Archive for the 'education' Category

LINC 2010 - University Leadership: Bringing Technology-Enabled Education to Learners of All Ages

Published
by
Steve Carson
on December 16, 2009
in conferences, education, mit, ocw and open educational resource
. 0 Comments

I’m happy to share that MIT President Emeritus Charles Vest, who was MIT’s president at the inception of MIT OpenCourseWare, will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming LINC 2010 conference on MIT’s campus this May. This conference promises to be a great opportunity for global discussion of OCW and other technology-enabled education projects. Details included below.

————————

The Fifth International Conference of
MIT Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC)
May 23-26, 2010
University Leadership: Bringing
Technology-Enabled Education to Learners of All Ages
On the campus of MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts USA

MIT LINC is an international community of individuals and organizations that focuses on higher education in emerging countries and the role that technology can play in expanding educational reach. It is a collaboration of educators from around the world whose purpose is to share best practices and to learn from each other’s mistakes, in order to move forward with successful e-learning projects in their home countries.

With the 2010 theme, “University Leadership: Bringing Technology-Enabled Education to Learners of All Ages”, the consortium intends to showcase examples where universities are increasing usage of e-learning by reaching down to K-12 education or reaching up to lifelong learners. If technology-enabled education is to contribute to the social and economic development of emerging nations, it must move beyond the university to improve K-12 schooling and to create a culture of lifelong learning.

Plenary speakers include rectors of the leading virtual universities in Latin America, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The keynote plenary speaker is Dr. Charles M. Vest, President of the National Academy of Engineering and President-Emeritus of MIT. Other plenary speakers include educational leaders from business and government.

LINC 2010 participants will travel from all parts of the world as representatives of universities, government, corporations, foundations, K-12 education and lifelong learning initiatives. Each will come to share an international forum with others who understand the challenges faced by emerging nations in achieving the transformational potential of technology-enabled teaching and learning.  Innovative technologies and content will be presented and explored, along with the policies and pedagogies that make them successful. In the end, as with previous LINC conferences, valuable contacts will be made, strategic relationships developed and exciting educational collaborations begun.

More information available here.

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.

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.

A Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Courseware

Published
by
Garin Fons
on January 27, 2009
in Fair Use, copyright, education, hewlett, intellectual property, news, ocw and open educational resources
. 1 Comment

Corona of the Sun during a Solar Eclipse (No Known Copyright Restrictions)

Corona of the Sun During a Solar Eclipse (No known copyright) (from flickr commons: http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2534500722/)

A Note from the Fair Use on Open CourseWare team:

All of us have been frustrated by problems with third-party rights for open courseware materials. We know that if we could clarify when fair use applies, we could vastly expand the utility of what we do. And we know that in other cases, creative communities have done that. For instance, documentary filmmakers now find that insurers accept their claims of fair use, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. Similarly, media literacy teachers now can teach without fear, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. These codes of best practices were coordinated by Profs. Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide, through the Center for Social Media and the Washington College of Law at American University.

We need a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware. A group of representatives at some of the open courseware universities—MIT, Tufts, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Yale, Notre Dame, Berkeley, Creative Commons—have started a project to do this, in coordination with Jaszi and Aufderheide, and with financial support from the Hewlett Foundation and from each of our universities. Each of the eight participating universities’ staff has set aside some part of their workload for this job.

Are you interested in helping to shape a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware? You can participate at several levels. If you would like to become a researcher on the project, just let Lindsey Weeramuni (lweera@mit.edu), the project’s coordinator know. Do you have a story to tell? Write Jaszi and Aufderheide at socialmedia@american.edu and we’ll connect you. Do you think your organization would eventually like to become a signatory? Let Lindsey know and we’ll be in touch when the document has been crafted, for your participation.

We hope to complete this work by September 1, so that the 2009-2010 school year can be a great one for open courseware.

