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January 2011 - Open Distance Education

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FGV Brazil
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FGV Online Magazine - January 2011 Open Distance Education - The dissemination of knowledge in a world without borders. FGV Online website: http://www.fgv.br/fgvonline

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ISSN 2179-8729 Year 1 Number 1 / January 2011 OPEN DISTANCE EDUCATION The dissemination of knowledge in a world without borders http://www.fgv.br/fgvonline/revista
SUMMARY 04 - Treading new paths. Stavros P. Xanthopoylos 08 - Beyond Sustainability: The Emerging Institutional Imperative of OER-OCW. Gary Matkin 24 - New Directions for OpenCourseWare: Implications for Brazil. Larry Cooperman 38 Open Schools and Learning. Fredric M. Litto 50 Teaching Practices for the perspective of an open education. Renata Biscaia 60 Pedagogical practice in distance education: reflections on the open university and FGV Online. Edite Flora Sabbi Porciúncula, Eloíza Gomes de Oliveira and Francisca de Oliveira Cruz 76 - Book review: The 2020 Workplace How Innovative companies attract, develop, and keep tomorrow`s employees today. Cristina Massari
FROM THE EDITORS With its debut issue, the Revista FGV Online examines one of the most thought-provoking and democratic aspects of EaD. Open Education (the Open Course Ware Consortium, OCWC) is a movement in which educators, students and others involved come together in an endeavor that crosses borders in the belief that it can unite and make education more accessible and effective on a global scale. Professor Stavros P. Xanthopoylos, who throughout his career as an educator and education manager has been a fervent advocate of this manner of delivering educational content. The - access courses. Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education and EaD and the University of California, emphasizes in his article that in spite of the major accomplishments to date both in forming consortia, such as the OpenCourseWareConsortium (OCWC), and in delivering Open Educational Resources (OER), there is still much to be done. The aim now is to grow by including new approaches to evaluation, accreditation and collaborative learning. Larry Cooperman, Director of OpenCourseWare (University of California), then describes the OCWC's history in the United States and the world and points up the wealth of opportunities for expanding this kind of course. He highlights particularly how institutions around the world has welcomed the proposal of offering open-access courses on subscription to the OCWConsortium it was the first Brazilian institution to develop an OCW website and signals some directions for this field in Brazil. Professor Renata Biscaia of the FGV Online examines the role of professor-tutors in their activities as mediators of the education process in on-line environments. She does this by drawing attention to the need for such educators to develop certain competences for on-line courses in general and, more specifically, for tutoring in distance learning of Open Education disciplines. Edite Flora Sabbi Porciúncula, Eloíza Gomes de Oliveira and Francisca de Oliveira Cruz, who are also professor-tutors with the FGV Online, take an innovative approach to language supports as an essential component of the on-line education environment. Language is adapting to the Internet era and that adaptation must be contemplated by the Open University, which the authors consider a vector in the democratization of education globally. In this issue you will also find a review of the book How Innovative , by Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd, due out in Brazil in March 2011. The book examines the not-too-distant future prospects for the digital environment and corporate labor relations under the direct influence of the new information technologies. As you explore these complementary themes, we invite you to participate in this new academic knowledge channel, not just as a reader, but as an author too. Revista FGV Online is open to your contributions and your suggestions. We are already preparing the next of our six-monthly thematic issues, which will deal with Corporate Education (see here how to submit your article). Pleasant reading!
Institutional Fundação Getulio Vargas General Management President: Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal Vice-Presidents Francisco Oswaldo Neves Dornelles Marcos Cintra Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Sergio Franklin Quintella Instituto de Desenvolvimento Educacional – IDE (Institute for Educational Development) Executive Director: Clovis Lyra D. Faro Academic Director: Carlos Osmar Bertero FGV Online Director: Stavros Panagiotis Xanthopoylos FGV Management Director: Ricardo Spinelli de Carvalho FGV In Company Director: Antônio Carlos Porto Gonçalves FGV Online Executive Director: Stavros Panagiotis Xanthopoylos Academic Production Manager: Mary Kimiko G. Murashima Marketing and Commercial Manager: Felipe Spinelli de Carvalho Operations Manager: Antônio Carlos de Sá Leite Product Manager: Adriana Schneider Pedagogic Coordinator: Elisabeth Santos da Silveira Graduation Coordinator: Maurício de Brito Gomes Postgraduation Coordinator – Open Courses: Cláudia de Cássia Capello Postgraduation Coordinator – Corporate Courses: Maria Alice P. Mendes Postgraduation Coordinator – Satellite Communications Courses: Marcos de A. Reis Villela Assistant Postgraduation Coordinator – Satellite Communications Courses: Lygia Maria F. dos Santos Leite Postgraduation Coordinator – Webcast Courses: Maria Isabel Leal Giusti Corporate TV Coordinator: Erenice de Almeida Alencar Corporate University Coordinator: Josilene Marinho CTAE Coordinator: Tatiana Sansone Soster Customized Courses Coordinator: Letícia Borba Balceiro Tutor Coordinator: Maristela Rivera Tavares Production Coordinator: Renata dos Reis Vasques Resources Coordinator: Sandro Eymard F. Bonadia IT-RJ Coordinator: João Carlos da S. Freitas IT-SP Coordinator: Alexander Dubrowsky Academic Office Coordinator: Leslie de M. Moysés Technical Support Coordinator: Anderson R. Pimentel Logistics Coordinator: Vítor Araújo de Oliveira Financial Coordinator: Gustavo Silva Villela Commercial Coordinator: Sandro Alan R. Rabelo Marketing Coordinator: Alexssandra das Neves M. Conti Projects Coordinator: Lorena Breda de Carvalho
About FGV Online Magazine 1. Presentation FGV Online Magazine is a biannual electronic publication, created under the responsibility of FGV Online, the distance education program of the Institute for Educational Development - IDE, which is responsible for the distribution of courses developed in partnership with the Schools of Fundação Getulio Vargas. It's a publication focused on issues related to education in general and more specifically to Distance Education. With the mission to disseminate the knowledge that has been generated under the Distance Education global environment, the FGV Online Magazine opens space to authors and experts in the area for publication of academic and scientific papers. 2. Editorial Body Editorial Council Clovis Lyra D. Faro IDE/FGV Director Gary Matkin Dean of Continuing Education at University of California, Irvine (EUA) Lindolpho de Carvalho Dias FGV Vice-President Stavros P. Xanthopoylos FGV Online Executive Director Marieta de Moraes Ferreira Editora FGV Director Flávio Carvalho de Vasconcelos EBAPE/FGV Director Yoshiaki Nakano EESP/FGV Director Celso Castro CPDOC/FGV Director Sérgio Guerra Vice-Director of PostGraduation at FGV Law-School-RJ Editorial Comission Fredric Michael Litto Abed/USP – Sao Paulo Mary Kimiko G. Murashima FGV Online Academic Production Manager Elisabeth Santos da Silveira FGV Online Pedagogic Coordinator Reviewers
Elisa Maria R. Sharland IDE/FGV Assistant Academic Director Jacyara Carrijo R. Nasciutti Prof. of FGV Quality Central Cláudia Capello FGV Online Postgraduation Coordinator Maristela Rivera Tavares FGV Online Tutor Coordinator Raquel Villardi Instituto de Educação da UERJ Assistant Professor Chief Editor Severo Hryniewicz Assistant Editor Maria Cristina Massari Editorial Production Production Coordinator Sandro Eymard Fontenele Bonadia Copy-desk Andrea Patricia Tostes Rabello Teixeira Milena Clemente de Moraes Translation Christiane Cerboni – Portuguese/English Maria Helena Rangel Geordane – English/Portuguese Yuri Kitsutani – Portuguese/Spanish Peter Lenny – Portuguese/English Graphic Design / Desktop Publishing Design & Criação Clube Digital Plataform Implementation Digital Pages
3. Information to authors About the next issue FGV Online Magazine issue #2 will focus on Corporate Education. Articles must follow the submission guidelines, and be sent to severo@fgv.br. The final submission deadline is April 31st , 2011. Besides the articles, book reviews may be accepted for titles related to the subject in focus. In this case, refer to book reviews presentation guidelines.
