Three Days of Focus on Curricular Alignment, the Reusability Paradox, and Offline OER

OEGlobal Plaza Three Days of Focus
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I’m so delighted with this topic and format. Thanks to you all for engaging in discussion on this, to my mind, essential but poorly understood paradigm - reusability. Big shout out to Werner for such amazing work and a fantastic example use case.

I read the reusability paradox several times with great interest. So interesting to flashback to “learning objects”. Let me make a couple of remarks about the argument David originally laid out. I found myself questioning some aspects of the logic. Is it really true that a large learning resource is less reusable than a small one? I’m not so sure it is. Here’s a corollary. What is more reusable a car or a steering wheel. A car is an assembly of smaller parts and I’d argue that cars as a whole are more reusable than the deconstructed parts. Look at the size of the used car market. Certainly it has higher “value” as a whole unit than uncoupled into parts. Learning resources are similar. A course is designed as a complete thing like a car. While it is possible to de-constuct it into parts it’s integrity and value are greater when kept together.

David asserts that open licensing introduces a new problem in that not everyone has the time, resources, and technical expertise necessary to engage in the significant amount of revising and remixing necessary to tailor a larger resource to a specific context. The same is true of cars thats why we have mechanics. And this issue has in my view had little impact on the reusability of cars.

I find the issues being raised about the visibility of instructional design really quite fascinating. Is instructional design similar to the engineering of a car that assembles the parts into a fully functional whole? Does revision and localization really result in degradation or destruction of instructional design? As Alan points out I question whether upstream instructional design is really sound and superior. And let me suggest something else - I think most faculty and teachers see themselves and their interactions with the leaerners as the instructional design. It is not necessarily a tangible visible thing embedded in the resource. Continuing with my car analogy hen someone buys a used car and customizes it for their own use (soups it up, custom paint job, etc.) are they degrading it? I don’t think so.

And finally I really like Mackiwg’s push for a move from sharing to learn to learning to share. One thing I discovered in my work supporting open education during my time at BCcampus is that faculty are more comfortable sharing and reusing a smaller learning resource than a larger resource. Oh my did I just undo my earlier arguments? I don’t really think so. It’s just that it takes time to build a culture of sharing and that culture is in direct opposition to societal norms that commodify resources into things bought and sold.

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Aaah, so I assume Kolibri has custom permissions to use Khan Academy videos (which are not extended to other initiatives). It’s unfortunate that the Khan academy dropped CC-BY-SA which from memory coincided with a large funding grant.

I was recently asked to assist Fiji in identifying resources they could copy into a local national repository for school children who are grappling with another COVID-19 lockdown. The use of Khan videos has worked well in your initiative, but I can’t advise a government to ignore copyright because I don’t think the rights holder will object. Unfortunately the Fiji initiative will need to incur additional transaction cost and time to get permissions to use those video resources :frowning:.

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In my opinion there are emerging/emerged technological solutions to both the reusability and localization paradoxes. Although it may seem amusing, copy and paste enables reuse on the most granular level, and automatic translation shatters language localization.

Remixers do this on a larger level but require much less expertise and time for the rebuilders. As with automatic translation, the results are not perfect but often more than useful and can be polished with comparatively little effort against starting from scratch.

This is all doable as we know from our interactions with such programs as are used to fill out tax forms. Constant reminders of the rules from the software may be annoying but in the end are useful. Hints about where to find more information also.

This does not take away from the fact that it always helps to know somebody in accounting but that a great deal of the work may be supported by building better tools and then using the tools to build content

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Hi folks! Learning Equality co-founder (and that “former KA intern”) popping in. :slight_smile: Thanks for hosting these great discussions!

First thing I wanted to clarify is that the majority of the Khan Academy videos are still CC-licensed – in particular, the vast majority are CC-BY-NC-SA. The exceptions to this are for content that came from KA partners (e.g. MoMA) or co-created with partners. It’s more hidden than it used to be, but if you look on a video page on the KA site, way at the bottom below the comment section, you can see text like “Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike” (e.g. here).

