This post is a complete brain dump.  I’ve just read about the pending decommissioning of the Utah State OpenCourseWare initiative and my mind is a jumble of thoughts, opinions, reflections, and memories – in no particular order or structure.  So this is as much to help me work through my own thoughts as to begin a conversation with others.

The Chronicle writes:

“The Utah State University OpenCourseWare project has shut down because it ran out of money, according to its former director, making it perhaps the biggest venture to close in the burgeoning movement to freely publish course materials online.”

Alas it would appear that this news puts Utah State’s initiative atop an unfortunate pile of skeletons, all of whom shared similar visions, and yet met the same fate.  I count myself amongst their numbers; the first project I worked on at UNSW (the Learning Resource Catalogue, or LRC) was founded on a similar vision, and yet was discontinued as well.

In the case of the LRC though, we had far less going for us than Utah State did.  There was an acute absence of uptake stemming from a complete lack of awareness of the purpose, logic, and benefits derived from sharing.  I’d estimate that 95% of the resources in the catalog were images – ALL of which were digitised and entered by me.

This is not to try and put the LRC on par with the Utah State’s Open Courseware initiative mind you, because there are major differences.  For example, we had a small collection of around 1,000 photographs of crabs, invertebrates and coastal geomorphology; Utah State had 80 full-fledged courses.  The difference in scale of this comparison is monumental.  Still, in the end both projects were discontinued largely due to lack of funding.

What this leads me to believe, as I’ve said before, is that open education is – and must be – about far more than the resources.  This point was clearly articulated – and re-emphasised – during the recent presentation I did for the UNFED group, when the ever-lingering specter of criticism resurfaced to ask “What’s in it for me? What’s in it for the university? Why should we spend the money on sharing with others?”

Limiting the conversation to the topic of resources and course materials alone, it is far, far too easy a target for institutions and senior executives to say “What’s our return on investment for the work and money we’ve put into this project?  What have your outcomes been?”

Unfortunately altruistic endeavors, as with other non-market resources, are ALWAYS undervalued in a financial sense, and therefore it is very hard to accurately put a dollar figure to in terms of derived benefit.  You can easily pinpoint the cost of sharing with the world; you cannot easily articulate a quantifiable benefit.  Of course education isn’t about turning a profit, it’s about fostering an environment of scholarly investigation, innovative research, creativity, and the cultivation of critical thinking – however this vision is typically limited to the population of local staff and students, not those worldwide.  So the value of openness needs to be seen as making a local impact.

The closure of the Utah State OpenCourseware initiative is therefore unfortunately not the first of its kind; it has happened many times before during the era of learning resources repositories and learning objects – and almost undoubtedly with other projects before then.

So really, something has got to change in order for Open Education to move forward and continue to grow.

In my view, the first and arguably most important step towards so-called “sustainability in openness” is to have it embedded in practice and culture.  To me, projects such as MITs OpenCourseware Initiative, Utah State’s Open Courseware initiative, and others like them, situate the sharing of resources and material outside the realm of normal practice, where all else remains equal and it is far to easy to declare “sharing has no relevance or value to me.”

This is not to say I question the significance of these initiatives. Yes, they are important steps towards increased collaboration and the aggregation of the world’s knowledge; yes, they have contributed tremendously to the notion of open licensing and Creative Commons; yes, they attempt to provide a hub for locating the materials; however they appear to do this with a singular vision towards the opening of content – of stuff – rather than the changing of educational practice, and a fundamental rethinking of learning and teaching.

To me the changing of practice – and indeed the culture of education as a whole – must be a key driver of Open Education, and it is through this emerging culture that the sharing of open courseware and other learning materials will occur as a natural by-product.  Without the understanding of what it means to be open – above and beyond sharing materials – I fear that open courseware initiatives will remain large targets for funding cuts.

In my view part of this process – the embedding of openness in culture and practice – by nature and by necessity involves a distributed model, because that is much the way that open education works in practice.  Individual teachers and educators sharing with one another during day-to-day interaction, in a much more microscopic level.  Sure this isn’t necessarily as impressive as an index of 80 courses, but it is arguably far more sustainable and may indeed be more effective in influencing systemic change through a grassroots movement that is quickly established, mobilised and flexible.

Importantly too, it isn’t the resources that are driving the sharing, it’s something much more fundamental, and much more esoteric.  We share because we are a part of a culture that values sharing; we share because it is a core part of the participatory process in the open educational community.  Yes, the resources are valuable and empower what we do, but they’re not the reason we come together; they’re not the motives that drive us – the learning is.

As I’ve said before, openness is a mindset; it’s a way of working.  You don’t produce openness, you are open.  Likewise, while you can shut down a project, you cannot shutdown a culture.