Treading new paths Stavros Panagiotis Xanthopoylos In its 15 years of existence, FGV Online has written a successful story in making flexible, quality education available in Brazil. In pursuing that goal it is totally aligned with the principles that make the Fundação Getulio Vargas a reference institution in professional development for executives who will contribute to building a scenario in which Brazil's economy is increasingly solid and trusted worldwide. The information and communication technologies (ITCs) and educational foundations used by the FGV Online, developed by acknowledged authors at the Fundação Getulio Vargas, are designed not just to reach those in the big cities whose more comfortable social and economic contexts enable them to attend the FGV's schools in person. The FGV's distance learning program permits high-quality content to be accessed at quite reasonable cost from the most remote localities in Brazil. Much more than that, in a country where demand for specialist skills is growing steadily, but which still requires its citizens to reconcile study time constantly with time at work, the FGV Online offers the possibility of professional development and capacity-building on a flexible model that makes allowance for the present- day lack of time. The FGV Online's reach is not limited to Brazilian territory. Given that all of its content is offered in Portuguese, other Portuguese-speaking countries can access its courses. Meanwhile, although Portuguese-speaking users are our main target public, language has not been an impediment, because FGV Online is constantly working to tailor its strategies to the present, strongly globalized world context. In that regard, a series of partnerships are being forged with prestigious international institutions, such as the University of California at Irvine (UCI) and the Manchester Business School (MBS), the largest school of Business Administration in the United Kingdom. In 2005, the Fundação Getulio Vargas reached an agreement with the University of California, at Irvine (UCI) with a view to offering a quality, internationally recognized MBA to Brazilian executives and liberal professionals. The content of the International Executive MBA in Project Management was produced by FGV and UCI professors. The MBA is offered totally in Portuguese, making it possible for knowledge constructed in international contexts to come into the hands of Brazilian students in their native tongue. Understanding that in a globalized world – an environment that calls for constant information exchange and for difference to work together – the notions of space and time are being reconfigured and the notion of unity, reconstructed, the FGV also signed an agreement with the Manchester Business School (MBS). That agreement is designed to make the Global MBA available to Brazilian executives, with all content completely in English. This course was maintained in its original language, because today English holds a key position in international negotiations. The Global MBA meets demand from executives seeking international projection in their careers.
It can thus be seen that FGV Online is concerned to construct products to match the new demands of the market, suiting them to the wide diversity of conditions represented there. The FGV Online is evidently striving to make quality content as widely available as possible. Accordingly, it is only natural that the program should make a variety of content available free of charge. In 2001 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) founded OpenCourseWare (OCW), which provides free access to learning assets from the university curriculum. Following in its footsteps, in 2008, FGV Online joined forces with the University of California at Irvine (UCI) to offer access free of charge to high quality content, especially for the Brazilian and other Portuguese-speaking publics. By joining the OpenCourseWareConsortium (OCWC), FGV Online has managed to popularize substantial knowledge on a vast scale, far exceeding all expectations of success. In the first 10 days after the free courses were made available on line, they received more than 20,000 visits. To date, the FGV Online courses accessible through the OCWC have received nearly five million hits, which have brought 1,1 million people to complete one or other of the courses on offer and visit the FGV Online website to post declarations about their participation in the courses. To the Brazilian public, which represents both huge demand for training and high education costs (approximately 35% of national GDP is directed to higher education), the free FGV Online courses are an appropriate and necessary response to Brazil's education needs in a certain sphere. The OCWC courses offered by the FGV, more than affording limited qualification to those who complete them, foster a movement of ongoing education, given that in the last two years more than 1,000 enrollments in paid courses originated from students who had concluded free courses. In this way, the FGV Online is building a solid structure that incorporates factors such as: • open-access content; • the mission of developing and managing distance education technologies, methodologies and solutions, under the academic responsibility of the schools and institutes of the FGV, one of Brazil's most prestigious educational institutions; • future outlook – to be an international reference in the distribution of innovative, high quality distance education products and services. In that context, the FGV Online has become a provider of high value-added educational solutions, as confirmed by the leading corporate sector awards granted in recognition of its achievements: • the 10 Melhores Fornecedores de RH, awarded to Brazil's top ten human resource providers; • Top of Mind, five times running; • E-Learning Brasil – National Reference in T&D; • The Prêmio de Destaque Educacional Nacional - prize for outstanding achievement in Brazilian education. In the wake of this history of successes as a provider of education solutions and education as such, the FGV Online is making available yet another means of popularizing high-quality
content. The e-zine Revista FGV Online is a space reserved to circulating current thinking on EAD, business schools, the world panorama and education in general. With collaboration from leading Brazilian and international names, the Revista FGV Online aims to foster discussions that contribute not only to analyzing the status quo, but also to outlining possible future trends. In that light this first issue focuses on essential points in present-day education: • All the various facets of Open Educational Resources (OERs); • The place Brazil occupies in response to this movement towards open-access content; • How the profile of the distance education professional is being reconfigured by the new scenario that is forming. Observing how the Revista FGV Online has gained form and content confirms, once again, our certainty that we are moving steadily towards providing content of excellence on a major scale, always in partnership with leading institutions and individuals like the ones that have contributed to the making of this first issue.
