Copyright Law Expiring Should Help OER

Public-domain documents are often important sources for open educational resource (OER) providers. Educators could soon have more public-domain documents from which to choose.

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, passed in 1998 in honor of the late entertainer and congressman, extended copyright protection of future works to 70 years after the creator’s death (previously 50 years) and added 20 years to the copyright of works already in existence. The law expires at the end of the year and there appears to be little momentum to extend it any further.

“We are not aware of any such efforts, and it’s not something we are pursuing,” a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America said.

Historians have criticized the copyright protections because they prevented preservation of some works that are nearly 100 years old. In addition, the Internet has led advocacy groups and companies such as Google to organize public opinion against open-access limits.

“I haven’t seen any evidence that Big Content companies plan to push for another term extension,” said Daniel Nazer, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This is an election year, so if they wanted to get a big ticket like that through Congress, you would expect to see them laying the groundwork with lobbying and op-eds.”

Melding Creativity and Tech for Gen Z

According to an Adobe Education survey, 93% of Generation Z—the demographic cohort after the millennials, with birth years from the mid-1990s to early 2000s—view classroom technology as essential to their preparation for a career. Eighty-nine percent also see creativity playing a big role in their identity and efforts to succeed.

Some higher-ed institutions are already establishing programs to address that intersection of tech and creativity for this next generation of college students.

An article in EdTech: Focus on Higher Education details three such programs, at Parsons School of Design, Clemson University, and Rochester Institute of Technology. Initiatives include a high-tech studio for academic programs in animation, film, and game development, and a partnership with Adobe’s education division for an open-access digital learning space that features recording studios and on-campus student internships sponsored by the company.

“Today’s students want to make a difference in the world, and they want to do it using the technology tools they’ve grown up with,” Jim Holscher, vice president of education field operation for Adobe, said in a press release.

Math Teachers Speak Out on OER

Open educational resources (OER) are seen as part of the solution to course material affordability. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NTCM) has issued a warning that too many open resources are not necessarily a good thing.

In its official position, the organization recognized that OER can stimulate discussions among teachers, allowing them to form communities to share ideas and compare results. NTCM also pointed out that OER can provide teachers with ways to use innovative technology.

At the same time, NTCM warned that OER can be difficult to organize and the resources students have access to can vary by teacher and school. Another risk is the potential for schools to drop the vetting process of the resources.

“A coherent, well-articulated curriculum is an essential tool for guiding teacher collaboration, goal-setting, analysis of student thinking, and implementation,” NTCM said in the release. “In a time when open educational resources are increasingly available, it is imperative that teachers be provided with curricular materials that clearly lay out well-reasoned organizations of student learning progressions with regard to mathematical content and reasoning.”

Rutgers Launches OER Initiative

Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, has joined the growing list of institutions turning to open educational resources (OER) to address the issue of rising costs for course materials. The Open and Affordable Textbook (OAT) project is offering grants to faculty and department groups as an incentive to replace traditional textbooks with free or low-cost alternatives.

The project, funded by the Office of Information Technology and administered by Rutgers University Libraries, will award grants of $1,000 to 12 groups from across the entire system. The university estimates the program will save its students as much as $500,000 in the first year.

A class in aggregate economics has already started putting together an open textbook. The required printed textbook has a new list price of $89.99, with the e-book version available for $69.99. Using the library’s Springer e-book collection, a PDF version of the book can be accessed for free and the paperback copy can be purchased for $24.99.

“We are committed to helping our students succeed, and one of the barriers to their success is the 1,000% increase in textbooks over the last 40 years,” Krisellen Maloney, vice president of information services and university librarian, said in a release. “We look forward to working with grant recipients to help them identify free or low-cost alternatives for their courses.”

Not All OA Publishers Are the Same

An avenue around traditional subscription-based publishing probably sounds like a good idea to many faculty members. The problem is that not all scholarly open-access (OA) publishing firms are equal.

That’s where Jeffrey Beall can help. Beall, academic librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado, Denver, has created a list of publishers that he feels do not meet sufficient standards and a blog to spread the word. The list is very long, with more than 120 companies listed as “questionable, scholarly open publishers” in the “A” section alone.

“Too many open-access advocates think that because OA is not a problem for them personally, they’re not a problem at all,” Beall told Inside Higher Education last October. “This is absolutely not true. Research published in predatory journals is polluting the entire scholarly publishing ecosystem.”

Beall’s list is updated regularly and the criteria for inclusion are about as long as the list of publishers.