Other questions or comments can also be directed here at open.michigan@umich.edu

Bridging the gap between 2- and 4-year colleges

Published
by
Terri Bays
on October 8, 2008
in education, educational, oer, online, open, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and teaching
. 0 Comments

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.

Not Again!

Published
by
Terri Bays
on September 15, 2008
in copyright, creative commons, education, intellectual property, licensing, mit, ocw, open, opencourseware, press coverage, remix, reuse and sharealike
. 0 Comments

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.

Fototalentos ‘08

Published
by
Terri Bays
on May 13, 2008
in education, opencourseware, press coverage, public and resources
. 0 Comments

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

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.

Say hello to Open.Michigan

Published
by
Garin Fons
on April 28, 2008
in education, hewlett, news, ocw, open educational resources, opencourseware and publicity
. 2 Comments

cc:by - regents of the university of michigan

Anyone familiar in some small part with what has been happening with the University of Michigan’s Open Educational Resources initiative will already know we have had a number of great developments over the last few months. We’ve had student dScribes from the School of Information participate in a pilot program to help gather, vet, and clear content for publication and we’ve made significant progress on the development of the software tools we’ll use to manage the process of clearing course content.

But what we’re most excited about now is the emergence of what we’re calling … Open.Michigan

Open.Michigan is more than an Open educational Resources site. It represents the diverse collection of Open initiatives on campus - from open access publishing and open archives to open source software and open standards. The site provides greater visibility to the various projects and attempts to expand the dialogue between campus participants and external collaborators.

We also hope to build upon the Open Community’s strong participatory culture, inviting people to explore the Open.Michigan website, subscribing, authoring, and commenting on our blog, taking a look at our wiki, and following updates on our Twitter (open_michgan) and joining our new facebook group, Open.Michigan.

We’re excited about this transition and look forward to your feedback and participation as Open.Michigan continues to evolve and expand.

Money makes the world go… open?

Published
by
Laura Dewis
on April 23, 2008
in copyright, education, oer and opencourseware
. 6 Comments

As we move towards the end of the OpenLearn pilot phase, there’s a lot of evaluation and reflection to do, especially on what business models might take us forward. I spent some time this month at the Economies of the Commons conference in Amsterdam. (Other people have blogged the event here so no need to post my 14 pages of notes). Since I’ve returned the Ithaka report on Sustainability and revenue models for online academic resources has been published in draft form for comment.

The conference, as the name suggests, was about how you make money from open content so you can sustain its production. Refreshingly, it wasn’t just about fab shiny young startups making tons of cash for a good idea that’s cheap-ish to produce. Speakers included those managing the digitisation projects for National Archives and the scale of these projects was overwhelming. For example, Images for the Future is the largest digitisation project in Europe. The facts: 173 million Euros to restore, conserve, digitise AND contextualise the assets (eg for school curriculum as they recognise just putting assets out there isn’t useful enough). Between now and 2014 they will digitise 137,200 hours of video, 22,510 hours of film, 123,900 hours of audio and 2.9 million pictures. They calculate that reuse of the assets will generate between 20 and 60 million Euros for the Dutch economy.

Interesting questions were raised such as: Are we creating a commons for a rich community? Who is paying for the gift economy? Is free culture just a fad? If scarcity of information is now over, might it return? How do we tip the idea of openness so it becomes commonplace? Are the community the new archivists? When will copyright die?

Free is not an option for digital businesses, it’s a reality. The value of what is easily copyable is low and getting lower. So we need to monetise the uncopyable (eg live performances making more money for an artist than their MP3s) and understand how the drivers to pay for open content relate to education – Embodyment (the live experience of seeing a band in concert), Immediacy, Personalisation, Interpretation, Patronage, Findability, Authenticity, Accessibility. We’ve understood this from the beginning - OpenLearn makes our educational resources freely available but doesn’t replicate the experience of being a student at the University. We’ve also recognised that times are changing - copyright may not be dead but it won’t necessarily make us money in the future. Plus while the copyfight (copyright vs copyleft) is in stalemate, innovators (albeit often illegally) are moving the world forward and shifting cultures in profound ways that we can’t ignore or change. So OpenLearn is The Open University experimenting with the Creative Commons license. And we’re not the only sector recognising this need to experiment with new models (see the news on Harpers Collins).

