Open Scholarship

In “Open Pedagogy: Connection, Community, & Transparency”, Tom Woodward responds to questions from Mary Grush about open pedagogy, open planning, open products, and open post hoc. Woodward describes open pedagogy as “a blend of strategies, technologies, and networked communities that make the process and products of education more transparent, understandable, and available to all the people involved”. In “OER: Bigger Than Affordability”, Robin DeRosa reflects on her experiences and insights from developing an open anthology of public-domain literature.

Here are some comments based on my experiences with OERs, FOSS, and communities.

Benefits

Woodward predicts that “content that is digital and free will likely continue to spread”. DeRosa describes a talk by Cable Green on how OERs “can allow for easier sharing and collaboration around educational materials”. Thus, OERs can lower costs (through sharing) and improve quality (through collaboration). DeRosa also notes that “the cost-saving aspects of OER is only the beginning of their benefit”, and describes the social justice of expanding access to “knowledge, knowledge creation, and education”.

In FOSS communities people talk about “free as in free speech, not free beer” – the real value in FOSS is the ability to use, repair, tweak, and enhance the software with few if any restrictions.

People participate in and contribute to FOSS communities for a variety of reasons. In “Why hackers do what they do: Understanding motivation effort in free/open source software projects”, Karim Lakhani and Robert Wolf surveyed 684 software developers in 287 projects and found 4 main clusters of motivation: 29% wanted intellectual stimulation and to improve their skills; 27% wanted the code for non-work needs; 25% wanted the code for work needs; and 19% felt obligations to a FOSS community and the ideals of FOSS.

My own experiences are similar. I’ve contributed to FOSS communities through academic work (e.g. Moodle, TWiki, MoinMoin), as a consultant (e.g. TWiki, Drupal), and for hobbies (e.g. MuseScore). I’m also involved in efforts to help faculty and students contribute to FOSS communities through the NSF funded OpenFE and OpenPath projects, and the Professors Open Source Software Experience (POSSE). There is some evidence that Humanitarian FOSS provides particular motivation for students from underrepresented populations, including women.

Challenges

Woodward mentions the “failure of open educational repositories to change things at scale” and that “often learning objects, of any kind, absent the process and the thinking leading to them, have far less value and are far harder to use or remix well”.

I have used (e.g. Ensemble for computing educators, and SWENET for software engineering education), contributed to and gardened (e.g. EngageCSEdu for introductory computing and FOSS2Serve for FOSS), and even created (e.g. PUI-eship for entrepreneurship education, and CS-POGIL.org for POGIL in CS) repositories of open educational materials. I see multiple challenges, including:

• Materials that work for one teacher & their students, in their classroom, at their institution, may not work well in other settings. It takes significantly more effort to create reusable materials (see below).
• There are obvious benefits for people to use OERs (lower cost, higher quality, more engagement), but less obvious benefits for people to share.
• There may not be enough users (teachers) to use and share OERs for a self-sustaining repository or community in a specific discipline or sub-discipline. Most successful FOSS projects depend on large communities with a pyramid structure; >90% of community members make at most minor contributions, and a small fraction of members make most of the contributions.
• Educational repositories are not always well designed or easy to use.

Responses

Woodward notes that there is a “glut of tools”, and that it is much more important to engage with people who “energize, challenge, and improve what you do”. Similarly, in the book Peopleware, Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister explain that “the major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological”. Peopleware is about software development, but many of the ideas apply to other forms of knowledge work, including education.

Thus, building communities (for FOSS, OER, etc) is essential, but not easy. Adrianna Kezar and Sean Gehrke identified 4 successful communities of transformation in STEM education: BioQuest, Project Kaleidoscope, The POGIL Project, and SENCER. In The POGIL Project, most of the successful classroom materials were developed by teams of faculty from different institutions (often with NSF support).

Even with a community, it takes significant work to produce resources that are easy to adopt or adapt in other settings. For POGIL activities, we try to provide affordances that include:

• learning objectives and prerequisites,
• alignment with standards (e.g. Common Core, NGSS)
• sample answers that student might give
• sample quiz questions, homework assignments

However, there are other challenges. How do we apply universal design principles so that materials can used or adapted for learners with disabilities? How do we create effective materials that are easy to customize and enhance? How do we encourage other teachers to share feedback and changes?

Conclusions

Creating OERs that are effective, adoptable, and adaptable requires significant effort – to grow a community, to build tools, to develop the materials and provide appropriate affordances, etc. We should consider both the benefits and costs for individual teachers and the broader community, and find ways to balance them.