Beyond Sustainability: The Emerging Institutional Imperative of OER/OCW By Gary W. Matkin, Ph.D., dean of continuing education, distance learning and summer session, University of California, Irvine Abstract The development of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Open Educational Resource (OER) movements of the last three years clearly indicates that all major universities are or will become producers and publishers of OCW and OER and that these efforts will become a feature of organizational life for these institutions. This statement and prediction is supported by both strong current evidence and a projection of major trends in higher education that will inevitably intersect with the OCW and OER movements. This paper makes the institutional case for developing some form of OER soon. Key Words Open Educational Resources, OpenCourseWare, Higher Education Trends, MIT OCW, UCI OCW, Institutional Case for OCW
The development of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Open Educational Resource (OER) movements of the last three years clearly indicates that all major universities are or will become producers and publishers of OCW and OER and that these efforts will become a feature of organizational life for these institutions. This statement and prediction is supported by both strong current evidence and a projection of major trends in higher education that will inevitably intersect with the OCW and OER movements. This paper makes the institutional case for developing some form of OER soon. 1. The Early Institutional Case Of course, this is not the first article on this subject. In fact, several major international studies describe the involvement of, and illuminate the case for, university involvement in OCW/OER. In 2007, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development issued a report “Giving Knowledge for Free” (OECD, 2007) which offers a strong context for institutional engagement in OCW/OER. Also in 2007, Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services, funded by the European Commission, published “Open Education Practices and Resources” (OLCOS, 2007), a comprehensive report with recommendations for institutions on the use of OCW/OER in Europe. Generally, these reports mix high-minded, public policy motives with very practical reasons for institutional involvement in OCW/OER (quotes from OECD, 2007, pages 64-65): 1. “…Sharing knowledge is a good thing to do” and “in line with academic traditions.” 2. “Educational institutions should leverage taxpayer’s money by allowing free sharing and reuse of sources.” 3. “By sharing and reusing, the costs for content development can be cut, thereby making better use of available resources.” 4. “It is good for public relations and it can function as a showcase to attract new students.” 5. “Free content lowers the cost not only for institutions but also for students.” 6. “Open sharing will speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation, and reuse and help the institution to keep good records of materials and their internal and
external use. These records can be used as a form of market research if one is interested in the commercial potential of individual resources.” These reasons have some overlap with the factors that prompted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to initiate a university sponsored OCW in 2001, an initiative that set the movement on a spectacular and highly successful start. Charles Vest, then president of MIT, lists five reasons for MIT’s pioneering effort to “give away all its course materials via the Internet” (Vest, 2004): 1. To advance education and widen access 2. To provide greater opportunity for MIT faculty to see and reuse each other’s work 3. To create a good record of materials 4. To increase contact with alumni 5. To help MIT students become better prepared MIT followed its land-grant mission, carved out some very high moral ground and markedly enhanced its image as a generous university. Indeed, MIT’s success in OCW/OER continues to this day, evidenced by the shear volume of its published open materials and the number of users. As of August 9, 2010, more than 90 percent of MIT’s tenured and tenure-track faculty have shared their materials on the MIT OCW Web site. The site features 2,003 courses with syllabi and reading lists, notes from more than 17,500 lectures, 9,500 assignments and 1,000 exams. (MIT, 2010). 2. Intersection with Long Term Higher Education Trends The early (2001-2004) institutional impulses for institutional involvement-in and sponsorship- of OER/OCW intersected with some compelling long-term trends in higher education—trends with a strong supporting context for university-sponsored open materials. Perhaps the most compelling is the world-wide need to reduce the costs of higher education. Sir John Daniel and his colleagues have identified higher education’s “iron triangle” in which the overwhelming world-wide demand for higher education (access) is met with the financial realities (cost) of providing that education effectively (quality). With an estimated one billion students effectively denied education world-wide, the world is faced with unfathomable problems associated with frustrated ambitions and ignorance. (Daniel, et. al., 2009). OER/OCW appears to offer at least part of a strategy to break this triangle. A second trend is the increasing global institutional competition for students, faculty and resources. This trend places a premium on positive world-wide institutional visibility and reputation building—
clearly something enhanced by providing free online learning material. Another trend is the demand for increased institutional accountability, to students, parents, governing boards, governments and the general public. In public perception, accountability and openness go hand-in-hand. Associated with this accountability is the increased attention being given to the continuous improvement of the learning process, practiced first on an institutional level and then at a more granular level by individual faculty members. Open expression of materials allows larger groups to contribute to the improvement process. Higher education can’t ignore the emergence of learning communities and serving these communities will be added to the agenda of universities. Finally, something that has not been fully recognized or written about is that the market for instructional content has changed. One indication of this is the continuing issue of the high costs associated with scholarly publication. Universities and their libraries are encouraging and producing open journals because publishers charge very high prices for journals, sometimes over $10,000 per year. Initiatives such as the Public Knowledge Project which helps scholarly communities develop open peer-reviewed journals are growing in influence and effectiveness as university budgets shrink and developing nations are disadvantaged by being effectively cut off from the latest research. (Schmidt, 2010). Thus, university scholars understand the market realities for their intellectual product, a market with high costs associated with the marketing, production and distribution of intellectual property, but with low costs of its content. The open textbook movement is another case in which educators are attempting to wrest the control of the market from the hands of for-profit publishers, this time in the instructional rather than the research realm. At a time when the commercial value of content produced for the teaching/learning process is in question and even declining, the social value, including the social value to developing countries, is increasing. With these forces acting simultaneously, the ground for the expansion of OER/OCW has been cleared. 3. Progress of the Movements MIT’s example inspired many institutions to follow it into the OER/OCW movements. MIT took the lead in the formation of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) which today has approximately 200 institutional members that have now posted over 14,000 open courses on the Internet. But factors independent of MIT’s example have also proliferated. For instance, the University of California, Berkeley now has over 8,000 courses posted on iTunes U (UC Berkeley, 2010), joining 600 other colleges and universities (including Yale, Stanford, Oxford and MIT) in contributing over 350,000 educational materials. (iTunes U, 2010). YouTube
EDU, http://www.youtube.com/education, counts over 300 universities and subscribers among its contributors and offers over 65,000 individual videos and over 350 complete courses. (You Tube EDU, 2010). Within the OER movement there are strong and growing sub-movements. Of particular note is the open textbook movement. Fueled by the high cost and ever-increasing price of textbooks, there are many initiatives dedicated to placing textbook material online for free. It is estimated that U.S. K-12 public schools spent about $4.4 billion for textbooks in 2006-07. In response, the state of Florida created Free-Reading, believed to be the first free, open- source reading program for K-12 public schools. (Toppo, 2007). The $400 million that California spends on textbooks in its K-12 system is the target of the California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) (http://www.opensourcetext.org/index.htm). The majority of higher education textbook costs fall on students rather than institutions, but these institutions are acting aggressively. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is funding a major open textbook effort focused on the community colleges. Individual campuses such as North Carolina State University is trying to help students reduce the total cost of their education by using open texts. (Laster, 2010). Despite this clear evidence of the health and continued growth of the OER/OCW movements and the widespread institutional publication of open educational material, there remain barriers to the formal adoption of OER/OCW by higher education institutions. The primary barriers appear to be the perceived cost of creating and sustaining open resources and the failure of higher education leaders to see the potential institutional uses of open content. 4. The Perceived Cost Barrier In an era of sharply reduced funding for higher education (in the U.S., at least) the notion of providing free material to the public seems counter to the cost saving measures widely in place today, particularly when universities are cutting staff and reducing wages. Indeed the issue of “sustainability” has dominated the attention of those involved in the OER/OCW movements, and has attracted criticism from outside those movements. Under a front page headline “Open Courses: Free but Oh, So Costly,” (Parry, 2009) the Chronicle of Higher Education reported predictions of the sharp decline in the movements based on the inability of institutions to continue to fund those efforts. In this article, David Wiley, now at Brigham Young University predicts: “Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit will be dead by the end of calendar 2012.” Since that article was published, the number of active universities on iTunes U (as of August 2010) has increased from 222 to 600 and education materials available on the site increased from 200,000 to 350,000.
