During the past years there has been a growing trend within traditional education to ‘open up'. The case of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative marked the start of the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement, a movement largely strategically driven on institutional levels. With this movement good quality tools and educational materials were made freely available to educators and learners throughout the globe. More recently one can observe a further type of openness within the educational domain, an openness where formally enrolled students engage with their peers at the web, resulting to an ever blurring border between the formal and the informal and providing the potential of taking further advantage of the opportunities the participatory web provides. Those attempts, unlike the OER case, seem to be more driven by individuals on a course level, but not be strategically addressed at the institutional level. This knowledge café is aimed at advancing our understanding on Open Course design by drawing on the Open Source case and recent trends in formal education.

1. The Emergence of Open Course Scenarios
Understanding Open Education
by drawing on the Open Source Case
D4PL workshop Knowledge Café 1
OSS 2009, 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems
June 6th 2009, Skövde – Sweden
Andreas Meiszner, Rüdiger Glott, Ioannis Stamelos, Sulayman K. Sowe

2. The changing landscape of education:
what happened so far?

3. The recent past
• Despite all of the potential the Web 2.0 provides higher education still has adapted very
little in response to them with graduate education often not employing the power of new
media in visionary or effective ways
• Higher education structures are still largely ‘analogue’, ‘closed’, ‘tethered’, ‘isolated’,
‘generic’ and ‘made for consumption’
• This is in sharp contrast to the learning environments the Web 2.0 provides, which are
‘digital’, ‘open’, ‘mobile’, ‘connected’, ‘personal’ and ‘driven by participation’
Students are inside a classroom (tethered to a place), using textbooks and handouts (printed
materials), they must pay tuition and register to attend (the experience is closed), talking during
class or working with others outside of class is generally discouraged (each student is isolated
though surrounded by peers), each student receives exactly the same instruction as each of her
classmates (the information presented is generic), and students are students and do not
participate in the teaching process (they are consumers). (Wiley 2006)

4. Learning as a finished and delivered product to be consumed

5. A myriad of closed systems

6. What happened further in between than and now?
• A vast and constant move towards the use of online resources fostering a change from
‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ and from ‘tethered’ to ‘mobile’ ...
• The remaining four desirable characteristics ‘open’, ‘connected’, ‘personal’ and ‘driven
by participation’ are more and more addressed...
• The start of the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement marked a tipping point
towards ‘openness’ in the sense of ‘Open’ and ‘Free’...
… Though the OER movement still follows very much the traditional models (static,
made for consumption, teacher/learner separation, …)

7. The Open Educational Resource movement

8. So, where are we NOW?
• Emergence of a further type of openness where formally enrolled students engage
with their peers at the Web 2.0,
• with more and more open course scenarios arising,
• resulting to an ever blurring border between the formal and the informal,
• where students from different institutions, free learners outside of formal
education and practitioners come together.
• The current emergence of Open Courses could mark a tipping point towards an
educational commons...

9. The emergence of Free / Open Course Scenarios

10. The emergence of Free / Open Course Scenarios

11. The emergence of Free / Open Course Scenarios

12. And where do we head from here?

14. Open Course Scenarios versus Open Source Software Projects
–
analogies & deviations

15. Do we know which the desirable supportive organizational models for Free /
Open educational scenarios and courses are?
Could the Open Source Case provide some insights for those?

16. The open source case – desirable characteristics
• A greater range of inputs – not just from the educator, but from all contributors so the
collective is the source of knowledge, not one individual
• A more personalized learning experience – learners can gather the elements of
knowledge they require – but skip what they know already.
• Greater sharing of knowledge – in higher education much of the previous input is lost,
whereas in FLOSS the dialogue, resources, and outputs remain as learning resources =>
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT & EVOLUTIONARY GROWTH.
• Peer production – active engagement in producing something with a set of peers is a
powerful motivational and educational driving force.
• Real activities – engaging in legitimate activities that are not restricted to an artificial
university setting also provides valuable experience.
• Peer support – a large support network provided voluntarily by peers in a collaborative
manner nearly 24/7.
• The sum is bigger than its parts – all the individual actions and activities add a value to
the course from which future cohorts of students would gain.

17. Open course scenarios & Open Source: Analogies
• A greater range of inputs – not just from the educator, but from all contributors so the
collective is the source of knowledge, not one individual
• A more personalized learning experience – learners can gather the elements of
knowledge they require – but skip what they know already.
• Greater sharing of knowledge – in higher education much of the previous input is lost,
whereas in FLOSS the dialogue, resources, and outputs remain as learning resources =>
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT & EVOLUTIONARY GROWTH.
• Peer production – active engagement in producing something with a set of peers is a
powerful motivational and educational driving force.
• Real activities – engaging in legitimate activities that are not restricted to an artificial
university setting also provides valuable experience.
• Peer support – a large support network provided voluntarily by peers in a collaborative
manner nearly 24/7.
• The sum is bigger than its parts – all the individual actions and activities add a value to
the course from which future cohorts of students would gain.

