Author Archive for Terri Bays

Fraud is in the air

Published
by
Terri Bays
on August 21, 2009
in copyright, intellectual property, online, open and opencourseware
. 1 Comment

As both the hiring and the fall teaching cycles get underway, we’re seeing a rash of articles in the Chronicle about various forms of Academic fraud. Today’s “Strange Tales From the Trenches” by Daniel J. Ennis and Arne R. Flaten (http://bit.ly/8ms1F) follows, for example, last Saturday’s “Should You Discuss Your Work in Progress?” (http://bit.ly/fEUk5) by Gina Barreca. The latter provoked a stream of comments by academics concerned about their research ideas being stolen, and I felt compelled to add a remark about not letting our concern to protect our ideas prevent us from engaging in the types of collaboration that brought so many of us into academics in the first place.

There’s more to be said than simply urging folks not to lose their sense of sharing, however. Those who have published their ideas in OCW know that OCW publication can be a way to stake their claims to ideas or techniques long before they are ready to publish research articles. The digital versions are date-stamped by the hosting server, so, should they actually need to take a case to court, they have tangible evidence of their prior claims. This is where it’s important to remember that OCW publication does not mean relinquishing either copyright or the right to attribution.

Granted, this isn’t enough to prevent someone from pursuing your line of research and drawing more insightful conclusions than yours (ideas cannot be copyrighted). This (as both Barreca and several commentators pointed out) is part and parcel of academic life. It will, however, give you recourse in cases like those described by Ennis and Flaten, where work either simply is used without permission or citation or more egregiously is misrepresented as someone else’s creation. Having your work visible and labeled as your own allows the vigilant to find evidence of fraud when they go looking rather than harbor vague suspicions they have no way of substantiating.

On the brighter side, sharing your nascent ideas with students, with colleagues and with the wider learning community opens you to further opportunities for academic growth. Those potential thieves are also your potential cheerleaders, muses and collaborators. Keeping your ideas to yourself might keep you safe, but it will also keep you isolated.

Using OCW to Augment Student Retention Efforts

Published
by
Terri Bays
on August 10, 2009
in education, local benefits, open educational resources and opencourseware
. 1 Comment

At this past weekend’s meeting of the American Sociological Association, Regina Deil-Amen, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, and Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor of educational-policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison presented their paper, “Institutional Transfer and the Management of Risk in Higher Education” (see Chronicle article at http://bit.ly/2BD0gU). The paper assesses the risk faced by first-generation college students of undergoing “reverse transfer,” where a student initially enrolled in a four-year college shifts into a two-year college, eventually leaving college without a Bachelor’s Degree. Not surprisingly, this risk is higher among low-income and minority students, who lack many of the support mechanisms available to their higher-income peers.

According to Godrick-Rab and Deil-Amen, students who do manage to overcome this risk tend to share four important resources:

guidance in developing their college plans, clear goals, an ability to find academic and financial help, and advocates pushing them to earn bachelor’s degrees.

As the college guidance season warms up in many countries, I’d urge schools to consider ways in which publishing an OCW site would help you provide your first-generation students with 3.5 of these resources.

First, the ability to see your courses is a valuable part of making plans based upon your courses. A thoughtfully-designed OCW site indicates a course’s:

  • prerequisites
  • fulfillment of curricular requirements
  • course learning goals
  • schedule and
  • assignments

in addition to allowing a student to preview content in order to really see whether a given course meets her particular needs. For the student coming into an advisor’s office, an OCW site allows for better-informed advising. For the student reluctant to visit an advisor, an OCW site provides the means for self-help.

Second, the setting of clear goals requires a realistic sense of what might be required for college success. OCW courses can lay out for your students what kinds of challenges they will face as they make their way through your curriculum. If you have a goal-setting session as part of new student orientation, consider posting that session to your ocw site so that students can come back to it once they have developed a sense of what it will mean to them. The University of Notre Dame tried this last year, publishing its “Making the Academic Adjustment To College” course on its OCW site. Not only were new students required to access the course prior to enrolling, but many came back after the semester was underway. The course has exercises on goal-setting, and time will tell whether those exercises stand ND students in good stead over the next few years.

Third, an OCW site may not provide students with access to financial help (though well-informed essays might gain more scholarships for their authors), but it does provide access to academic help they might not otherwise receive. Deil-Amen and Goldrick-Rab cite a student they call “Monique” who fails to reach out to her professors for academic help and ends up transferring out of her four-year college. For students like Monique, the ability to review a course on an OCW site might well enable her to:

  • engage in self-help at a different pace than she encounters in class
  • engage a fellow student for help with course materials they both can see
  • develop better-informed questions and thus muster the courage to reach out to her professors.

