Billy Meinke

23
Dec
2016
Discovering OER Production Workflows

Discovering OER Production Workflows

We’re building steam to carry our OER efforts into 2017 by getting into the nitty gritty of the production cycle, how open learning content is actually adopted and modified for use. Textbook production workflows are a useful place to start when you’re seeking a model of OER production that will work for your community. But there are some nuances about developing OER, such as designing for reuse and leveraging outside volunteer efforts that may place greater demands on a project and change the processes for creating content. This post will review some interesting examples of OER production workflows and how their ideas may support the UH system as we move into the production cycle for our first open textbooks.

Messy desk space

Image by Jeff Sheldon / CC0

Considerations for OER

The production cycle for an OER course often varies from that of an OER textbook, largely because textbooks don’t always have pedagogical or delivery dependencies that could require more of the project (beware of scope creep!). An OER textbook is a knowledge base for the course, and may or may not include activities or assessments, but is “alive” for continuous improvement as a foundation for a course or workshop. Developing an assignment or assessment bank, for example, means including another OER product that may need its own workflow or extension/inclusion in the primary workflow for a textbook alone. Properly scoping the OER project is essential, regardless of how developed the workflow might be.

OERu’s Workflow

I have a lot of appreciation for the OERu’s mention of Raymond’s  release early, release often approach to developing OER. Content improves as more eyes are put on it, and it’s important to realize how many other individuals might be working on an OER similar to yours. What could you learn from them? What could they do for you?  This relates to BC Campus idea of having OER projects live in Open Creations mode, where they publish after each piece of remaining production work, and advertise tasks still to be done. I’m not sure how many takers they’ve had, but the point is that there’s an invitation for collaboration. Their OPEN sign is lit up.

OERu points out the modularity of their approach, breaking the OER production cycle into 5 parts:

  • Select
  • Design
  • Develop
  • Deliver
  • Revise

There are expectations of following a series of milestones in each step or phase in the cycle, finishing with a delivery and feedback loop. In theory, the course feedback would inform anyone who wished to improve or update the course for themselves or for the existing course.

OERu Workflow

OERu OER workflow / Wikieducator.org / CC BY-SA

It reminds me of the ADDIE model for instructional content development, which is still a popular method despite being used to support behaviorist instructional strategies. In OERu’s cycle, OER receive peer review during their initial development, and then as part of each delivery of the course. This model can likely be used as a starting point for a unique OER production workflow, as it has useful descriptions of each step without other distracting details.

CORRE

This framework was part of a 2011 presentation by Gabi Witthaus, (University of Leicester), Julian Prior (University
of Bath), Sam O’Neill (University of Derby), Alejandro
Armellini (University of Leicester) that explained the process for the University of Leicester’s (and others in their network) of OER production and development. The CORRE model is “a framework for transforming teaching materials into OER” which assumes that those who implement the model will have a substantial amount of known materials available to support the building of an OER. They emphasize four phases:

  • Content
  • Openness
  • Reuse & Repurpose
  • Evidence

CORRE framework for OER development

This framework gets into the specifics of OER production such as screening and clearing rights of OER, and preparing the OER for release in multiple formats. Colors indicate the specific collaborator/roles charged with delivering or helping complete part of a phase. Further on in the slide deck (linked in the image above) there is mention of a modified CORRE model by the University of Bath. Just like each person’s ideal version of the same OER – the way they would deliver it –  is different, I expect that institutions will have their own ideal version of a common production workflow . This one may be less off-the-shelf ready for application than OERu’s, depending on the staff and expertise available.

Additional Conceptual Frameworks

As part of the very-comprehensive OER Workshop self-learning wiki course, David Porter mentioned these two models. The first emphasizes the license on the OER as the key indicator of how others can share and/or modify the resource. The legal rights associated with OER are what give it wings, but not all CC licenses work the same way and can be edited or remixed with other OER.

OER workflow / Wikieducator.org / CC BY-SA 3.0

Another cycle mentioned on the wiki is one that assumes you are working with a pool of relevant OER, for which the rights have been cleared. The COMPOSE phase of this cycle encapsulates steps (again) similar to ADDIE, but as a loop and with the front end Analysis step rolled into the FIND step. An expectation here is that the desired knowledge or information has been clearly identified as the “something” a teacher or learner wants.

OER Development Cycle / Wikieducator.org / CC BY-SA 3.0

David did this work ahead of the successful BC Campus Open Textbook Project, so we can assume these above two models are along the path towards productive work with OER. They may be most useful when describing OER production in a zoomed out way, but do well to cover the basics when it comes to explaining how OER are created and reused.