That said, there are a few things that have always been a bit muddy:

  • The KA exercises don’t explicitly specify their licensing on the site, as of 2014. We have verbal clarification from them that the intention is for them to still be open, with the same caveats as the videos (certain partner-provided content, e.g. College Board). The rule of thumb being “if a video is CC, then the exercises alongside it are also CC”. We pushed to have this made more explicit, but it looks like it’s been left implicit so far.
  • Their licensing metadata on YouTube hasn’t always been accurate. We pushed for some cleanup and it got better. I believe we primarily refer to API results to determine licensing, when bringing content into Kolibri, as it’s more canonical.
  • I too find their Terms of Service at times confusing, and in some cases possibly contradicting itself. The “Downloadable Content” pieces referenced above I think are largely (in terms of intentions) targeting their mobile applications. Section 7.2 first sets up a generic “personal, non-commercial” license as the default for “Licensed Educational Content”, and then 7.2(a) specifies that some content is made available under an “Alternate License” (with the example of CC being given). Despite this being phrased here as the “exception”, it’s actually the case for the majority of their videos.
  • One shift that has definitively happened over time is a move away from open-source, on the code side. When I interned at KA in 2012, the full KA website codebase was available for download, with many components (e.g. khan-exercises) released as explicitly open-source components. Later that year or in 2013, that download was removed, but some elements stayed open-source (and these were the pieces we incorporated into KA Lite and Kolibri). In 2018, they archived the Perseus exercise renderer codebase (GitHub - Khan/perseus: Perseus is Khan Academy's new exercise question editor and renderer.), which is required in order to render their exercises, and moved it into their internal repositories for ongoing development. So far we haven’t had issues using the 2018 version of the exercise renderer, but issues may arise as it continues to diverge.

Hope that provided some useful context and background! In terms of Learning Equality’s approaches to licensing, we always advocate for as open a license as possible. And in KA’s case we’re operating under the explicit CC license. In some cases, however, we do negotiate “special permissions” for distribution through Kolibri from a content provider that is not otherwise fully open.

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@jamalex

Big thanks for your clarification, and ongoing commitment to keep things as open as possible.

I will let Fiji know how to dig deeper to find the respective licences for KA videos and point them to your platform.

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I really appreciate your comment with regards to Learning to share, and wanted to propose the following:

In my experience in South America, teachers “naturally” have a tendency to share with peers, especially younger peers. The mediated sharing that Information and Communication Technologies make possible, however, is something they find much harder to do. Though it might be about the technology, my informal observation is that the formality of proposing materials for others’ consideration creates a significant mental barrier. “My materials are not good enough” is the leitmotiv. The reference is the textbooks that have big (although unknown) names on their covers, the gloss of having editors pouring over, and a pinch of impostor syndrome work against the desire to share.

It was interesting for me to hear Hans De Four, creator of KlasCement, echo this observation in some measure: in Belgium, his platform is dedicated to teachers sharing classroom resources and it took a few years of learning to develop strategies to incentivize teachers to share with other teachers resources they had created that “might be useful”.

In summary, i think educational systems have to consciously think of and implement strategies to foster teacher-to-teacher sharing (including making sure teachers know of CC licenses, for instance). Of course, this might demand relinquishing some of the control and the top-down approach to resources sharing and adopting more of an experimental mindset… How many educational institutions do we know that would fit that description?

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Hello @paulstacey , regards and thank you and the OEG crew to support these necessary conversations.

Let me hang on to this idea of value, because its emerged in the curriculum alignment work and why I went back to the Reusability Paradox. I was amazed with the possibility to create these offline OER channels, bundling and sequencing OER at ease to meet the official learning outcomes, creating robust and extensive solutions, in our K-12 chilean-aligned channel ended aligning 2000 OER. But as I tried to see how this set could be used … many questions emerged: are there too many?, should we balance the number of OER per objective?, to what depth can we treat a learning objective?, this is more relevant to learners or teachers? So basically went back to the paradox and rethink the tradeoff: how can effective and quality OER also have impact in different contexts.

I totally agree that openness provides the end users the possibility of the 5R’s with OER or the collection of them to fit the best way possible their specific needs and context, so they can be effective. But also, the other side of the paradox, those looking to reuse to scale and create “cars” that can be effective and have positive impact.

