You can also see me give the talk at OpenEd, but unfortunately some time is wasted on technical difficulties with the projection. Maybe it will give you a laugh.

The need for an ecosystem of tools and services: To maximize the benefit of the materials, we need editors to create the content, converters to take our existing content and create remixable versions, tools for rating, reviewing, and discussing the content, services for printing, services for packaging for learning management systems, adaptive learning environments that delivery and coach, alignment tools, and lots of things that have yet to be invented. That innovation and creativity needs to occur in an open ecosystem around learning repositories. 

Step 1 (Done). Closing the loop: Making publishing easier. So the first step in the fellowship was to choose and adapt an API (Application Programming Interface) for publishing to Open Repositories. This step involved research, advice gathering, and then specification writing.

• OERPub Specification

• Detailed Implementation Specification for OERPub in Connexions
• Documentation of the OERPub API on Connexions developer site.

• Prototype Massive Content Enabler (Code on Github). This importer currently takes Word documents, Open Office/ Libre Office documents, Connexions documents, Google Docs, and some HTML and blog entries. It transforms them if needed into a remixable XML format (CNXML), shows a styled preview, and then lets authors upload and publish to OER repositories (currently Connexions).
• Components of this tool can be used on their own, like the previewer (code on github). The converters can all also be used on their own, and more importantly, improved independently.
• Translation. Connexions content CC-By licensing makes translations a simple matter of fluency. We are working on a tool that lets translators select a Connexions module and the tool derives a copy, gets the content, retrieves a machine translation candidate (if requested), edit the translation, and publish the new module with links to the original — all using the OERPub API.
   

• Batch Operations: The API also provides immediate benefits for experts that are comfortable writing scripts that make repeated operations fast and efficient. The Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges Open Course Library has produced 42 courses for high-enrollment, high-impact community and technical college courses. Each course is represented by a Connexions module that showcases the syllabus, downloads for learning mangament systems (LMS’s) and pointers to the Saylor Foundation versions of the courses when available. These Open Course Library modules were created using the new OERPub API. Upcoming batch scripting projects will publish translations for existing content and link them to their original-language sources, and will produce a tool for textbook publishers to migrate content from a development server to the live server.

Although I live in the world of bite-size, modular education that can be remixed and adapted, I also have a very healthy respect for the power of narrative and a good storyteller to enhance learning. Stories are sticky. And that is a good thing for learning. But the seduction of a good story can also lead to overlearning and overconfidence. Dan Kahneman’s recent New York Times Magazine article (Oct. 23), illustrates the point with his own experience evaluating leadership potential and analyzing financial performance of stock traders. For traders, the statistics say that those end-of-year bonuses are just rewarding luck.

“The confidence we experience as we make a judgement is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.”

We ought to be able to do something about the exhorbitant salaries and prestige that we give to smart, hard-working gamblers, but the flip-side of that coin is that visionaries also are overconfident. They have a story in their mind that is so compelling that they keep working despite failure. The Emperor of All Maladies (Mukherjee), about the science and scientists behind the search for a cure for various forms of cancer, illustrates careers that spanned decades before some theories panned out. The leaders in Good to Great (Collins) typically took 10 years to turn middling success in a business into great success.

The open education movement is similar. The story is compelling. If we take the vast sums of public money that we spend buying textbooks over and over, and instead create a permanent, shareable, and adaptable store of teaching and learning, it will unleash creativity and productivity trapped in underserved and undernourished (intellectually) populations.

I am still convinced and I am still keen on being a part of that story.

Sharing clearly: When creating and sharing educational content, one of the first things that author’s (and their sponsors and funders) must think about are the circumstances under which others can use their work. I work with an open education project, Connexions (cnx.org), that chose one of the most liberal of the Creative Commons licenses, the Attribution only license (CC-BY). The Attribution license requires anyone redistributing content to give credit to the content’s authors. Creative Commons human readable version of the license explains the terms clearly and succinctly. Connexions thinks of itself as like Type O blood, the universal donor. While proper attribution is required, almost anything else goes. Take the content and adapt it, translate it, transform it, improve upon it (or not!), package it, market it, sell it, sell ancillary content and services based on the content, etc.

The Non-Commercial Choice: Quite a lot of freely available educational content, however, is licensed with a non-commercial restriction, the Creative Commons NC license being one of the most popular. The restriction is quite natural and content producers gravitate toward it from a basic sense of fairness. If I put a lot of effort into creating and sharing free content, it is natural to think that if someone else makes money off of that content, then some of that money should come back to me.

Why not? I find three compelling reasons to recommend that philanthropic foundations, national science and education agencies, education organizations, and individuals reject the non-commercial restriction for Open Education Resources (OER), if their goal is to accelerate human development through access to high-quality education.

• One of the reasons is a positive reason. Commercial entities bring resources and sustainability to open content. 
• Two of the reasons are negative. It is impractical to find and negotiate with the creators of most content that is available under the non-commercial restriction. 
• Finally, the definition of commercial versus non-commercial is undefined, and I would argue that it is likely to remain murky indefinitley. 

First, the positive: Commercial enterprises can market, package, and support open educational resources (OER), in a way that most of us sharing content cannot or aren’t interested in doing. Foundations and agencies fund the creation of OER, but, typically, not the distribution and long-term support of OER. The OER movement is still fairly young, but can look to open source software for guidance here. Most of the popular and successful open source software use licenses that do not restrict commercial use. Large companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), Mozilla, and Google have been instrumental in supporting open source operating systems, web services (ex. Apache) (you are probably relying on one right now while you read this), and word processing software. These companies support open-source software, because they use it themselves. They use the software because of the quality and continuous improvement. In addition to the support of companies that use the software, Red Hat, Canonical, and others specifically focus on selling services to support open source software. Now we certainly don’t yet have significant commercial support for the OER movement yet, but the commercial restriction forecloses this positive opportunity.
 
Secondly, the negative: Finding and negotiating with OER producers is expensive and often impossible. Authors share their work but may or may not say how to get in touch with them. Even when they do provide contact information they may move, lose interest, or even pass away. One of the clearest and most entertaining illustrations of the complexities and pitfalls in rights negotiation is the comic, Bound by Law, by the Duke Law “Center for the Study of the Public Domain”. Read about how the classic documentary, “Eyes on the Prize”, was pulled from circulation because its music rights expired.  The point is not that everything should be shared freely, but that if our purpose is specifically to create and spread education widely, the non-commercial restriction adds significant drag.

Thirdly, the issue that I find most troubling:  The Non-commercial restriction is hard to define and it seems unlikely to get settled any time soon. Some of the trickier issues that I have seen discussed are whether ad-supported sites can reuse non-commercial work (mostly, but the details may be important), exactly what sorts of costs can be recouped without being commercial (it depends), and whether charging for related ancillary services would be allowed (probably not, but it depends, because existing educational exceptions would apply). Take a look at this long list of situations by Evan Podromou, for instance, and see whether you could make an easy call for each of them.

The history of copyright and copyright legislation makes it seem unlikely to me that the non-commercial distinction will be settled quickly or ever. In the U.S. alone, Congress has enacted unbelievably arcane and specific rules in the Copyright Act to settle just these sorts of issues about what is commercial and non-commercial. Take a look at section 5 (B) on this page of the United States Copyright Code, at the detailed wrangling over when performances are public, using square feet calculations (exclusive of parking), speaker number and power, and screen size. This is followed by some sort of specific allowance for the government for annual horticultural and agricultural events. Huh?

Notes:

• I chair the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee and my fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation is helping to make Connexions easier to publish to and work with.
• Creative Commons points to quite a bit of further reading about the NC restriction.