Since we last blogged about CC in Barcelona, we’ve been very productive. Two weeks worth of open events have yielded several talks around open educational resources (OER) search, discovery, and policy at Open Ed, recommendations and tools for greater open content reuse at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, and a 12 month plan for the future of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).

Open Ed 2010

In addition to an excellent talk by board member Cathy Casserly, CC staff members Nathan Yergler and Timothy Vollmer both gave talks that led to fruitful side conversations that will be helpful going forward. Nathan’s talk on “Search and Discovery: OER’s Open Loop” spurred conversations about one of the underlying issues of OER search, which is, “how do you (software, crawlers) know what’s an OER and what is not?” Timothy Vollmer’s talk on the “iNACOL survey: An inquiry into OER projects, practices, and policy in U.S. K-12 schools” identified how OER is being used in K-12 online education and investigated the existing OER models at the state, district, and school level. The survey revealed the widespread knowledge of OER among the respondents, but also ongoing questions about the funding models and professional development needs to alert other teachers and administrators about the process and benefits of exploring OER. On the whole, survey respondents were optimistic about the potential for OER, wanting to see it implemented for a wide variety of functions, including the development of digital textbooks to replace hard copy texts, as a component in building better assessment mechanisms, to augment learning materials for struggling students, credit recovery, independent study, college prep and tutoring, special education, library tutorials, and to provide opportunities for students to engage in content and classes that the school doesn’t offer.

CC BY by tvol

Mozilla Drumbeat Festival: Learning, Freedom, and the Web

CEO Joi Ito gave a keynote and CC’s International Project Manager (and Drumbeat Festival program co-chair) Michelle Thorne worked closely with Mark Surman and other Mozillans to make this event happen–a huge shout-out to all the Mozilla volunteers! The Peer Learning Lighthouse tent, organized by CC Superhero Delia Browne, Alison Jean Cole (P2PU), and myself, focused specifically on overcoming barriers to reuse of CC licensed content and a future School of Copyright & Creative Commons at P2PU. One of the coolest outcomes of this tent was tech specifications around a CC attribution generator, a browser and platform plugin that would export the metadata around a CC licensed work to produce a formatted attribution. University of Michigan’s Molly Kleinman and our CTO Nathan Yergler, in collaboration with Mozilla, are working to make this tool a reality. Discussions on the School of Copyright & Creative Commons revolved around increasing global and linguistic reach of the Copyright for Educators courses, and also adapting the course for librarians, policymakers, and creators.

P2PU Workshop

All P2PU-produced content is under CC BY-SA. In order to more effectively educate P2PU participants and course organizers, the P2PU community are planning to integrate copyright and CC license education into its orientation process, in addition to emphasizing the P2PU value of openness as part of a “social contract” at the beginning of every course, which will be revised to explicitly call out the license. Additionally, the revamped P2PU platform will introduce values and licensing in the latest stage at the sign-up phase.

CC BY-SA by kiyanwang

Of course licensing was far from the only issue that was talked about. Governance, nonprofit incorporation, sustainability, course formats and content, quality control, research, and more were heavily workshopped, and all outcomes from the workshop are available at the P2PU wiki, under CC BY-SA of course. Immediately after the workshop, the P2PU techsprint, involving volunteer developers and designers, produced the next iteration of the P2PU platform–which you can preview here.

CC is making a strong presence in Barcelona at the many open culture and education events that are taking place in the next couple weeks. Board members Catherine Casserly and Esther Wojcicki, CEO Joi Ito, CTO Nathan Yergler, International Project Manager Michelle Thorne, Open Society Foundation (OSF) Policy Fellow Timothy Vollmer, myself, and a slew of CC Affiliates from all over will be participating in the Open Ed Conference, first Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, Free Culture Forum/oXcars, and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) Workshop. Some preview highlights and invitations to join us at specific events:

Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival (3-5 Nov)
The Mozilla Drumbeat Festival “will gather teachers, learners and technologists from around the world who are at the heart of [the open] revolution.” It will consist of designated spaces, or “tents”, with specific focuses, like building peer-2-peer courses (part of the Peer Learning Lighthouse), designing badges to recognize informal learning (Badge Lab), and fusing Wikipedia with education (Wikipedia lounge). You can check out the evolving schedule here, but we’ll be hosting the following spaces, where we encourage you to join us:

Encourage Content Reuse: Educate your users! (4-5 Nov)
This session addresses the lack of education around openly licensed content and its associated freedoms–how to use, adapt, and remix content to realize the full collaborative potential that is enabled by CC licenses. We will discuss, collaborate, and create educational resources for users of open content. Specific outcomes include a reuse/remix guide for P2PU or other content and DIY license tutorials. The reuse/remix guide will lay the foundation for a “reusable” template that other initiatives can customize to educate their users. DIY license tutorials can be on the “open” subject of your choice, whether it’s a particular CC license, open educational resources (OER) in general, what is “open” anyway?, or org-specific policy (ie. why did P2PU choose CC BY-SA?) in the form of short video, pictures, or design—basically, how would you explain open licensing to your parents?

Building a School of Copyright & Creative Commons (4-5 Nov)
Building on P2PU’s Copyright 4 Educators courses, this is a planning session to discuss how to extend the current network of educators of copyright and Creative Commons. This may involve issues such as recruitment for more course facilitators, collaboration with CC affiliates around the world, and building a “School of Copyright and Creative Commons” at P2PU that would serve as the umbrella for all related courses and programs around copyright education. What other audiences besides educators should we focus on, and how do we leverage the international network of CC affiliates to reach more jurisdictions?

In addition to the above, Joi will be giving the opening keynote to the festival. The full (also evolving) list of drumbeat activities is available at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/activities.

Open Ed 2010 (2-4 Nov)
The annual Open Ed conference is “the world’s premiere venue for research related to open education” and this year’s theme is “OER: Impact and Sustainability”. Board member Catherine Casserly will present “Open Educational Resources and the Bull’s-Eye: Opening Access to Knowledge AND Improving Teaching and Learning,” CTO Nathan Yergler will lead a session on “Search and Discovery: OER’s Open Loop,” which focuses on DiscoverEd, a prototype for scalable search of educational resources online, and OSF Policy Fellow Timothy Vollmer will present the “iNACOL survey: An inquiry into OER projects, practices, and policy in U.S. K-12 schools.”

