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Cole Camplese has a piece on pushback against MOOCs over on his blog. In it, he asks:

(N)ow that the MOOC thing has happened the same people who built rallying calls for more open access to learning are now rejecting this movement. Why? Because it is driven by corporations trying to make money? Because it isn’t really open? Because the press isn’t giving a few people the credit they believe they deserve? Because these aren’t really courses? Ok … that sounds like the same stuff we’ve always dealt with.

The hype around MOOCs is identical to things we have been dealing with for a while. EdTech and Higher Ed have a bad habit of looking for a messiah. Remember when Second Life revolutionized education? Before that, remember when the "free" web made charging for things obsolete? Good times.

He then answers his question:

Yes, the way the current MOOC landscape is shaking out has little to do with real honest to goodness open access. MOOCs are still closed in that you have to take the time to actually enroll in a “course” and take it over a period of time. I guess the true open crowd would prefer that everything just live on the Internet within “open” spaces like youtube and blogs. The reality of that is that it didn’t work and won’t for quite some time.

That last line - "reality of that is that it didn’t work and won’t for quite some time" - bears greater attention. Who didn't it work for? People have been learning in the open for years. Open source communities build amazing things, and have complex communication, and solve difficult problems, in the open. The people who took the original MOOCs learned things. People participating in ds106 are learning things. So, when we say that something isn't working, it's imperative to ask who it isn't working for.

And there is an excellent point to be made that the early MOOCs, and informal learning in general, didn't and don't work for people who need a degree or a certificate or some other formal proof of learning as a step on the path toward greater social and economic mobility. However, the limited information we have about who is taking the platform-based MOOCs shows that these implementations are really serving those who already have ready access to jobs and higher education - in other words, the platform-based MOOCs are slanted heavily toward the "haves".

Looking at it from this perspective, it seems like the early MOOCs served learners well, but didn't serve the organizations accrediting learning very effectively. The learning process within the original MOOCs was learner-centered, sprawling, and messy, and that takes time to certify. If we had to look at what "didn't work" and for whom, there's a good case to be made that MOOCs worked better for learners than for institutions; this is the "problem" that I see the platform-based MOOCs attempting to solve.

Cole ends his piece with a call for reflection:

I want all my ed tech friends to chill out. To enjoy the fact that this is progress. That this isn’t selling out. That this is a step in the right direction. That this has the attention of faculty, administrators, and boards of trustees. That without that attention, this moment wouldn’t be happening. That our job isn’t to bash the movement but to do what we have always done — move it in the right direction using positive energy.

What is currently happening with MOOCs is not selling out, at least not by the people who developed the concept. The platform-based MOOCs certainly co-opted an idea, and are using it as they see fit. That is their prerogative, but I'm not sure that passes as progress. Undoubtedly, MOOCs have increased talk around the benefit of open learning, but equating the platform-based MOOCs with open learning is comparable to saying that you went on a wildlife tour after going to the zoo. The point of MOOCs - in any flavor - is to help more people learn more effectively, and get the benefit they want from the process of learning and the knowledge gained from that process. If something advances that needle, awesome. If it doesn't, then it's okay to point that out. I'm glad that better conversations are occurring. But, within the space of those conversations, it's okay to point out how things could be better, or when logical inconsistencies are being applied at scale (also known as marketing). If that critique is part of what informs additional work and learning, that is positive energy.

I'm getting ready to head in to DrupalCon, where over the next few days I'll be talking education and open learning with anyone who is interested.

And as I'm heading in, I have MOOCs on the brain - not because I'm particularly a fan of MOOCs, but because of the tendency to take a great thing (in this case, information and interpersonal exchanges distributed broadly over the web) and reduce it into something that feels more manageable, but is ultimately something lesser (in this case, MOOC platforms). More on this later.

The Web Is Your MOOC

Part of the reason that I'm thinking these thoughts prior to heading into DrupalCon is that I've long held the notion that open source communities have been engaging in effective peer-supported learning, even while many for-profit companies and academic communities have been struggling to distill the process of peer-supported learning into something resembling a replicable product. From having participated in and built many types of learning communities over the years, simpler is often better - many open source communities have done amazing work with listservs and issue queues, and many more feature-rich platforms have withered because, over time, a site owners "must-have" feature is the post launch usability nightmare. There's a moral in there about user-centered design and user testing, but that's a subject for another post.

