became the father of "shareware" (www.shareware.org) when he created a database program for the early version of the IBM PC. In distributing his program, he asked for voluntary contributions to maintain and improve the program. Following a positive review in a magazine, his basement overflowed with mail offering money and assistance.
Linux--The Internet proved an excellent tool for quickly distributing and sharing open-source software updates. Linux (www.linux.org) is a Unix-type operating system that makes its source code freely available and has become popular in certain applications.
In recent years, academia has found the Internet to be a natural forum for creating a sharing cooperative that follows the open-source spirit. Faculty and instructional designers on individual campuses often work long and hard to create lessons, simulations, and other "learning objects" for class use. Given the amount of time the creators invest, many seek ways to share their creations with others and suggestions for improvements.
David Wiley of Utah State University defines learning objects as "any digital resource that can be reused to support learning." While there have been other collections of learning objects (such as Apple Learning Interchange and MERLOT), the announcement by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative is the most intriguing. Other collections contain isolated learning objects, which means individual faculty members may find it difficult, or at least very time-consuming, to figure out how to incorporate these elements into the overall curriculum. MIT's OpenCourseWare will develop the first comprehensive set of integrated learning objects.
Over the next 10 years, as part of this initiative, MIT will post on the Web the substance of more than 2,000 courses. It will make them available to anybody anywhere in the world at no cost--thanks to the support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
OCW does not mean online courses. The typical offering will consist of lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, assignments, and similar course elements, as well as experiments, demonstrations, and students' work. At institutions embracing OCW, as MIT has done, the courses will be in the context of sequences and programs at these institutions. Thus the institution's academic offerings will be fully exposed to the world.
OCW is conceptually straightforward: Put course material on the Web and give it away as a worldwide educational resource. Its implications for higher education, however, are anything but simple. What are the possibilities for local and regional colleges and universities? What will make OpenCourseWare a useful resource for faculties and institutions?
Within MIT, the intent of the program is to improve teaching and learning. While its foundation-based funding is for the external applications, MIT expects OCW to result in significant internal improvements, department by department. OCW can improve teaching by encouraging reflection: course materials are available to the community. The program also is expected to increase communication across the disciplines and improve transparency across the departments. For example, when instructors of upper-division classes can easily access the content of lower-division required courses, they will better understand what they can expect their students to know.
Last December, Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET) hosted a forum sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation to examine some of the issues that may arise as OCW becomes a reality. Our colleague, John Witherspoon, created a record of the conversations, some of which are reproduced here. The full report is available through the WCET Web site (www.wiche.edu/wcet). Here are some of the issues we explored:
Implications of OpenCourseWare for Traditional Institutions. Most American higher education institutions have long followed a cottage industry model: those within an individual institution have defined, designed, implemented, and assessed the entire process of teaching, research, and service conducted by the faculty. They have used technology to enhance the existing cottage-based product rather than to consider their product's implications for the future of the institution.
Recently, there has been pressure to change that model. The University of Phoenix, other entrepreneurial specialized institutions, and the corporate purveyors of postsecondary courseware have demonstrated key characteristics of information-age organizations: they are oriented toward broader (sometimes global) markets, they focus on functions in which they excel and can compete effectively, and they often are built on technology platforms.
Gradually, many old-line colleges and universities are moving into the mode defined by Arthur Levine of Columbia Teachers College as "brick-and-click"--adding a significant layer of technology-based services to the traditional structure. Some have launched virtual universities that operate entirely online.
With its OCW initiative, MIT is using the same technologies to pursue a different path. While other institutions seek to enroll students in their courses and programs, MIT is giving the substance of its courses to others, inviting them to make appropriate local adaptations. In a forum we hosted recently on this topic, it was suggested that there might be pressure to use the MIT material because of the assumption that courseware from an institution of MIT's stature must be the best available choice. MIT, of course, makes no such claim: material prepared by its faculty for its students will not be appropriate for all others. Instead, it offers the material as a potentially useful library of ideas, examples, and references.
In many ways, OCW's success will be measured by the skill of local instructors who use the courseware as a professional resource, building it appropriately into courses designed for their population of students, for the cultures reflected in their institutions, and to advance their specific curricula. In designing their courses, these faculty members incorporate textbooks and audiovisual materials. MIT adds a wealth of courseware and a helpful set of curricular benchmarks for faculty users.
OCW Implications for Copyright Law. As already mentioned, MIT and its faculty are posting the substance of the Institute's courses online, available to users worldwide at no cost. But that is not to say that this material is therefore in the public domain, unprotected by copyright law. Rather, pursuant to the law, the copyright owner grants permission for a wide range of uses. However, there are constraints: those using the material are expected to give proper attribution to its authors, and commercial uses require a written license from the faculty owners.
