I’ve just finished reading the latest Open Education primer – the much-blogged DIY U by Anya Kamenetz. Commentators have made the point that it’s difficult to work out her agenda – is she simply a critical friend of education, or does she have a stronger agenda? And does that really matter either way? At any rate, the last time an Open Education book really made such an impact was probably Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen, which offered a vision of a transformed school system, and readers more interested in opening up Higher Education had to work hard at interpreting the ideas across the sectors. By contrast, DIY U is written with higher education specifically in mind.

History never repeats

Kamenetz starts with an interesting history of higher education in the United States, in which she unfortunately views the past through the prism of the present at some points:

“Students sometimes offset the boredom by founding debating and literary societies, like Phi Beta Kappa in 1776.”

Were learning societies really founded on boredom brought about by the prevailing pedagogies? If so, where is the proof?

Right at the end, she attempts to bring us round full circle:

“Everyone explores, virtually and actually. Everyone contributes something unique. Everyone learns. This is the essence of the DIY U idea. It takes us back to the basics – the universitas (guild) and the collegium (community). People everywhere will have a greater ability to create their own learning communities and experiences within and outside institutions.”

It’s a nice ideal – I certainly buy into it. But it reads a little strange when she has devoted considerable space to lambasting the myth of the past earlier in the same book, for example her bald statement “There is no vanished tradition of serious scholarship.”

My fundamental problem with the book leads on from this observation. DIY U is juxtaposing formal higher education with a DIY-type alternative, however it is judging them on separate criteria. As other commentators have noted, she takes an entirely instrumentalist approach to formal education, looking at the material return on investment for the student plus the relationship between higher education and the broader economy. But once Kamenetz starts to examine DIY exemplars, then our old friend “learning for learning’s sake” makes a late appearance, for example this genuinely uplifting description of The School of Everything:

“In the average week, about three hundred people make a connection. A lot of them are on typical hobbyist subjects: music, yoga, foreign languages. There are also university professors whose intense enthusiasm for their subjects is not shared by their bleary-eyed 8:00am lecture attendees, so they sign up to chat about philosophy or physics with people who want learning for its own sake.”

True Dat

So what’s good about DIY-U? Well, whatever your views on the ideas behind the Open Education movement, the book unquestionably describes very serious shortcomings in the American higher education, and uncovers some uncomfortable truths – here’s one of her conclusions:

“So we’re looking at a system that charges the typical middle class student $11,000 a year for a bachelor’s degree at a flagship public university, paid for with publicly subsidized loans at 6 per cent a year, while the typical poor student pays $14,000 a year for an associate’s degree at a nonselective technical school, financed with nonsubsidized loans at 18 per cent a year.”

And she is right to argue that if the college experience is so wonderful with its “opportunities to stretch your abilities, test your personal mettle, follow your natural curiosity, and jam intellectually with friends, colleagues, and mentors” then it should be open to all, and not just those with good grades? And why should it be centred around 18 year olds who may not yet have the self-awareness necessary to choose the right studies? Kamenetz contrasts this picture with a host of down at heel Community College (roughly equivalent to the UK Further Education sector) students struggling to pursue part-time studies while working full-time, and eventually defeated by some unforeseen micro-disaster such as a car repair bill or a sick partner.

Opening up the Open Education Debate

Kamenetz has also given us a record of the achievements of the Open Education to date, that seems surprisingly up-to-date given that it appears in a printed book, and in so doing, has swerved around the temptation of technological determinism. She has joined the chorus that sings the praises of blended learning, and points to proven positive outcomes of this approach. She carefully defends the need for human interaction at a number of points in the book. This avoidance of technological determinism is important because it admits a non-geeky readership to the ideas of Open Education which, until a broader debate takes hold, will not be crossing the chasm into societal discourse around the transformational change the movement itself calls for.

Back to Disrupting Class, despite the fundamental flaw which the authors have recently acknowledged, namely that the ideas in the book all hang off a theory of diverse learning styles, that is widely discredited, what the book did offer was a vision. It was crude but it was a vision. The problem with DIY U is that it fails to deliver the vision that it promises. In fact the final chapter reads more like a self-help guide for 18 year olds. She has interesting ideas, and articulates a stronger belief in 18 year olds than many educationalists, but she’s some distance away from providing a blueprint. What the book is doing, though, is to trigger a debate about the fundamentals of higher education and whether it meets modern needs. That may be exactly what is needed at this juncture.