P2PU Workshop 2010 (27-30 Oct)
The second P2PU workshop will focus on the future of the Peer 2 Peer University, including issues of education around open licensing, accreditation, community norms and review processes, governance, sustainability, larger “schools” of courses, and general peer-produced mayhem. Active workshoppers include Neeru Paharia (former CC Executive Director) and myself, in addition to a “friends of P2PU” day where CC board member Catherine Casserly will contribute her expertise and support.

Free Culture Forum and oXcars 2010 (28-31 Oct)
The Free Culture Forum is “an international arena in which to build and coordinate action around issues related to free/libre culture and access to knowledge.” It “brings together key organizations and active voices in the spheres of free/libre culture and knowledge, and provides a meeting point where we can find answers to the pressing questions behind the current paradigm shift.” oXcars 2010 is the free culture awards ceremony that will take place at the beginning of the forum, recognizing international artists and performers, including those of Spanish culture.

Barcelona was also host to the sixth COMMUNIA workshop earlier this month, which focused on “Memory Institutions and Public Domain.”

We hope to see you at one or all of these events, and if not, stay tuned for updates in November.

Digital Journalism 2010 is “an introduction to online journalism, citizen media and the use of social networks for journalism and collective action. Participants will work on self defined projects either as individuals or in groups using any combination of media types including video, photographs, illustrations and text as well as online tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and any other reasonable tool the participant or team would like to use.” In addition to learning about how the journalism landscape is rapidly changing, participants will learn to research and create news online by publishing stories of their own in teams. These stories will be presented to the class (and the world).

The course is a work in progress, so the community can contribute by suggesting readings, activities, and more. P2PU is looking for course organizers to facilitate the P2PU end of things. If interested, please contact thepeople [at] p2pu.org. To participate in the course remotely via P2PU, you can sign up to apply at www.p2pu.org/journalism. Sign-up is open now and the course will begin on Friday, 4 June.

Joi teaches Digital Journalism annually as part of the Keio Graduate School of Media Design. He has contributed pieces to the New York Times, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and Wired. He is also a prolific photographer and if you didn’t already know, the CEO of Creative Commons.

The Peer 2 Peer University is “a grassroots education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls.” In addition to leveraging existing OER, P2PU licenses all of its own courses under CC BY-SA. For more on why P2PU chose this license, visit http://p2pu.org/license.

P2PU has always been committed to openness in everything we do, from the way we run our activities, to how we licence the materials we produce. However, as many people who have worked in the Open Educational space will attest, choosing the right kind of licence, one that provides both the protections and the freedoms that a project like P2PU may require, can be a tricky process…

As we went through the process, we also realised that our experiences may be useful for other people who are undergoing a similar exercises. So we decided to document what we did, and why, and how it turned out. And today, we are proud to announce the publication of our Guide to Choosing an Open Licence (with a CC licence, of course!) In this document, you’ll find details of every step we took to choose our licence, and a range of opinions from several open educators, lawyers and practitioners which we found invaluable.

The P2PU experience is only one of many, and it is not necessarily the process or the license that everyone should choose. It is simply one example of a process that worked for a diverse community of people with various viewpoints. In the end, they chose CC BY-SA (with the allowance of CC BY for when content is entirely funded by a third party). The document is thorough, objective, helpful, and not very long–so make sure to check it out, especially if you’re wondering how to go about choosing a CC license for your own project. (The document itself is available via CC BY-SA).

If you’re in the SF Bay Area, we hope to see you at our next Creative Commons Salon on the power of open education, featuring:

Brian Bridges, Director of the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN)
Murugan Pal, co-Founder and President of CK-12 Foundation
Carolina Rossini, Berkman Fellow, Advocate for OER in Brazil, and Peer2Peer University community member

The Internet and digital technologies have transformed how people learn. Educational resources are no longer static and scarce, but adaptable and widely available, allowing educational institutions, teachers, and learners to actively participate in a global exchange of knowledge via Open Educational Resources (OER). At next month’s salon, we’ll be gathering together three preeminent individuals involved in shaping the future of education and harnessing the power of the internet and digital technologies as forces for good in this field. Each participant will give a brief presentation on their respective projects, followed by an informal panel/discussion period where we’ll explore more in depth the issues, challenges, and opportunities emerging in the field of education.

This is a great chance to meet CC staff, learn more about Creative Commons, and connect with Bay Area creators and innovators. Hope to see you there!

When: Monday, May 3, 7-9pm
Location: PariSoMa, 1436 Howard St. (map and directions). Plenty of street parking available. (Please note, the space is located up two steep flights of stairs, and unfortunately does not currently have elevator access.)

Light refreshments will be provided, and since we rely on the generosity of our community to keep us afloat, we’ll be accepting donations for CC at the door.

Check out the event posting on Facebook. We hope to see you there!

CC Salons are global events, and anyone can start one, no matter where you live. We encourage you to check out our resources for starting your own salon in your area.

• Flat World Knowledge (as mentioned earlier today),
• Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU),
• and a dynamic panel of K-12 technologists and educators (my personal favorite from the event).

All videos are available via CC BY, of course. I’d also like to point out that the Hewlett OER Grantees meeting is going on right now, which you can follow with the hashtag #oerhf.

Late last year, I caught wind of an initiative that was being funded by the Gates Foundation—it had to do with redesigning the top 80 courses of Washington State’s community college system and releasing them all under CC BY (Attribution Only). The initiative was called the Washington State Student Completion Initiative and the specific project that was dealing with redesign and CC licensing was the Open Course Library Project. I decided to find out more, so I set up a Skype date with Cable Green, the head of the project.  Below is the transcribed interview, edited for clarity and cut as much as possible for 21st century attention spans.

Tell me a little bit about who you are, where you come from, and what your role is in open education.

Sure, my name is Cable Green. I’m the eLearning Director for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. Our system consists of 34 community and technical colleges and those colleges teach roughly 470,000 students each year. Our enrollments are growing fast in this recessionary period as people are looking to enhance their work skills and go back to college to get degrees and certificates.

A big part of what I do is to work with colleges to figure out what technologies the system needs to run online, hybrid, and web-enhanced learning environments; and to roll out needed eLearning technologies [out] system wide. The other part of what I do is to try to figure out how we can share content across our system and with the rest of the world—and, in turn, how we take the open educational resources others are sharing and use it at our 34 colleges.

We are just now launching a new project that’s funded by the [Bill and Melinda] Gates Foundation and the Washington Legislature and it’s all about doing exactly that. We’re going to take our 80 highest enrolled courses and design them to be digital, modular and open—to use very low cost instructional materials and we’ll be putting Creative Commons Attribution Only licenses on all of those courses and giving them away.

