As teachers begin to post multimedia lecture material on their SPARK courses, they often ask our Instructional Media Lab staff how to stop students from downloading, saving, or re-distributing course content outside of the UMass SPARK environment. The short answer is: you can’t. While SPARK is a safe place to post files for educational fair use, original course materials such as lecture videos, powerpoint slides, and syllabi are always exposed to the elements of the Internet to some extent. Instructors entering the world of the writable Web are beginning to face savvy students’ abilities to access content on their own terms outside of class, or even send it to fellow students taking a similar course elsewhere. Yet is it really a bad thing? Is this lack of teacher-centric control a new form of cheating, or is it an emerging paradigm for curricular development and open learning?
In his new book titled “The World Is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education,” Curtis Bonk describes the ideology of openness and sharing that has leaked into our culture from the Internet. Building on Thomas Friedman’s notion of the “flat world,” Bonk explores the idea of global access to free or cheap learning tools outside of the institutional walls, a practice popularized by the free and open source software movement and other crowdsourced Web tools like Wikipedia. Open educational materials, Bonk contends, contributes to a set of academic tools that are leveling educational access for learning communities around the world. If the Internet becomes a portal to a world of educational materials, then all learners are empowered regardless of socioeconomic background, academic affiliation, or local resources.
In 2002, MIT announced that it would begin distributing free course content over the Internet as OpenCourseWare (OCW). The Website includes syllabi, video lectures, audio recordings, lecture notes, and student projects that are viewable by students and non-students on the Web. Since then, several other academic institutions have released their own OpenCourseWare initiatives including Yale, Tufts, Notre Dame, and UMass Boston. Free video and audio podcasts are even available via “iTunes U,” a section of the Apple iTunes store completely dedicated to distributing course content to iPods from schools like UCLA, McGill, Ohio State University, and many others in such fields as business, fine arts, science, and education. With OpenCourseWare and iTunes U, global citizens have access to a wide range of learning materials right from their iPhones or library media labs. Free content, listed in the 2010 Horizon Report as “likely to enter mainstream use” in the near future, surely won’t replace the full college experience, but it is a great opportunity to supplement traditional coursework or to preview interesting learning avenues.
By expanding open learning initiatives, sharing course materials and modules will become part of the teaching process: building on previous syllabi instead of starting from scratch; viewing student films from all over the world as sample projects; posting portions of lectures from other professors and discussing them in class; learning introductory material from distributed, modular Web resources; etc. But why share at all? What is the benefit of distributing free content outside of the institutional boundaries that have become so central to the university experience? Here are several advantages to placing free course content on the Web:
- It’s easy. The tools for sharing through the Internet are often cheap or free, and you don’t need full-fledged OpenCourseWare projects to share course materials. You can use personal websites, blogs or wikis to distribute lecture slides, post videos to YouTube, or share links on Twitter. For additional support, the OIT Instructional Media Lab staff is always available to assist with these instructional technologies.
- Gain credibility as an academic. Letting instructors or students view your content on YouTube or a blog can gain attention and generate interest in your work. While this informal attention may not always count towards tenure, getting publicity for yourself can help immensely for future publications or speaking events.
- Generate interest in your institution and your academic field. While sharing course content can help you further individual professional goals, it can also help the mission of your teaching institution or department. Students in high school can view your course materials when they are shopping for colleges and programs. Your video lecture or Powerpoint slideshow could be the catalyst that interests them in your institution and get them excited about attending college.
- Contribute to a growing global society. As Bonk and Friedman contend in their books, quality of life is closely linked with education. Yet many poor cities and countries lack the monetary resources to strengthen educational institutions. By opening access to learning materials on the Internet, you are contributing to a web of learning that can take place outside of the expensive, credit-bearing system. While full degrees will likely always be acquired through traditional college programs, open course content creates a more level access to supplemental knowledge materials so that all learners—inside the University or outside of it— can build new ideas upon previous ones.
- See what your colleagues are presenting. Viewing other teachers’ content can give you new ideas about how to present your material or provide a contradictory angle to what you are teaching. Presenting academic disequilibrium to your students can spark lively and interesting discussions.
Of course, opening up free course content on the Web comes with risks that you should be aware of. The bottom line is that you should share what you feel comfortable sharing, and the following criteria may help you sort this out:
- Be very careful about copyrighted materials. While posting copyrighted, non-original media behind students’ password-protected SPARK access falls under fair use of that material, distributing it on the Web without permission does not. When sharing open course content, you must be very careful about who can access PDFs of scholarly journals or clips from copyrighted films. Of course, if the source material is already available by its author or copyright holder for free on the Web, it is fair to link to it, while posting citations of source material without full text is always acceptable. (For more on academic fair use, visit the OIT Copyrighy & Fair Use page.)
- Student participation. Distributing student content to peers through the Web is a great motivator. Students are more aware of the quality of their work when they are producing it for a potential audience, but in some cases it can also create anxieties or self-censorship. Be sure to get permission from students before sharing their work and always accommodate students who opt out of Web distribution.
- Students in your class may rely on distributed content rather than attending class. In-person discussion and class participation is what sets apart the credit-bearing university experience from independently studying outside of the academy. Students relying on open course content in lieu of attending class is a large hindrance for sharing materials online. Having these materials available will no doubt change the learning dynamic and it will force instructors to find a balance between learning inside and outside of class. Creating incentives for attending the physical lecture is a good way to keep students attendance high, but it is up to you to structure how much material is available, and how much isn’t.
- A wider dialogue. Putting your content online exposes it to a much wider and more diverse global conversation about your content. Exposing your research in this open domain can be daunting, but the global feedback could actually start a dialogue that will improve your research and pedagogical skill.
For now, sharing course content is up to you. If you are willing to adjust your course structure to ensure consistent attendance while also accommodating an audience of global learners, you will be contributing to a stronger global society and operating on the emerging cusp of higher education.
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