My earlier posts on open source higher education have generated a lot of discussion and I want to say thanks to all who have chimed in thus far.
One of the contributors to this discussion, Greg Byshenk, questioned my use of the term “open source” and so I thought I ought to clarify exactly what I meant. Because I’m an anecdotal communicator, let’s see if a concrete example helps.
One of the courses I teach on a regular basis is History 312: Nationalism in Eastern Europe. When I taught it for the first time in 1997, it was in no way “open source.” If you wanted to obtain any information about the course and how I taught it, you would have had to be in my classroom at Grinnell College.
Over the years, the course has become more and more open. The most recent version of the course is now available for your perusal from the website, which is nothing more than a blog with associated documents (assignments, podcasts of lectures, syllabus, etc.). If you read through and listen to what’s on this website you’ll know a lot about what goes on in my class. And, like open source software code, you are free to take and use whatever you find there, modifying it as you choose.
My intention is to take the course a step further in the next iteration, setting up a video camera in the classroom and recording my presentations to the students. I won’t be recording them because the human subjects/permissions issues are so complex that I simply don’t have time for them. But once the video recordings are complete, then anyone anywhere can do one of two things–take the course as an auditor (no credit awarded), or use any portion of the course for their own (non-commercial) purposes.
And, just as good open source code includes commentary by the author(s) of the code, I intend to record meta-commentary on the course itself that would be useful to both instructors and learners. This commentary will include an overview of the conceptual design of the course, what I expect to happen when I teach it, what actually happened the most recent time I taught it, and so on.
Finally, I’ll be inviting others who might teach the class to add to the “code” I’ve put forward in a variety of ways–including other assignments, etc., that will enrich the overall course.
This is a very different model from the standard course taught in American higher education. Most instructors consider that course their intellectual property (although their universities consider it work made for hire) and so not available for use by others without permission of the “author” (instructor).
In this case, I’ve laid out an example of what an open source course might look like. In my original example, I speculated about what an open source major might look like–one where our enterprising student was able to modify the content of the major to fit her own intellectual needs. I’m more than happy to stipulate that there are plenty of practical problems associated with this idea, but I’m also convinced that at least some segment of higher education will pursue a more open source path in the coming decade that in some way reflects the basic principles I laid out.
Already, this course is much more “open source” than it was 10 years ago when I taught it for the first time, because in 1997 the only thing I put online was the syllabus.
Unfortunately, this follow-up doesn’t really address the issues I raised in my previous comment. My concern was not regarding “openness” per se, but about the misuse of the “open source” paradigm (buzzword?) where it simply isn’t appropriate.
To understand why it is inappropriate, one must understand what ‘open source’ means. ‘Open source’ is a paradigm originating in the world of software, and is used to distinguish between ‘closed source’ — software for which you have access only to the compiled program, and not to the actual code used to make it — and ‘open source’ — software for which you have access to the actual code itself. In the strictest sense, ‘open source’ means nothing more than that; that is, it does not mean that yo
u can redistribute the software to someone else, nor even that you are entitled to change the software for your own use. Indeed, one can have ‘open source’ software for which you are given the source, but the license forbids sharing the source with others or even changing the software. Further, ‘open source’ has no relation whatsoever to how easy it might be for people to acquire the source or how public the source might be. Indeed, even ‘free software’ (distributed under a license for the Free Software Foundation, such as some version of the GPL) doesn’t require that the source be public, but only that the source be available to those users to whom you distribute your software.
But, turning to education, I submit that the paradigm is simply inappropriate, largely because, as I stated in my first comment, all education is ‘open source’, and the idea of ‘open source’ only makes sense of there is a contrasting ‘closed source’. But such simply is not the case in education. The ‘source’ of a given course simply is the material presented in the course, and there really isn’t any way to make it ‘closed’. Perhaps in theory one could create a ‘course’ that parallelled ‘closed source’, in which the point was simply to produce a collection of results without understanding how or why they were produced, but that would hardly qualify as ‘education’.
In relation to the specifics of the most recent discussion, the issue at the fore is the dissemination of the material. But note that this has nothing particularly to do with ‘open source’ (though it may have much to do with ‘openness’ more generally).
The History 312 course, for example, has _always_ been ‘open source’, because any student who has access to the course (the ‘program’) has access to the ‘source’ (the ‘source code’ of the ‘program’). It may well be true that in previous years the course (program) was only available to a limited number of students at Grinell, but those students also had access to the ‘source’. And no doubt there were vast numbers of people who did not have access to the ‘source’, but similarly they had no access
to the course (the program) either.
Let me close by adding that none of this should be taken as in any way opposed to your ideas of making your course materials more ‘open’ in a general sense. Indeed, I am all in favor of such things. My point is only that such has nothing particularly to do with an ‘open source’ vs. ‘closed source’ paradigm.