Technical Diagram*

An output of the JISC #UKOER program, Lisa Rogers (Heriot-Watt University) shared a technical diagram for OER production, with useful indicators of decision points and transitions beginning with an OER content audit. Their detailed diagram includes five phases through which an OER being developed might move:

  • Creation
  • Quality Control
  • Technical
  • IPR Negotiation
  • Cataloguing

OER Workflow Diagram by Lisa Rogers – Heriot-Watt University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.5 UK: Scotland License

Provided there is the legal expertise available, this diagram would support the important rights-clearing steps associated with releasing and combining OER. What’s missing is the detail of the Technical Work step, which probably deserves a diagram of its own.

*Note: This diagram resource recently (today) disappeared from the Heriot-Watt University website, but an important Snapshot was saved by the Wayback Machine. Huzzah!

What’s actually going to support us?

My search for workflows was inspired by Rebus’ Hugh McGuire and his post on the forum inviting others to build on his draft project description. Signaling for others to contribute to a project is a nice gesture, but less useful unless discrete parts of the development process are identified. Thus, it makes sense to have a workflow to use for planning and mapping out milestones, not only for those formally involved with the project but also those volunteering from the outer community. Others need to know how they can pitch in.

Finding a workflow that works in our OER circle will involve answering some questions about the resources we have, end points we’d like to reach, and how each institution in the UH system can share steps in the production cycle. I’m hopeful for constructive dialog that will help refine workflows that work for us, and have already sent out a call for participation with our first open textbook creation project.

Happy holidays, everyone!

See you in the New Year.

Posted by Billy Meinke in OER, Open Textbooks
08
Dec
2016

Technical Openness of OER and Pressbooks

Something we take for granted when it comes to Open Educational Resources (OER) is that there is a simple solution to the legal restraints on content. Creative Commons licenses are the gold standard for releasing content, making it clear that you would like others to build upon and share your work.

But the legal openness of content is only one side, and the technical openness of content is easily overlooked. Just because you have the legal rights to edit and revise or adapt an OER does not mean that it is easy to do so. Borrowing from Wiley’s Open Definition page that explains both legal and technical openness, this post will explain some of the reasoning behind our decision to use Pressbooks as the platform of choice for working with OER at UH.

Tools for craft making

Wiley offers the ALMS framework for assessing the technical openness of open content:

  • Access to editing tools
  • Level of expertise required
  • Meaningfully editable
  • Self-sourced

In a nutshell, the above criteria can be asked as a series of questions when trying to understand how easily you can edit OER. Does the file format the OER is shared in require expensive software to work with? Must you be an expert using specific tools to make changes to the OER? Are we talking about a PDF here, or an HTML page? These are all things to consider as they can present barriers to anything beyond an off-the-shelf adoption in which the adopting party makes no changes to the work. For educational uses, this rarely works well.

Enter Pressbooks.

Pressbooks is a variation of the popular WordPress content management system (CMS) that supports more than 60 million of websites, a huge chunk of the Web. Pressbooks is different than the WordPress you may have encountered in the past, in that it has been set up with controls and features designed to make the publishing process easier.

To be sure, lots of different content creation software and suites can be used to make OER. Tools ranging from MS Word to Google Sites can all create and house content, but a limiting factor of a many of these is that they require that same software to edit OER created in them. What if I want to re-use OER someone made in a piece of software I don’t have? This is often the case, and can drag a project to a halt.

Reason #1: No lock-in

Pressbooks export options

One of the most powerful features of Pressbooks is that it exports to a variety of formats that can be read and edited elsewhere. It should come as no surprise that editing a Pressbook inside Pressbooks is easiest, but a Pressbook can be exported to ePub, PDF, MOBi, and a range of XML flavors among other options. This means that content created in Pressbooks will be readable by almost any device, and is likely available in a format that you will be able to edit with free software. Content in, content out, so to speak.

Reason 2: Editor and reader all in one

Pressbooks editing screen

With Pressbooks, the editor and the viewer are all in the same location. Just like any other website, a Pressbook can be edited on the fly by an author or contributor. As I’ve been telling faculty lately, “if you can edit a webpage, you can edit a Pressbook.” This is what firmly places control over the content in the hands of instructional faculty, something traditional textbook publishers simply do not offer. For example, if you were reading one of BC Campus’ textbooks produced in Pressbooks, it takes very few steps to grab an export of their content and import it into your own Pressbooks instance. This is what we’re going to be offering to faculty within the UH system that first complete training in OER, copyright, and using Pressbooks. The power to create and adapt OER will be in the hands of everyone who wants it.

