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I can’t tell you how many tenured faculty I’ve talked to that steer new faculty away from from “experimenting with technology” because it will harm or kill their tenure process at PSU. Cole mentions time as the deciding factor here. That is part of the issue, but here’s another - We end up with only a few faculty that make it through P&T without becoming so vulcanized by the process they are willing to try new things, or with instructors not on the P&T path willing to try new things. We lose many brilliant minds to P&T, IMO.
While I can see a bottom up and sideways movement happening at PSU, I don’t see a top down approach to change in P&T ever happening unless tremendous pressure is exerted on administration. They too are vulcanized in the way things are. Some give lip service to the need for change, but that’s all it is.
So what to do? Maybe we need a black ops to bring in new administration that believes in this change in P&T. Maybe we need to slowing suffuse the existing administration(s) with those that “get it.” Sounds radical, I know. Maybe (and more likely) another major university will move in this direction and PSU will follow.
What will happen to students’ e-Portfolios as they graduate? Will the usual 6 month and it’s gone policy still be in place, or do we allow students’ portfolios to become alumni portfolios of life-long learning?
I am a newcomer to the OER conversation so apologies if I’m addressing elementary issues or conflating some ideas incorrectly.
Cole, in your post you stated that “Lately I have been spending a lot of time talking to people in the newspaper industry to help them understand our students and what they mean to their continuously downward trending subscription rates.”
My question is, are we re-defining how our economy currently functions in terms of what is sold and paid for? E.g. Are newspapers going to try as make comparable money in an online model to combat the downward subscription trend? Is the idea with Open Educational Resources parallel to a notion of Free Educational Resources? And, if so, how do we (as people employed in large part because students pay for an education) continue to make money?
I’m not arguing for or against anything here. It’s just a question that’s occurs to me whenever OER issues are discussed. And, like Ken, I was intrigued by Terry Anderson’s Sloan keynote.
Andrea … good question. My comparison of the newspaper world (old media) and OER was primarily based on lack of vision of foresight and not necessarily business models. That being said, I think you will see old media start to get the idea that open may indeed be better — if they can drive traffic (and measure) through their pages. As an example, the New York Times released an interesting new tool as part of their online presence called, Time People. It is essentially a social network built into the paper that allows people to follow other readers and have recommendations dropped into their profile for reading later. I see it as a step towards attempting to keep readers at the site (and for driving people there). If I am reading headlines via RSS I am giving the ads on the pages less importance, but if I am at the site, digging through recommended articles then I am increasing my click through.
I guess the same could be said of open educational resources — that the more eyes that travel the content, the greater the likelihood of having someone, who otherwise wouldn’t have, decide to take the course for a fee. I’m not sure if that is true and I don’t have any data to support that claim.
How we make money is an entirely different question — I don’t think that opening access to some courses will cannibalize our market. Until people figure out how to take OER and repackage into degrees from across the web (google might be able to pull that off) we are going to continue to enroll the kinds of numbers (or greater) that we currently have. Paying for access to an instructor and a community for support that add up to a credential is still what people are after. The negative impact of OER may be in the sunk time it takes staff to produce the resources … not sure. But if they are designed appropriately, we should be proud to show them off in an open sense.
My questions focus on how we as educators will work to rethink the kinds of environments we use to provide access to our own and other open content providers out there. I see a shift in the willingness for content providers to share — I never thought I would be able to watch full length movies online for free … let alone write a review of it and embed it in my own site. That is a major shift. I am just curious if we are paying attention to that shift.
I know I didn’t really answer your question, but I tried!
Pat, the 6 months is our current policy. There are lots of conversations going on about this, but it is what it is. Our goal has been to make the portfolios built on the PSU Blogs portable. They can be moved easily to wordpress.com or typepad.com without much effort. Is it ideal? No. We are working on it.
[...] “Embedding Student Expectations,” the 25th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on November 5, 2008, by Cole Camplese. Cole serves as the Director of Education Technology Services at the Pennsylvania State University. As Director, it is his responsibility to oversee University-wide initiatives with a focus on impacting teaching and learning with technology. In reality Cole makes fantastic use of his role, serving as a prime mover and advocate for creativity within (and far beyond) the educational technology community at Penn State. Thanks Cole for a great posting! [...]
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