18. Open course scenarios & Open Source: Deviations
• A greater range of inputs – not just from the educator, but from all contributors so the
collective is the source of knowledge, not one individual
• A more personalized learning experience – learners can gather the elements of
knowledge they require – but skip what they know already.
• Greater sharing of knowledge – in higher education much of the previous input is lost,
whereas in FLOSS the dialogue, resources, and outputs remain as learning resources =>
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT & EVOLUTIONARY GROWTH.
• Peer production – active engagement in producing something with a set of peers is a
powerful motivational and educational driving force.
• Real activities – engaging in legitimate activities that are not restricted to an artificial
university setting also provides valuable experience.
• Peer support – a large support network provided voluntarily by peers in a collaborative
manner nearly 24/7.
• The sum is bigger than its parts – all the individual actions and activities add a value to
the course from which future cohorts of students would gain.

19. Traditional educational characteristics we might want to preserve
• Educator input – to provide students with guidance and support.
• Structure – learners approaching a new subject area value a certain
level of structure and focus offered.
• Learning objectives – to set out for students what they should be able
to learn through the experience.
• Assessment – some form of formal assessment and the possibility to
obtain a degree or certification
• Face2face interaction with others – students as well as educators.

20. Towards supportive models for Open Course Scenarios:
inside, outside or hybrid approach

21. Open Educational Scenarios: ‘inside approach’
• The inside approach takes principles found in open source communities and applies
them within a (higher) education context.
• Including an evolutionary growth of the course and its environment.
• Current students would build upon the work of earlier students developing course and
content further year by year,
• Therefore improving content quality and richness and providing regular feedback.
• Such feedback might refer to course structure, material, processes and tools.
• The inside approach thus takes the sort of characteristics and tools found in open source
as its inspiration.
• An institution or course might also decide to ‘open up’ their virtual learning
environments to fellow universities or the general public to view what is going on within
the environment or allow those outside groups to participate and engage at this
environment

22. Limitations of the ‘inside approach’
• The outside world remains largely or totally disconnected, depending on the degree of
openness (e.g. open to view, open to participate, etc.).
• ‘Community building’ and ‘evolutionary growth’ is per-se limited within a given
institution that only involves the own student population, and usually even further limited
due to
• (a) a 100% student turnover per semester / course and
• (b) a comparatively small number of potential community member (formally
enrolled students of a course).
• Students are kept within the institutions learning environment preventing their ‘semi-
structured’ engagement and collaboration within the wider web.
• Limited opportunities of ‘best of breed’, as the wider web might provide better
technological solutions or already established and mature communities for respective
study fields.

23. Open Educational Scenarios: ‘outside approach’
• The outside approach might take traditional education as the starting point by
providing theoretical information and then sends the students ‘outside’ to find well
established communities, such as the open source ones, to work within those
communities and to apply and deepen their theoretical knowledge.
• Students are sent into already well established and mature environments to engage at
and collaborate within those communities on pre-defined tasks.
• Students are provided with an initial academic background and then required to
choose and engage within a real world project.
• This gives students real experience and allows collaborating with others.
• This approach can be realized whenever there is an external ‘real’ community that is
operating on principles such as e.g. common for open source, or also Wikipedia.
• The outside approach might be the least complex and almost cost neutral; and
therefore relatively easy to implement.

24. Limitations of the ‘outside approach’
• The results of this collaborative learning and knowledge production remains
within the outside community and…
• Therefore likely will be lost for future students.
• The outside approach does not provide next year students (newbies) with an easy
access as no former learners, nor the resources they created, are present at the
institutional level to facilitate the newbie entrance.
• The outside approach does not foster an evolutionary growth and continuous
improvement of the institutional / course environment.

25. Open Educational Scenarios: ‘hybrid approach’
• A hybrid approach combines components of the inside and outside approach.
• Activities occurring in a broader ecosystem consisting of various spaces that are open
for everyone combining students, informal learners, tutors, experts, organizations, etc,
allowing learners to engage in a real community (outside approach).
• It allows a continuous evaluation (by educators, students and the wider world) of what
‘the best of both worlds’ is and how the transferred elements actually suit in their
respective new environments.
• A hybrid approach could also be a response to challenges such as a 100% student
turnover per semester as (a) not all participating students should start at the same time
and (b) free learners outside of formal education and practitioners are not bound to any
course schedule.
• A hybrid approach likely includes a number of environments where students engage at
in a ‘semi-structured’ way and where guidance and support is provided through
technologies (e.g. RSS, suggested contents, etc.) and humans (e.g. educators,
knowledge brokers, community support, etc.).

26. Open Questions on Supportive Models:
• How to allow for a continuity and evolutionary growth of learning resources,
spaces and tools, communities involved (internal and / or external ones), or the
transactive group memory?
• How to keep learning resources (initial ones as well as those leveraged into the
course by the students), artifacts created by students and underlying discourse within
a context and structure that would allow future cohorts of students to re-
experience, build on and improve what others did?
• How to easily allow for a ‘re-seeding’ and to organize, formalize and generalize the
created knowledge, including structures and processes?

27. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects as a supportive mean?

28. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects as a potential solution?
Small students driven learning projects at which learners engage (to a certain degree)
within areas of their personal interest; individually or together with other learners as a
group work, therefore:
• contributing to the overall development of the learning environment.
• providing a potential bridge between ‘static’ content on the one hand and learning
processes and activities (discourse) on the other hand that might allow a similar type of
‘re-experience’ as in open source.
• allowing an open source type engagement, where content is often taken forward
and backward, contextualized, adapted, translated, re-mixed, embedded into
processes or feed into new products by individuals. Those individuals act for
example as knowledge brokers allowing content to be dynamic and causing it to
continuously change.
• allowing learners to become an active participant in the respective study field, to
acquire subject matter skills through practice, and providing the potential of gaining
key and soft skills as a result of their activities and engagement.

29. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects as a potential solution?
“Learning project” tasks:
1 Define objectives of this learning project (what do we want to show)
2 Develop your own roadmap, communication and collaboration channels (or use the
ones provided)
3 Review existing content at the web relevant to this project, this should be in
accordance to your objectives
4 Debate pro’s and con’s of the retrieved information
5 Analyze your findings, summarize them &
6 Present the outcomes
7 Evaluate your work and discuss it within your group as well as with the other
groups
The result of your learning project should be preferably understandable for “others”
outside of your project group – please keep this in mind once developing it!!!

30. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects as a potential solution?

31. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects – initial trials

32. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects – self organized learning
projects and spaces (I)

33. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects – self organized learning
projects and spaces (II)

34. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects – self organized learning
projects and spaces (III)

35. Forges, Modularity and Learning Projects – self organized learning
projects and spaces (IV)

36. Students’ voices on their learning experience

37. “At the beginning it started really small, but as time went on the
NetGeners.Net website and courses grew in size.”
“More and more material was added and discussions intensified.”
“At the beginning we didn’t know each other,
but with time, our confidence and trust grew and we were able to talk more freely.
And frequently scheduled chats also helped us to know each other”

38. “We participated in a learning project named "DWTDI". During our research we have
learned how to collaborate from distance using web technologies, as two of us were in
Sweden, one in England and one in Greece.”
“Furthermore, we have learned how to merge our separate work using open source
technologies like wikis in order to introduce a common result.”
“We strongly believe that this project helped all of us to improve our ability in English and
our knowledge about the tasks that are included in the project.”

39. “I've learned a lot of things. To be honest I didn't even know what exactly copyleft
was when the project started; but I learned about it along the way and figured out
some details about copyright.”
“We liked the NetGeners experience because it was different from formal education
and because we had the freedom to choose our tasks and project methods.”
“The "find out yourself" aspect NetGeners provides stimulates to search and
actually learn about something, while in higher education students are mostly
supposed to read books and just learn them by heart, rendering the knowledge
useless since most things are forgotten along the way.”

40. “The NetGeners.Net experience was very different: learning is done - not received;
more flexible, more possibilities to choose the theme and the way how to develop it;
dynamics of the roles with no clear separation of teacher/learner.”
“We believe that the NetGeners project had some unique features. First of all, the
group participants could totally take the responsibility of their project, content and
organisation and could make decisions about the future tasks or chats on their own.”
“We were not obliged to use the NetGeners official places (e.g. the NetGeners' web
pages and Wiki) to upload our stuff and we could make decisions all together!”

41. “It's not about what I learned, but about how I learned it. The same knowledge might
be obtained through open source communities or traditional learning environments
(actually the whole learning process is identical with open source in my opinion), but
in traditional learning environments it is not as interesting.”
“In formal classes you're bombed with information which you have to cope with, at
•
NetGeners.Net it was easier to do so and I think we have learnt better than in formal
education.”

42. Open (?!?) Questions on Supportive Models:
• How to allow for a continuity and evolutionary growth of learning resources, spaces
and tools, communities involved (internal and / or external ones), or the transactive
group memory?
• How to keep learning resources (initial ones as well as those leveraged into the
course by the students), artifacts created by students and underlying discourse within
a context and structure that would allow future cohorts of students to re-experience,
build on and improve what others did?
• How to easily allow for a ‘re-seeding’ and to organize, formalize and generalize the
created knowledge, including structures and processes?

43. Thank you for your attention!
Andreas Meiszner (a.meiszner@open.ac.uk)
Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University, UK
Rüdiger Glott (glott@merit.unu.edu)
Sulayman K. Sowe (sowe@merit.unu.edu)
UNU-MERIT
Maastricht, The Netherlands
Ioannis Stamelos (stamelos@csd.auth.gr)
Department of Informatics
Aristotle University
Thessaloniki, Greece