Team: Chris Bourg, Curt Newton, Hunt Lambert, John Willinsky, Loic Tallon, MJ Bishop, Cable Green
Meeting #2:
Breakout discussion 9/30: Cable, Curt, MJ, Willem
MJ: Why produce Open? Faculty really need good incentives and infrastructure to support this. e.g. OER analog for citation tracking, Willem's study of 10 schools with 39k students; e.g. "my OER simulation was adopted by ## classes impacting ## students" taken into account for Promotion and Tenure cases
Cable: OLI presentation by Candace, for 39 WA school presidents and provosts got leadership support; but when they take it back to their schools and faculty, not a single instance was implemented
Open Textbook Library - paid $250 for faculty to review these submitted books - $$ incentive!
Change in Higher Ed requires persistence more than anything else.
Willem -
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he's done an analysis of blended learning success / challenge factors, at micro- (faculty course) meso- (institute) macro- (national policy)
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, could be relevant
MJ: On the ground perspective: for most faculty, the key Open Value Prop is “free textbook.” As the comm’l publishers appear to drop costs (via lease model etc), it gets harder to make the cost case. So we need a Big Bold Statement about Open Is More Than Just Free.
Language translation
Etc...
“You’re not interested in copyright until someone takes it away from you.”
Cable: pointing out how bad the status quo about curriculum development, was pathway to add CC BY requirement to all $5B of Dept of Labor funding of materials
Why so hard to make the case for Open is more than Free?
MJ: functional fixedness - we don’t see the oppty in this new tool
Messaging about remix, reuse, building the commons, ML analysis of open stuff, continuous improvement
Academic freedom disincentivizes top-down direction
Cable: OER reduces the “technical latency”
Tuning the Value Props to audiences
Governments - commonwealth
EDUCAUSE - faculty
Community colleges
Research institutions, oppty to create
Can we enlist, train, support, a network of ambassadors really good at having 1-1 conversations with faculty and decision makers? Meet each person where they are, understand what they value, scaffold it up toward understanding. Cable is doing something similar for 1000 members of the CC Open Edu to lobby their gov’ts for OER policy - support meetings, buddy system to help out
Willem: Embed (??) model - different levels of aspiration, and support for leveling people up
MJ: see EDUCAUSE Maturity Index
https://sparcopen.org/our-work/howopenisit/ [below]
BTW - Smithsonian person who attends edX Global Forum is very interested in Open (Jacquie Moen, VP online education - edX MOOC on Superman), could be a great contact and collaborator for this work.
GMMB hired by Hewlett to boil down nuanced OER comms into easily understood hooks → Free
How to message the Open Value Props?
GMMB: lead with the positive, and stay there
Cable w Govt’s: here’s the status quo and how inefficient it is
Cable w K12 school: here’s status quo, curriculum way out of date with no rights for remix update, low income families won’t sign the textbook cost responsibility so increases inequality
Dave Ernst at MN OTL is a master at this, with data about specific school(s) he’s talking with
Report-back discussion
Talking points:
Access and Equity is a key value proposition
Faculty incentives and support
Messaging requires nimble 1:1 conversation - trained ambassadors that can meet people at what they value
Investments in people, in the support infrastructure (e.g. CC certificate)
Hal: OER product placement in a movie, Kanye tweets about free textbooks, documentary about Paywall - can we get OER on Hasan Minhaj? Or John Oliver?
Sharon: Lofty goals, top # of high level goals that are like the SDGs? Colorful, simple, direct
How about something like Bill McKibben's Time Magazine climate essay - imagine looking back from 2050 at the decisions we made to get here, what the pathway was like
Preparation (MJ & Curt conversation before the meeting):
Do we have all the big questions on the table? For example, to what extent is Open a thing in itself, vs. an affordance or facilitation for bigger goals? And what are those bigger goals, that could motivate deeper engagement in Open?
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