“Unfortunately, the pressure to publish in the academic system is liable to keep scholars eagerly looking for outlets,” British poet Paul St. John Mackintosh wrote in a post for TeleRead. “Said scholars, however, would be well advised to look over the criteria for Beall’s list and the list itself. Clearly, not all open is good.”

Ohio Defunds Education Clearinghouse

Ohio has funded an online repository of free educational resources since 2007. Next year, teachers will have to find the content themselves after the state legislature elected to stop funding the Distance Learning Clearinghouse.

Funding was cut in half, to $500,000, last year. The Ohio State University, Columbus, which operated the clearinghouse, has taken no position on the elimination of funding, but did prepare a report which estimated that 82% of the schools in the state had used the resource in some way. The clearinghouse has more than 12,000 lessons in key subject areas, more than 950 reviews of online courses, and more than 1,000 professional-development lessons for teachers, according to a report from The Columbus Dispatch that appeared in eSchool News.

“They’ll have to go to Google and try to do their own reviews,” Janet Herrelko, a math-education professor at the University of Dayton, said of instructors who previously used the clearinghouse as a resource. “It will take a lot longer for them to understand it. If you try to skim this material, you could miss problems with it.”

State politics may also be involved since a liberal advocacy group has charged the administration of Gov. John Kasich used the program to steer contracts toward a major Republican donor. One of the contracts provided an online interface that critics said didn’t work and that most users bypassed.

Unlocking the Potential of OER

Convincing faculty that open educational resource (OER) content is of high quality continues to be a stumbling block for proponents of the alternative course-material model. Providing better tools to find quality material is the next big challenge.

Products are being created to locate independent quality evaluations. More faculty members are using products such as FacultyEnlight from Barnes & Noble College and Hero from Sidewalk and helping to make them better.

“Being able to think about, from a cost perspective, how one textbook compares to another, to be able to see what peers are using the materials, what their reviews are of the materials, and then being able to take those materials and adopt them,” Rich Hershman, NACS vice president of government relations, said in a report on EducationDive, “that’s where I’m really excited about where things are starting to develop in the future.”

The fact that OER content is flexible and can be tailored to fit the needs of individual students should encourage greater acceptance and growth, according to Tom Caswell, director of learning engineering who served as the open education policy associate for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges during the development of its Open Course Library.

“The next step for OER is to get away from flat resources and put OER in personalized spaces that allow students to really benefit individually from those resources,” he said.

NOVA Provides Access to OER Program

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) has developed two zero-textbook-cost degree programs that can be adapted for use by other institutions. The courses use open educational resources (OER) and fulfill all requirements for associate degrees in general studies and social sciences offered by NOVA.

The institution claims it’s the first community college to fully share its OER courses, according to a report in eCampus News. Other colleges can use the program, developed through the NOVA Extended Learning Institute, to fit their own learning outcomes.

NOVA has partnered with Lumen Learning to create the courses, which are available through the Lumen website. For a fee, institutions can access additional services from Lumen, such as faculty training, technical and OER program design support, and help in customizing course materials.

“This step by NOVA goes far towards putting OER degree programs within reach for other colleges,” said TJ Bliss, program officer in the education program at the Hewlett Foundation. “It gives academic leaders a vision of what is now possible in open education, as well as the means to get there. For institutions struggling with affordability and access, OER degree programs can catalyze systemic change towards open education, and colleges can reap the benefits in terms of student success.”

World Wide Web Turns 25

At 25, the World Wide Web has become an integral part of life. A recent Pew Research study found 87% of adults in the United States use the Internet, 90% admit the Internet has been good for them, and 76% believe it’s been good for society.

In another Pew study, technology experts said that by 2039 access to the Internet will be like flipping a switch for electricity and an Internet of Things will allow artificial intelligence-enhanced, cloud-based information storage and sharing via smartphones, wearable technology, and smart appliances.

Most of the innovation will come about as digital natives grow older. Those individuals are currently in school or on campus.

“The first generation that grew up on the web is hitting maturity,” Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium, told Computerworld. “Everything that’s happened until recently was with people who weren’t web natives by birth using technology and using it to improve life. I can only imagine when you have digital natives hitting maturity the level of innovation will be even greater.”

Covering the Cost of OER

While free to users, most quality open content still incurs costs for development and distribution. How can costs for academic content be recouped while still ensuring students have free access?

In his Thought Leader presentation March 7 at CAMEX 2014 in Dallas, TX, Charles Key noted that a number of business models for open educational resources are emerging. "There's a lot of money coming in from government and college systems," said the director of adoptions, grants, and the College Open Textbooks project for the Open Doors Group, a nonprofit dedicated to education affordability.

These funds are paying for development of course content intended to be shared among institutions. For-profit publishers are also providing some digital content at no charge while offering other formats and enhanced services for a fee.