Do you want to tell me a little more about [this] Washington State Student Completion Initiative? How did that initiative come about?

The idea for it came from a two-year, system-wide discussion called the technology transformation task force… [and] out of that process came our Strategic Technology Plan. Boiled down what it says is—we need to find a way to share technologies and services better than we do today, and we need not do things 34 different ways at 34 different colleges when we’re talking about common, commodity, enterprise technology services.

And in that same report we said—hey, there’s this whole thing called Open Educational Resources (OER) going on out there in the world and we don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, but we’re not part of it right now and we know that we need to be. So the Washington Student Completion Initiative project is really our chance to engage a significant project where we can, as a system, learn about open educational resources.

The student completion initiative is a broader set of projects through the Gates Foundation, but the piece I’m working on has to do with OER, and is called the Open Course Library Project. All of the information about the project is online on a wiki. A big part of this project is for our system to figure out what it means to share our digital educational resources. What does it mean to work with publishers in new ways and get them to reconfigure their content into affordable and modular formats? What does it mean to go out and find open textbooks and evaluate them and modify them? What does it mean to understand the different types of Creative Commons licenses vs. copyright? And what do we have to understand re: the legality around how those licenses mesh or don’t mesh? And then how does that affect the final digital thing that we release at the end, and put out in Rice University’s Connexions [repository]?

We’ve been trying to be very open about the process, so we’ve got this wiki online with all the [project] information. You’ll see the project budget up there with the goals and the timeline for the project. We’ve been having town hall meetings this fall—not only going out to the colleges and meeting directly with faculty face to face, but we’ve just finished our third online town hall meeting. We use Elluminate and anybody in the world is welcome to come [to these meetings which] are archived and put up on the wiki as well. As questions [and] concerns come in, we address those and put the answers up on the wiki.

When I read the proposal it said that one of the main goals of the student completion initiative is to increase community college graduation rates and that there’s a big problem about overcoming the “tipping point.” I was wondering if you could explain more about what the tipping point is and how the OER component, the redesign and release of 81 courses under CC BY, would help achieve this goal.

The tipping point research came out of the Washington state board for community and technical colleges.  David Prince [state board staff] led the study. I don’t claim to be an expert on it, but my understanding is that the tipping point has to do with students attending college for at least one year and getting a credential, and when students get to 15 credits in their academic plan, they tend to earn more and are more likely to do well in college. So 15 credits is a tipping point for them, [and after that] they are more likely to succeed than if they don’t complete 15 credits.

With this particular project–the Open Course Library–we’re looking at increasing completion in a few ways. And [there is a bit] of experimentation here. One thing that we think might increase completion rates is to have better designed courses. The idea is if you’ve got a well designed course–[as in] the course is internally consistent, the flow is good through it, there are formative assessments and summative assessments that make sense to the students, the listed learning outcomes match the assessments, etc. –that this could help students in completing the course.

The other completion [design] piece is significantly reducing the cost of instructional materials. We’re putting cap on how much instructional materials can cost in these redesigned courses; at $30. That could be for a printed course pack, it could be for the cost of printing an open textbook; it could be that somebody’s worked with a publisher and really got them to reconfigure their business model to bring their materials under $30. The idea here is if the instructional materials are significantly less expensive, that might help students stay in school where they otherwise might have to leave school to make money. And in community and technical colleges, Washington included, that’s a common occurrence. Students will come for a quarter or more, they will take as many courses as they can afford, and when they don’t have sufficient funds to continue,  they will leave college to work and make a living. Full time tuition in our system is roughly $3,000 / year and textbook costs for a full time student are conservatively $1,000 / year. If you look at it that way, the cost of textbooks is roughly 25% of a student’s cost of attending our colleges; that’s significant. So a big part of this project is to try and take a lot of those costs out of the system. We think that will not only improve participation rates, so more people will have the opportunity to come to college in the first place, but we think we might just improve completion rates as well.

Other than cost, is there any other incentive to using open educational resources for students and instructors? You mentioned becoming part of the global OER movement beforehand.

Absolutely. Let me start with the students. The students are primarily concerned about cost. We have a student legislative academy in our system, and these students are very active; they’re very organized. They get together annually and firm up their legislative platform, and then they go and testify in front of the legislature, and often work with the legislators to write bills. Their number one issue for two years running now has been textbook affordability. The students are aware that there are open textbooks out there, that there are ways to use open educational resources to build affordable course packs, and they are aware of this project–the Open Course Library project–and they are eager for it to be done so some of their highest enrolled courses might have required instructional materials under $30. The students are also very concerned about quality, obviously. Nobody wants low quality educational resources, and that’s primarily the faculty members’ concern as well, as it should be. Again, that’s part of the project–to help faculty go out and learn about open educational resources, and for them to engage their disciplines re: OER, to find out what’s out there, and then the faculty will decide what is high quality and what they want to use in their courses.

So–from the students’ point of view, it’s really about cost. There are other areas why our system is interested in OER. One of them is a belief (and I’ll speak for myself) that there are a lot of challenges and problems in the world, and to the extent that data and ideas and knowledge and education can be shared openly, there are more eyes on those problems and potentially a greater chance for solution. For faculty, I think that there’s a general understanding that the academy has always been about sharing, and sharing knowledge and building off the shoulders of others that have come before us. And to the extent that that’s true about the academy, open global content provides faculty with even more choices when they’re building their learning spaces. And not only to use others’ digital content, but to share their content as well.

OER is also about building networks; when people share their digital materials, one of the things that happens is that their professional networks grow and strengthen, and that’s positive. I think that one’s particularly challenging to just tell somebody because I know I didn’t believe that until I did it. When I started to share my slides on Slideshare.net, when I started to write blogs, when I started to put my projects on wikis, when I put my information and my work out in the open, all sorts of new opportunities came my way. I was invited to be speaker at many conferences around our state and around the country –which is all great– but the most important thing that happened is [that] I’m now connected with people all over the world who have similar interests, who are tackling similar challenges, and that makes my professional network much stronger than it ever has been. And I’m able to use that network when I’ve got problems that I can’t solve. So for example, as we were starting the open course library wiki, I really wanted people’s feedback. We were getting a lot of feedback from inside our system, but I was interested in what the rest of the world thought as well. So I put a post up on my blog and I put it on my Twitter feed saying, “hey here’s some ideas we’re working on and if anybody has other ideas or can help us make it better, please send me an email, or reply to my blog post.” And within hours I had twenty to thirty messages from people all the way from South Africa to Fairbanks, Alaska. That’s what is so exciting about open educational resources and openness in general… it’s that we live in a globalized society and higher education is part of that global network.

