All posts in Open content

Yesterday, Darren Draper put out a post expressing some concerns with Teachers Pay Teachers. Shortly after putting out that post, Darren was forced to don his flame-and-troll-proof suit, as the comment thread got, well, interesting.

I'll get to the discussions in the comment thread later in this post, as a majority of the comments are illustrative of a small part of a larger problem.

OpenWashing, Teachers Pay Teachers Edition

Teachers Pay Teachers markets itself as "An open marketplace for educators where teachers buy, sell and share original teaching resources." In this context, Teachers Pay Teachers (or, TpT) provides a clear example of how the word "open" has been mangled beyond recognition.

For those of us working in open source and open content, our notions of openness generally share some common pedigree with the four freedoms of free software, the definition of Open Source, and the Creative Commons licenses. It's worth noting that, even within these broad definitions, there is often vehement disagreement as to what constitutes open. However, even while acknowledging that there is no universally accepted definition of what "open" really is, it's still safe to say that TpT isn't it.

"Open" does not equal "being on the internet."

TpT is a marketplace, and this is fine, but a marketplace that anyone can enter isn't an "open" space, at least not in the context of Open Educational Resources. TpT puts technically unneeded barriers in the way of reusing content; the most obvious of these barriers is the need for a login even to download a free resource. The business need of TpT (collect contact info) is in direct conflict with greater openness, and TpT lets the business need trump the tendency to be more open.

And, of course, this is fine - it's just not open. If, however, your actual practice conflicts with your marketing catchphrase, that's not good.

I'll return to the TpT at the end of this post, but now, we're going to jump into Darren's post.

Private Time, Public Money

Darren lays out seven reasons why he struggles with TpT. I'm highlighting 5, 6, and 7, below:

5. Public school teachers are paid by the taxpayers - with public funds - to work during specific hours of the day.
6. The computer and other equipment used by public school teachers were all likely purchased by the taxpayers, using public funds.
7. It is my belief that classroom activities, assessments, games, handouts, outlines, posters, printables, research, worksheets, and the like - that have been created by a public educator during work time or with school-owned equipment - belong to the public and should therefore be licensed with an appropriate, open license. Resources created with public funds should neither be bought nor sold by teachers because they were never the teacher's to sell in the first place. Because these resources were created with public funds, they belong to the public.

I checked the comment thread on Darren's post before staring to write this response. When I looked, there were 34 comments - 19 of those comments focused on when content was created - and this is illustrative of the larger problem.

The question of who owns teacher-created content - and the nuances of the time of day and equipment used to create the content - came up in several of the Open Content Authoring events we ran over the last several months.

Our advice to this question in the short term:

• Work on your curricular material outside of school hours, and use your personal account. Store a copy on personal hardware (an external hard drive, a personal blog, a personal Google Apps account, etc);
• Let your district know that their policy on intellectual property creates an unnecessarily adversarial relationship around curriculum planning;
• Let your district know that their policy on intellectual property creates a disincentive to you doing your best work, as the only way you can maintain ownership over your work is to do it outside "normal" working hours on your own equipment;
• If you belong to a union, bring this to union leaders as an issue that needs to be on the table as part of contract negotiations;
• Incorporate a piece of Creative Commons Licensed content into EVERYTHING you do for your work - make sure it is licensed under the Share-Alike clause. This means that your District can claim ownership of it, but that due to the nature of the license, you (and anyone else) is free to reuse it under the terms of the CC license.

In Darren's comment thread, the fact that so many commenters were fixated on the timing issue flags the reality that people are having a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. Fighting about the time of day when you are allowed to maintain control of your creative output means that you are living in the box that people laid out for you. Fighting about the time of day when you can do your work means that your perspective is limited at the outset. This comment illustrates the predicament perfectly:

I was so with you on this post, until it hinted that items were most likely being created on school time and/or with school equipment. I would encourage you to spend a week with me to see that I don't have enough hours in my "school day" prep time to make my weekly schedule, copy/assemble resources, grade papers, record grades, communicate with parents, and supervise my students during additional remediation opportunities. I consider myself lucky to sneak in a second bathroom break each day! :)
All of my TpT products are made by me, at home, on my personal equipment with software I've purchased myself (my classroom computer is a desktop that is over 8 years old) .That's *after* I have spent numerous additional hours per week grading papers, inputting grades, and emailing parents (from home, on my own computer). My dear husband can attest to the hours he has spent helping me cut, laminate, recut, and assemble centers for my kiddos.

