Can Open Education Work for Associations (Part II)
By jtcobb on Sep 9, 2008 in Open Education
In my previous post on open education and associations I suggested a number of benefits that might spring from associations embracing an open model for some portion of their educational activities. In this post, I consider some of the challenges and in the next post I will examine potential business models.
Open Education Challenges
The major challenges that associations face in embracing open education are similar to those faced by academia. They include (though certainly are not limited to):
- Appropriately addressing intellectual property rights
- Monitoring and maintaining quality levels
- Funding and sustaining the investment in open models
Intellectual Property Challenges
Addressing the issue of intellectual property rights has been made significantly easier by the rise of Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons project, which now provides a viable model for content creators to retain underlying rights to there works while stipulating clearly how others may or may not make use of them. Recent estimates (which are rough at best) indicated some 130 million Web files linked to a Creative Commons license.
While Creative Commons provides an alternative means for handling intellectual property rights, however, it does not provide an inherent motivation. Motivating paid faculty members, who generally retain ownership of intellectual property they create, even as paid employees of an institution, is challenging enough.
In the case of associations, where content providers are generally either unpaid volunteers or professional speakers, the issue takes on additional complexity. Whether in associations, academia, or elsewhere, matters are further complicated by the fact that those perceived (or who perceive themselves) to own the most valuable content are often the least willing to open up access to their content.
Overcoming this hurdle will require significant cultural change in most organizations. Indeed it may be closer to the mark to say that it requires a shift in worldview for those wed to traditional production and distribution paradigms. A first step is to affirm clearly intellectual property ownership by the producer as, for example, MIT does in its OpenCourseWare initiative.
But this move alone offers only so much reassurance. Producers must understand and embrace the benefits articulated in my previous post before they are likely to participate in an open model. And they must feel a sense of urgency – one likely driven by two realizations.
First, other highly talented producers can now publish, distribute, and collaborate around content in a way that has simply never been possible before. Some will be willing to do it freely and openly as a means to build their brand and claim market share.
Second, learning experiences are increasingly valued less on the basis of content and more on the basis of context, experience, and validation. MIT, Berkeley, and Yale – all of which have embraced open education at some level – certainly realize this. Every last byte of content ever produced by these institutions could be made freely available, but the context provided by expert faculty, the experience of participating as part of the Institution, and the validation a degree provides to employers – not to mention the graduate’s ego – will continue to command a high price.
As far as I can tell, any urgency around either of these points is largely absent from the association world at the moment. But the urgency will come, and the challenge will have to be met at some point.
Quality Challenges
On one level, the quality issue strikes me as much easier to address than the intellectual property issue. “Open,” after all, in no way restricts content from being fully reviewed and vetted by peers, committees, or other mechanisms before being released for general access.
Additionally, there are already good approaches to vetting content on the Web, with reviews and recommendation systems like one finds at Amazon.com being the most obvious example. I’ve discussed this before in Imagine There’s No Courses, which built off of George Siemens’ presentation A World Without Courses. In that post I also suggested that assessment and certification provide a way of verifying that the learner has in fact learned what was intended.
On the other hand, an attendee at my recent ASAE session on open education asked a question that I had not really considered before: How far does liability extend if someone “remixes” some of your content and distorts it to the point that it conveys bad, and potentially harmful, information? In other words, how do you control what might be considered the “downstream” content quality? I don’t have the credentials to give legal advice on such a question, but I suspect that as long as the original information is presented appropriately (i.e., with appropriate caveats, warnings, citations, etc.), there should be no liability.
Perhaps more importantly, it seems to me that this is a risk with any content that an organization publishes. To assume that locking content up behind copyrights and passwords will keep it out of the hands of people who really want it is naïve at this point in our digital history. Providing content under a well-organized open model may provide better opportunities for tracking and monitoring its eventual use.
In any event, it will be critical for associations to achieve a reasonable level of comfort with this particular aspect of quality if they are to offer open learning in a sustainable fashion and reap the full rewards of opening up. To empower sector volunteers or learners themselves to contribute back to and build upon the open base of content – thinking Wikipedia – is the surest way to ensure that it continues to grow and thrive over time, and at the lowest possible cost to the association. Additionally, it is this aspect of openness – the learning community it engenders – that leads to many of the benefits suggested in my first post.
Economic Challenges
Given that I am writing this post in a U.S. election year, I am sure some readers will draw analogies between the concept of open education and campaign promises like universal health care or some of the candidates’ ideas to “re-tool” the American workforce: Wonderful ideas, but how do we pay for them?
Much of the more formal work so far in open education has been led by academic institutions and non-governmental organizations that have been able to rely, at least partly, on grant money to fund the initial investment in infrastructure and content development. The Hewlett Foundation, for instance, has invested roughly $68 million to support initiatives at MIT and other organizations.
Given that most associations do not (at least directly) rely on public funding and, for the most part, are not big recipients of foundation or government grants,* it seems unlikely that the equivalent of a Hewlett Foundation will emerge for the sector. Associations will need to develop open education offerings in the same way that they develop traditional education and knowledge products – with an eye toward how the initial investment costs will be recouped.
I’ll address the potential business models in my next posting. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit and contribute to the Open Learning for Associations wiki.
Jeff Cobb
Mission to Learn
* Tax exemption is arguably an indirect form of public funding. Also, some associations do receive grant money, but in my experience, membership dues, and revenues generated from events and publications tend to make up the vast majority of most association’s operating budgets.
P.S. - Get the most comprehensive report on e-learning in the association sector: Association E-learning 2009.
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