The version of Responding to recession: IT funding and cost management in higher education that I’m reviewing here is a free of charge summary of key findings, as opposed to the full-blown report that costs somewhere in the region of $750. The methodology used is a combination of a literature review, web-based survey supported by qualitative interviews with 20 IT leaders. The findings, whilst US-specific, are highly relevant to UK higher education. The framing questions include IT funding, cost management strategies and tactics, and the positioning of IT and the IT leader within the institution (including the ever-pertinent question – is IT a cost centre or an asset?)

The national picture

The report devotes over a page to the context of Higher Education in the US, particularly since the banking crisis of autumn 2008 onwards. This is well worth a read if you, like me, were struck by the immediacy of the impact of the crisis on US higher education. This nugget may cast further light on the specific problems faced by US universities:

In October of 2008, the credit crisis in the banking industry spilled over into higher education as nearly 1,000 institutions temporarily lost access to much of their assets invested with Commonfund. Colleges and universities had used this fund to hold their most liquid assets and depended on continued access to it to fund their payroll and other near-term operating expenses.

IT in crisis?

The point is made that higher education has fared reasonably well in the recession, compared to other industries in the US. And the first finding of the report is the overall shallowness of budget cuts to date:

While a small majority of respondents (53%) reported a decrease in their central IT operating budgets from FY2007-2008 to FY2009-2010, the magnitude of the decrease for most was less than we anticipated. Nearly a third of respondents (30%) reported an aggregate change of between 0% and 4%. Even more surprising, a similar percentage of respondents (31%) reported that their central IT operating budgets had increased over the same period, including 15% who reported increases of 5% or more.

Although it does qualify this finding…

Some institutions did not fare as well. Nearly a quarter of respondents experienced reductions of 10% or more to the central IT operating budget, including 10% who experienced a decrease of 15% or more.

And the report explicitly recognises that even a flat IT budget can be challenging even when maintaining core technologies, let alone adopting new ones. On this vein, respondents were generally pessimistic about funding adequacy, and:

Mean agreement was highest that funds were adequate to maintain critical IT operations reliably and to keep pace with vendor-mandated upgrades.

Where IT budgets grew, this is attributed to the need to sustain basic IT infrastructure, support projects in progress, or resource an increasing functional remit. It can also be the result of multi-year investments previously approved.

Too scared to save?

The area of spending to save is then broached.

Almost a third of respondents with decreased central IT operating budgets (29.4%) reported that the lack of up-front funding to induce savings was a top-three factor limiting IT cost reduction.

This takes us, of course, to a recurrent theme in recession discourse – the perfect storm, and the opportunity to bring in transformational technologies such as cloud computing, mobile devices and green IT. At the start of the report, the authors state that:

We pursued the notion that a crisis is also an opportunity to take more aggressive action to introduce changes that under normal circumstances would not be politically or culturally possible.

Respondents disagreed that economic crisis had “catalyzed fundamental change”:

As bad as things were, they may not have been bad enough to overcome higher education’s innate resistance to change that comes too fast or too radical. Looking beyond IT to the academy as a whole, we have seen few examples of substantial change or aggressive risk-taking. It is impractical and unwise for IT leaders to get too far out in front of their institutional leadership in calling for change. It may also be a sign that leaders are still somewhat ambivalent about the benefits of some of the more substantial changes available to them. Cloud computing, software as a service, and multi-institutional collaborations promise savings through economies of scale. But, their track records are fairly short, some are difficult to implement, and all carry risks that must be managed.

Personally, I think it’s worth asking whether this risk-averse tendency is inherent to higher educational institutions, or whether, in part at least, it has been induced by economic crisis, widely blamed on an over-risky financial sector. Either way, an inability to invest for longer-term productivity gains is problematic.

Cost centre or area for investment?

Consistent with this conservative approach, an examination of patterns of adoption revealed that most institutions favoured actions that yielded quick and controllable cost savings – hiring freezes, travel and training budget cuts, elongation of replacement cycles, and so forth, compared to more long-term measures such as consolidation of local server management or retiring under-utilised or duplicated technologies. On the other hand, projects with higher potential returns on investment remain strongly prioritised across the sector.

A failure or reluctance to engage in initiatives that deliver longer term gains presents the risk of IT being defined as a cost centre rather than an area for investment, and so high levels of risk aversion may prove damaging over time.