Let’s admit it, going into a professor’s office while suffering from a state of confusion is terribly daunting. While most of us probably think that developing faculty contacts is the way to go, we first must give students preparation for out-of-class engagement with the faculty.

Finally, advocates pushing first generation college students to earn bachelor’s degrees will come from many different aspects of a student’s life. An OCW site allow those advocates to inform themselves about what a student is facing in the college classroom and to tailor advice accordingly. Alienation from the very people who helped a student get to college is a phenomenon experienced by many first generation college students, and the ability to share the academic excitement with the folks back home is one of the many social gifts OCW has to offer.

None of these benefits is automatic. They require careful design of OCW courses and careful presentation to alert users to their potential. Nevertheless, OCW offers considerable potential to those at work on retention issues, so that care will be amply rewarded.

$16.5 million in grants for groundbreaking remedial education programs

Published
by
Terri Bays
on June 25, 2009
in education, news, oer, open educational resource, open educational resources, remedial education and teaching
. 0 Comments

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and MDC, Inc. announced today that they are awarding $16.5 million in grants to community colleges and states “to expand groundbreaking remedial education programs that experts say are key to dramatically boosting the college completion rates of low-income students and students of color” (http://bit.ly/wouV8). A significant portion of the grants, especially those made to the states, will go towards enhancement of tracking systems so that systems can tell how well their efforts are succeeding.

These are important initiatives, and we hope that the grantees will follow the lead set by the beneficiaries of a recent £7.8 million grant in the UK (see bit.ly/ibBcB), designing their solutions with openness in mind. For much of what succeeds in these efforts defies description in an academic article or conference presentation. If successful methods are not to slip away they must not only be measured and celebrated but also shared at a level of specificity rarely delivered outside of classroom observation or the publication of open educational resources. Naturally, we at the OCWC favor the OER approach!

Nor is OER useful only as a way of promulgating retention methods. Carol Lincoln, director of the Developmental Education Initiative and national director of Achieving the Dream for MDC says:

The pressing need to shore up weak academic skills in first-year students is one of the most significant, but least discussed, problems confronting higher education. Colleges that can figure out how to quickly and efficiently boost basic skills, particularly among students of color and low-income students, will play a leading role in helping them earn the college degrees necessary for economic success in America today. (see http://bit.ly/wouV8)

Teaching with OER provides quick, efficient, strategic remediation in the form of Flash Forward-Flash Back, a technique where an instructor “flashes back” to openly available background skills and information, granting students access to learning they missed the first time around. An instructor may also motivate current learning by flashing forward to applications in later coursework. This technique, and others like it, are particularly valuable to students who may be the first in their families to attend college and thus have considerably less opportunity to imagine where their efforts might lead them. As more and more courses become openly available, techniques like this will only increase in value.

Yes, it’s another new staff person!

Published
by
Terri Bays
on June 23, 2009
in ocw consortium, ocwc, opencourseware and staff
. 0 Comments

Today we’re welcoming Rana Banerjee to the OCWC team. Rana will be consulting with us regarding the development of better membership support processes. Back in the old days (as long as a year or two ago) membership support was something we could handle informally, with a call or email in the course of handling other OCWC business. As the consortium has grown however, and new members come on board at an increasingly rapid pace, we have to be more deliberate in our proceedings. Rana will be helping us out with that over the next three months, in preparation for our hiring a more permanent staff person in September.

Rana comes to us from MIT OCW, where he’s worked since March, 2006 on the Highights for High School project, a resource for high school math and science which includes both MIT OCW materials modified for the high school audience as well as presenting content created by MIT
students and outreach programs. In addition to having primary responsibility for the acquisition and publication of Highlights site content, Rana has worked extensively in the area of usability, conducting interviews and focus groups of over 200 teachers, students, administrators and policy makers in order to help the site meet the needs of secondary STEM education.

Doris Rojas of the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria, Lima-Peru Appointed to OCWC Board

Published
by
Terri Bays
on June 17, 2009
in OCWC Board, ocw consortium and ocwc
. 0 Comments

The OCWC Board of Directors has recently appointed Doris Rojas of the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria, Lima-Peru to fill the vacancy left by Meena Hwang’s resignation from the Board. Doris Rojas is an Industrial Engineer with 24 years of professional experience in business consulting, working on topics such as Strategic Planning, Redesign of Processes, Informatic Projects, and Human Resources. Currently, she serves as the director of the Center for Information and Communication Technologies at the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria, where she has taught courses such as Planning and Strategic Direction, Organization Projects and Methods, Human Resources Management, and Redesign of Processes. I am pleased to report Prof. Rojas’ acceptance of this appointment, which will last until next May’s annual election, when the OCWC membership will elect a director to complete the term.