Are your works online released under an open license as well?

Yes, everything I share is under a CC BY license.

So why did you choose that license and why for this initiative, too, for the 80 courses? Why did you guys decide to go with Attribution Only as opposed to the other licenses?

I had a lot of conversations about this, because in education I think the ShareAlike clause makes a lot of sense. I think, particularly in higher education, we believe that if you use somebody else’s stuff, not only should you credit them (and that’s what Attribution is about), but you should share whatever you’ve done with other people as well, and you pay it forward, as it were. And that’s my instinct, and the license that I wanted to use. But then I talked with folks at Hewlett, Gates and ccLearn, and they said, yeah, that’s what’s intuitive, but if you really are concerned about your materials being used by as many people as possible and to be modified in different ways and to be mixed with other people’s content, what you really want to do is to go with the lowest common denominator, most open license, which probably wouldn’t even be CC BY… it would probably be [in] the public domain or [dedicated to it via] CC0. But I think that the Attribution Only was a nice compromise for us. It’s important, I think, for our system to be recognized, for somebody to say “yes, this came from the Washington Community Technical Colleges”—not just for the recognition but what’s more important to me is again that network building piece. I want somebody in the Sudan to download, from the Connexions repository, our Introduction to Psychology course, and I want them to use the pieces [of the course] they want, or the whole course, and I want them to be successful. But I also want to know who those people are; I want to be in contact with them; I want their university president to send us an email and say, hey we’re using this and this part’s useful but this other part’s not–are you planning on changing it? We want those connections. And so I think the CC Attribution license is a good choice for sharing educational content.

What do you think about the more experimental projects in open education, purportedly working outside of traditional systems like the Peer 2 Peer University? …do you think that these two types, the traditional institution and projects like Peer 2 Peer University, can exist side by side? Or do you think the trend in the future of education is moving more towards one than the other?

It’s a great question, and I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen–I don’t think anyone knows what’s going to happen. What I do know is that there are some trends that are happening right now, and they may be disruptive to existing higher education models. One of the trends is cloud computing. Another is Web 2.0 participatory technologies–and bottom line on that one is that there are more opportunities to contribute, participate, [and] work with each other than ever before in human history. That’s a biggie. Another trend around educational content is the open educational resources movement.  Put these three trends together and, naturally, folks are putting their [educational] content online and are sharing.

And a new trend is emerging – when tax payers (be it federal or state money–provincial money in Canada) pay for the production of something that’s digital and educational, that’s something that should have open licensing and should be freely available to the people that paid for it. So we’re starting to see that notion come out of this current US Congress. There are bills that provide funds for open textbooks. Senator Dick Durbin dropped a bill on that idea. In Obama’s American Graduation Initiative, there is 50 million dollars for the development of open courseware; those [courses] would have open licensing. There’s another bill, the 2009 Federal Research Public Access Act, that would require that 11 U.S. government agencies make journal articles stemming from research funded by that agency to be open and freely available. So I think those are all real trends that are happening. And that they’re not something that we can ignore.

Then what gets interesting around [initiatives] like Peer 2 Peer University and University of the People and Straighterline and others like it is that those are entities that are taking all of those trends and leveraging all of those trends… and frankly, thinking outside the box in ways public higher education typically does not. And not accepting the existing structures, the existing rules, the existing business practices we’ve followed in public higher education for decades. So what’s going to happen? Are they viable entities? I don’t know. These are the early adopters, and you never know what’s going to happen with early adopters.

So Peer 2 Peer University for example–there are a lot of volunteers in that particular model that are volunteering their time because they care about it and because they want to learn, and because they enjoy building networks with people from different cultures around the world who might speak different languages and have different opinions about the seminar topic. That’s interesting. That might not be based on a financial model that we would think about in traditional terms. I think we need to listen to Clayton Christensen’s advice about disruptive innovations and technologies, and we need to understand these trends are real. We need to pay attention to what happened to the newspaper industries when the disruptive technology and business practice called Craigslist came into being and took away the advertising revenue from newspapers, or a lot of it anyway, and has driven many newspapers out of business. And it’s not like [it was] Craigslist’s intention, but it was certainly a better place to have classified advertising.

I think the trends we’ve discussed are a similar threat to existing higher education models, and if you look at what’s really protecting existing higher education models today, it’s probably two or three major things. It’s accreditation, state subsidy, and federal subsidy around financial aid programs. And I’m not saying any of those things are bad; they’re not; they’re extremely important; but what I do think will happen sooner or later: these new disruptive models–  some of them will get accreditation, and sooner or later some of these new models may do a really good job of showing student achievement and dramatically increasing completion rates. And when that happens, how will money from state and federal governments flow? I don’t have the answers to that, but I think that those are some of the questions that we need to pay attention to.

Do you have any thoughts on how you or the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges would work with organizations like Creative Commons or [initiatives like] Peer 2 Peer University?

We partner with everybody. We’re staying in touch with Creative Commons now on our Open Course Library project. One of our questions is… so we design these 80 courses, we put them out in the world–[but] who’s using them? And right now there’s not a good way to know where it went. The new RDFa standards around putting an XML script on your digital materials and then (and I’m not fluent in how it works yet) somehow being able to get a report on where you stuff is and who’s using it…. I think this is crucial to this whole conversation, because a faculty member who shares her Introduction to Statistics course and [say] it’s being used in 30 countries by 10,000 students in X number of classrooms–that’s a powerful statement to make when she is up for tenure. It’s also just a powerful statement in general. And I think we, as educators, want to share, we want to make an impact, we want to make changes in people’s lives, we want to help people learn. That’s why we’re in this business. Nobody in higher education is in it to make money. If you want to make money, you go do something else. We’re in it because we care, because we want to do the right thing by students, and I think to have data that shows the impact one is having by sharing their open content is absolutely critical.

Another partnership that we’re heavily involved in now is CCCOER, the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. We’ve also partnered with Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative. I sit on the board of CC OLI and we have an opportunity because of that to have two of our [college] faculty involved in national designs and redesigns of Carnegie Mellon’s open content.

