44th Distance Education Association of Southern Africa Annual Meeting and Conference
18 – 20 September 2009, Maseru, Lesotho
By Paul G. West
Director, Knowledge Management & Information Technology
Commonwealth of Learning (COL)
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak with you today about Digital Scholarship. When I was asked to speak, I was given the guideline: to cover Online Publications, Open Access, and the thorny issue of Copyright. I will certainly try to cover these areas from my perspective and hope I will not jam up the gearbox while I am at it.
I will be looking at these areas from a global perspective, showing that our countries in Southern Africa are not working in isolation, but rather as part of the global educational scene. Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia and Botswana form part of the Virtual University for the Small States of the Commonwealth and so educators especially in these countries are reminded of how they are collaborating in a global setting with partners in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean and the Pacific.
As we look further afield across not just neighbouring borders, but across further borders, we face new challenges in addition to those we know of such as deferent languages and cultures. We face continued rapid change in technology and in legal frameworks.
So, when we find impediments to sharing and to good scholarship in this conference let us also look for ways to overcome the challenges.
What valid reasons can we find to not share educational content? I sometimes hear that institutions do not want to receive content from other institutions or give learning content they have developed to others. This may be understandable if the institution has all the funds to be completely independent, but if you are looking for financial support from a donor, expect to share learning content in future.
Before we get deeper into this, let us first consider the various terms. I have listed a few of the terms you may come across, the most known of these seems to be OCW which was coined by MIT. OER was coined in a UNESCO discussion group. It was later popularised by the Open University of the UK and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has funded a number of initiatives in this area. There are also terms like OARs, OLRs and simply “sharable resources”, which is really what we are talking about.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) received significant press coverage a few years ago when they announced that they would be releasing learning resources free of charge. Open CourseWare was the term MIT coined and it referred to the notes and courses used in the classrooms at MIT. MIT is not a distance education institution and so they were not sharing complete courses. This resource collection has been made more comprehensive over the years and so you may find them more useful today than they initially might have appeared.
MIT’s website now states that OCW are: “ . . publicly available materials that are either a part of or a complete course usually from a higher-education institution such as a university or college.”
The Open University in the UK took this concept of opening up courseware one step further with the release of modules of distance education materials. They describe them as being: “publicly available resources that may be used for educational purposes.” Anyone can go to their website, register for a topic and study it. There are no tutors, examinations or certificates. For these, one would follow the link to the Open University where you can pay to register for the real course, interact with a tutor, pass an examination and receive a certificate.
As you can see, the Open University and MIT do not regard learning resources as “their core product” or “the product they sell”. These resources are resources they are willing to give away for others to use, including to you and your institutions, at no cost.
So if you and your institution could receive learning materials that could help to reduce the time it takes to create a new course or to update an old course, what stands in the way of you using these materials?
Do the arguments for OER outweigh the arguments against them? If you can download modules that save you days or possibly weeks of work, and you have the right to adapt them to suit your country and culture, what still stands in your way of using existing materials as a starting point?
If finding materials is a problem, try using the tools COL provides on its website. We index materials on many websites using Google and bring them to you in one easy to use search field. You don’t have to go to multiple websites, just go to this one page at COL and it will help you to find learning materials from 50 institutions and repositories.
Also on COL’s website are a number of courses we have helped to develop. These are all available to you. These materials are mostly available in printable format, while some institution’s websites are more aimed at providing interactive experiences and even science laboratories.
So, returning to my point about finding OER, they can be found on the Internet by using Google, Bing or any other search engine. If you want to try more focused search facilities, try the COL search field or the field created by OpenContent.
Once you have found modules or sections of content you would like to use, you will need to assemble these in some kind of tool. Your course development teams will no doubt look at the kind of components you have found, which may be Word documents, web pages, audio files, video files including clips from YouTube and Flickr.
Assembling content can be done with a range of tools and any instructional designer will no doubt be able to list their favourite tools. If you have started using wikis, you could try COL’s wiki; if you are intending to print anything you create, you might find the free instructional design templates from COL useful. Consider also, the potential of cloud services.
Services like Scribd, GoogleDocs, Microsoft Skydrive and ThinkFree all offer free services that you can use to assemble print-based materials. Team members can access the materials from different locations and you can download them for local printing and even publish them to the world if you are willing to share what you are creating.
When publishing learning content, you need to think about the copyright licenses of the materials you are copying from and releasing to others, as well as the formats of the materials.
The format of files takes us to a discussion about standards – another hot potato. If I asked now who uses Microsoft Office, I suspect most people will confirm that this is the computer program suite most in use. This is not the only office suite available though. In addition to names like Microsoft and Windows you will also hear of Linux, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Apple Mac and iWork. These are all different operating systems, computer programs and different standards.
The most widely used format for word processor files seems to still be the Microsoft proprietary formats – somewhere around 85% of computer users I am told use Microsoft Office. About 10% use Open Office and less than this use Mac formats for Word Processing.
Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice 3.5 use different formats today, but in the future versions due out in 2010, these two formats should be more compatible.