Just as U.S. copyright law has as its purpose the advancement of knowledge, so does academe. Copyright achieves its purpose by balancing the interests of copyright owners with public interests. It provides an incentive to authors, encouraging them to create; however, the works have to be distributed and available for the public in order to derive the defined benefit: increased knowledge. Thus, there is an important interplay between the rights of authors and the rights of the public to use their works to improve themselves, scholarship, and society.
The copyright owner's incentive is the exclusive rights we grant authors to control the use of and exploitation of their works, exercised for the most part through control over production and distribution of copies and over public performance and displays.
The number of works created these days, irrespective of the direct economic incentive, is staggering and far exceeds those created because of the incentive. That is because currently, any original work is protected from the moment it is fixed in a tangible medium. Everything is protected automatically, even works the author cares nothing about protecting. The issue, therefore, is not ownership of the work, but who is authorized to do what. In OCW's case control over copies and distribution is minimal.
Offering OpenCourseWare Worldwide. One of OCW's most important elements is that the material is offered worldwide, free of charge. In addition to the obvious benefits of such a program, there arise questions such as language translation, cultural differences, the availability of telecommunication services, the economics of Web access, differences in educational systems, potential regulatory factors, and a host of related issues.
Fundamentally, however, as in domestic U.S. applications, OCW's success will depend on adaptation as well as access. In many developing countries, teachers, students, those responsible for institutional infrastructure, and the general public may need to be informed of the resources available and, equally important, how to make best use of them.
Resolving these issues involves information, access, policy, and investment, as well as custom and pedagogy. But none of those problems--as genuine and serious as they are--diminishes the potential value of OCW beyond MIT's home continent, particularly for the developing world.
Technology Issues. One constraint on the global distribution of OCW is the disparity in bandwidth available to diverse populations. Approximately 3 billion people have no telecommunication network connection, and nations are attempting to catch up by applying everything from packet radio to multipoint microwave. While satellite communication increasingly offers promise for reaching many areas, even where it is available, access is frequently unaffordable.
Developers of the OpenCourseWare program recognize the problems inherent in bandwidth limitations. The issue poses a fundamental dilemma, since OCW material can be expected to use bandwidth generously. Using text-only versions of Web sites, often necessary to make it possible for disabled persons to access the material, may be feasible in some situations. However, complications arise, for example, in the many equation-intensive courses. Some of these concerns might be addressed through use of CDs rather than online media, although some course Web sites will change frequently enough that using CDs would introduce another set of logistical and financial concerns.
Politics, Culture, and Language. A range of factors related to individual countries, regions, or beliefs is likely to arise:
The perception of U.S. imperialism. Some countries restrict the import of information-related material from the United States (although in China, for example, it is expected that OCW will be available to individual citizens).
MIT will make OCW available only in English. Others are already arranging to make translations, with Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese versions expected early in the life of OCW.
Some material can be expected to be offensive in some countries. MIT will not alter content to make it politically correct. As Steven Lerman of MIT observes, "There is no right not to be offended."
Those responsible for the OpenCourseWare initiative recognize that the ideas and images in OCW material might not be acceptable in every country with Web access or to every potential user in any country. It will be possible for users to register comments, objections, and observations, but the right to free academic expression remains with the individual professor. Others within MIT itself might disagree with what is said, but academic freedom remains paramount. MIT recognizes its potential liability, but its policy at home is its policy for OCW.
There are countless other issues that are likely to arise. With tremendous help from UNESCO and the Hewlett Foundation, we are assisting MIT in identifying more of these barriers, hoping this will lead to ways of overcoming some of the obstacles to OCW's success.
Sustaining a Global Program. Two major American foundations are supporting the initial development of the OpenCourseWare initiative, which is intended as a substantial long-term resource for higher education worldwide. It's a strategy that can narrow the gap between developed and developing nations. In launching OCW, MIT recognizes that it has made a long-term commitment of significant proportions to maintaining this resource.
Those creating the MIT program envision the advent of comparable initiatives by other major universities and colleges. One can imagine a virtual global intellectual community, a worldwide network of participating institutions.
As MIT President Charles M. Vest put it in his report for the 2000-2001 academic year, "inherent to the Internet and the Web is a force for openness and opportunity that should be the bedrock of its use by universities." With the OpenCourseWare initiative, "[w]e now have a powerful opportunity to use the Internet to enhance [the] process of conceiving, shaping, and organizing knowledge for use in teaching. In doing so, we can raise the quality of education everywhere."
While we agree completely with President Vest's sentiments, the real success of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative goes back to David Wiley's definition of learning objects...will they be reusable to support learning? Wiley uses the metaphor of an atom, which may be simple or complex and can be reused and recombined in many ways with different results. However, the act of combining is the key. It will be interesting to watch how well the OCW elements are used and reused as the project matures.
Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Jul/Aug 2002