The concept of assessing a special student fee "hasn't caught on but is increasingly being looked at," Key said. Typically, the fee runs around $100 per term.

In some cases, individual schools and academic departments are choosing to produce course materials out of their own budgets. The mathematics faculty at one community college, for example, decided to collaborate on writing textbooks for all classes; the books have been used by some 600,000 students so far.

Some professors are also willing to take time to create their own course materials, a trend Key said is on the rise since textbook affordability has become a hot issue.

Baraniuk Bullish on Future of Free Content

You might think there wouldn't be much room for traditional publishing in the world of open and free educational content. However, Richard Baraniuk, director of the Connexions and OpenStax initiatives at Rice University, would disagree.

Baraniuk is already using open educational resources (OER) to create free learning materials through his nonprofit organization, OpenStax College. If traditional publishers can build on the material, he's all for it.

"We're trying to provide better access to all high-quality learning experiences," he told University Business. "If what we offer saves traditional publishers money, they're able to lower their costs and that will help advance education."

Textbooks will be modular, allowing instructors to choose multiple sources for each class. They will then be able to modify the difference sources of content to suit each student, who will also be able to collaborate on developing the text, according to Baraniuk.

"There's nothing stopping students from becoming authors," he said. "The students in my engineering class conduct a research project every year and then archive their results in Connexions, so they're published authors. These projects get used by people around the world and they get referenced and built on by others." 

Learning Registry Ready for Educators

The U.S. Department of Education has been working on a network aimed at organizing online academic content for educators. The DOE recently finished the computer code for its Learning Registry, a free tool that will connect educators with vetted resources.

DOE officials are trying to increase participation in the system, according to a report in Education Week, and have created a video to introduce the project.

Caltech Implements Open-Access Policy

Faculty at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) decided on a policy that requires them to grant open-access rights to their scholarly papers. The move will make their work more readily available and help simplify the copyright process, according to a report in Campus Technology.

Copyright issues are a big reason for the new policy because it prevents publishers of the many journals in which Caltech research appears from suing authors who post their content to their own online sites or the institute’s online repository. It also complies with a directive from the United States Office of Science and Technology that requires federally funded research be made available for free within a year of publication.

Caltech faculty will continue to publish in academic journals and can still grant exclusive rights to their work; they just need to request a waiver from the policy.

“Ideas are most powerful when they are free to move, not held behind a screen until they are purchased from a vendor,” said Brenda Fultz, professor or material science and applied physics at Caltech. “The new open-access policy at Caltech increases the impact of our ideas by better connecting them to the information society around us.”

Bill to Expand Use of Open Textbooks

Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX) introduced legislation that would create a grant program for colleges and universities to create and expand the use of open-access  textbooks. The Affordable College Textbook Act would give the public the right to access, customize, and distribute the online content in an effort to curb the rising costs of supplies and course materials.

Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Al Franken (D-MN) have introduced similar legislation in the Senate.

If passed, the law would establish a grant program to support efforts to create and expand the use of open-access textbooks with priority placed on those pilots that achieve the highest savings. It would also guarantee that open educational material would be easily accessible and require institutions to report on the effectiveness of any funded program.

“Simply put, this is about making college more accessible and more affordable for students who are eager to earn their college degree,” Hinojosa wrote in a guest column for a South Texas newspaper.

New Ways to Search Online Content

While there are plenty of open-source course materials available to students and faculty, finding them remains a challenge. It’s also troublesome for content creators to be noticed.

However, solutions are beginning to pop up, such as Education Marketplace, launched recently by the education platform StudySoup. Education Marketplace is a one-stop location where instructors can find, create, and sell digital content.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Why is all this content decentralized?” Sieva Kozinsky, who founded StudySoup with Jeff Silverman, told eCampus News. “You have notes in your notebook, readings in your textbooks, content on an LMS. There are great resources out there, but there’s no systemized way of finding, using, and learning from all this material.”

In July, Pearson launched a searchable catalog of nearly 700,000 open educational resources that included video and content from Open Course Library though the expansion of its OpenClass Exchange. Education Marketplace is different because it allows content to be created and sold through the StudySoup online tools, which are already being used at more than 40 campuses across the United States.

“Really it allows anybody to create interactive content,” Kozinsky said. “You don’t even have to be tied to a university. Anyone can come into the platform and create material which can then be compiled into what we call a ‘course,’ and delivered to potential students.”

StudySoup has different pricing plans available and intends to keep 15% of the royalties from any course purchased. The company is also working on a peer-review and user rating system to ensure course quality.