One more example–the 2009 Open Ed Conference at the University of British Columbia this summer, which was hands down the best conference I’ve ever been to–one of the presentations I gave there was about this [open course library] project, and early ideas about it, but after I was done presenting, Texas, Florida, and California walked up and said, “So you’re really going to give away those 80 courses?” And I said, “Yeah, we really are.” California said, “Well we just got some money from a foundation to design 20 new open textbooks, and to revise some existing open textbooks. Which 20 would be useful?” And I handed them our list of 80 courses, and I said, “If you’re on any of these 80 courses, our faculty would sure like to take a look at those textbooks. I can’t guarantee we’re going to use them, but you know it would be useful to have quality textbooks out there that meet similar needs.” And Florida said, “We’re thinking about some projects like this, and rather than doing courses that you’ve created, how about we produce a different 15 or 20 courses, and then together we’d have a hundred instead of just 80.”

And Texas then chimed in, and since then, Ohio’s gotten involved in those conversations, and Connecticut, and others. And now what we’re talking as a whole group of states: “What are the top highest enrolled 50 courses in all of our states?” And so we’re all collecting that data right now and – big surprise —we all teach Intro to Statistics; we all teach Intro to Sociology; we all teach Intro to Psych… and tens of thousands of students in each. So we are producing a very simple matrix, nothing fancy, that shows those top 50 courses and shows where all the open textbooks are for those top 50 and where the open courseware is. And where the states are running open education projects–like this Open Course Library Project–we will actively reach out to each other and share information.

Here, when Washington is done with our 80 courses—please, take them, use them, here’s where they are—to be very vocal about that. And then as a consortium … and I hope that this grows to 50 states and many countries eventually … if we can really share what we’re all doing, I think we have an opportunity and tremendous power to go after grants when we find gaps in the matrix. So let’s say for example that we look at that matrix and we say, we just can’t find a really great [open] Oceanography textbook. We’ve pieced together some course packs, we have quality open courseware, but we really need a good open textbook for that course. We can’t find one; everybody’s looked. We’ve all reached out to our networks. That’s an opportunity for us to go to foundations, to the federal government, to our state governments and say, we need a couple hundred thousand dollars so we can hire the five best or ten best Oceanography professors in the United States to design and write an open Oceanography textbook. And we, this consortium, we’ve looked together, we’ve already shared learning resources, and this is something that we collectively need. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there.

All of this conversation though has to be balanced against academic freedom, and faculty’s right to choose, and faculty’s need to and desire to determine what is it that they are using in their courses. I personally don’t believe in mandating any of this stuff. I think that’s the wrong approach. I think when you do that you’re just wading into waters that are not only destructive, but frankly unnecessary. I believe that if quality materials are available, at very low or no cost with open licensing; and students know about them… that is such a persuasive argument for engaging with those materials, that, over time, people will.

For those of you who don’t know Karien Bezuidenhout, she is the Chief Operating Officer at the Shuttleworth Foundation, one of the few foundations that fund open education projects and who have an open licensing policy for their grantees. A couple months ago, I had the chance to meet Karien despite a six hour time difference—she was in Capetown, South Africa—I was in Brooklyn, New York. Via Skype, I asked her about Shuttleworth’s evolving default license (CC BY-SA to CC BY), her personal stake in OER, and how she envisions us (CC Learn and Shuttleworth) working together. She also gave me some insights into three innovative open education projects they have a hand in: Siyavula, M4Lit, and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).

The conversation below is more or less transcribed and edited for clarity. It makes for great holiday or airplane reading, and if you’re pressed for time, you can skip to the topics or projects that interest you. This is CC Learn’s last Inside OER feature of 2009—so enjoy, and happy whatever-it-is-that-you-are-doing-in-your-part-of-the-world!

How did you arrive at your current position and its relation to open education and open educational resources?

I did an undergraduate degree in accounting and taxation, but I very quickly realized I don’t ever want to be in a purely finance job. I wanted to be in social development, but when I went to university I didn’t actually think of this as a viable option. After I finished my degree, I started looking around and I was fortunate enough to find a job in social development, helping to establish an organization and its programs. Next the work of the Shuttleworth Foundation looked interesting so I joined them as a Project Manager in their free and open source software unit. It wasn’t software development; it was basically advocacy programs around free and open source software, engaging government, education, the private sector and the public on the use and underlying philosophies of free and open source software. From there, I moved into the education unit at the Foundation, it was actually a very natural progression. We believe in the principles of free and open source software, and the Foundation became interested in saying, well, it’s not just about software, but also about an intersect between the ideas behind free and open source software and education. We became interested in this idea of open education or open educational resources, and it went from there. My position grew with the organization’s interest in this area. So I started as a Project Manager specifically around this area, grew to a Program Manager, and from there I became the Chief Operating Officer.

Were you interested in open source and openness in general before you joined Shuttleworth?

Not really; I didn’t really know about it before I joined. Once I joined I thought, wow, everyone should actually know about this—why don’t people know? That was in 2004. Now I actually find more and more people have at least heard about something in this general area, whereas at that stage it really was just in the realm of geeks. I joined based on the fact that I could project manage, but I don’t know anything about this stuff. I told them I’d like to learn and it’s actually been a very interesting journey.

What were you doing before that?

I was in program work as the Project Coordinator at the Trade Law Center for Southern Africa.

How has that work influenced what you do at Shuttleworth?

It’s very interesting because we were working on trade law and trade regulations and one of the things that was being investigated at the time that I was there was the TRIPS provision on Intellectual Property rights. A lot of the work we did was in preparation of and in conclusion from the Doha Declaration on protecting African interests in the trade negotiations and implementation around it. So I had the formal exposure to, “we should protect and we should lock down!” Coming here (to the Foundation) it was really interesting because you see the other side of it. What it did help me do was think about the other side of the issue, what the arguments are that people use when they’re talking about lock-down and increasing rights for owners and decreasing rights for users… So when I started working in this area, it was easier to understand the contrast and to be able to present the case to people in a way that counters their arguments.

So then, as an overarching mission statement, what would you say the Shuttleworth Foundation stance on OER is if you could sum it up in a few words?

The underlying philosophy of the Foundation is around methods of openness, you know the values that underly the free and open source software movement. Transparency, building communities, collaborating, sharing, building on what others have done, making available what we’ve done. These, for us, are the values of what we’re trying to do in open education as well. And then of course the Cape Town Declaration which Ahrash (Bissell, from CC Learn) was a part of developing. So there are three things from the Cape Town Declaration that is important for us: People should participate. (Open education is about more than open licenses.) People should make their works available under open licenses. And people should make policies to allow for and encourage these things to happen.

