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.
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.
Check out The Web Difference, the class blog for John Palfrey and David Weinberger’s fantastic class at Harvard Law. The site is an interesting take on dynamic open education–the instructors utilize lots of open content and encourage students to participate in class discussions publicly via the blog.
This is not entirely new–Wiley’s been doing this with his online course Introduction to Open Education by maintaining a wiki with content and input from students around the world. Eventually the wiki content is ported to the OCW site. This semester Chuck Severance is maintaining his own flavor of OCW for his undergraduate Python course at the University of Michigan.
These projects demonstrate the evolving nature of open education. Not only will open coursewares continue to provide and support open content, but will also begin to explore a more open, transparent, and collaborative teaching pedagogy.
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