The workload issues here sound very typical of most teachers that I know. There is not enough time in the workday to cover their professional responsibilities, so work comes home. Work spills into weekends. Budgets for supplies have been slashed, so teachers buy supplies out of their own pocket. School equipment is outdated or locked down to the point of unusable, requiring much prep to take place outside of school networks, on non-school machines. Teaching doesn't fit into the hours defined in most contracts, and teachers put in significant time outside of traditional working hours, in addition to spending their own money on class supplies.

And this is the conversation we should be having: why are teachers expected to power the underfunded mandates of increased reporting in the era of high stakes testing, with fewer resources, less support, in a work day that doesn't have room for all the demands on teacher time? Districts that have policies that claim ownership of teacher intellectual property are perpetuating that absurdity, and this absurdity needs to be addressed and clarified in employment contracts. Unions need to make this an issue as well.

Lessons Are Not The Ultimate Goal

The problem - and a shortcoming - of both traditional textbooks and content silos like TpT is that they treat a lesson as the stopping point. This makes sense for them, because both textbook companies and TpT make money from distribution. If there is no sale, there is no revenue. From a business place, this makes perfect sense.

Creating and using open content approaches the same problem - how do I get the best possible material to my class - from a different place. Teachers can use open content exactly as they would use a textbook, or a piece of content purchased from TpT; for many people, that is where their understanding of open content ends. However, that vision of open content is incomplete, and rooted in our habits of using material with restrictive licensing.

There are different levels of using open content; teaching lessons that use open content is the starting point. Remixing material that incorporates two or more openly licensed sources is a next step. Releasing that remixed version is the next step. Collaborating with other people to edit and remix content is an additional level of involvement.

And, if you look at the trajectory of using open content, it resembles the trajectory of learning. It's not a transaction (go here, buy this) - it's a series of interactions of increasing complexity, each of which requires judgment and expertise. Over time, building and using open content develops a professional network and a collection of domain level experts to work with. Working with people to create open content is some of the best ongoing professional development out there, and districts would be wise to embrace and support this reality. Rather than make absurd claims over ownership of teacher IP, they could divert some professional development money into supporting teacher time in a facilitated authoring process that spanned the course of a year. The resulting material could be released under a Creative Commons license, ensuring that teachers and the district were given the appropriate credit for their role in creating and funding the work, and material created with public money would remain available for public use.

Image Credit: "Money, get away!" taken by kiki follettosa, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.

On Saturday, March 9th, we held an Open Content authoring day in San Francisco. It's the second we've put on this year, and for those interested, we have a third coming up in Portland, OR on April 6th.

The San Francisco meetup was held on the campus of Lick Wilmerding, made possible thanks to Jonathan Mergy. In the morning of the meetup in San Francisco, we spent some time working with the participants on converting existing lessons - stored in word docs, google docs, or as collections of files - into more granular, more easily reusable, chunks of information.

The work of transitioning existing instructional material into reusable open content is largely organizational, and involves reviewing and editing existing material to ensure that it is well organized and coherent. However - and this point cannot be emphasized enough - this review and editing process results in better material. This is something that, in an ideal world, would happen anyways. This review should be viewed through the lens of supporting better instructional design, and should be incorporated as part of ongoing teacher professional development. The process of organizing a lesson to make it easier to reuse as open content is EXACTLY THE SAME as reviewing a lesson to make sure it is coherent.

In the afternoon, the discussion included sketching out a rough road map for an entire school to transition to a broader, more regular use of open content. The key element in this transition involves reinforcing the idea that the process of creating open content is identical to the process of creating any other type of content - the only substantial difference is the license that is applied to the work. It sounds obvious, but when discussing open content, the notion of openness - and the new horizons implied by the philosophical shift in focus - often distract us from the familiar act of creating useful educational material.