While predictions of decline in open educational materials seem quite contrary to hard evidence, the cost issue remains important and, indeed, underlines a problem that has dogged the OER/OCW movements from the beginning. Despite the high minded purposes clearly articulated for the movements, OER/OCW seem to be solutions in search of a problem. In fact, sustainability for the efforts will not come from identifiable and separate sources of external funding such as providing students with distance learning courses as Wiley suggests, but from the normal carrying out of day-to-day institutional activities. The “imperative” in the title of this paper derives from this circumstance—current functions and obvious improvements in those functions will be served best by the institutional publication and maintaining of open content. 5. The Failure of Imagination Barrier Despite its immense contribution to the OCW movement, MIT’s OCW model has so dominated the press and overall conception of OCW that it has served as a barrier to the imagination— even as MIT itself pushes at the edges of that model. That model is defined for all on the MIT OCW Web site (http://ocw.mit.edu/about): MIT OCW “is a free publication of course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.” “OCW is not an MIT education” “OCW does not grant degrees or certificates” “OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty” “Materials may not reflect entire content of courses” These explanations are quite reasonable and necessary from MIT’s perspective but they are not limits that must be adopted by all universities—even the most prestigious. Other institutions may choose not to limit their OER/OCW offerings only to degrees they provide their own students, choosing, for instance, to share with and target their expertise to deserving non-student audiences. They may add instructional services, including learning assessments and certifications to their open offerings, so that the open material does constitute an institutional educational offering. Some open material may be intended to foster external involvement with faculty members. And finally, institutions may decide to define what a “course” is to distinguish it from materials that are less complete in order better to serve their users. So, the institutional case for OER/OCW should use the MIT OCW as a sound but also limited model for what can be accomplished.
6. The New and Improved Institutional Case The experience of the last four years has added substance to the case that can be made for institutional involvement in the OER/OCW movements. This experience has supported and reaffirmed all of the early objectives for higher educational institutions to become actively involved in sponsoring and publishing OER/OCW and, in addition, presented new examples of the benefits that institutions can derive from such involvement. As these new uses emerge, so does the justification for the financial support of them, support that results in revenue generation, cost savings, and service improvements that are so compelling as to demand funding and support from institutional leaders. The case for institutional support of OER/OCW falls under several categories which are listed and described below. There is no more compelling a case to be made for OER/OCW than its ability to serve the core instructional mission of the institution. As indicated earlier in this paper, Charles Vest describes why MIT chose to give its materials away for free and lists two of his five reasons under this category—to provide MIT faculty the opportunity to view each other’s work and to help MIT students be better prepared. In fact, these two reasons are clearly manifested in the MIT experience and in the experience of other universities, some of which have taken an even more active role than MIT. For instance, UC Berkeley has created an infrastructure whereby course lectures are automatically recorded and then posted to iTunes U, available for viewing by students in the course soon after the lecture is complete. Individual students and study groups can review lectures as they prepare for exams. This same service can also serve students who miss a class and, in one case at a major university facing a classroom shortage, an alternative delivery system to the classroom. New York University (NYU) recently announced plans to video capture lectures in ten courses, add learning assets to them and place them online in an open format for its fall 2010 term. The professors teaching the courses will use the time gained by not having to deliver the lecture for one-on-one interactions. (Parry, 2010). Of course, these examples could be provided by the institution without offering the material in an open format. The advantage of the NYU and UC Berkeley models is that they utilize a free, publically available distribution site (YouTube EDU or iTunes U). These sites are easily accessible by students from anywhere and can remain in place along with later versions of the same course beyond the current term, serving as a continuing reference for subsequent students. And the institution gains the benefits of wide-spread exposure to its instructional product. Serving Current Students and Faculty (Supports Teaching and Learning)
The earlier mentioned open textbook movement comes into play here also as the distinction between textbooks and Web-based and digitized materials of all types begin to blur. Universities are seeking to provide students with the material needed for their courses in cost effective ways. Last year, University of California’s (UC) chair and vice chair of the academic senate wrote an “open letter” to the UC faculty saying “now it’s our turn to cut the cost of textbooks for our students.” One way they suggest for cutting such costs is to “try to identify open resources textbooks (OER) or other published material that is freely available in digital form.” (Croughan, Powell, 2009). This notion of a designated open Web site for a commonly taught course is being exploited in even more innovative ways. At the University of California, Irvine (UCI), the faculty of a department responsible for a major introductory course with a high volume of students each year and faced with budget reductions have worked together to design a course that can be taught by faculty on a rotating basis without the high personal cost in development time. Faculty are free to make modifications to the course when they teach it and may (and do) add their modifications it. They are now considering making it a “canonical” course, open to all. Once placed in OCW, modifications to the course may be posted in a manner referenced at the appropriate point in the course so that subsequent students benefit from multiple approaches to the same topic. Sometimes these additional materials take the form of a video lecture by the professor that term. A possible extension of this process when presented in an open format (not contemplated in this example) is that viewers from outside the university, including other academics, might comment on the material and perhaps even contribute material to the course. Thus the faculty course authoring process has changed as a result of faculty being “able to view the work of others.” Another, this time institution-wide, example of aiding course authoring can be seen at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Monterrey, Mexico, with its project know as the “knowledge hub,” http://www.temoa.info/cache/normal/khub.itesm.mx/_.html.gz. Individual and teams of faculty members have created their own course materials, reviewed open material from other universities, and categorized the material by university course number in a repository ready for the use of both students and faculty. This institutionally sponsored project promises to drive down the time, effort and cost of developing institutional courses by harvesting vetted material from other institutions while making their own material available to others. They have kept this “hub” open for others to use as well. Another service to students performed by OER/OCW turned up as an unexpected result early in MIT’s experience. With a significant amount of material about a particular course
available, students were able to “shop” for the classes they wanted, prior to the enrollment period, to reduce the flurry of activity during the traditional “drop and add week.” This advantage to students was also a boon to MIT in cutting down its transaction costs associated with student schedule changes. Obviously being able to examine the details for a particular course beyond the description in the catalog is a benefit both to students and their counselors, enabling them to design their academic careers with more information. While an argument might be made that an institutional open resource Web site seems to duplicate what most colleges and universities already provide—technological and Internet- based support for instruction, usually through organizational units called teaching and learning centers—the open dimension adds significantly to the utility of the effort. As indicated above, open course materials are generally more permanent and enduring than materials created only for the teaching of one instance of the course. Free public utilities such as iTunes U and YouTube EDU can be used and students from outside the institution can both benefit from and even contribute to the material. This opening is gained primarily at the cost of relinquishing most of the rights to control the material, but, given the commercial issues mentioned above: this cost is usually lower than the value of the benefits gained. Recent studies by MIT indicate that 79 percent of entering freshman report that they visited the MIT OCW site before deciding to attend MIT. Frequently their parents also visited the site. Seeing “how MIT does it” makes sense as part of the decision-making process. Clear statistics on this benefit are difficult to gain since it is difficult to track enrollments back to particular visits to a Web site, but some data is available. The Open University of the Netherlands estimates that 10 percent of the people who visit their free online courses go on to pay for online courses. (Aujla and Terris, 2009). The University of California, Irvine (UCI) placed a series of public health seminars on its OCW Web site, and professor of public health Oladele Ogunseitan reports that “applications at the undergraduate level and the graduate level have all increased over the past year.” Attract Students http://learn.uci.edu/ucionline/. Also at UCI, the continuing education unit of the University reports that traffic from its OCW site (http://ocw.uci..edu) is the largest source of referral traffic to its catalog site. It uses its OCW Web site to capture leads for its online courses and programs and as a demonstration site for those who want to understand what kind of experience they will have in an UCI online course. Stimulates and Facilitates Accountability and Continuous Improvement