“What word processor program do YOU USE?” If almost everyone at your institution already uses a particular word processor, it may make sense to stick to the same one. Change to something else and you are likely to run into difficulties sharing your documents.
And finally on this issue, once you have created your print-based materials, you can then convert the files into a number of different formats. This will help others who perhaps use different software. . Remember to check the accessibility standards to ensure that your materials can be converted into Braille or audio files as well.
If people at your institution use various versions of MS Word, use the DOC format. If everyone you know already uses Word 2007, you could go over to the newer DOCX format. Once you have completed the materials, convert copies into ODT and PDF so that others can access them too. Make a mental note to go back to the files in 2010 and convert them to the latest formats that emerge.
If your whole team already uses OpenOffice, you could create your files in ODT; and when you are finished, convert them to DOC, DOCX and PDF.
The format used on web pages is a very versatile format also to be considered. It is not always as convenient to work with HTML for educators, but if you have the technical support available, you could use HTML and then publish the material in the same way as publishing a website, which could be on the Internet or on a CD, pocket drive or memory stick.
Whatever you do, avoid making decisions based on ideologies that are not supported in the realities of your institution!
Let’s move on to publishing. Do your institutions have lists of acceptable publications in which you are expected to publish articles? I heard an academic lament that he had to publish in particular journals that were so expensive, not even his own institution could afford to subscribe to it. This person worked at an institution in one of the G8 countries so I wonder about those of us in developing countries?
Did you know that there are over 4,000 free, academic publications online? There is quite a range of journals in which you could publish, but this will depend on institutions deeming some of these 4,000 publications acceptable.
Here is a list of just the Open Access Distance Education Journals. I could not fit them on one slide and on four slides; you still cannot read the names. If a journal is not on the web today, you need to question: “why”. And if it is so expensive you cannot legally make copies for all your learners, you really need to question the economics of what you are doing.
All these journals can be found on the site and I encourage you to see if any of them suit your publication needs. If DEASA plans to continue publishing its journal started many years ago, it could consider doing this online and not endanger any trees at all.
So – you can see there are opportunities to publish in journals that do not cost too much for institutions and learners to access. Furthermore, if institutions or DEASA wishes to promote African research more, a free online journal has bigger potential of reaching the world than a few thousand printed copies. With over 4,000 free journals available to you to publish in, I hope to see many more quality publications emanating from Africa!
Even the publication of abstracts is sometimes not done, which means that people outside of the institution do not benefit from the research that is taking place. People outside of the continent could get the impression that “not much is happening over there”. I must ask – can we change this? Can we get to the point where the full text of research works are published on the Internet so that others can benefit from what IS happening in African countries?
If all our institutions were to publish their research work on the Internet, academics around the world would be able to see the quality of work being produced, quote it and gain respect for what is happening in Africa. For older research works, at least list the titles, authors and abstracts so that these could be requested on inter-library loan or visits to institutions could be arranged. This can be done on a regular web page on your institutional websites.
There is no shortage of existing repositories for academic research and so you do not have to create a major project, approach funders and so on.
To publish works at no cost, you could simply resort to one of the growing numbers of cloud services. Cloud services are online services that you can subscribe to rather than having to install locally. One such service, used by the US Government for President Obama is ‘Scribd’. With this free service, you can upload papers from individuals or teams and publish them to the Internet – Just like President Obama! The service is free and seems to work well for him.
Each learner can register individually and then join an institutional group in Scribd, as set up by a research committee. An archivist could have an account to upload older abstracts and link them to the same institutional group. Using this method is so easy; an institution can have this running by the end of the day.
Copyright – this is that “thorny issue” I was asked to talk about. I will not cover the bigger issue of intellectual property, I will not even mention patents and trademarks, nor will I talk much about “all rights reserved”, which you will see written on all the text books you are NOT allowed to copy for your learners.
Over the last few years, COL has published a number of documents aimed at helping Commonwealth Education Ministries improve their awareness on the topic of copyright. Some of these have focused on finding ways to reduce the cost of importing copyrighted materials and making use of the so called flexibilities in the internal copyright agreements.
You will find a free introductory book on our website that you can download and use for yourselves, and share with anyone else. It is free and it has been published under a Creative Commons license. A printed copy is available for the libraries of each of your institutions.
These are the options I will touch on now – all rights reserved and creative commons.
‘All rights served’ is what you all know. You may not copy copyrighted books. You may not copy the book even if it is out of print and you cannot buy copies any more. You may copy small pieces under the fair dealing provision under the laws of your country. You may not publish anything on the Internet that is copyrighted by anyone else.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation in the USA that has created a set of copyright licenses that you could use as an alternative to the ‘all rights reserved’ publication model we have used for so long. They have a set of licenses, which give you a few options. Based on these options, you will be saying to others that they MAY use your materials, so long as they conform to specific requirements.
If you choose to use materials that carry the CC-BY license, this means you are agreeing to include a reference to the original creator of the materials you are using. You can re-use, customise, publish and even profit from the materials.
If you are publishing your materials on the Internet with this license, you are asking others to credit the materials to you. You are also providing permission for others to re-use your materials, customise them and recover costs, including to generate a profit without asking your permission.