Reason 3: A community of makers

Pressbooks codebase on Github

One sign of a successful software project is that there is a community of end-users and developers who actively work to make the software better. Pressbooks only has one part-time developer working on the codebase, which on the surface may seem worrisome. But if you look deeper and realize that there are 23 developers who have committed code to the core codebase, and dozens more who are working on their own version of the software, you see that it’s a much bigger project. Pressbooks supports the BC Campus Open Textbook project, OPEN SUNY, and Lumen Learning’s flagship OER platforms. It’s the community of folks working on the codebase, and working with OER inside of Pressbooks that makes it a solid choice for us to begin our own OER initiative with.

This post hopefully provides some of the reasoning behind our planned use of Pressbooks at UH. I’m currently working with faculty inside a development instance of Pressbooks to give it a ride around the block and learn what aspects of working with OER inside Pressbooks will need support and training. If you’re interested in tinkering around with Pressbooks yourself, get in touch with us at oer @ hawaii.edu.

Posted by Billy Meinke in OER
21
Nov
2016

Say it like you mean it: Describing revision and remixing of OER

In my new role as the OER Technologist for the UH Manoa campus, I’m charged with helping faculty adopt OER resources, primarily “open textbooks”. Without getting into the details of it, faculty at higher ed institutions in the U.S. find comfort and confidence in OER resources that are packaged as a textbook. Although we are trying to move away from using the term textbook to describe OER, it’s still a term that helps us have more productive conversations with faculty who are new to (or are skeptical about) OER. I’ll keep using it for now.

A building in Montreal that has been built upon

A building in Montreal that has been built upon / Image from Imgur (no creator shown)

But just as we use the term textbook to have productive conversations about adopting OER, I’ve been brainstorming ways to describe the adaptation, revision, and remixing ultimately necessary to cement the adoptions. The open license on an OER permits reuse and repurposing, without which faculty could not make the book their own; they can’t take the steps needed to mould the OER content into materials that will work with their teaching style and with their students. So what language should we be using?

It’s important to mention here that a great deal of OER reuse and revisions happen in the dark, in places where we don’t see what changes have actually been made to the OER. Could these changes benefit others who are re-using the same OER? Maybe. Or would the original creators of the OER want to see how their work is being remixed? Probably. Heck, they might even want to roll some of those changes back into the MASTER version of the OER. I wrote about a need for better version control (git) for content back in March, if you’re interested.

Part of my interest in sussing out useful language to describe reuse and remixing comes from my upcoming work with faculty on their OER adoptions, specifically scoping the editing/revision work they wish to do with the OER. Will this be an off-the-shelf adoption, or one that includes sweeping changes to the structure and content of the OER? Probably not the former. So let’s begin.

Revision and remixing

Here are some terms to begin with:

  • Revising: Altering the textual content or media in an OER
  • Adding: Including new (previously unlicensed) textual content or media in an OER
  • Remixing: Combining two or more existing OER

On the surface, the act of revising an OER seems like a lighter-duty task thanremixing, but as the amount of content to be revised grows (ie a 1300-page textbook), even revision can take a great deal of work. Revising OER includes activities such as editing the tone or voice of the content, removing or reordering sections, and moving topics between chapters or modules. When we revise OER, we’re primarily talking about changing individual pieces of existing OER content, not adding new content.

Once the existing OER has been squeezed and stretched to the limits of its usefulness, we add content. This comes in the form of including more local examples that explain concepts, adding links to supporting research or media content, and including activities that can extend the content – such as curation or constructive activities that benefit the world’s knowledge (such as improving a Wikipedia article or contributing a choral explanation to the content). Whether we are adding new instructional content to the OER, or including new activities that encourage students to produce knowledge, the addition of content is the step important to any OER adoption.

The third of three terms, I expect many OER adopters to be interested inremixing multiple OER into one (or a cohesive set of them) that works for them. Now, we can safely assume that most new OER included in the remix will require some sort of revision (and possibly addition of new content) before its ready to be incorporated into the whole. If the base OER (the content we begin with) needed some work before prime time, the other OER we include will probably need some reworking as well. Exceptions to this exist of course, as it’s not reasonable to expect we can (or need to) edit or modify every openly licensed video, simulation, or research article we remix into our OER. But when we remix multiple OER, a certain amount of revision should be expected to help it “fit” into the base content.

Say it like you mean it

What this leads me to believe is that the more clearly we can describe the work needed to adopt OER, the fewer surprises and bumps in the road we’ll encounter. Instructional faculty have been reusing full-copyrighted instructional and research content without permission for decades, moreso since the mid-90’s when the Web made it dead simple to copy and share. And if they did revise or remix that content, it was done behind closed doors and in most cases never saw the light of day, for fear of legal issues, or simply because there was no reason to document it.