But getting back to MOOCs, the early MOOCs - the ones run by Stephen Downes, Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, (and yes, I know I'm forgetting people - please fill in the gaps in the comments) etc - encouraged participation from anywhere. If you had a blog with an RSS feed, you were in. Participants remained in control of their work (depending, of course, on the publishing tool they were using. Open source platforms generally offer more options for data ownership and portability than their closed brethren). The MOOC was like a marauding mob of information, with the potential to sprout anywhere.

It's All About The Portfolio

In the post-lifestream, post-MOOC era, it's been rare to see much excitement about portfolios. This doesn't surprise me, because like all good ideas, portfolios have been around for a while, and thus lack the shiny newness that generates great marketing copy. However, the need for the concept hasn't diminished - any time you see a site that promises to collect the sources of your learning into a single location, so you can show your employers what you know! - you should think, "portfolio." All of the sites that promise to simplify collecting and curating your digital footprint? Portfolios. A lot of the conversations around documenting and receiving credit for informal learning have their roots (and possibly solutions) in portfolios.

In the conversations we have had about portfolios over the years, we have seen three main barriers, or areas of misunderstanding:

• Distinguishing between a working and a presentation portfolio: simply put, the working portfolio is a running collection of just about everything you do. The presentation portfolio is a selection of elements from the working portfolio selected for a specific purpose. Portfolios can serve different purposes for different reasons, and the relationship between the working portfolio and the presentation portfolio is key.
• Portfolios need care and feeding over time: as mentioned before, the working portfolio is messy. Periodically, the working portfolio needs to be pruned and cleaned up. But, messy is great, and if it's not messy, that could be a sign that things aren't working as they should.
• Ownership and control of the portfolio: because most portfolio implementations are paid for by an organization, the organization usually controls access to the portfolio and any information in it. Organizational control is also seen as an essential element to assessment. However, this flies in the face of learner control and ownership of the means by which they learn. Ultimately, this is a data portability issue with implications for the learning experience. More on this later.

Concluding Thoughts

One of the things that has been particularly underwhelming about the corporate MOOCs that have cropped up is their uncanny resemblance to an LMS with an open enrollment policy. While there are many differences between the platform-stylehttps://chronicle.com/article/Providers-of-Free-MOOCs-Now/136117/ MOOCs and the original versions, the lack of learner control is a key element. Like Vegas, work in a MOOC stays in a MOOC (unless, of course, a company pays money to study student data).

In the platform-style MOOCs, the open web is missing. From a learner perspective, the portfolio is MIA. For a learner, throwing the evidence of your learning into a space that someone else controls isn't a viable long term strategy.

So, if you're at DrupalCon and want to talk open learning, let's make some time and sit down together. Open source, and the methodologies that support sustainable open source development, have a lot in common with open learning. I'd love to hear what other people are doing in this space.

Over the weekend, as I was searching for something on my phone, it struck me how little I understand this device that I use countless times each day.

What happens when I touch my finger to the screen? What is the technology that enables my fingertip - but not, for example, a finger in a glove - to effect reactions within the phone. While I could probably do a decent job explaining the software and data components of this interaction, I would have - at best - a highly speculative breakdown of how the hardware worked.

And taking a step further back, once we understood how the hardware worked, how many people could explain where the hardware was sourced from? Who has an informed insight into how people live in the places where are things are sourced and built?

Once you start asking questions, our surrounding world is filled with them. How many people can explain what happens with other, more pedestrian interactions: what chain of events are set into motion when we flick a light switch? Does the chain of events described there end at the wall, at the fusebox in the building, or further up the power grid? Where does the wire come from that carries electricity? Where and how is your electricity created?

Look at the label on a piece of clothing - where was it made? How did it get from its point of origin to you?

While driving a car, what happens when we hit the accelerator, or the brake, or the turn signal (except, of course, in California, where using a turn signal is a sign of weakness)?

Using questions like these as starting points, the connections between our immediate life and the laws and theories that govern these interactions, and the art and literature that situate it against a larger backdrop, become essential knowledge.

Is anyone approaching teaching STEAM in this way? Has anyone - at the high-school level - completely jettisoned the traditional curricular structure of Arts, Sciences, Math, and Humanities and adopted an inquiry-based approach? If so, I'd love to hear about it.

