Author Profile: Terri Bays
Author Archive for Terri Bays
Great article by Jeffrey Brainard in the Nov. 10th Chronicle of Higher Education about collaborations which assist aspriring engineers as they make the transition between 2- and 4-year colleges. This type of collaboration strikes me as a great opportunity for OCW-providers. Brainard observes that:
the road leading a two-year engineering student to be a full-fledged engineer has proven to be rough because it travels through four-year degree programs. Universities’ requirements for transfer credits vary, sometimes in unpredictable ways, making admissions hard and forcing some students to repeat course work. Even a little additional time and expense can force some of those students, who are frequently from lower-income families, out of engineering altogether.
He goes on to report on efforts in California and Maryland to smooth the transition, including an agreement among schools in Maryland which defines:
analytical skills and areas of knowledge expected of prospective transfers. Participating two-year colleges would ask their governing board, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, to certify that their courses leading to an associate degree in engineering provide students with all of those “learning outcomes.” Participating four-year institutions would, in turn, agree to accept all of the credits earned by those graduates.
The movement towards defining “analytical skills and areas of knowledge” is where the opportunity arises for OCW-producing institutions. From the 2-year institution’s end, ocw publication allows the faculty to demonstrate that their courses foster the requisite skills and knowledge for successful transfer. From the 4-year institution’s end, ocw publication allows greater communication with prospective transfers, who can supplement their learning at a 2-year institution with materials from the 4-year institution to which they aspire. Since engineering students transferring from two-year colleges “perform quite well. . . earn[ing] better grades and graduat[ing] at slightly higher rates than those who started at the four-year institutions,” they ought to be worth recruiting, and what better way to convince them to enroll than to give them a taste of what they can expect to get from your institution? What we’d love to see is a situation where students could demonstrate independent acquisition of skills and knowledge for transfer or placement credit, further reducing the chance that time and expense will force worthy students out of professions where they are sorely needed.
Nor is there any reason this should apply only to engineering. Any number of professional fields are suffering from a shortage of skilled workers. Any number of communities are suffering from a shortage of affordable training opportunities. Schools who open up their course materials will attract and place better students. And we all will benefit from that.
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Very nice article by Noam Cohen in Sunday’s NYT about Connexions, an OCWC affiliate member and leader in the open textbook movement. Cohen starts with an account of R. Preston McAfee’s decision to allow free downloads of his economics textbook (or low-cost print-on-demand from Lulu and Flat World Knowledge) rather than with a traditional publishing house. McAfee is protesting both the high price of traditionally-published textbooks and their market-driven content.
The article then justly commends Connexions for its “broader effort” to allow users to “rip burn and mash” course material. I am cheering right along until Cohen uses the remix issue to contrast Connexions’ work with “other projects that share course materials, notably OpenCourseWare at M.I.T.“ Okay, so he’s not talking about most of us, and now we’re going to hear about the evils of .pdf, right? No. . . Cohen tells us that the big difference is that “Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited.”
Huh?
It’s admittedly a tough thing to explain in short space. And it’s even a tougher thing to make interesting to the average reader.
But this article gets it wrong, and I’m compelled to set the record straight once again.
What we have here is a mash up of concerns. Connexions does use the Creative Commons Attribution license, which is broader than than that used by MIT and many other OCW’s, on account of its not requiring either a non-commercial use or license compatibility. The Share-Alike clause is the point of concern, because can complicate the mixing of materials originally published under incompatible licenses (and here the non-commercial clause can come into play as well). But complication is not the same as prohibition, and we would do well not to let our internal disagreements over optimal licensing blur that fact, especially when we are addressing our potential users.
The fact is that OpenCourseWare projects, including those under the CC share-alike license, have had a lot of success on the reuse and redistribution front, as attested to the hundreds of courses that have been localized and translated around the world.
I do not want to downplay the legitimate concern that undue complication of the remix process might prevent its happening at all. We should and do engage in lively debate about what licenses will strike the right balance between the desires of producers and the convenience of users.
But it’s important to be clear on the essentials. The average reader of the NYT article surely walked away with an erroneous impression of what we do here. And to the extent that reader was a potential OCW adoptee, everybody loses.
In Spain last week for the presentation of awards to Spain’s top ocw courses in Valencia at the Junta General de Accionistas Universia (more about that in a later post), I had the pleasure of viewing an exhibition of the finalists in the Education Category of this year’s Fototalentos Contest. Fototalentos ‘08 is the first of what we hope will grow into an annual event, attracting photographic talent from all over the world. This year fosuses on three themes:
- sustainability (finalists were on display at the Universidad de Zaragoza April 18-30)
- education (finalists on display at the Universidad de Valencia May 5-17)
- co-existence (finalists will be on display at the Universidad de Cádiz May 23 through June 6)
Like Universia, this contest is sponsored by the Fundacion Banco Santander, and Universia’s staff have provided valuable logistical support in processing and displaying the 15,937 entries which came in. You can view each of those entries at the Fototalentos site, and you can vote among the finalists through the end of this month. The winners will be notified June 9-13.
Primeras Clases. Fototalentos ‘08 entry. |
I was particularly struck by this photo, entitled “Primeras clases,” not because it is necessarily the best in the education category (I’m not trying to influence voting here), but because of what it says about the risks involved in teaching.As a mother, my first reaction is alarm as I envision all the different ways this scenario could end bady, all the different injuries that might be sustained, all the different inconveniences that might be incurred as those injuries are accomodated. Mom’s are like that, even educator moms who are into openness.
But then even I am able to witness the trust with which the little girl leans into her father’s body, trust strong enough that she can lift one foot off the book rack. She has one foot off the rack, and he has two feet off the ground, his body distorted as he curves to balance her weight with his own and with that of the machine that supports them both on uneven ground. |
And isn’t this what we do in education, especially open education? We take risks; we bend ourselves and our content to meet the needs of the learning environment. We steer the flimsy and often faulty vehicles of our various disciplines across terrain which may or may not be suited to our purposes. And we do so in hope of sharing that thrill of the balancing act, that moment of connection that overcomes all the costs and risks and reasons why it shouldn’t be so.
That thrill isn’t all that open education is about, and it may not even be what this photo is about, but it made me glad of the chance to view this quite amazing collection of photos in Valencia. I’ll be visiting the website to see the other two collections, and I invite you to do so as well.
In the Governance Portion of the 2008 OCWC Meeting in Dalian, China, we formally registered the proxy votes cast April 8-18 for the Board of Directors for the OCW Consortium. Those board members are:
Institutional Board Representatives
Two Years:
- Stephen Carson - MIT (United States)
- Yoshimi Fukuhara - Keio University (Japan)
- Andy Lane - The Open University (United Kingdom)
- Phillip Schmidt - University of Western Cape (South Africa)
One Year:
- Meena Hwang - Korea University (Republic of Korea)
- Jesus Arriaga - Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain)
- Jose Escamilla - Technologico de Monterrey (Mexico)
- Anka Mulder - Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
Affiliate Board Representatives
- Brandon Muramatsu - Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (United States)
- Fun-Den Wang - China Open Resources for Education (China)
Thanks to all who participated in the election process, and particularly to those who were willing to stand as candidates for this inaugural board. In addition to the regular work of steering the OCWC, this board will have the burden of establishing structures through which that work can get done fairly, efficiently, and as transparently as possible. Please extend to them your thanks and support in the year to come.
Terri