One step ahead

With all this in mind, what next for higher education IT? In both the US and the UK, there is much talk about a “double dip recession” and a “jobless recovery”, and the report has this to say about the impact of a weak economy:

Persistent structural problems and a slowly recovering economy are likely to sustain higher education’s focus on its costs for many years to come. In this regard, higher education IT organizations should sustain their focus on IT cost management and prepare for budgets that will grow slowly and may endure additional cuts. However, the coming years need not be a period of decline and retrenchment for IT. The long-term fiscal pressures institutions will face should increase their interest in using technology to address their most strategic issues.

In other words, IT is an investment rather than a cost centre, and IT leaders with the courage to invest in long-term gains in this adverse climate need support right to the top of the institution.

This title of a new article in In Education says it all, and I couldn’t agree more. Incidentally, why have I never come across In Education before? According to the blurb of this Open Access journal, it has been in existence since 1993, but published its first issue as an online journal in December of 2009. The May 2010 issue is rich in promising articles, and Small steps across the chasm: Ideas for embedding a culture of Open Education in the university sector may not be the only one I blog about.

The paper aims to “present recommendations for change within higher education to help ensure that universities can remain relevant”, drawing frequently on the 2009 Demos report Edgeless University to warn universities not to take the same “heads in the sand” approach that was taken by record companies a decade ago, and indeed quotes that same report here:

The next stage of technological investment must be more strategic. The sector currently lacks a coherent narrative of how institutions will look in the future and the role of technology in the transition to a wider learning and research culture.

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before

The question is how best to take those small steps across the chasm. We must take care not to allow the body of theory around the Open Education Movement to fossilise and become insular from the exciting initiatives taking place on the ground. This article quotes quite a lot of theory to support its arguments, but I’d argue that we’ve heard a lot of it before, for example this excerpt:

By providing value to learners outside of the established academic model, the application of Web 2.0 technologies could be the disruptive influence that is instrumental in moving traditional hierarchical broadcast models of education, structured around a defined body of knowledge, towards a networked approach which is more adaptive to the needs of learners.

A case study approach

It’s when the case studies are introduced that the article takes on a fresher feel.

The first case study describes a social psychology module in which an e-learning component substituted a weekly seminar class. As the article points out:

Students were therefore “forced” to use technology as a learning tool as their task was to debate a psychological problem online which was part of their assessed work, accounting for 25% of the unit.

The students were marked on the basis of three criteria – academic contribution criteria, evidence of reading around the subject, and independent thought. Interestingly, when annual student evaluations and comparison performance data were analysed, it was found that “over a three-year period, students generally achieved higher marks on this component of the unit than on the more formal components such as critiquing a paper or individual essay writing.”

The findings are presented and evaluated thus:

For the UK participants, learning through technology presented opportunities to contribute at both sociable and unsociable hours, as well as enjoying the advantages of working from home – not having to physically attend classes, which was a positive bonus for some. Other participants found that having to proactively debate a real-world issue motivated them to read more widely around the topic area. Conversely, the Taiwanese and Chinese students found that being able to make their point after deliberate consideration, practicing their writing skills and having more time to be secure in the knowledge that their contribution was the best they could achieve was a better fit for their own value systems.

and…

There was more variety in negative comments, the most common being that participants missed the face to face contact with others and the tutors. This is a problem in virtual environments when the absence of non-verbal cues curtails the development of cohesion and trust.

Signposts of the revolution

It’s not just that the case studies make for an engrossing read, although that’s very true. The authors themselves refer to “possible signposts of the revolution”, and I would argue that these small-scale exemplars such as this are set to be the best signposts for the revolution that the Open Education is anticipating. So it’s imperative that strategic and theoretical development occurs in tandem with the findings of ground-level initiatives. A related problem is the constant references to “producing graduates that the modern business world would wish to employ. Trouble is, we don’t actually know what the future business world will look like. This is a really important point; innovation is open-ended. That’s one of the main reasons why we need to be looking carefully at these small steps across the chasm that are being made in different locations across Higher Education. And every time we make a small incremental step, we should always make sure we survey the changing landscape, refer back and modify the theory, and then step forward again.

So my final quotation from the article gets it partly right, in my opinion:

A JISC report concludes that while advice and guidance is available to institutions, there is no blueprint for the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies, so each university is currently deciding its own path.

The big truth is that there’s no real blueprint for anything right now, and you can either see that as a bleak landscape, or you can see it as an open one.