In the U.S., the regional accrediting bodies are requiring that desired student outcomes (DSOs) be articulated for each degree program as a whole and for each course, and that metrics, preferably external metrics, be adopted for the measurement of those outcomes, and that the results of those metrics be translated into action that improves the educational product of the university. Similar regulations are beginning to be promulgated in Europe partly as a result of the Bologna Process. But the calls for accountability go beyond educational organizations. A recent law passed in the state of Texas, HB2504, requires institutions to post a public Web site for every undergraduate course taught for credit by public institutions (except medical and dental schools). Included in the posting must be the course syllabus, departmental budget (if available) and the curriculum vitae of each regular instructor. The information must be easily accessible to the public no later than seven days after the academic term begins, must be updated as appropriate, and must be maintained for two years. While this is an extreme example, the trend is toward more openness in the instructional function. Data from student performance can more easily be used to improve courses that are open. But even in its most passive form, OCW improves instruction. Faculty will pay more attention to the quality of their efforts when faced with the knowledge that their courses will be exposed to full public scrutiny. An OER/OCW Web site immediately pays dividends in terms of recognition at the institutional, school, department, center and individual faculty levels. The impressive statistics of the use of MIT OCW clearly enhanced MIT’s already strong image and recognition. But there are more such examples, including the astounding response to FGV’s launch of its OCW site in 2008. The launch was accompanied by significant coverage in the popular press providing highly positive messages about FGV’s contribution to education in Brazil. Since that launch, FGV has recorded over 3.6 million visits, registered over 1.4 million interested people and issued almost 800,000 declarations of completion for its open courses. Significant in its own way is the experience of UCI, which was the first campus in the UC system and the first west coast university to join the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). UCI’s OCW site features over 50 full open courses and is consistently ranked alongside MIT, Johns Hopkins, and other major institutions within the top ten U.S. OCW Web sites. The existence of an OCW Web site enables the institution to regularly and with little cost provide contributions to the public welfare, attracting positive stories in the news media. Advances Institutional Recognition and Reputation The reputation aspects of OCW do not stop at the institutional level. Components of the university—colleges, schools, research centers—also gain in visibility. For instance, Johns
Hopkins University has concentrated its OCW in the area of public health, benefiting its Bloomberg School of Public Health. Individual faculty members can also gain very high recognition for their efforts. UC Berkeley’s Professor Marion Diamond’s human brain video lectures have gained her an international following. Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University drew more than 400,000 views to his video describing Web 2.0. (Young, 2008). OER and OCW supports the ability of the university to serve the public. While this purpose was an underlying impulse of MIT’s pioneering project, the expression of its OCW did not directly address specific public service efforts. But the large mass of material ultimately produced by MIT naturally put pressure on it to adapt the material for deserving audiences. The most ambitious effort is MIT’s Highlights for High School project, an effort to provide a “lens” on the mass of MIT material in science and mathematics that might be useful to high school teachers and students. Supports Public Service Role http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/. A related example is UCI’s OER material designed specifically to help California’s K-12 teachers prepare for the state’s examinations in order to teach science and mathematics. Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Boeing Company, UCI’s effort continues to serve thousands of teachers and receives more visits than any other collection of courses on the UCI OCW site. Every large university has many initiatives that call for dissemination of parts of the knowledge base created and maintained by it. Sometimes the need for dissemination is internal, such as the sharing of learning materials among colleagues even when they are in the same department or located close by. But most universities continually produce material useful to the public. For instance, universities often produce learning objects useful to the K- 12 educational segment. Even when they can find funding to produce or publish the material, delivery methods remain cumbersome and expensive. The main issue is not so much OER production as its disposition. An institutionally sponsored OER/OCW Web site is a convenient “default” repository, but one that also automatically serves as a low cost publication and dissemination mechanism. With the establishment of an open Web site there is immediately a place for much of the production of the university. Default Repository with a Purpose For research universities, an open site can become a powerful competitive advantage in gaining research funding. All federal agencies and many foundations now emphasize and Research Dissemination Mechanism
reward sound plans for getting the results of research funding into practical use as quickly as possible. Sometimes, the creation of high-quality learning materials for use by institutions and individuals is the best mechanism for dissemination, with the greatest impact. At the beginning of this paper one trend cited was the emergence of learning communities as a force to be recognized by universities. Part of the emergence of these communities is being stimulated by OER/OCW. The existence of high-quality learning materials available for free, anyplace, anytime has naturally led people to seek some form of valid learning assessment and certification. But there are several more serious efforts at encouraging this kind of learning. For instance Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is organized to help learners connect with subject experts in a temporary learning community, but the effort is searching for ways to legitimize the learning accomplished. The University of the People hopes to gain accreditation for the learning experiences it organizes around courses purchased by other universities. (Abramson, 2010). OpenLearn, an initiative of the Open University (OU) of the UK “is working toward creating a truly interactive and collaborative learning experience.” OU students can meet up in chat rooms to discuss their lessons and the university is working on what will be the educational equivalent of Facebook to allow users to create profiles, find, and communicate with others studying similar material. (Aujla and Terris, 2009). Some instructors are opening their online courses to the world, joining the open teaching movement and spawning the term “Massive Open Online Course” (MOOC). (Parry, 29 August 2010). Serving Learning Communities While none of these major efforts can yet be termed a success, there is enough impetus to indicate that something will happen soon that will be important to higher education. And, there are enough potential learning communities within or associated with the university to warrant attention, including matriculated students, alumni and friends, scholarly communities and professional societies. These communities are logically served by OER/OCW. Through participation in the OER/OCW movements, institutions become automatic members of a powerful but informal international club. To remain on the sidelines of OER/OCW risks exclusion from the club or may necessitate a scramble to get in when opportunity knocks. Many national governments, including the U.S., with now a somewhat diminished initiative to foster open education for the community colleges, are adopting OER/OCW as part of a Membership in the International Club
national education strategy. Brazil and Vietnam are certainly poised for such an effort as are several governments of Southeast Asia and Africa. Indeed, the African Virtual University is focused on institutional sharing of resources through an open exchange. With such powerful patrons, universities should prepare themselves for what is inevitable—calls for sharing their instructional materials with the world. The “iron triangle” will be addressed and institutions around the world will be pressured to be become either suppliers or users of OER/OCW (or both). The interaction among international partners has already stimulated innovation and excitement. Those features will accelerate the movements further in the very near future. 7. Conclusion There is no way that higher education institutions around the world will be able to avoid becoming a part of the OER/OCW movement. The form of that involvement may not be clear today and no one can predict or describe the future clearly, but the pathway toward openness in instructional material and the learning/teaching process is already well paved. The combination of current activity, long term trends and institutional necessity make involvement in OER/OCW an imperative. Such activity will be sustained out of a montage of funding sources—the most important of which will be institutional resources that fund instructional support and innovation on campuses today. This category of funding will be joined by new funding sources and income streams stimulated by the powerful idea of openness combined with targeted, cost-effective services. The future shape of OER/OCW is not clear but its essence has already entered the bloodstream of international higher education. Abramson, L. “Global University Eliminates Barriers to Education,” National Public Radio, 10 March 2010. http://www.npr.org/templates.story/story.php?storyId=124008749 Aujla, S., and Terris, B. “Around the World, Varied Approaches to Open Online Learning,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 October 2009, p. A20. Croughan M., and Powell, H. “An Open Letter to Members of the Faculty,” University of California Academic Senate, 11 August 2009. Daniel, J., Kanawar, A., Uvalic-Trumbic, S. “Breaking Higher Education’s Iron Triangle: Access, Cost and Quality,” Change, 2009, April/May, pp30-35. Hubbard, B. “A Year to Remember for webcast.berkeley,” January 2010. http://ets.berkeley.edu/blog/year-remember-webcastberkeley-itunes-u-and-youtube
Laster, J. “North Carolina State U. Gives Students Free Access to Physics Textbook Online,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 February 2010. Open Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS), Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 Toppo, G. “Free Online Materials Could Save Schools Billions,” USA Today, 6 November 2007. , 2007. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-11-06-freereading_N.htm Organization for Economic Co-operation and Economic Development, Giving Knowledge for Free Parry, M. “Open Courses: Free, but Oh, So Costly,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 October 2009, p. A 1. , 2007. Parry, M. “Mass Video Courses May Free Up Professors for More Personalized Teaching,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 August 2010. Parry, M. “Online, Bigger Classes May Be Better Classes: Experimenters Say Diversity Means Richness,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 August 2010. Schmidt, P. “New Journals, Free Online, Let Scholars Speak Out,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 February 2010. Vest, C. “Why MIT Decided to Give Away all Its Course Materials via the Internet”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 January 2004, p.20 Young, J. “YouTube Professors: Scholars and Online Video Stars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 January 2008, p. A9.