Now that we have explicit rights to reuse and repurpose content, we should be actively working to use language that describes OER activities. OER adoptions can include a great deal of work, and better tracking and describing of the work that goes into an OER adoption would go along way to support others who are considering working with OER.

Just as the Mozilla Science Lab has been working on badges that show who, what, and how folks have contributed to a published research paper, I’d to give credit to those who adapt OER and open the doors for all sorts of neat things to happen. Once we can better describe all the steps and work needed for successful adoptions, we can begin to look at giving credit to those who do the work. Now that sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

*This writing was originally published on billymeinke.com and reposted here under the CC BY license.

Posted by Billy Meinke in OER
14
Nov
2016

Takeaways from the OpenEd16 conference

This post is a collaborative summary of the Open Education 2016 conference by Billy Meinke, Beth Tillinghast, Sunny Pai, Helen Toregoe and Carol Hasegawa.

A handful of us were in attendance at this year’s OpenEd16 conference, which took place two weeks ago in downtown Richmond, Virginia. Record numbers were in attendance, and the conference served as common meeting ground for those building OER communities and resources.

UH folks at OpenEd16 conference

This year’s conference focused on a swath of topics including the “how” of successful open textbook projects, open pedagogical practices, and the future of OER content.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Open Pedagogy

Various projects were showcased at the conference, highlighting the possibilities of what can happen in the classroom when the content is open. As it was explained by David Wiley, organizer of the conference:

People learn when they do things

Copyright restricts what we are allowed to do

Open permits us to do new things

How will doing new things impact learning? Will we learn more? More deeply? Different things?

For those unfamiliar with Open Pedagogy, it essentially means that student in a given course are tasked with being producers of knowledge as part of their grade in the course, not just consuming content. OER are legally-open resources that can be built upon, and Open Pedagogy describes tools and methods of exploring how learners can benefit from knowledge co-creation.

Any example of Open Pedagogy can be found in Robin De Rosa’s blog post where she discusses the process she went through having her former students and student assistants help her create an open textbook covering Early American Literature. This is a great example of how students can contribute to OERs, becoming part of the content production process.

Meaningful Editing of OER

Adopting an open textbook often assumes that a certain level of adaptation need to be made before it will “fit” the style of the instructor and students. OER in come in many technical formats (ie .pdf, .doc), but not are as easy to edit as we like. Fortunately, the technical systems that make it easy to edit OER are improving, and many conference attendees were sharing their experiences using the Pressbooks platform to adopt and revise open textbooks.

Two groups who are building and supporting the adoption of open textbooks using Pressbooks as a platform are BC Campus and the Open Textbook Network. Each of them shared a guide to editing OER on the Pressbooks platform, which are worth a look.

Brad Payne from BCCampus gave a presentation that highlighted overlaps between the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement, and hinted at work he is doing to build technology that improves collaboration on OER content. Two ideas that are supporting this work include 1) Stigmergy, which relates to the traces of our collective behaviors to collaborating on OER, and 2) Choral explanations, which are a form of stigmergy in which the collection of “good explanations” to answers about instructional content can help maintain and sustain effective OER.

Open Citation

David Kernohan’s (of JISC and the former UK OER effort) talk focused an intriguing historic lens on the tangled web of authors and publishers and how current measures of scholarly output & reputation need to be reconsidered and brought into the open. For more on this, see the Wikipedia article on altmetrics.

The OER Degree Initiative

The Open Educational Resources (OER) Degree Initiative, supported by Achieving the Dream, seeks to boost college access and completion, particularly for underserved students, by engaging faculty in the redesign of degree programs through the replacement of proprietary textbooks with open educational resources. This three year program started working with 38 community colleges in March 2016 and Bunker Hill CC, Santa Ana College, Central Virginia CC, and San Jacinto CC shared their early experiences. Some of their challenges included working with their institutions to change their class availability systems to identify OER courses, getting faculty buy-in, and navigating copyright questions.

A Synthesis of OER Efficacy and Perceptions Research: 2015-2016

John Hilton shared a few real life stories about how saving on textbook costs helps students with their basic living costs, then reviews studies that show how students using OER have been getting better grades and using their savings to sign up for more courses. OER use has also reduced drop rates, saving colleges significant sums as students are better able to persevere and finish their courses.