At this point in the lifecycle of OpenLearn we need to do more than experiment and start work on the new business models. OpenLearn can’t be seen to be a nice standalone experiment that makes everyone at the OU feel good about working here - although it is and does - but as something that presents an ongoing challenge that needs to be worked out for the future sustainability of our entire business. Economic equilibrium takes time as we move from one cultural paradigm to another - it doesn’t happen overnight, or even in the lifetime of a 2 year pilot. The example of Le Monde, France’s national newspaper taking 11 years to get to economic equilibrium with its website is a powerful one.

One business model won’t be enough. The French National Archive project made half of what it spent last year by employing several models (which doesn’t sound good but 600K is better than nothing). So what models are peeking over the parapets?

Pre-finance - get someone to fund you. We were lucky to be funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to start OpenLearn and certainly other sources of funding have been realised for research projects and are being investigated.

Sponsorship – there are organisations we have worked with over the past year that might have paid us a sum for the opportunity to say “we offer free learning in association with the OU”. We sponsor events in the real world such as Edinburgh Festival, so there are relationships that could work the other way, extending and capturing the knowledge of real world events in open content form and providing sponsorship opportunities.

Subscription – essentially charging for extra services. This needs some thought around how people could be enticed into a stronger ongoing relationship with OpenLearn, past dropping in for a cup of tea and a slice of knowledge from a search engine and only returning by chance (actually not chance, but the fact we are taking over search engines real estate - add evil laugh and cat stroking here).

Currently about 3% of our visitors have registered for free extra services, so what services would be so compelling that these people and more would pay for them? With many sites it is about the user’s social status in that website, so Last.fm make something like $2.50 from each user who wants to indicate their fan status on their profile (this means their user icon changes from one colour to another - costing Last.fm next to nothing to satisfy a user need).

This is about making what we already do more attractive, which might be extending our offer (pay to join an online video conference with an OU tutor) or communicating it differently (pay to see who else is studying online) and perhaps even closing off some of the current functionality (since closing down access to content would be detrimental for both users and the promotional/ business benefits of having freely accessible and distributable content).

This depends on us understanding our market and finding out what organisations and individuals will pay for – hosting and branding their own open content on OpenLearn, DVDs of content to upload to their own Learning Management Systems, Print on demand etc - and how much they will pay for it. As Jan Velterop, CEo of Knewco succinctly said, “He who has most interest pays”. So who has the most interest in open educational resources - the institution, the learner, the teacher, the private business or the government?

Freemium – pretty much the same concept as subscription where people are paying for added services but the paid for offer is usually made more cleverly at the point of need and familiarity with the product (ok I made that up, I just needed another sub-heading as this blog is getting text heavy). When 1% are paying for 99% of users to use the system, the costs of production and maintenance need to be lower than ours are currently and the user numbers need to be higher. Freemium works for Web 2.0 sites because of low costs and high user numbers. This could be a model we could pursue once we have mainstreamed the production of open content (so instead of digitising legacy material, we are working with new materials that have been developed with open content in mind). Perhaps we could bring down costs in areas other than production. For example, rights as we begin to gain more experience in rights clearance for online use. To bring rights costs in line with the economic model for open content, perhaps we need to seek new agreements. Could we pay the rights holder per download of their asset, or offer the rights holder an affliate deal where open access to their content proves to bring them income? Could we negotiate deals that are more like the public lending rights agreements that libraries have where authors get a capped payment per year related to the amount of times their content was lent from a public library? Could we give tiered access, so that users pay to get access to the versions that include third party materials and a portion of this money goes to the rights holders? (I should point out, if its not already clear, that I’m not the OpenLearn rights expert).

