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 - he's done an analysis of blended learning success / challenge factors, at micro- (faculty course) meso- (institute) macro- (national policy), 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?

  • Is this an either/or ... or a both/and?  We can (must?) open as a base to accomplish our bigger education / knowledge goals.

We should consider value propositions by use case:

  • Why produce Open? 
    • Open what? Content, research, data, policies, practices?
    • Because open is the best way to do science, education, data analysis for the public good.

  • Why use (teach / learn) with Open?
    • With open content (OER) or open practices? I think both - and there are different reasons for each.

  • Why support the Open movement / field?
    • Because: enter vision statements here.

See the comments after Meeting #1 for breakdowns of constituencies (for whom), flavors of open, timing (tiers)

Some suggested deliverables

Meeting #1: Define key questions/considerations the Open 2020 Working Group should address. Who is missing? Work products?

Team: Chris Bourg, Curt Newton, Hunt Lambert, John Willinsky, Loic Tallon, MJ Bishop

Also fold in here the Incentives content from the original Sustainability and Incentives team.

** **

Value Propositions definitely good; what value propositions work for each constituency, where do they conflict vs. align?

Team also wants to include incentives that support behaviors toward the value propositions. Need to resolve overlap with Sustainability + Incentives group.

Definitions of Open, not worth working on - use the Budapest Open Access definition? (ask Nicole, Peter S)

Who is missing? Keep it from being too elite

  • Meetings not just at MIT and Hewlett. MJ will help arrange Meeting #2.
  • Engaging state and public ed leaders - e.g. SUNY, CUNY (Mark McBride), ASU global freshman academy
  • Faculty who are actually doing it
  • Norman Bier
  • Richard Sebastian / Achieving the Dream, cc initiative
  • Google - Jamie Casap
  • Quality Matters - Deb Adair, OER process for quality control
  • ISKME
  • Employers - they can contribute to the content, or they'll go around higher ed
  • Publishers - various types, comm'l journal, textbook, university presses, OAJournal

Metric: public ed wants access and outcomes 

Some value propositions for Open

  • Cuts the tether to time and space - learn when, where, how you want
  • Modularity to custom ordering to stacking into solid credential 

Questions of scope:

  • Higher ed only, or include high school also?
  • Expand beyond US-centric to a global perspective? How might that happen given time and resources?

Incentives

  • Authors: To generate content, to share it openly

    • Grants available only for making open content

  • Educators: To use open content

  • All: Rewards and recognition of efforts

  • Interim issue, because it fills in an area that is currently unsupported

  • Institutions: From governments to encourage them to adopt open practices; accreditation organizations; Enhanced reputations

Via Willem van Valkenburg:
University: Reputation, quality, innovation
Students: Cost reduction, accessibility, quality, flexibility, modern learning methods
Teachers: Career perspective, possibility to innovate, recognition for education effort, impact

Work products:
  • Map of incentives: key places, groups, and people

9 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    Do we need to get hung up on definition of open? I’m happy with the panoply of terms out there as long as they are reasonably applied eg datawall, loginwall, public access, moderated access, read-only access, freemium access... I think as discussed earlier we are now beyond the minutiae of licensing and what is and isn’t open - I’d hope we can recognise that issues like governance and ownership of infrastructure are beyond or outside of simplistic questions like: is the code open source? Is the content open access? Not to say we shouldn’t still ask those basics but we also need to go beyond a mere checkbox approach to open and not get stuck on the minutiae of the checkboxes

  2. Anonymous

    Value propositions vary by for whom.  

    Researcher, university, learner, enrolled student, publisher, ...

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    1. Anonymous

      Also teacher, employer, policymaker, journalist

      1. Anonymous

        Employer:

        • Workforce development
        • Certificates e.g. specific IT credentials

  3. Anonymous

    Flavors of open:

    • data
    • research
    • education
    • pedagogy
    • access
    • journals
    • source / infrastructure

    1. Anonymous

      Tiers of open

      • Enrolled students while in classes
      • Once you've had access, always have access
      • Preprints vs final versions (Nature now supports preprints explicitly).

  4. Anonymous

    Incentives: for people in power, why change when the existing system worked for them?

    Your research will be left behind if it's not computationally open and accessible

    OER saving millions of student dollars per school, per state

  5. Anonymous

    Increasing affordability is key, and sometimes there are specific resources necessary to acheive the outcome. We'll strive for OER, but it may be outweighed by other considerations.

  6. Unknown User (huntl_1@touchstonenetwork.net)

    My summary from yesterday.  First, thanks to everyone for improving this with edits and other ideas.

    Next steps - next 90 days:

    • Articulate where we are as a project ie: what do we already know? Includes adding the Open definition we will use (Nicole, MJ)
    • Who else do we need to hear from: each please submit names and questions we want to ask each.  We can manage this as a data collection effort across our networks. some of this is already above.  (all)
    • Do a first cut at value proportions
    • Identify who we need to influence - organizations and individuals.  Think Gladwells model = who are the Mavens, Connectors, Salespeople that can drive this = beyond us.  This is our target list for accelerating progress.
    • What are the incentives in place for those listed above and what would they need tom move toward for our future Open2020 goals?