Netease: China corporate sponsor of OER

The 3rd biggest internet provider of online games & email service in China, Netease has spent 40 million yuan/year for the past 6 years to support a dedicated staff of 100 to service the higher educational needs of 18-35 year olds. High school in China, as in Japan, is rigorous; college is not, so Netease is addressing the learning gap to better prepare youth for the competitive and increasingly global job market.

Secrets to Success as a Faculty OER Champion

Linda S. Williams, a Business Professor at Tidewater Community College, is known for leading the first textbook free (Z Degree) program in the nation. She posits that “The most successful OER initiatives are those that are faculty driven and administratively supported. Key to this success are faculty champions who either by design or desire take on the role of OER advocate.”

She shared three important lessons she learned as a faculty OER champion at her school:

  1. Commitment – Takes an incredible level of commitment.  Commitment requires thick skin, because not everyone wants what you are selling.  But you can’t waiver.
  2. Consensus – Think about building consensus. Can you build consensus among the department?
  3. Community – Find people around you who will partner with you, to help you over the rocky times.  She formed a Z-degree advisory committee. Community is very important.

Finally, she stated “leadership is the ability to walk away from something and not have it fail.”

Pathways: Facilitating an online OER Training for Faculty

Since Fall 2014, 96 faculty at Tidewater Community College (TCC) have completed the 6-week online asynchronous “Adopting OER in the Classroom” training.  Per TCC’s OER policy, the librarians provide pathways, support, and training, and therefore facilitate the faculty training twice per semester.  It is not mandated but required of faculty before being allowed to teach a z-degree course.  Faculty choose to participate because they 1) want to teach a  developed z-course, 2) convert to z-course, or 3) interested but not yet teaching a z-course.

More stories & storytelling in presentations

Patterns emerge when you attend a marathon of 25 minute sessions over 2 days.

One thread noticed was the use of storytelling by multiple presenters, including the keynote speaker, Sara Goldrick-Rab. Narrative is a research method, the qualitative enriches the quantitative measures of assessment. Stories linger with us.

In sum

The OpenEd16 conference was a valuable experience for everyone involved, and the folks from the UH System who attended have brought back a renewed vision for OER and many great ideas. Looking forward to next year.

Posted by Billy Meinke in Conference, OER
31
Oct
2016

Next steps for OER at UH

Over the last few years, Sara Rutter has done a fantastic job promoting OER adoption at the Manoa campus and supporting the OER community across the UH system. The UH community colleges have done amazing work themselves, with Leeward Community College and Kapiolani Community College leading the way with OER/Zero-cost textbooks, OER Fellowship programs, and broad creation/adoption of OER by instructors and faculty at their campuses.

We’ve had success at the Manoa campus as well, with the Department of Physics and Astronomy now a year-and-a-half into their adoption of the OpenStax Physics textbook in their PHYS 151 and PHYS 152 courses. Other adoptions of OER to replace costly commercial textbooks are imminent, but it will take a great deal of work to get there.

Creative Commons staff 2013

Although I’ve been in the role for several weeks now, I’d like to officially announce that I am now the OER Technologist for the UH Manoa Outreach College. I come into this role from the Distance Course Design and Consulting (DCDC) Group, an innovative digital design arm of the College of Education at UH Manoa, where I managed online program and course design projects. Before that, I worked for Creative Commons (CC), the global non-profit whose licenses have liberated over a billion digital works through open copyright. At CC I supported hundreds of institutions with open licensing their educational content as OER, and fell more deeply in love with free software and open practices.

I have big plans for OER at Manoa and throughout the system. Most of my time will be spent between advocacy and platform, meaning that I will be championing the use of OER in courses, and working on an OER platform for the UH system. One of the incredible benefits to working with OER is that they can be adopted, revised, remixed, and shared with others, but unfortunately, useful technology for OER revision hasn’t matured as well as the community would like. I am now working with UH ITS to spin up an instance of the WordPress-based publishing platform called Pressbooks.

Global leaders in the OER space such as BC Campus, OPEN SUNY, and Lumen Learning have all found success using Pressbooks, and I have high hopes for this platform and it’s ability to allow faculty to import OER and make it their own.

BC Campus Physiology and Anatomy open textbook

There will also be some changed to the oer.hawaii.edu website, but the core pieces will stay the same. The UH OER Repository will continue to accept OER submissions and ratings, and this blog isn’t going anywhere.

For those of you with whom I have already worked, I look forward to collaborating further. And if we have not yet met, I look forward to working with you for the first time 🙂

Billy Meinke headshot

Sincerely,

Billy Meinke

wmeinke@hawaii.edu

Posted by Billy Meinke in OER, UH Manoa