Advertising – this could be cross selling our own services through OpenLearn more effectively (something we’ve been quite timid about) or it could be selling third-party services. We need more eyeballs to make any money. Advertising brings its own costs as it needs to be managed. However, it is one possible income stream. Almost immediate benefit could be gained from affiliate partnerships with retail partners (selling tickets to museum exhibitions, books on Amazon that related to the content - having a targeted audience is as good as having a large audience). And since we can’t get a marketing budget for OpenLearn unless we can prove it generates student registrations, perhaps we can make income from our own Marketing department for every clickthrough from OpenLearn that results in a registration. And perhaps we can think more deeply about whether rewarding informal learners for their study can grow our student numbers rather than canabalise them - if you track use of OpenLearn and give people time/money off the relevant paid-for course, will that increase use of oepn educational resources, improve conversion rates from enquiries to student registrations and ensure the student is better prepared for study?

Of course once you have advertising you can charge people a sum to have it turned off in their ‘advanced profile’ (isn’t this why people pay for their TV license?). We all know how people who love education, hate advertising, so voila!

Private partnerships – eg Google paying for digitisation of assets. Normally this would include some sort of exclusivity agreement but hybrid models that tie the market economy with the commons are worth investigating because of the huge sums of money that are available. In these partnerships negotiating the best deal is crucial to avoid becoming an imaginary owner of our own content (the third party has the potential to make more revenue than we do from our content so ensuring a fair deal is crucial). See Peter Kaufman’s report Good Terms - Improving Commercial-Noncommercial patnerships for mass digitization.

Community donations – appealing to the good people of the internet. This is where we can learn lessons from the pirates and the open-source community, like the producers of Steal This Film and the animation guys at Blender who got 100KE from their users to make their closed software open. The Steal This Film guys consider subscription, advertising and pay-to-download, doomed business models. With 4 million viewers of their pirate film in 1.2 years, 1 person in every 1000 donated sums of between $1 and $500 in the first 1-2 months. Most donations were in $15-$40 range. People connected with their ‘League of Noble Peers’ identity which set them out as pioneers in the field so the financial viability of this model might depend on whether you have cult status or can appeal to someone’s passionate defence of freedom and democracy.

“Voluntary supportive donations for the post-IP generation” are being exploited by sites that make it easy to donate. Each asset is given a fingerprint, and as it travels the inter-web with this identifier people can donate wherever they consume the asset. The aim is that 10-15% of all content consumed via P2P networks will result in voluntary donations. The P2P networks get a cut of the donations. A donation can be made from any point in the distribution chain – from P2P client to the embedded media player.

So when we think about voluntary donations it may not just be our website visitors donating, but also the consumers of our content in other online and potentially offline spaces.

At the moment we give no huge incentive to donate – we don’t strongly appeal to the learners to donate even though we know from feedback they love the resources. What if we made donating simpler? We could encourage small donations and make it possible to donate at every point in the distribution and consumption chain. What if you asked every viewer of an Open University programme on the BBC to donate a small sum to create free study materials related to the programme? What if open content became an ethical gift - you could buy someone a study unit and dedicate its creation to them (massive OU friendly audience of teachers, lifelong learners and alumni that this would appeal to).

Open source consultancy/training – helping other educational institutions and organisations use open content/ Moodle. We know there is demand for this and some of our research projects (and the good people of the technical team) have been trying to meet the demand.

Gift economy - doesn’t this rely on gift exchange? “Oh, you shouldn’t have” is always a lie. Of course you should have! Give us something back - we didn’t go to all the effort and expense of using the CC license if we didn’t want our content repurposed and shared back with us. This is a model that hasn’t been realised to any great extent in the time of the pilot - perhaps because we are ahead of the curve in educational institutions. Early adopters have started to share and co-produce materials and their feedback suggests the process is of value, and that there will be opportunity to decrease the costs of course production through open content in the future. Making open content more visible to educators through things like the OER Recommender is essential to open content reaching a tipping point.

Deep breath. If you got this far, you are special :)