NOTE: some of the thinking behind this post was put into motion by putting some random thoughts onto Twitter. Thanks to Chris Blow for responding to this.

Image Credit: "steam" taken by westy ford, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.

Over on his blog, Dr. Charles Severance has outlined some issues he faces with his use of Creative Commons licensing. I suspect that he is not alone in grappling with these issues. While I have responded in the comment thread on his blog, I also wanted to put these thoughts down here so I don't lose them over time.

Dr. Severance (and additional commenters) outline some scenarios where they have experience issues.

The first two scenarios pull from this comment:

The first scenario is I write a book, make it CC-BY, provide a free electronic copy, and publish at a low price on Lulu so those who want a printed copy can get it. An unscrupulous person grabs the electronic copy and with no changes puts it up on Amazon Createspace and starts selling it. Createspace *would* take the book down if it was ARR but not if it is CC-BY.

After reading through the CreateSpace content guidelines, this actually appears to be a non-issue. CreateSpace is very clear that openly licensed material that is available on the web can only be sold on CreateSpace by the owner of the content. The quotation below is pulled from the "Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive Content" section.

Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale through CreateSpace. We do accept public domain content, however we may request that you provide proof that your submitted material is actually in the public domain and may choose to not sell a public domain title if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more books already available through our service or available through other retail sites. We do not currently accept public domain material for Amazon Video on Demand.

Lulu doesn't appear to have comparable language around openly licensed content, so the NC license would be required to prevent people from reselling openly licensed materials on Lulu.

The next scenario concerns people taking video content and using it in a YouTube channel:

Coursera allows download of high quality videos for those who have bad connections – sometimes a school will download one copy and pass them to many students – or perhaps a company will grab a copy of all the videos and put it up on their intranet behind a firewall. This is great. I license the lecture materials and videos as CC-BY to allow flexible responsible use of all or parts of the lecture materials and videos and because I firmly believe in open educational resources and permission-free remix/reuse etc. But one (out of over 100,000) students decides that they will download all my materials and construct their own YouTube channel of my materials. I contact youTube and ask for a take down request and of course since they are CC-BY – even as the owner of the materials I have no standing in my take down request.

This could be addressed in a couple ways. First, using the Non-Commercial license would probably require Coursera to ask permission before reusing the material, as Coursera is a for-profit company, and delivering courses is their business. At the least, this would enable a conversation that would allow the creator of the material to have some say in the specifics of how the content was reused in that context. It's worth noting that in this instance, the effect of the NC license is comparable to reserving all rights - except, of course, that the NC license would still permit legitimate reuse.

And, in the case of a student who creates a YouTube channel of these videos, the NC license would provide the creator with additional recourse. And, in the case of videos, embedding links/information about the creation of the video in the video would mitigate some of the effects of a third party creating a YouTube channel, as every video would point back to the original source of the content.

Is this a widespread practice? And if it is, and the video contained links back to the original creator, what harm, if any, is done by this? If the point is to help as many people as possible learn as much as possible, even the spammers are helping (despite the fact that spammers are the lowest form of life, below even car salespeople and SEO marketers).

In another comment, Mike Caulfield describes his concerns with a question bank:

I hit different problems with CC-BY on a course I was building — the question/answer bank was importable from the Common Cartridge export, and it occurred to me that it licensing it CC-BY essentially allows it to be shared with any student taking the tests. I wanted to assert that it was free for teachers while maintaining takedown rights on things like Course Hero. You can’t really get to that level of subtlety with CC licenses.

First, the licensing on the questions has never stopped people from sharing them or posting them. As Mike notes, making them freely available as CC-BY would give them the right, but it's worth highlighting that questions have been shared even when people didn't have the right to share them.

But let's dig into this: what if the questions were shared out and known in advance? Students would still need to read through and learn the answers. If the questions are good questions, this provides another means of mastering the essential information in the course. If the questions are mediocre, that's an instructional design issue, and the quality of the assessment needs to be improved.

In any case, the questions could still be licensed as CC-BY, but only made available on request.

In looking at the issues described in this post, they feel more like issues with human behavior (or misbehavior) as opposed to licensing. As many people have noted in the comment thread, there is a subset of people who steal content all the time, and the license is not relevant to these folks. So, reserving all rights won't do anything to stop the thieving class, period.

