Exploring the bridge between open access and lecture slides
On Feb. 11, the Institute for Community Engaged Scholarship (ICES), a group housed within the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences (CSAHS), held a small learning circle devoted to exploring the implications of “opening up” educational materials – course slides, syllabi, etc. – to the public, online and free of charge.
The philosophy behind sharing educational materials is broadly the same as the one that underpins the free sharing academic research – a movement known as ‘open access.’ But there are compelling reasons why academics are wary of divulging their educational materials, according to Gavan Watson, an Education Developer with the U of G’s OpenEd office and one of the learning circle’s co-facilitators.
Academic research is, by its very nature, “designed to be shared,” said Watson. Many academics like the idea of “removing barriers” to their published work even if the logistics of doing so can be a bit murky.
“But one of the assumptions I have, and one of the perspectives I think exists,” Watson said, “is that often teaching is seen as a private practice. And though it happens in front of 50, 60, 600 students, it’s really the instructor who makes the decision about what learning outcomes are going to be.”
The learning circle, which was composed of staff and graduate students, noted that instructors can be very protective of their educational materials, and can be reluctant to share even a course syllabus among themselves for fear of compromising its worth, and even their own worth as an instructor.
“They’re concerned about how [an educational material] might be used if others got access to it, that somehow its value might be diminished,” said Watson.
The circle acknowledged, however, that the value of an educational material depends on the instructor’s ability to employ it effectively. Indeed it is precisely for that reason that anxiety about releasing such materials is so strong.
The process of making post-secondary educational materials available to people outside the university is a movement that is gaining traction. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are becoming increasingly popular, and top-tier schools like MIT have invested a lot of resources in making some of its course materials freely available online.
The learning circle’s other co-facilitator, Anne Bergen of the ICES, who is also a sessional instructor in the Department of Psychology, discussed her decision to make her lecture slides open to the public.
Like MIT’s Open Courseware service, Bergen decided to use a Creative Commons license to protect her work in at least some capacity. Creative Commons is a copyright system that allows creators to open up their work to whatever degree they feel comfortable.
In this way, Bergen’s lecture slides were made freely available but with certain restrictions: for example, users are forbidden from altering or copying the slides for commercial purposes, and, if a user chooses to alter or repurpose the slides, they must “share alike,” ensuring that the derivatives are also barrier-free.
For practical and philosophical purposes, many people (the ICES being just one example) are attracted to the equitability of open access. But just how similar open access research is to open access education is evidently a complicated matter.