Meena Hwang resigned her position on the OCWC Board of Directors last month, subsequent to resigning fro her position at Korea University. An OCWC Director is required to be an officer, director, trustee or employee of an OCWC member organization. Directors officially resign upon ceasing to be related to the members with which they were affiliated at the time of their election.

Meena Hwang Joins OCWC Staff as Interim Director of Community Outreach

Published
by
Terri Bays
on June 17, 2009
in news, ocw consortium, ocwc, opencourseware and staff
. 0 Comments

We are very excited to have Meena Hwang join the OCWC staff as our Interim Director of Community Outreach. Having formerly initiated and orchestrated not only the Korea University Open Course Ware project, but also the Korea OCW Consortium, Meena brings considerable experience and enthusiasm to the OCWC staff. She will be directing the outreach efforts of the OCWC over the next six months, taking over from the much-missed Mike Caulfield. We are grateful to Meena for stepping in at this juncture so that our new Executive Director may settle in before running a formal search for the DCO position.

Many of you are already familiar with Meena from her work with KU OCW and KOCW. In addition to those responsibilities, Meena served on the OCWC Board of Directors from its inception in 2008 until her resignation from Korea University this past month. From her position on the OCWC staff, Meena will be able to extend many of the valuable projects she started in Korea, particularly the OCW Student Movement. I know that you will want to join me in saying how delighted we are with this opportunity to continue our collaboration with Meena.

Into the Sunset. . .

Published
by
Terri Bays
on May 14, 2009
in opencourseware
. 2 Comments

Today is Mike Caulfield’s last day working on the OCWC staff. We thought we had successfully stolen Mike from Keene State, but they sneaked up on us from behind and stole him back with an offer of a pivotal role as an Instructional Designer in a Teaching and Learning Center for which he helped write the proposal. Rest assured that plots are already in development to get an OCW project going at Keene so that we can retrieve Mike as a committee member!

Mike came on board last fall as our Director of Community Outreach, and in nine short months has done a great deal to increase awareness of OCW and to support both current and potential OCWC members. We are very sorry to see Mike go, and we’re sure you will want to join us in thanking him for his work, his enthusiasm, and his fine company.

Best wishes, Mike!

Participate in the OCWC Business Meeting and Board Reports

Published
by
Terri Bays
on April 21, 2009
in opencourseware
. 0 Comments

You can call in to participate live in our business meeting by dialing

Reservationless-Plus Toll Free Dial-In Number (US & Canada): (888) 830-8920
Reservationless-Plus International Dial-In Number:(770) 657-9185
Conference Code: 510-267-9409

Between 10:30am and 12:30pm CDST (GMT/UTC -5) today (April 21).

Proposed Amendments to Bylaws

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 23, 2009
in ocw consortium and ocwc
. 0 Comments

Dear Colleagues,

As required in Article X of the OCWC Bylaws, last Friday I posted 30-days notice of seven measures calling for amendments to those bylaws. The certified voting representative for each OCWC Member will have the opportunity to vote by proxy on these measures between April 16, 2009 and April 21, 2009.

To download the Proposed Amendments to the OCWC Bylaws arranged on a measure-by-measure basis, please visit:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/docman/2009-bylaws-amendments-measure-by-measure/download.html

To download the Proposed Amendments to the OCWC Bylaws in their entirety, please visit:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/docman/2009-bylaws-amendments-entire/download.html

Please fee free to contact me at tbays@ocwconsortium.org if you have any questions about individual amendments or this process in general.

Best wishes,

Terri

Working Session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at OCWC Global 2009

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 19, 2009
in Fair Use, OCWC Conference, copyright, creative commons, education, educational, intellectual property, licensing, ocw, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and remix
. 2 Comments

You may have heard rumors that some of the US OCW producers have been working on a project to explore issues of Fair Use in Open Educational Resources.  Fair Use is the US version of a phenomena more generally known as Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, and most OCW projects have started out with the conservative assumption that they don’t get much fair use coverage.  Some lawyers are starting to say otherwise, however, so the Fair Use Working Group is gathering data about how OERs in the US are negotiating Fair Use.  The hope is to publish a Code of Best Practice for OER later in the year.

But the OCWC is a global consortium, so the Fair Use project is only one part of a larger initiative to explore the implications of Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (CELs) for OER’s.  We’ve started a wiki page for this larger initiative entitled Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, where you can see a conceptual map for the larger project as we see it so far.  You’ll also see a link to a draft page for gathering data about CELs in different legal jurisdictions.  Use the comment tabs on either page to share your ideas!  We’ll be hosting a working session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at the OCWC Global Meeting in Monterrey, Mexico next month, with Ahrash Bissell from CC Learn as our facilitator.  At the session we’ll discuss what additional data it would be useful to gather and walk through the data gathering process.