A Creative Commons license that bears the SA restriction requests the user of the material to share any new versions of the materials with others. For example, if you downloaded it from the Internet, you should post a copy of your customised version on the Internet for others to use.
The other rights and duties remain the same as the previous example.
One example of a website that uses the CC-BY-SA license is WikiEducator. Anything on this website can be used and customised as you like. You are expected to provide acknowledgement to WikiEducator as the source of the materials. And as I mentioned earlier, you can recover costs and profit from the use of materials found on the website.
If the Non-commercial restriction has been included, it means you can still download, customise and re-use the materials. You need to check the meaning of ‘non-commercial’ in your own country. As far as I have been advised, ‘commercialize’ refers to profiting from the materials. I have been told in a number of countries that the word ‘non-commercial’ still allows you to recover all costs and that this is not dependent on the kind of organisation. For example, even a publicly listed company would be able to use materials with a non-commercial license, provided the particular project using the materials is budgeted to break-even.
You need to check the website where you download materials from to see if there are specific interpretations related to this. Both the Open University of the UK and MIT in the USA have added their own interpretations to their website.
In the UKOU’s case, you will see that they state: “You may charge a fee for any value added services you add in producing or teaching based around the content providing that the content itself is not licensed to generate a separate, profitable income.”
MIT on the other hand interprets this slightly differently; they say: “Non-commercial: Use of MIT OpenCourseWare materials is open to all except for profit-making entities who charge a fee for access to educational materials.”
The moral of this story is that when using non-commercial material, it seems public sector and non-profit private sector institutions may use non–commercial materials, may charge registration fees, and may recover the full costs of reproduction of the materials, but may not profit from the materials.
For-profit enterprises should exercise a little more caution by first checking the legal notices and FAQs on the source website. In everyone’s case, standard advice is to check with your institution’s lawyer before proceeding!
The last of these restrictions is: ‘no derivative’. This means you can download and use the materials, reproduce them in full and give them to others, but not make any changes. All these restrictions operate independently. If there is a ND but no NC, it means you may not change the materials, but you may profit from it, and so on.
I get asked sometimes how useful a learning resource could be if the teacher cannot customise it – even though we use text books all the time that cannot be customised! Some source documents may be legal or medical in nature and so the originating author or institution may not want to take the chance of their name being referenced on a derivative work without being able to first check it. In this case, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has published this document and does not want anyone else to make changes to what they have said, although they don’t mind the document being duplicated and distributed free of charge.
All the licenses provided by Creative Commons could be used for learning resources that are uploaded to the Internet to be shared with others. Each of the licenses provides for different circumstances. Materials marked as “all rights reserved” cannot be legally copied or posted on the Internet. Therefore when you see the little ‘C’ in a circle, this is material that cannot be freely used or shared. The materials licensed under Creative Commons licenses can be used, but you need to understand what the terms of the license mean in your country and for this, you should speak to a lawyer.
COL has created a template to help you in the creation of learning materials for distance education use. It is available in three formats, - Word 2003, Word 2007 and OpenOffice 3. You can download it, customise and use it as you like. It is licensed as CC-BY-SA.
If you look for pictures and diagrams on the Internet, remember that you do not automatically have permission to use them in your materials. You need to check each website ‘s copyright page and if you find it says ‘all rights reserved’, rather find another way to get your graphics. Either create new ones or take your camera and take new pictures.
And now for a few examples:
Example 1
Here is an example of a book that was partly created on the Internet using a wiki, and then the author published the final book under an all rights reserved license for his own gain.
Example 2
This book was collaboratively created on a wiki and is available for free download on that wiki. The printed version of the book is available from a print-on-demand service for about USD$20. It shows how you can encourage people to help you create a book and then sell it!
Example 3
This book was published by MIT in the US. The full book is available for free download under a Creative Commons license, and the printed version can be ordered at about USD25 from the MIT Press.
Example 4
This is a book commissioned by COL. It is available free of change on our website – that is, you can download it free of charge. If you want a printed copy, you can print it on your computer’s printer, take it to a local printing company and print it at your own cost, or order a print-on-demand version.
So, in conclusion, this is what I recommend can be done:
1. Submit publications to open access journals so that anyone can afford to access them.
2. Use open access journals in the institution to promote free access to research and information.
3. Use a Creative Commons license when publishing works so that they can be shared and used.
4. Publish your (& your institution’s) work on the Internet! Let others find it, learn from it and quote it.
If you do this, you will be contributing to African institutions becoming more visible internationally. Hiding your research work in libraries and not publishing it on the Internet plays into the hands of some people who have a perception that ‘not much happens in Africa’. It is high time to show the world what good work is happening in Africa.
In closing, I would also like to announce that we will be handing out a free copy of the recently published book for each institution: “Perspectives on Distance Education: Open Schooling in the 21st Century”, edited by Dominque Abrioux and Frances Ferreira. The book’s contributors who are educators from around the world confirm that open schools can provide good-quality secondary education as long as senior policy-makers, bureaucrats and administrators are well informed about the key factors affecting success in open schooling; and that they use this knowledge to plan, implement and monitor their own open school initiatives.
Thank you for spending this time with me today.