And openness is also a great answer, as you could also modify, extend, curate, improve, etc. these larger sets of aligned OER. But to do that, and many more open practices, not only requires expertise and skills from users, but also needs
a flexible and trusting infrastructure to support, replicate, expand, design for remix, etc.

In this days of discussion we’ve talked about collaborative and participatory platforms (like the Kolibri Studio), digital content, open licensing schema, interoperable technical standards … all components to a (open) infrastructure to support the power of open in K-12. How can countries/communities count on such infrastructure? But maybe more important and difficult, how can this infrastructure be sustainable over time? Any thoughts you can share on that for the K-12 context? Thanks again!!

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I’m missing something basic about Kolibri.
I hope to install it on a community intranet offering wifi connectivity (the Nimble mentioned here) for users without internet connectivity.
Does the learner/end user need to download a mobile app to use it on a smartphone, or does Kolibri run in a browser?
If it requires a dedicated app, can the server be configured to allow downloading the app via the intranet, or does it have to come from the App/Play store - which requires an internet connection?

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Looks like it’s browser based, from its web site

To facilitate broad, low-cost adoption, the Kolibri Learning Platform is designed to run on as many devices and operating systems as possible, leveraging existing legacy hardware or low-cost off-the-shelf devices. This includes Windows, Linux and macOS. We’re also building the Kolibri Learning Platform to run standalone as an Android app.

I’m accessing the demo on my mobile device web browser

https://kolibri-demo.learningequality.org/

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@WayUpNorth Precisely as @cogdog said: in a wifi network, the devices (smartphone, tablet, some kind of computer) only need a browser to connect to the local Kolibri server (a legacy laptop, an old desktop, or a Raspberry Pi, for example).

The Kolibri installation can also be duplicated locally without an internet connection: this could be useful to share the app via a USB drive or directly from device to device, for example.

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@Mackiwg - I stumbled upon your challenge WRT learning to share at the same time as I was installing KolIbri, the offline OER sharing platform. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the proposed curriculum alignment hub, and it’s potential usefulness in assisting with sharing capacity development. See https://blog.learningequality.org/curriculum-alignment-hub-cc975433d6a1

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Hi @Weblearning

That’s a very good question, and very timely as I’m working to assist the Pacific Small Island Developing States in the school sector to improve collaborative OER development combined with national OER repositories aligned with the curriculum. Hubs or authentic “Communities of Practice” are part of the solution but I don’t have authentic experience about how these will work in practice, at least in our context.

Currently I’m considering an open source approach of trying to find that “itch-to-scratch” - What are the itches teachers are scratching in their classrooms, and how does OER fit into that space as a potential solution. Building thriving OER communities in the K-12 area is a systemic challenge. For example, the elephant in the room is copyright. In many jurisdictions, the copyright of instructional materials produced by teachers belongs to the employer (School Board of Trustees, or Ministry) and teachers do not have the legal authority to apply open licenses!

The power of open source applications lies in the low barriers (an low risks) to try different solutions. If it doesn’t work, not much is lost because we can try other open solutions. At this stage, we are going to try a variety of approaches and see what sticks in a given context.

National curricula are valuable frameworks to organize OER initiatives. I also think that what is produced should be shared across multiple “repositories” and applications. In other words, thinking about the Internet as the repository with different hubs, applications etc working as nodes in the ecosystem.

Derek - what do you think? How do we grow authentic and active OER educators that are passionate about sharing. That is when the idea of sharing is bigger than the effort to do it.

Learning as we plod along in the open trenches :joy:.

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Bula @Mackiwg! You have raised an interesting point. Below I have extracted Fiji’s Copyright Act 1999, subsection on 'Exemption from copyright infringement, which says that “the school supplies no more than one copy of the copied material to any student or staff member of that school”.

What implication does this have on copying and distributing “closed” educational resources by schools? My interpretation is that schools can copy “closed” resources and share one copy with students and staff. Suppose KA materials were not CC’ed, could we in Fiji copy and share KA videos in schools without infringing copyright?