The starting point for individual teachers, a department, or an entire school is exactly the same: the individual lessons that teachers have already created, currently stored on hard drives, in Google docs, in notebooks, and/or in filing cabinets. These lessons exist; many of them have been tested and revised multiple times. Cleaning up this existing source material - a practice that leads to better instructional design, and a practice that should be happening anyways - provides a starting point. It's also worth noting that teachers working in groups, revising the lessons of their colleagues, provides natural opportunities for peer mentoring.

In an earlier post, we talked about the steps involved in creating open content. Working teachers have already done the first steps. Most are at the point where they can edit and revise to make their work clearer - and, as a side benefit, easier to reuse.

Teachers have lessons and other educational materials. They create them regularly, and use them every day.

Like just about anything, this material can benefit from review, and this review can include reorganization into a structure that makes it easy to reuse the lessons.

Once the lessons have been edited and restructured, they can be sequenced into a unit or a course. At this point, the goals of the unit or course can be used to determine what additional material, if any, is needed to round out the work. If any new material is needed, it can be created, or sourced from other openly licensed content.

In practice, this would look something like this:

The review process - steps 2 and 3, where existing lessons are converted into smaller, more granular components, would occur periodically throughout the year. The process of sequencing the lessons - step 4 - would occur less regularly - perhaps 2-3 times a year - with a semi-annual review session - step 5 - dedicated to cleaning up full courses by filling in any gaps that aren't met with the material that has already been created. This way, the work unfolds gradually, and is a natural extension of the work already required to teach a course, and to prepare for upcoming classes. The process can be sped up, of course, but that requires more focused time, and people who have both the content area expertise and the available time to do the work. If this was implemented at the department level - with all teachers in a department collaborating over the course of a year on focused lesson cleanup - the first year would produce a solid body of work, and the second year could allow for greater levels of experimentation and sophistication - for example, Chemistry and Biology teachers and students could generate some 3d molecular models that could be incorporated into science texts.

But in any case, when we talk about creating open content, the discussion needs to be framed around the act of creating. Teachers are already doing this work, and many teachers are already on board with sharing their work to benefit others. However, we have found calling this process "creating open content" confuses the issue. When we are introducing people to the concept of open content, we need to talk less about the licensing issues, and more about sound instructional design. It sounds counter-intuitive, but we have found that by reinforcing what teachers know, and how that pre-existing knowledge dovetails cleanly with the new concept of open licensing, people understand the new concept - open licensing - more fully, even though we talk about it less. Open content is good teaching, and this is the discussion that we need to be having.

If you are thinking about going to an open content authoring day, here are some tips to help you get the most from the day:

• Identify what you want to get from the day ahead of time. The authoring events are a mix of community work days and a maker space, and knowing what you want to do with your time will help you make the most of the day.
• If your goals for the day include working on a specific project, try and make progress on your working outline and your initial research before the event. This way, during the event, you can work with other participants on structure, editing, and other elements of the project where you will benefit from outside review.

• If your goals for the day don't include working on a specific project, that's fine - one of the other ways that you can participate in an open content authoring day is by helping to clean up existing open content that has been released in clumsy formats (pdfs, word docs, powerpoint, etc).
• If your goal for the day is to learn more about open content, that's fine as well - most events will have an intro session on open content, but then you will get the chance to learn by doing. The open content authoring days have more in common with Project-based Learning or Maker events than with traditional lecture.
• Identify potential partners - if you think that someone else might be working on a similar concept (or might be interested in working on a similar concept) ask them. If you can assemble a working group prior to the event, you will be better prepared to make the most of in-person meeting of the open content event.

Based on feedback we have gotten from other open content events we have run, we put together a series of posts to help provide background information for people authoring open content. This documentation works equally well for people looking to author open content on their own, with a small group in their school or organization, or for people attending open content authoring days.

• A General Guide for Creating Open Content; and a shorter version
• Using Advanced Search To Find Open Content;
• Licensing, Attribution, and Reuse;
• Resolving License Conflicts When Authoring Open Content
• Background Information On Open Content

But really, the short version of this post is that if you are coming to an open content authoring day, that's awesome. Talk about it. Talk about the work you want to do there. During the day, start the planning for the next one. Identify people you might want to work with to collaborate on a year long project where you each save ten of your best ideas, and then, over the summer, get together to refine that group of great ideas into the best open educational resource ever. The open content days are group work days, but as educators, every day is a work day. Using the ethos of open content, infused with the learn while doing of Project Based Learning, flavored with some of the inventiveness and freedom to experiment that comes from Maker spaces, let's see what we can build.