UC System Making Research Open to All

The University of California system recently announced a new policy that will make all of its research articles free online and available to the public through its open-access repository, eScholarship. The policy covers faculty on all 10 UC campuses and allows research from faculty to be reused or modified for future publications.

The research will still be subject to peer review and appear in prestigious journals. The question is whether it’s a policy that will provide too much information for busy professionals, according to Kent Anderson, CEO/publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery Inc.

“Why read information that is pushed to you when you can Google something that’s right in front of you?” Anderson asked in an article for SmartPlanet. “There is a workflow dimension to this, certainly, but also a corrosive problem of dependence. It’s good for Google, but not great for science, which often takes reflection, immersion, and inspiration to work. It’s not just a journeyman’s game, with Google as an occasional toolbox.”

Carnegie Mellon Launches Acrobatiq

Carnegie Mellon University has been providing free open and online education since 2001 when it began the Open Learning Initiative (OLI). The institution has now created Acrobatiq, a subsidiary company focused on improving course quality and learning outcomes.

The new venture will offer customizable online courseware, consulting services, and learning analytics for educators. The company will continue to offer OLI courses and work to create new ones.

“Through Acrobatiq, we will be able to scale up capacity to serve more learners and institutions, accelerate innovation, and ensure financial sustainability from revenue versus a reliance on grant funding,” Eric Frank, the company’s CEO, said in a blog post.

Acrobatiq will begin offering its services in the fall and will not interrupt any agreements with OLI, according to Frank. It will maintain a catalog of free courses and continue the OLI approach of making its tools available to educational researchers at no cost.

Open Course Library Expands Free Content

Advocates of the Open Course Library (OCL) estimate it has saved students about $5 million on course materials in just a few years. Now, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges has expanded the library’s offerings to include 81 of the most common community college classes.

The OCL project, funded by the state legislature and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brought together state community college faculty to create online textbooks and course materials that are freely accessible and open to any student across the nation, not just those in Washington.

At Pierce College, Lakewood, WA, 500 students have used OCL text in precalculus and other math courses and achieved similar success rates to students using traditional textbooks, while saving about $50,000 in textbook costs, according to David Lippman, a Pierce College math instructor who helped develop the open material.

“I was fearful about taking a strictly online course, especially one dealing with math since I haven’t taken a math course in over 30 years and the online option was very new to me,” Terri Questi, a Pierce College student who took a Lippman math course using OCL content, said in a release. “The course was well organized with clear requirements and grading system, helpful videos to supplement the text, and responsive instructors who replied quickly.”

OpenStax Set to Double Free Offerings

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk started OpenStax College to improve student access to quality online learning materials. A new grant has the nonprofit organization ready to up the ante.

OpenStax College will use funds from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to double the number of titles in its free online textbook catalog by 2015. In addition, the publisher wants to capture 10% of the college textbook market by offering free online textbooks for 25 of the most popular college courses, which it estimates could save students around $750 million over the next five years.

“With student debt at an all-time high, it has never been more important to make education more affordable,” Baraniuk said in a release. “Our textbooks do that—not just because they are free, but also because they are every bit as good as books that cost $100 or more.”

OpenStax already has introductory textbooks in physics and sociology that have been downloaded more than 70,000 times. It is set to release two new biology books and an introductory anatomy book in the fall.

The publisher will use the grant money to add textbooks in precalculus, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology, and statistics. OpenStax said it spends more than $500,000 to develop a textbook, using content developers the major publishers use and hundreds of faculty reviewers to vet each title.

“Quality is the key,” Baraniuk said. “We believe the reason instructors have been slow to adopt open-source textbooks in the past has been that the free options weren’t all that attractive. The rapid success of our books over the past year bears that out. If you offer a quality book for free, people will jump at it.”

Some Obstacles in Using OERs

There’s a lot of hype and plenty of expectations in higher education surrounding open educational resources (OER). Those expectations are one of the hurdles that OERs must overcome.

“OER should be a source of inspiration for innovation and creativity in the world of college course materials,” Brian Jacobs, president of the virtual bookstore Akadémos, wrote in an article in Campus Technology. “When that happens, the sky will be the limit for the OER movement.”

Jacobs said OERs must become “as good or better” than content now being commercially produced in order to gain acceptance. But first, faculty must learn how to develop open course materials and get past doubts about the quality of free resources.

He also said institutional processes and a lack of tools to help faculty find and assess the materials must be changed or developed from scratch.

“It’s not enough for institutions, foundations, and even the federal government to produce these open resources,” Jacobs said. “There has to be a way for the OERs to be discovered, evaluated, and used effectively in the classroom.”