New Directions for OpenCourseWare: Implications for Brazil By Larry Cooperman, director, University of California, Irvine OpenCourseWare Abstract OpenCourseWare has gone in 10 short years from the preserve of a single university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to a global movement of hundreds of universities and over 14,000 courses written in every major language of the globe. More recently, governments have begun to understand the importance of free and open access to the teaching and learning materials that make up university coursework. This paper proposes that we are entering into a new phase in the lifecycle of OpenCourseWare and its potential implications for Brazil. Key Words OpenCourseWare , Open Educational Resources, Economic Development, African Virtual University, Learning Object Repositories, Creative Commons
1. Introduction OpenCourseWare (OCW) is the branch of open education that concerns itself with the production and reuse of university-level course content. OCW is a social movement to open the firewalls of higher education — if not the physical doors themselves — to all who seek to better themselves or others. With this growing library of syllabi, course outlines, readings, presentation slides, exams, data sets, simulations and textbooks, OCW providers target independent learners, current secondary, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professors looking for materials to enrich their teaching. Today, there are over 14,000 sets of teaching materials available for the 200+ university and affiliate members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). In fact, if all available outside material was included in this organizational context, the number would be even greater. OCW’s original expression was very much a publishing project, initiated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At the time, the mere idea of OCW sent tremors throughout higher education, some believing that the open sourcing of university content would destroy a thousand business models that kept universities afloat. But OCW can better be seen as a reaction to the commercial failure of a series of prominent dot-com era Web-based higher education projects and the growth of open source software. On the institutional side, MIT founded a consortium, originally composed of a number of international partners who had translated portions of the MIT OCW Web site into a number of languages, including Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin. In addition to these translation sites, the notion of publishing course materials with an open license permitting free reuse was beginning to spread. In May 2005, the Japan OpenCourseWare Alliance was started by six universities. Today, in addition to 212 English-language courses translated to Japanese, there are 1,285 courses published by Japanese universities in the Japanese language. Universia, a consortium of universities supported by Banco Santander, began its affiliation with the OCW movement (and later the Consortium) by translating MIT courses. Today, it publishes course content from the Iberian peninsula and Latin America in Spanish, Portuguese, and in translated versions for some 16 languages. From this internationalization of OCW came a new organization, the OCW Consortium (OCWC), founded by MIT in February 2005. The Consortium’s growth has been rapid in terms of its own institutional members, who are required to have at least 10 courses available within the first two years of membership and pay the modest dues required. As of July 2010, the OCWC Web site lists 178 institutional members, nine associate consortia and 46 affiliate
members. While, in its early years, the majority of published OCW came from MIT, current production of OCW is now spread throughout the world. 2. Creative Commons Licenses Good, Not Great At the heart of open education is the issue of overcoming the strict regime of “all rights reserved,” imposed by U.S. copyright law and enshrined in World Trade Organization treaties on intellectual property. By default, a scribble that a professor draws on a blackboard — a fixed expression — is not shareable unless he or she expressly licenses it as such. Someone who wanders in from the hallway, sees the scribble, copies it and then publishes it is guilty of copyright infringement. He has not sought prior permission, so, regardless of the professor’s intentions, his scribble has become legally trapped. Of course, millions of people copy things from the Web and share them freely. However, in institutions such as universities, embedding such practices outside of limited frameworks such as “fair use,” leaves the institution vulnerable. The second problem in using “all rights reserved” as the default arrangement is that it impedes innovation, despite the fact that the justification for intellectual property laws in the first place is to incentivize innovation. As Larry Lessig, a founder of the Creative Commons non-profit organization, stated at Brazil’s 2004 Free Software Conference, “creativity has always been about building upon other people's creative work.” Creative Commons licensing (CC) allows the reservation of specific rights, particularly the requirement that licensed works be properly attributed (BY), that the license terms may not be changed when incorporated in other works (SA), that no commercial use be made of the work (NC) and that the work remain as a whole and not be subdivided and reused (ND). In practice, the combination of Creative Commons licenses can be complicated. First, there is the issue of national borders. While the licenses themselves have been successfully ported to many countries, including Brazil, a remixed work produced in one country may not travel well. Second, there are national complications even when copyrighted works are considered, such as the varying definitions of when a work has entered the public domain or whether a work produced in a country that is not a signatory to the World Trade Organization is protected. Even the definition of what is in the public domain is bound to legal interpretations in each jurisdiction. 3. The Challenge for OCW Even in a perfect world where no gray areas existed around licensing, OCW would still need to undergo a sort of punctuated equilibrium, an evolution from being an ill-defined set of
course materials, to a useful narrative about a subject matter that is more easily transportable between countries, institutions and intended audiences. Within the OCW community, much attention has been devoted to the problem of discoverability. Some projects have focused on providing quality indicators, such as adoption by professors1 Discoverability remains an important problem for the consumption by learners of OCW. Part of the problem is that a course is found principally through search engines and that, in turn, relies on the learner to make good use of keywords. As a result, most proposals to enhance discoverability of OCW or open educational resources (OER) have centered on better use of metadata. In practice, it is very difficult to enforce consistency and quality in metadata production on a large, global community of producers. , peer review (Merlot), “lenses” or sets of recommended modules (Connexions). In the end, the challenge of discoverability is related to the absence of context for most courses – the extraction of an OER or an OCW from broader curricula designed to produce engineers, teachers or health professionals. Perhaps the solution is to build a global university catalog, in which courses are found within schools and departments, and their relationship to other courses and paths of study are transparent. This idea that the course-level organization of assets may be too finely grained for maximum utility may, at first, appear strange. However, it is much clearer when seen from the vantage point of using open education to leverage cost efficiencies, introduce new curricula or train an existing workforce in new areas. There are increasing glimpses of the transformative power of open education. In the next section, two examples are provided where OER/OCW are being used to drive economic development and workforce training. They achieve this through moving from open courses to open curricula. 4. OCW for Economic Development In the beginning, OCWs were produced for incorporation into university courses, translated versions of courses, or for use by professors and students. There has already been a substantial social benefit from this. However, the most recent OCWC global conference held May 2010, in Hanoi, Vietnam, turned its attention to government as an OCW consumer and producer. Brazil was represented by Anna Cristina Nascimento of the Ministry of Education. 1 The Open Educational Resources Portal of the Tecnológico de Monterey surveys OCW Web sites and stores their description and URL in a database. They compensated professors to evaluate useful assets they found and created a ranking based on the review, and an indication whether a specific OER within the open course had been adopted for use by one of their professors.