Image Credit: "Working - Glass Blower" taken by Bob Jagendorf, published under an Attribution Non Commercial license.

As discussed in Open Content: Licensing, Attribution, and Reuse, the licenses of our source material can affect the licenses we can use when we release our remixed work. At times, there will be potential conflicts that need to be addressed. Unlike traditional copyright, where our options are limited by the whims and decisions of the copyright holder, Creative Commons licensing provides authors with more flexibility and choice.

With some thought and planning, licensing issues can be relegated to just another step in the process of authoring open content.

Resolving Potential Conflicts

If you come across a situation where you are looking at a licensing conflict that appears insurmountable, you have a few other options:

• Contact the license holder and ask permission; or
• Fair Use; or
• Curation; or
• Multiple licenses covering components within a resource; or
• Write your own.

Frequently, contacting the license holder and asking for permission will be all that's needed. In many cases, the original author wanted to have some degree of control over where there work will be reused, and are open to allowing it to be incorporated into a derivative work. When we have asked authors to use their work under a different license, we have written a brief email describing our project, how the piece will be used, and why the piece is important within the project. Additionally, we let the author know that we will attribute them, and ask if there is a specific way that want to be recognized as the original creator.

Fair Use is a second option; Fair Use is part of US Copyright Law; there are also some international parallels. The concept of fair use defines a set of conditions under which a portion of a work can be reused or remixed within a new derivative work. This video provides more information on Fair Use. The short version: using information within an educational setting is widely protected under Fair Use.

If Fair Use is not a fit for your specific situation, you can also incorporate work by curating external sources. In this context, "curation" includes a description of how the external resource fits into your work, along with a link to the resource (or, for information not on the web, instructions on how to access the resource).

Using multiple licenses is a third option; while this is the most complex of all options, it does allow for reuse of content under different licenses. When a work uses more than one license, individual components within the work retain their original license, while the bulk of the new work is licensed under a different license. As one example to illustrate when this is a viable approach, if an image under a No Derivatives license is reused in its original format, the rest of the work can be released under a different license while the image retains its original ND license.

The final option covered here is to create your own resource. If none of the options discussed so far work, creating your own new work and releasing it under a Creative Commons license is always a viable option.

Through the options described above, many external resources can be incorporated into open content without infringing upon the rights of the original authors. Attribution and transparency, discussed later in this post, provide additional ways that we can safely and ethically reuse existing content within open educational resources.

Transparency and Intent

One of the fears we hear repeatedly about adopting open content is the fear that it can lead to legal action for infringing on the rights of copyright holders. As with every fear, it helps to temper the concern with some reality.

The reality is that large companies use the threat of a lawsuit as a means of chilling competition. However, the likelihood of that happening is incredibly small, and it becomes even smaller when we use the steps described in this post to make sure that we are respecting the licenses that creators put on their work.

By being completely transparent about the source material we use, by using proper attribution, and by making an intentional effort to use and support open content creation efforts, we minimize any risk even further. The companies and organizations looking to sue are concerned about the long term prospects of their business model, and they should be. The goal of open content, however, is not to ruin the textbook industry in its current form - while that might happen, that's a secondary effect. The goal of open content is to support teachers and learners working together to create the best learning process possible. Content plays a role in that, but, the process of creating and reusing open content becomes more valuable than the actual content.

When discussing open content, many people become focused on the "content" rather than the "open." By being transparent about our sources, our methods, and our goals, we can provide a clear roadmap of how we got to a specific piece of content. In most cases where the author of a piece of work has a question about how their work is being used, they will ask that the work be removed, or they will ask for more information. In these situations, being fully transparent about how we created the work will help demonstrate our intent. This is not a blanket protection against legal action, but given that (in the US, anyways) anyone can sue anyone for any reason, it's difficult to get that blanket protection whether we use open content or not.

Being fully transparent in how we source and create open content, however, helps illustrate the process by which more people can benefit from open content. It's also a stark contrast to traditional textbook companies, where various interest groups vet and make recommendations to textbooks prior to publication. Transparency offers demonstrable evidence of how our work came into existence.