What would you say is the role of Creative Commons in facilitating that process or that mission?

It’s an interesting question because the Creative Commons license for me is actually the key part, and enabler. I mean we wouldn’t be able to do it without the Creative Commons licenses, simply because trying to explain and make clear to people what it is they can and can’t do in each instance would be almost impossible. You’d have different lenient licensing statements on each and every site which would result in things that are almost as difficult to navigate as the uncertainties in the prevailing copyright system. So basically licenses set the rules of the game for everyone who wants to play. And they’re absolutely essential in that.

The question about what Creative Commons as an organization’s role is, is a completely different one. And that’s one to which the answer isn’t entirely clear to me. I think, especially in the early days, there was a lot of pressure on Creative Commons, and I think the same for CC Learn when it started, to be the community leaders. And it didn’t appear to me that that was what the organization wanted to do. It mostly tried to focus on the licenses. Now, looking back at it, I think that was appropriate, making sure that the licenses are clear and understandable and usable and are used—I think that was the most important part that they had to play. Of course connecting people is equally important. It seems the role is evolving, including more networking and connecting the people in this space, in the way that you now do the interviews and showcasing of projects, saying these are the people who use these licenses, you guys should know about each other.

Going back to what you said about the licenses and how they’re a key part of open educational resources, I found that really interesting because there is sort of this trend going towards people arguing how Creative Commons is part of the infrastructure of open education. So I was wondering if you had any analogies or real world analogies that you would use for the licensing aspect of open educational resources.

Hmm, I started thinking of them as the rules of the game, but a colleague suggested they are actually more like the rules of the road. Because the roads are part of the commons (like knowledge) and everyone uses them, nobody thinks this is my road, I’m here now, and nobody else can be here. It’s about there being something for everyone to use that’s valuable, that everyone contributes to in terms of development and upkeep, and that people need rules to be able to use safely and happily and get where it is they need to be going in their educational journey.

I guess getting more specific, talking about the actual OER initiatives that are funded by Shuttleworth, including the M4Lit project, Siyavula, and the P2PU, could you tell us a little bit about all of them?

Sure. Siyavula is an initiative to provide access to open educational resources that specifically match the South African school curriculum for grades 1-12. The making available of the resources is a key element of it, but it’s not the only one. It’s more like a grain of sand when you’re trying to make a pearl, because what we’re actually interested in are the processes around that—how teachers collaborate, how teachers form communities of practice around the materials, how they adapt the materials for their own uses and share that back with the greater community. And we believe teachers have a lot to offer in that regard, but that it’s under utilized by the teachers themselves. They just don’t have the time or they’re not mobilized around it. By making the resources available, we give them a head start, but then we’re interested in how those communities form and how to help teachers with professional development and curriculum delivery in the classroom.

M4Lit is a practical exploration of the use of mobile phones specifically in education. In South Africa there’s still, and I think it’s the same for around the world, there’s still a great deal of  suspicion from schools and teachers around mobile phones, most considering it a distraction. But it’s a pervasive technology in the hands of teens and learners anywhere, so we’re interested in finding ways of actually using them for education. It’s a way that kids communicate; they do more writing on mobile phones than they would have ever done in essays and/or letters in school, so is there a way that we could harness that in South Africa? So we made available this serial story specifically for mobile phones to see—do kids read more, do they interact, do they write back, do they comment, those kinds of questions. It’s a small project in the sense that we started with one story and a small focus group, wanting to engage with learners directly, and we’ve had some pretty good responses so far—pretty good comments from kids and the focus groups have been really positive about it. That’s actually been really great.

So have you gotten a lot of participation from the students?

We didn’t publish it that widely, we wanted to make it a small pilot, because there are so many mobile phones around and so many potential uses, it’s easy to get lost in trying to meet too many needs and requirements, when actually there are specific solutions we’re exploring for specific groupings, and so we tried to keep it small. Initially we had a couple of hundred teens participate, which is pretty good, but eventually we reached a couple of thousand teens, exceeding readership numbers for accepted “best seller” figures for teen literature.

What would be the next step for the project after this initial phase?

Once we have all the findings back, I think there will be two ways of taking this forward. One is to go into schools and try to create direct links to the curriculum and involve teachers. We could show that we have interest from learners in terms of engaging in this way with long form writing and mobile phones, so instead of just chatting and responding via text message, [it would be] reading things that are a bit more substantial. It would be interesting to see how teachers respond, how they could use it for language teaching as it happens in the classroom. Or as a matter of fact, beyond the classroom. The other path is, of course, that we’ll make the platform and the story available under open licenses, if anyone else wants to try it in their local area, then they’re open to do so. We’d love to see more applications of the approach, and some variations on it.

And then of course you know about Peer 2 Peer University… Given that there is so much open courseware out there now, how do we support self-learners who want to use some of those materials.

Which direction do you see P2PU going in? Because I’ve heard it described more as a study group for peers to get together and the role of the course organizers is less of a teacher or an instructor but more as an organizer or facilitator. And then other people might view it more as these volunteer instructors [that’s] more akin to distance learning but with open educational resources. And I was wondering what your stance or view on that was.

I have my personal preference but I think it should be open to both options. I think it should be the kind of platform where you can have, as we have now, courses run in different ways. My personal vision, if I were to put it in that way, for the Peer 2 Peer University, would be more peer study group—less distance education.  But I think the really important part is that there should still be a course coordinator, who puts together the curriculum and reading list, because I think for self-learners, what’s sometimes difficult is that you can find fifty different articles on a specific topic. How do you know you’ve got the balanced view? How do you know you’ve got all the information you need? I think the course outline done by a tutor or coordinator is important and I think that peer learning is the way to go.

On the specific course that I was on, we had peer assessment and it was really challenging! You read other people’s work and it’s difficult to assess while you’re still learning yourself. But it was also very valuable, because we made sure that we read all the other answers to the weekly questions, and we thought well, do we agree, don’t we, is it similar to ours and if it isn’t, why isn’t it. The subject matter (copyright for educators) also meant that the answers would be jurisdiction specific. I’m in South Africa, so I focused on the South African situation, but then I also had the opportunity to learn what’s happening in Australia, the U.S. or India and that was great.

So all these initiatives that the Shuttleworth Foundation is supporting, they’re all licensed pretty openly, either under CC BY or BY-SA, and I was wondering why the foundation decided to support these initiatives that allow for commercial adaptation of its content when a lot people are pushing the Noncommercial term in other open educational projects.

Well, I think, to begin with, we were open to the commercial angle because in the greater Shuttleworth group we’re the only nonprofit entity. We’ve got venture capitalists that’s part of the group, so commercial pursuit was normal to us, I think that kind of predisposed us to be open to that. I just don’t think that you can separate out education and commercial use so easily. If you look at a private school, for instance, is that commercial use or isn’t it? If you take schools in South Africa, they can’t survive with only the government subsidies so they charge school fees. In some instances they charge for the printed educational resources; is that commercial use or isn’t it? I don’t think that commercial use is clearly enough defined, and I also don’t think that you can entirely separate it out of education and say, education is always not-for-profit or noncommercial and therefore, it’s only those people out there who are trying to make money off it.

Secondly, I think commercial enterprises are key participants and an important part of social development. Otherwise you will always have nonprofit entities or donor entities pushing money into certain sectors, and at some point you don’t want to only transform the nonprofit sector, you also want to transform societies, and you want people to be social entrepreneurs and you want society to take up the ideas. The only way I believe you can sustainably do that in the long run is by involving commercial entities and allowing them to be part of the process. It’s not to say that every single thing should have a commercial leg or anything like that; I just think that we should also allow them to be part of it. If you brought a big enough community around open educational resources and you say, we’re going to make available these resources for free; we’re going to put them on our websites, we’re going to publicize that they’re there for use—that will actually prevent those who are trying to profit unjustly off other people’s work by making it widely known that there’s a free version available. People who do use it for commercial purposes are going to have to add value to be able to sell it as a commercial product. And therefore I think that’s okay to allow that in.

So then even within those projects I mentioned, you have distinctions between the kinds of licenses that they use, and I was wondering what was driving those distinctions, and how it affects those projects. For instance, M4Lit is BY-SA and P2PU is CC BY.

Part of it is an evolution in our own thinking, and part of it is specifically project driven. The evolution in our thinking happened as the open educational resources community matured. Initially we picked CC BY-SA, because there were very few open educational resources out there, and we believed it was the only way that you could grow the community and provide some comfort and security to early adopters. We were essentially saying, don’t worry, everybody else has to do the same. Everyone else who uses your material is going to have to contribute back into the pool.

But as the content pools have grown and as the community has grown, opportunities for partnerships came up and we started running into interoperability challenges more and more. Because of this, [interoperability] started becoming more important to us. The ShareAlike provision was a safe condition for people who were worried about adopting open licenses and saying, won’t someone else use my work and benefit without giving back. But actually there are bigger questions than that. It’s about saying, do you want to participate? Do you want to contribute and collaborate? And do you really believe in the principles behind this? Then you should contribute and collaborate; you should participate. And it should be as free and open for people to use as possible. We don’t want unintended restrictions. We don’t want to end up with people who can’t translate our work, or who can’t include our work in their collections, thereby limiting their reach. If OER Commons wants to use it, or Curriki, or CK12, or anybody else, they should be able to, and they shouldn’t be stuck with a licensing restriction that prevents them from reusing and remixing the work in ways that we want to support.

Siyavula for instance [is a project where it] became most apparent and important to shift. Even though we were philosophically thinking in that way already, we hadn’t yet made the shift in the license we applied throughout all of our projects. Then we started working with Connexions on Siyavula and we realized that Connexions used CC BY and we used CC BY-SA, and essentially those weren’t compatible and we could lose a partner because of the more restrictive license we used. That was the final point at which we decided that CC BY was the license for us.

We still allow projects and initiatives to debate the licensing issue for themselves and motivate for an alternative license for their specific situation if they’d like, but CC BY is now the default position.

So judging by a lot of your answers, CC Learn and Shuttleworth—we seem to be on the same page about a lot of these things. And I know you mentioned before how you envisioned Creative Commons or CC Learn’s role in sort of developing the community a bit and serving as community leaders. Do you picture us working together in the future? And what do you see CC Learn’s role becoming in the future?

Yeah, so we would love to work together in the future. I think one of the things we’ve been doing over the past couple of years is staying in touch and sharing information which has been really valuable. This links to the role CC can play, putting people in touch and saying, this is what other people are doing, take note, how does it impact on what you might want to do. It has changed some of my own thinking over the years and that’s been really, really valuable.

Also the Shuttleworth Foundation has a fellowship program, which I’m sure you know a little about given that you know quite a few of our current fellows. The fellowship program is really about freeing up the time of individuals who have a vision for their part in bringing about positive change in the world, to do just that—go and change the world in the way that they see it. There is also the possibility of matching project funding – if the fellow wants to implement a project idea within the scope of their fellowship, the Foundation will match every unit they invest themselves by at least ten-fold to help them get their projects off the ground. I think that it would be great if CC Learn could share ideas with us on individuals that they think are valuable to support in this way.

And then obviously I think networking and connecting the community around the licenses are really important, especially in [the] education sector, and CC Learn can (and does) help to drive discussion and establish a base around issues like, what does commercial and noncommercial really mean? What is the best license for my situation? CC Learn just recently released a paper on Why CC BY. Those kinds of activities are very important because the community really looks to Creative Commons and CC Learn to see what the right thing is to do. CC Learn are the ones who should drive making the rules of the road and supporting others in using them.

Do you have anything else to add, any last words?

I think that [open licensing] is really important for foundations and funders to do. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Berkman report on open licenses and private foundations. It mentions the Foundation, among others, and our approach to open licensing. It is important for funders and foundations to actively use open licenses. Because if anyone can say, I don’t have to earn my keep by commoditizing this content, I really do believe that our funding should go as far as possible and that the investments that I make should reach as many people as possible, it’s funders and foundation—using open licenses is the way to do it. It’s a policy within the Foundation to release everything under an open license. We’ve had a couple of potential partners who’ve said, no we don’t want to do that, and then we walked away and said that, well maybe they’re not a good match for us anyway. We have also found people are more and more open to this idea, and if anyone can afford to do this it’s funders and foundations. I really do think that they should prioritize that.

We have a recommendation sheet just on this, on encouraging funders. It’s called, Increase Funding Impact. It’s on learn.creativecommons.org/productions. And we have a bunch of documents on there—Why CC BY? Stuff like that. So I would encourage you to check it out.

I will, definitely, thank you very much. That is one of the challenges, starting from scratch on every discussion. Advocacy documents are so valuable. It helps convey the message that the ideas we present aren’t coming from a lone ranger, but are well established and backed by sound arguments from a growing global community.