Within the Creative Commons world, using the NC license is probably the closest thing (arguably - the No Derivatives license is also very restrictive) to reserving all rights. It's worth noting that using a restrictive Creative Commons license still provides more flexibility that reserving all rights, as the more restrictive licenses all identify specific ways that the content can be reused without needing to ask permission. Looked at in this context, a more restrictive Creative Commons license is like a flag that indicates that the author is open to allowing reuse, but that they want to retain some control over the specifics of that reuse.

Still, with all this said, it's worth noting that you can't license people into good behavior. What a lot of people want is a Creative Commons license that says "People who use this well can use it however they want; people who don't, can't."

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

As part of our work on open content, and how to design systems that support authoring and translation that are both useful and usable, we have been thinking about the role of metadata and, by extension, search. This post contains some incomplete thoughts - a line in the sand, more than anything - and, six months from now, will provide something for all of us to laugh at. Possibly, we will all be able to laugh at this sooner than that. Time can be cruel.

In other words, I am firmly reserving the right to recant any or all of what I'm saying here. I'd love to hear different viewpoints on this.

Keep Data Simple

This sounds - and is - pretty basic, right up until it's time to implement an actual system. However, as soon as it's time to build a system, people "just need this one field."

In building data systems, additional fields are the equivalent of scope creep.

Humans Should Only Enter Metadata In Precisely Defined Circumstances

We'll get to this in more detail later in this post, but whenever possible, metadata should de derived from the data.

In some cases, this is simple: the author of a piece of content is easy to derive. Ditto for the date a piece was created.

A good example of metadata that should be entered by a human is a license.

But, in the case of a person remixing data that uses different licenses, the pool of possible licenses for the remix should be derived.

Your Picture Is My Image Is Her Binary

A system-defined metadata can be useful, but it will be most useful for the people who designed and built the system, as they are the ones who define the system-specific meanings of the metadata terms.

In other words, your metadata will be useful to you, but it might not be useful to your users. For better or worse, metadata is rooted in language, and words carry baggage and connotations that, among a large group of individuals, make a universal meaning elusive at best.

With this in mind, the "best" metadata is often good search.

But Community Tagging Is Awesome

No, it isn't. Community tagging creates the appearance of structure and organization when what you really have is a chunky stew of chaos.

If you can get enough people contributing tags, then - maybe - you will be able to pull some signal from the noise, but that also assumes a large number of people and a robust search technology.

Faceted Search: Blech or Ugh?

In designing search systems for sites, faceted search can be useful at providing structure when sifting through content. However, is faceted search something that we actually appreciate,or something that we have grown accustomed to?

On Google, how often do you use faceted search, or go beyond the options that you can access via the advanced search UI?

If faceted search went away, or was replaced with facets generated from metadata that could be derived from the core dataset, what would be lost? Anything?

Look at your search habits. Identify if or when faceted search saved you time. In situations when you use faceted search, was faceted search essential, or could it have been replicated by full text search?

Search Has Its Limitations

But with all that said, search has its limitations.

Understanding how stemming works (or doesn't work) is essential to interpreting the results we get.

And this is more complex when we work with translated content in multiple languages.

"Just In Time" Metadata

There are times and places where good, structured metadata is essential. By separating out the metadata requirements from the actual dataset (and keeping the core data as simple as possible) you help ensure that the quality of your underlying data remains high.

Implementing a metadata structure around data is firmly in the domain of a context-specific application.

In terms of open educational resources, this allows for easier reuse of the data. If a piece of content was written in the US, a school looking to resuse that content in the UK won't care about the Common Core alignment of the resource.

To put this another way, inflicting a metadata standard on your data (as opposed to applying metadata within an application that uses the data) makes your data both less portable and less useful.

Portability

In listening to people who are writing and using open content, a key barrier we hear about repeatedly is portability (there are others as well, and these other issues will get their own posts).

A barrier to portability - and really, to the usability of authoring and translation platforms that support open content - is the premature and often unnecessary application of metadata into the underlying data. If we keep the data as clean as possible - which means resisting the urge to apply metadata without a compelling need - we can simplify both portability and usability. Metadata should be applied as part of an application that uses the data, when there is a clearly defined need to catagorize the data. And then, the categorization should be done by people who know what they are doing.

It doesn't matter how good your categorization system is if it is applied to your data inconsistently, and/or if no one uses your data.

Image Credit: "faceted" taken by jenny downing, published under an Attribution license.