What typically limits the reuse of OCW is a mismatch between the intended educational audience and the new target audience. The transfer of materials involves not only translation, but a transition between cultures, prior levels of educational attainment, university policies and a handoff to a different instructional staff. If educational opportunity is expanded, it inherently creates a shortage of qualified instructors. The pent-up demand for education cannot immediately be met due to the imbalance between the new learners who will now have access and the existing background, training and professional development of the instructional staff. This paper argues that when the granularity of resources is too small, the labor involved in piecing together the relevant OERs can be overwhelming. That is why so many professors and universities simply start from scratch in building new courses, while commercially published textbooks that match the scope of typical courses are adopted so easily. 5. African Virtual University The African Virtual University (AVU) is a unique distance education institution, similar to the Associação Brasileira de Educação a Distância (ABED) that incorporates open education into the core of its mission. It is a pan continental project, incorporating 53 universities from 27 countries. It operates in conflict and post-conflict zones as well as in stable countries. Its most recent project was the completion of 70 modules in math and science secondary teacher education. Each of the modules was produced and peer-reviewed by African professors. Where facilities don’t exist, including basic connections to the Internet, the AVU develops them. Included in its services is the development of what they term “open and distance education” learning centers, or ODELs. Among its accomplishments, it lists the graduation of 4,000 Somali students, of which 30% are women. The AVU produces full curricula — tracks or degrees of study — rather than individual courses. It starts from the standpoint of the degree or certificate to be offered and then works backwards to produce the necessary modules in an open format. The fragmentation of most OCW collections is avoided through the scope of the project itself, for example, preparing prospective teachers with content knowledge in math and science2 2 The participants in this project are comprised of 12 universities in ten countries. The 70 modules are available in three languages – Portuguese, French and English. At the February 2, 2010 meeting of the new consortium, the university vice chancellors became the signatories. They were joined in the meeting by deans, professors, project team members, and even union leaders. at 12 universities in 10 countries in three languages. The openness of the assets becomes more important when the assets have to live in so many different environments throughout Africa.
6. TU Delft Transfers Its Water Management Courses to Indonesia TU Delft represents one of the most impressive examples of the transfer of OCWs (http://ocw.tudelf.nl) from their master’s degree in water management to a different educational and cultural context. The project, recently funded, is described below: The faculty of Civil Engineering obtained a grant from the EVD to develop an educational programme on Water Supply and Sanitation in Indonesia making use of OpenCourseWare. The project is carried out in collaboration with Stichting Wateropleidingen and ITB Bandung, Indonesia and aims at accelerating the achievement of the Millennium Development Water Goals by capacity building in the field of education and research on drinking water production/distribution and waste water collection/treatment through open, practice oriented education and applied research on appropriate water technologies. The project builds on experiences of Delft University of Technology and Stichting Wateropleidingen with educational and research concepts (training the trainer in both technical knowledge and didactical skills, OpenCourseWare practice orientedness of trainings, active learning, modelling and cooperative applied research) and aims to make these experiences available in education and research in the Indonesian setting. In both cases, it is the scope of the project that provides the educational benefit and the cost efficiencies. Both the AVU teacher project and the TU Delft/ Stichting Wateropleidingen collaboration build capacity. AVU builds distance learning centers and trains professors and staff in the use of technology. And the TU Delft/ Stichting Wateropleidingen collaboration trains instructional staff to deliver the curriculum and graduate water management professionals and technicians. 7. National Opportunities in OCW From the cases previously described, we can begin to outline how OCW/OER initiatives can embed themselves successfully in national education systems. These successful transnational projects have in common certain key elements: 1. They solve the problem of granularity. Much of the cost of OER/OCW reuse is incurred during assembly. That is, there is a cost of incorporation of an externally developed learning object into another environment. However, the cost of integration or creation is lessened when dealing with an entire program, not just a module or a course.
2. They address the problem of instruction. OER/OCWs remove barriers to access. Imagine the best possible world in which all of the resources themselves are of the highest quality and match the target audience in their depth and scope. While this provides an opportunity for learning, such learning would be amplified many times over by capable instruction. Yet, by its very nature, overcoming barriers to university coursework creates an instructor shortage. 3. They demonstrate a clear fit — not with university education in the abstract — but with clear locally determined needs. The topics chosen, though locally determined, tend to have global importance: water resource management, for example, or math and science teacher education. 4. Capacity building is a core value. This goes beyond the previously mentioned issue of development of a cadre of instructors/professors to meet the demands of the larger student base created by open access. Capacity building refers to the development of the institutional infrastructure for successful open education with the requisite governmental support. 8. Can Brazil Successfully Develop Open Education? From the examples above, it should come as no surprise that this article argues that the primary opportunity for Brazil is to adopt open education as a national strategy and tie it to rapid workforce development. Brazil's educational and economic strides in the past decade have been accompanied, to some extent, by a rapid increase in the participation rate, the rate at which students of university age are enrolled in tertiary institutions. However, because Brazil started at a low rate, there is an inevitable lag as the formal educational system strives to keep pace with the economic opportunities available. OCW is inherently a good fit for this situation. The development of teaching materials and open textbooks is a relatively inexpensive investment compared to the ongoing infrastructural investments that the government has to make, such as the high-speed rail planned to connect Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo. The response to FGV Online's OCW is without parallel in the world. MIT and Open University (OU) have the same scale of response, but both with significantly larger libraries of courses. How can we understand this phenomenon? It has to be that the demand for educational opportunity is quite high. Unlike the global reach of MIT or OU, FGV Online reaches only a Portuguese-speaking audience, most of which is Brazilian. The original impulse for the adoption of OCW generally starts with foundations and universities. There is a point of hand-off, however, in which the initial work “goes mainstream” and formalizes the commitment through the activities of the Ministry of
Education, as in the case of Vietnam, or through a pan continental approach, as in the case of the African Virtual University. In the U.S., the Obama administration has committed to provide $500 million for the development of the most commonly taught community college courses and to provide these as free, open resources. While it is still too early to see how and if this initiative will play out, it is symbolic of a growing recognition that open education provides: 1. cost efficiency through development for audiences that already have standardized educational goals; 2. an improved path from secondary to tertiary education through public visibility of course content, and; 3. greater flexibility in usage through open licensing. Brazil's landscape, despite its various challenges, has some interesting characteristics that can make open education a powerful contributor to national educational and developmental goals. First, it is by far the most economically important in the Portuguese-speaking world. This makes its efforts in open education – whether by university or government initiative – much more likely to become global centers of open education in the Portuguese language. This is especially true about repository creation, in which the flow of educational objects will be toward Brazil from the rest of the lusophone world. The AVU typically produces materials in English and then translates to French and Portuguese. The problem is not the burden of translation of the original materials. What confounds the translation effort is the use of links in the original to English-language Web sites and other sources. Translators in Mozambique, for example, need to substitute those links with equivalent Portuguese-language materials, and the likeliest source of those will be from Brazilian repositories3 Second, it is an uncluttered landscape. That is, in contrast to the U.S. where there are many and often conflicting initiatives around OCW, Brazil has the opportunity to set up the rules of engagement for the players in this space — to the effect that interested non-governmental organizations, public and private universities and companies serve a broader national and educational purpose. To that extent, the clarification of the legal foundation for open education is critical as is the ability of the government through the Ministry of Education to assist with development and distribution of OCW. . 3 See two learning object repositories in particular – a university effort known by the acronym Proativa - Grupo de Pesquisa e Produção de Ambientes Interativos e Objetos de Aprendizagem (http://www.proativa.virtual.ufc.br/oa.php?id=0) and the Ministry of Education’s Banco Internacional de Objectos Educacionais (http://objetoseducacionais2.mec.gov.br).