Confused! Happy to learn your take on this.

Chhers.

Division 2 - Education
Exemption from copyright infringement

43.-(1) Copying by a school referred to in subsection (2) for the purposes of research or private study by an individual does not infringe copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, unless there is a collective licence available of which the school is or should be aware under which the copying can be done.

(2) A school referred to in subsection (1) includes-

  1. (a) a kindergarten;
  2. (b) a primary school;
  3. (c) an intermediate school;
  4. (d) a secondary school;
  5. (e) a special school.

(3) For the purposes of subsection (1) copying for purposes of research or private study means-

  1. (a) the whole or part of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is copied for supply to any student or staff member of the school;
  2. (b) the school supplies no more than one copy of the copied material to any student or staff member of that school; and
  3. (c) if any student or staff member is required to pay for a copy, the payment required is no higher than the cost of production of the copy together with a reasonable contribution to the general expenses of the school.
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Bula @deepakvprasad!

Fiji has liberal copyright exemptions for education at the school level. It’s a pity that legislators did not extend these provisions to post-secondary education :sunglasses:.

I’m no lawyer, but the list of protections under the Copyright Licensing Agreements is where I imagine commercial publishing interests are regulated. The other area of potential confusion in a digital era, is what constitutes a single copy made by an individual. If a rich media object is hosted on a server - what counts as a single copy? Each time a student accesses the resource, does that add to the count? Not sure.

In my view, education exceptions should be used to the fullest extent possible under the law, and it may well be worth getting legal advice on what this means in a digital world. Fiji is definitely closer to the original intent of copyright, specifically an “Act for the Encouragement of Learning” under the Statute of Anne.

Thanks for sharing and look forward to increasing OER adoption in the Pacific.

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Hi @Mackiwg,

Many thanks for your response. Yes, I agree; things become a little complicated when it comes to digital copying. I shared similar sentiments some 13 years ago in an article titled, Copyright law, the internet, and education: does Fijian copyright law work in the web environment? Since then, our Copyright Act has undergone some minor tweaks; clarification over digital copying would be helpful. I wish I were a lawyer. I may seek clarification from my AG’s Office.

I am looking forward to learning new things on this journey.

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Excellent post. Every word resonates. I train educators for creating MOOCs, Online courses etc etc and I have experienced the things @opencontent has spoken about. It is absolutely true that content experts do not have training in instructional design - that is where things begin to start going topsy turvy. Also, the mention of paradox of localization left me smiling due to its reality. I was just wondering- some loud thinking here- whether having a template would help people to follow the instructional design to develop OER? At least initially, before they get hold of the whole process and its working. The template could also point towards areas where localization could be included and where it should not.

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It looks like there was some effort to align OER to curriculum in India (@AjitaD pointed me here) via the National Repository of Open Educational Resources

https://nroer.gov.in/home/topics/

but last activity looks like 2015.

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No! Resources get added into this every day. HUGE work done during the pandemic. See this. The resources are not arranged ‘latest first’ order, hence the confusion I guess. This is by the apex body for school education in India.
https://nroer.gov.in/home/e-library/

After the pandemic hit, an alternative academic calendar was launched within a month and subsequently in terms of weekly calendar in order to guide the teachers to mix off line activities with online teaching and resources. There is also a guideline called PRAGYATA to guide teachers regarding effective digital education and addresses the digital divide. Refer here under “important documents”.
https://ncert.nic.in/
These are my personal favorites.

And then there is DIKSHA App (ongoing) mapping the OERs to the curriculum across the country. Check here: https://diksha.gov.in/

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Thanks Ajita, yes the e-library has very active and a large amount of OER contributions, almost 20,000 items.

I was looking at just a specific part of the collection that was listed as OERs mapped to the national curriculum, as that was the approach that @wernerio shared in his work in Chile. I was anxious to see that this had been done elsewhere. I could only find dates by exploring the different categories, and it seems like this work was organized in 2015-2016.

curriculum

This was just from a quick exploration within the site.

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Hi, I wonder why it appears that way. Bcz that is not how it is. :expressionless: :unamused: