Students' Push for Open Education Meets Faculty Ambivalence

Washington, D.C. – We’ve all heard about university-driven open-education projects like MIT OpenCourseWare. These days, though, the push to freely publish course materials and research papers online is increasingly coming from students.

And some of them are bumping into a barrier: their own professors.

This weekend, Adi Kamdar and Parker Phinney joined campus activists from around the country at the Students for Free Culture conference here. Mr. Kamdar belongs to a Yale University student group campaigning for an open-access policy that would make scholarly papers freely available in an online repository (like the one at Harvard University, which has an opt-out rule). Mr. Phinney is prodding Dartmouth College to develop an open-courseware site for lecture videos and other materials (like the ones at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

They're both idealistic sophomores trying to pry open greater public access to their privileged Ivy League cocoons. An easy sell? Not quite. Over sandwiches at Potbelly Sandwich Shop during a break in the conference, both share similar struggles getting faculty members to budge.

"A lot of them just don't care," Mr. Kamdar says.

"In general, professors are very nervous," Mr. Phinney says. "Some are outright offended."

In talking with nearly a dozen professors, Mr. Phinney has heard their concern about violating copyright by making materials available online, about having to censor their remarks, about whether filming lectures will stifle discussion or drive students to skip class, and about running afoul of departmental politics. Mr. Kamdar finds professors generally supportive but also ambivalent, sentiments reflected in a series of faculty interviews that his group has published online.

The cases underscore how far universities are from the "free culture" advocated at the conference. Students for Free Culture, whose name parallels a book by Harvard cyberlaw guru Lawrence Lessig, consists of more than 40 campus chapters that care about intellectual-property policies and "digital civil liberties." It's probably the only student group more likely to use the initials "JZ" as a reference to the Internet legal scholar Jonathan Zittrain than the rapper Jay-Z. The group's genesis was a 2003 controversy involving two Swarthmore College students who had posted leaked memoranda from a company that makes computer voting machines.

At this week's conference, a more recent case grabbed their attention: the decision by the University of California at Los Angeles to stop posting copyrighted videos on course Web sites after complaints from an educational-media trade group.

Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University, described the capitulation as a "really dangerous" signal that was "bad for everybody else." She urged students to "push back."

Another conference participant shared a story of how much one student can get done when he does push -- hard.

Like Mr. Phinney, Kevin Donovan had an ambition to build an open-courseware Web site, this one amid the "not-so-free culture" of Georgetown University, as one blog put it. Mr. Donovan, a junior in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, wants to see first-class education available to the third world. He argues that open courses make sense, given Georgetown's Jesuit tradition of social responsibility.

The dean of his school bought his pitch, which carries a valuable lesson for fellow student organizers: once you obtain that kind of high-level support, things get a lot easier. The open-courseware project became Mr. Donovan's summer job. Working with faculty and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Mr. Donovan helped put six courses online last year. He hopes to build on that start in the coming semester.

Comments

1. richardtaborgreene - February 16, 2010 at 07:22 pm

Open courseware in a society drenched through and through with political correctness will do the following:

It will split ed materials into

1) a bland safe politically correct boring heartless public free open version and

2)an exciting, grounded, incident-containing cheerful and entertaining version where a full person shares experience and impressions as well as that person being a formal person sharing models and variable names.

Just as eLearning colleges are finding that face-to-face exposure has higher salary impact and respect impact than e-mediated degrees (JSBrown and Duguid)--the systems split.

Open Courseware will cause such a split. MIT is THE high class exception---a top set of minds teaching MOSTLY engineering---the least subject to political correctness manias. Other top rank universities will have a hard time matching them. Americans, at present, do not DESERVE open access to any ideas at all---they have invented private ways to prevent free speech more powerful than the public ways of dictatorships.

2. 11122741 - February 16, 2010 at 10:03 pm

something is only free to these people when it is someone else's hard work and product; nothing is free and somebody pays somehow and in some way and as Dickens said wise and rational people write for money, only fools write for free. It is important that all of these people learn that there are no free lunch. I'm sure that JZ, a lawyer like all other lawyers, doesn't provide free lunches. All of this nonsense reminds me of the free speech movement at the Berkley in the 60's when students were egged on by people with political agenda, axes to grind, and "capital" of various kinds to make at the expense of other who typically were sitting duck like tragets who were going to get their stuff JACKED ...I was there; I watch it; this is the RERUN and it was a terrible serial the first time round. Pranksters on the web have a term for this kind of behavior. It is called GRIEFING .... creating grief and being a pain in the butt to others; very easy to do to somewhat sitting ducks. New motto: you're entitled to what you earn so get out there and earn something and what you want and then we'll see how fast you are to give away what you've earned. I particularly dislike "forced charity" ...and believe me
there is someone making a buck off this movement in several different way. There is no free knowledge: all knowledge costs and costs dearly, which anyone can find out quickly and easily when they have to actually produce some. I also agree with the others that "forced charity" will result is the real knowledge producers offer useless pablum for free and everyone should read Gene Glass' book on the privatization of knowledge which these folks and a lot of the web and intellectual property theft is bringing about rapidly. As the woman said to the Pope, "you no playa da game, you no maka da rules"...until you are a real
knowledge producer and have a real track record at it, don't talk to be about giving it away because the one thing my mother taught me was not to give it away so pony up if you want it.

Lucretia Borgia

3. alanbeaudrie - February 17, 2010 at 10:26 am

Lucretia,
Dr. Jonas Salk.
His sole focus had been to develop a safe and effective vaccine for polio as rapidly as possible, with no interest in personal profit. When he was asked in a televised interview who owned the patent to the vaccine, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
Yes, everyone remembers him for being a "fool".

4. amy_l - February 17, 2010 at 01:48 pm

I wouldn't mind posting my lectures for free, but there's no way in heck I'd grade assignments or carry on online discussions for free, and that's where most of the learning happens in my classes. It's the interaction and the personal feedback that helps students most, but it's also the part that takes a lot of time and energy for me.

5. dramirez - February 18, 2010 at 05:57 pm

WebAssign is a homework assignment service which was initially developed at North Carolina State University.[1] Some of the disciplines covered include mathematics, chemistry, statistics, physics, and biology.

WebAssign partners with textbook publishers, providing online versions of the homework problems found at the end of each chapter. There are also utilities which allow teachers to create their own questions. While the questions are modeled after textbook questions, numbers in the questions can be randomized so that cheating is discouraged as answers will vary. WebAssign can be set to recognize both numerical and text answers, and has a variety of grading options.[2]

Students are required to pay a recurring fee for the use of the service (teachers receive it free). This fee must be paid every semester/quarter for every course that utilizes WebAssign. Brand new copies of textbooks often include the registration fee as part of the overall cost of the textbook; however, used textbooks do not include this.[3]

6. dramirez - February 18, 2010 at 05:58 pm