Bard Quest 1: Failing to Catch the Vision of Openness
(Note: I’m participating in a course on Open Education under the intrepid David Wiley. This post is part of that course, but may be interesting to some of you.)
There seems to be a paradox within the academic community which strongly emphasises the importance of openly sharing research results and building on existing scientific data, but at the same time often takes an unresponsive attitude towards sharing or using educational resources developed by someone else.
(Giving Knowledge for Free, p. 60)
This attitude is not unique towards Open Content. Indeed, there are many parallels between this double standard and the establishmentarian attitudes towards Open Source products in general. Those who would not consider OER may have apparently valid rationales for their decisions, but many of these rationales were shortsighted when they were first levied at Open Source. Why would they be any more valid for Open Content?
In the Fall of 2001, alumnus David Wiley returned to BYU to give the first IP&T seminar of the year. Besides the lively debate after his presentation (in which an administrator compared open content to the Boston Strangler), David also participated in a consultation with a committee charged with selecting a content authoring system to marry with the university’s Blackboard course management system. (Blackboard hadn’t yet shifted to “content management.”)
That meeting included, among others, Olin Campbell, Vic Bunderson, and Mike Bush. As each feature from the committee’s wish list was read, someone would invariably ask, “Vic, didn’t TICCIT have that feature back in the 70’s?” Vic would just nod. I know; I was there.
One requirement was paramount: Whoever provided the authoring system needed to be willing to partner with BYU to develop solutions to the university’s unique needs and resources. In response to this request, David suggested the university get involved with MIT’s Open CourseWare, which was still in its nascent stages. Though OCW was included in the early list of potential solutions, two main arguments removed it from consideration:
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OCW wasn’t ready at that moment. It was still at least a year from its public beta.
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Though the university could customize OCW to its heart content, it would be on its own for support issues. Higher-ups wanted to be sure there was a corporation backing the authoring system.
Therefore an early opportunity for the institution to become involved in Open Education was aborted.
So the search continued, focusing on less-free options, and many months later a short list of finalists was compiled. Representatives from each company demonstrated their software for a committee representing Continuing Education, the Center for Instructional Design (now the Center Teaching and Learning), and the National Security Education Program Language Project (now the ARCLITE Lab of the Center for Language Studies).
From there, if memory serves, two companies agreed to sign six-week agreements with the campus for an in-depth pilot implementation of their product. The first pilot lasted only two weeks as several of the key advertised features were actually not present in the production software. The second pilot, with Avaltus’ Jupiter authoring suite, went very well. Not only was Avaltus willing to partner with the university to develop specialized solutions (Mary Stevens, now the Assistant Director of Independent Study, hosted a pizza party where programmers from CID and other campus organizations met with Avaltus techs; the party was interrupted by a campus-wide power outage), Avaltus also created an IP&T internship program. Last I checked, the plaque listing the program’s participants was still on the wall between David Williams’ and Stephen Yanchar’s offices.
The plaque only lists two names, even though there is space for at least a dozen. After some internal chaos, Avaltus moved its headquarters to Denver and canceled Jupiter, annulling six months of cooperative effort with BYU.
This was 18 months after David’s visit to campus and his advice to get involved with OCW. Remember that the main reasons for which that option was never really considered were:
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OCW wasn’t ready at that moment. It was still at least a year from its public beta
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Though the university could customize OCW to its heart content, it would be on its own for support issues. Higher-ups wanted to be sure there was a corporation backing the authoring system.
Well, OCW went live about this time, and there was still no campus-wide system for authoring web-based instructional content, meaning that Point 1 was moot. Additionally, Point 2 considered the supposed disadvantages of Open Source, but ignored the disadvantages of traditional, corporation-backed proprietary systems: One company lied to the university about their product’s features, then months of university effort were wasted when another provider closed up shop.
It was interesting to see David return again to campus for a conference on the SCORM specification, and continue his theme of openness. This time he criticized the university for “casting the poor out of their temple of learning” (paraphrased). As the institution finally begins to Open-up, similar specters of doubt may be raised again. The detractors would be wise to learn from our past experience.