Talis is proud to support the launch of the Creative Commons’ Catalyst Campaign, which will be running from now through to June 30th, raising money to fund its Catalyst Grants programme.

The aim of these Catalyst Grants is to make it possible for individuals and organizations to harness the power of Creative Commons. For example, one grant might enable a group in a developing country to research how Open Educational Resources can positively impact its community. Another could support a study of entrepreneurs using Creative Commons licences to create a new class of socially responsible businesses. Anyone can apply forCatalyst Grants, the value of which range from $1,000 to $10,000.

Creative Commons needs the help of all of its supporters to raise  $100,000 to fund the grants that will make all this possible. Donate today to help spread our mission of openness and innovation across all cultural and national boundaries.

The Milan Chamber of Commerce has generously donated EUR 10,000 to jumpstart the effort.

We can all help by…

Advocating: Take a moment to spread the word about the Creative Commons Catalyst Campaign and Grants program on your blog and social networks with banners and buttons.

Donating: If you give $75 or more, you can become the proud owner of a bright and cheerful, limited edition “I Love to Share” t-shirts.

Every bit helps so give what you can today to ignite openness and innovation around the world!

Talis has announced the winners of its Talis Incubator fund set up in September last year to further the cause of Open Education through the use of technology. Interestingly, it was the small-scale nature of the funding – £1,000-£15,000 being awarded to each successful bidder – that seemed to prove most attractive to the learning technology community. Funding channels are already awarded elsewhere for larger projects, but these smaller allocations seemed to meet a need at grassroots practitioner level. The Talis Incubator has been able to attract an impressive group of individuals who together form the Talis Incubator Review Board. All six board members share a commitment to open practices within education, facilitated by technology, and see the Talis Incubator as an important way of helping get the best innovative ideas off the ground.

Following a lightweight open peer review of submissions, we’re proud to announce the three winners of the first round of awards:

Drawtivity

To date it has been difficult if not impossible to make changes to educational images – for example to introduce explanatory animation or enable interactivity with students – due to the underlying complexity of digital images and lack of interoperability between different image authoring software tools. Webducate’s Drawtivity interface will make it easier to reuse educational images, and enable students to interact with those images, offering considerable potential for assessment activities. Andy Lane, one of the Review Board members, was particularly impressed with the potential for open assessment – remarking that tools in this area are badly needed.  On receiving the award, Tony Lowe from Webducate said, “I am extremely excited about bringing this idea to life and also about getting to work more closely with the OpenEd community.  I feel a bit daunted too considering the high standard of the competition and the interest this is likely to generate.”

Moodle Course Repository

Joseph Thibault and his team plan to build a repository of every course ever created on Moodle, as most of the valuable content is currently locked up behind individual installations. The Moodle Course Repository would make it easier to share resources, activities or even entire courses, without compromising the security of users’ personal data. Steve Ryan echoed many thoughts on the Review Board when he remarked that “if it achieves only a small part of what it sets out to do, it will be worth funding”. Joseph said it was an honour to have the chance to advance Moodle and open educational resources worldwide through the Talis Incubator, and his team was “really excited to be giving users an easier way to share their content and find new course templates, resources and Creative Commons licensed materials”. He added that “Teachers everywhere will be enabled to share. Students everywhere stand to reap the benefits.”

TwHistory

The TwHistory project looks at the potential of Twitter to deliver exciting new ways to study history. Tweets are sent out at an appropriate day and time, as if a historical event were happening at that exact time. Using a group of volunteers, for example, the Battle of Gettysburg was tweeted using journals and letters from fifteen soldiers present at the battle. The project aims to simplify this process, enabling more educators, students and volunteers to create their own TwHistory events. David Wiley loved the idea, and noted that “it does seem to be gaining ground with educators. Making it significantly easier to do, as with the tools they’re proposing, would fuel the fire.” The Review Board was also excited about the potential of this idea beyond the field of history.

As Marion Jensen, TwHistory’s creator and project manager explained, “We’ve spoken with many teachers and historians about TwHistory, and the idea has really generated a lot of excitement. But we see that excitement dim when we explain the rather difficult process involved. The generous grant from Talis will provide a simple way for students and teachers to create their own Twitter re-enactments, as well as find and follow other re-enactments on the web. We are very grateful to Talis for their support.”

For Chris Clarke, Programme Manager of Talis Education Division, the high standard of all the bids received was impressive, and everyone at Talis looks forward to following the progress of the winners, and working with them to evaluate what the outcomes mean for learning and teaching in education.