The pilot phase of P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University) ended in October, after having run for six weeks with seven courses and approximately 90 participants. Last month, the pilot phase volunteers, including the course organizers, met in person for the first time at the first ever P2PU Workshop in Berlin. The goal of the workshop was to integrate pilot phase experiences into a working plan for the future of P2PU. Judging from the outcomes, the workshop achieved its goal. Check out CC Learn’s video download of the workshop at Blip.tv, Vimeo, or YouTube. (It’s CC BY, so feel free to share and remix!)

Background

“The mission of P2PU is to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other. P2PU combines open educational resources, structured courses, and recognition of knowledge/learning in order to offer high-quality low-cost education opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.”

Why is CC Learn interested in P2PU?

“P2PU is the social wrapper around open educational resources.”

The open education movement started by focusing on the legal and technical aspects of educational resources, and how they could be opened up for use by anyone, anywhere. Creative Commons licenses provide the legal, technical, and social infrastructure for OER, enabling the easy use and reuse of OER while improving discoverability and adaptability around the world. This movement towards opening education has resulted in an abundant and still growing commons of open educational resources (OER).

However, P2PU recognizes that content isn’t enough. Accessing OER does not automatically result in learning. There are reasons why traditional education institutions exist, one of these being the social interaction between peers that enables, facilitates, and motivates learning. But what about those that want to learn outside of brick and ivy walls? P2PU is an initiative outside of the traditional institution that aims to provide the social learning structures, the “social wrapper”, around existing open educational resources.

Because P2PU is a true OER project, testing the bounds of what can work when you empower a community of volunteers and peers to learn for free from each other, CC Learn is interested in where it’s going.

Where is P2PU going?

In the short term, P2PU is aiming to double its courses for its second pilot, which launches towards the end of January next year. P2PU has also established a strong community of core volunteers in tech, outreach, sustainability, research, and course organizing. These volunteers run P2PU, and they are all very busy getting P2PU ready for its next phase which will feature, among other things:

• a new website and social platform
• an orientation process for new course organizers
• a CC BY-SA licensing policy (and a compendium on how to choose a license for your open education project)
• a set of core values that the community subscribes to

P2PU is also preparing a research workshop on alternative accreditations in early 2010, and building relationships with other organizations (such as CC Learn) to explore avenues in research, assessment, and sustainability.

What is the role of P2PU in education?

Good question, and good answers—here. Like the education landscape, P2PU is still evolving. For more reflections on the workshop, check out the video, Nadeem Shabir’s post on Talis Education, and my post on OnOpen.net.

A recent emigrant to New York, I experienced the first turn in weather on the east coast marking the transition from summer to a fast approaching fall. Though a lovely relief from the hot, muggy season that has persisted here for the last few months, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness. Many students all over the world are feeling this same twinge, mingled with excitement, as their summer vacations skid to a halt. No more lazy, hazy days in the sun—instead, it’s time to hit the books and lockers, classrooms and lecture halls.

This is the vision of school we have had with us for ages. A first grader, when asked to draw school, usually draws a little red school house with a bell, or a teacher standing at her desk, with an apple for added effect. However, this traditional picture is hardly where the future of education is headed, as new technologies and mediums of communication, like the Internet, have already revolutionized the way we interact, learn, and live.

CC BY by Philipp Schmidt

Peer 2 Peer University is one initiative that acknowledges this fact—that the world has already changed, and not everyone is going to settle for the traditional modes of teaching. First of all, not everyone can afford to dole out the thousands of dollars required for a higher education, and secondly, not everyone has the time to—those of us with full-time or several part-time jobs, families, and other responsibilities, especially.

P2PU, in their own words, is sort of like an “online book club for open educational resources.” It’s “an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses… The P2PU helps you navigate the wealth of open education materials that are out there, creates small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses.” Unlike formal universities or distance education, P2PU’s courses are all defaulted under CC BY, which means anyone can access, share, adapt, and redistribute them. In fact, the founders are more than happy for others to adapt the model they have begun to new and successful ways of thinking about education’s future.

What do you think is the future of education? P2PU co-founder Philipp Schmidt answers the big question and more.

P2PU has been getting a ton of attention lately. Courses are set to start on the 9th! What are you hoping to gain from these first six weeks? What are you most excited about?

This is the first time we will run courses. We have been thinking a lot about how to make sure participants get a lot out of the experience, but this is the real test. I am sure we’ll discover many things we did not anticipate at all—and I look forward to learning as much as the participants. This is an amazing learning experience not just for the participants, but also for ourselves.

I am most excited by the fact that we seem to be providing something that many people from all over the world find useful and want to participate in. One person is taking the Copyright for Educators course and intends to get credit from his university for it. The fact that he is thinking about the course in his own context and trying to “hack” the system in a way that makes sense for him is awesome. This is exactly what we were hoping to see. Another person said that she had always wanted to take a course about cyberpunk literature, but couldn’t find a place to take one. To realize that we can provide a type of learning experience that people are looking for and which simply doesn’t exist elsewhere, is incredible.

There’s so much speculation around the future of formal education. What are your thoughts on it? What will be P2PU’s role in this changing educational landscape?

It is clear to me that the education landscape will change dramatically. I should mention that I am a huge fan of the university as an institution where young people spend a few years learning and immersing themselves into knowledge. It’s wonderful and I wouldn’t want to miss it. However, learning is not just what happens in universities and there will be new and different organizations providing many of the components that today’s universities offer as a package. There are two areas where P2PU could fill a gap. One is to create the social learning experience that will make open educational resources more useful to more people. The other is to provide forms of recognition for informal learning—this could be by enabling pathways to formal credits or by creating a community based reputation.

What do you have to say to those who confuse P2PU with distance learning? How is P2PU more than that?

The core of P2PU is social learning—working with others who are interested in the same topic as you. The fact that it happens by distance is almost secondary and we are hoping to have local off-line groups joining the P2PU community in the future. Distance learning is a broad term, but too often it is used in the context of what I would call industrialized education. Content is delivered to students—either by an online teacher or in the form of course materials designed for self-study. Knowledge is considered as something that can easily be measured, like weight or height. It is a totally different model from what P2PU is doing.

All P2PU courses are licensed CC BY. Why CC BY?

The pilot phase materials are licensed CC BY because that places the least amount of restrictions on others who might want to use and re-mix our content. However, the licensing choice is still a big debate. Some members of the community feel that CC BY-SA better reflects their desire to create a global knowledge commons. It’s one of the topics we will discuss at our upcoming workshop and we will make a final decision there.