Third, the costs associated with higher education in Brazil as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) are relatively high. In a World Bank research paper comparing select Latin American countries to high income countries, these countries share a high cost of education relative to per capita GDP, approximately 35% for the higher education sector, despite notable successes in improving enrollment rates in primary, secondary and tertiary education. With a low 12% participation rate and a relatively high total cost of education (tuition, living costs, textbooks, fees, etc.), Brazil can benefit more than most countries from a strategy that lowers educational costs. The same study notes that while Brazil has free tuition for public universities, there has been growth in private higher educational institutions with average tuition levels. Therefore, the potential benefits of OCW are relatively high and can lead to a virtuous cycle of capacity building, quality improvement, and lowering associated costs of curriculum development, instructor development, materials and textbooks. In recognition of these potential advantages, Brazil’s principal distance education association, the ABED, has incorporated into its mission the notion of open and distance learning. ABED has a potentially important role to play in the dissemination of open education since its membership regroups professors from not only the elite public universities, such as the University of Sao Paulo, but also a broad representation from the federal system. Fred Litto, president and founder of ABED, in his introductory remarks at the 2009 ABED conference in Fortaleza, noted that open education is “free and democratic” in its essence, there is a match between often-stated public policy goals and the universal accessibility of open education. 9. Challenges to Brazil's Capacity to Adopt OCW/OER as an Educational Strategy Carolina Rossini, in a brief “green paper” updated in January 2010, presents the case that Brazil requires a national policy around OER. Her list of recommendations, while specific to Brazil could be generally applied to most countries of the world: 1. Strengthen requirements for open access to materials already funded by public institutions and governments. 2. The infrastructure for open education is based on content and repositories, which should have standardized methods of access and data collection, the latter to inform public policy, among other objectives. 3. The educational system should be directed at all levels to develop and incorporate open materials, including instructor training, student access and provisioning of instructional technology — all through a systemic and transformative plan.
4. Transformation of copyright law to eliminate ambivalence in its application to author rights, exceptions for educational use, and legal obligations of service providers. In the list above, it is the area of copyright law itself in which Brazil's history diverges from the general trend. Beyond World Trade Organization-imposed limitations, Brazil has never clarified key issues in copyright law. Mitzukami, Lemos, Magrani and Pereira de Souza tie the Brazilian copyright regime directly to the cost of university textbooks, “books in Brazil may be cheaper than in many other countries in absolute terms, but when purchasing power is taken into account, they are much more expensive.” Most interesting is the way in which Brazilian law has differed from cultural norms around sharing. If the laws are so vague that even the owners of copy shops cannot be sure of what they can legally copy, then inevitably those who seek to access knowledge and culture will find ways to avoid the law's limitations.” A simple Google search with a few keywords – such as “emule,” “torrents,” “brasil,” “br,” “p2p” and “comunidade”– will point the way to the many Web sites, forums and blogs that form the infrastructure used by Brazilians for file sharing, gateways to vast global repositories of content spread throughout millions of computers. The authors conclude with a harsh indictment of Brazilian copyright law: Exceptions and limitations in Brazilian copyright law are inadequate on many accounts. They are excessively restrictive and anachronistic – in some cases incoherent – and offer no opportunity for balance through interpretation. To make things worse, they are often misinterpreted by the content industry to pose even greater limitations on users. As a framework for public rights of use and access to culture and information, the current lists of exceptions and limitations are unacceptably limited. Brazil’s opportunity stems from this dismal state of affairs. Consider the predicament of textbook authors. High textbook prices have shut out a large group of users. To maintain the same level of profitability faced with a declining market, they raise textbook prices, yielding fewer users4 4 Eric Frank, a former junior executive at a major textbook company, frequently cites this spiral as the reason for the creation of Flat World Knowledge, a publisher that offers open textbooks and makes its money principally on the demand for printed versions. Authors receive 20% of a typical U.S. $30 price, one-third to one-sixth of the pricing for similar texts by the principal textbook companies. . Brazil stands out as the only country in which one of the largest global publishing companies, Pearson, has created a CopyLeft Web site, in which anyone can freely upload or download. Whether publishing companies can maintain themselves by tying auxiliary “open” content to their textbooks is, as yet, an untested model.
From this unmet user demand for educational materials comes perhaps the greatest success of an OCW Web site — FGV’s granting of free certificates of completion. 10. The Case of FGV Online FGV Online was the second Brazilian university to join the OCWC in 2008, but the first to develop an OCW Web site. FGV Online has experienced explosive demand from over three million visitors to its open courses. Beginning with a translation of two University of California, Irvine courses and then posting its own material, it is one of only two OCW Web sites in the world that generates significant tuition fees for its for-credit courses from visitors attracted to the free courses. FGV Online innovated by allowing those who finished a course to print out a certificate of completion. This provided FGV with the ability to survey those learners requesting the certificate of completion, ultimately to understand its OCW users in a way that few other universities have been able to do. Among their findings was that single women were the largest group of users of its OCW. It also points to a conclusion about Brazil. The demand for education is so great that hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have taken at least one full course in order to get a paper certificate of completion. Another example of Brazilian demand for OCW is Peer2Peer University (P2PU)—a project that seeks to tie together learners around open content and open courses. Already, the largest courses are being organized by Brazilians in Portuguese and attendance is out of scale with the classes offered in English. 11. Conclusion OCW is the organization of open materials as courses. It is most effective when delivered as part of a curriculum, both in its portability across national borders and in its reusability from institution to institution. Following the creation of some 14,000 courses by member institutions of the OCWC, attention is being turned by both individual members and the organization to a next phase, in which its current scope—course materials—gives way to curated collections and learning paths, such as degree majors and specializations. The value for the end user of this development is that individual courses appear in a learning pathway that better guides the learner to a useful outcome. This development, already begun in places like Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam, could be accelerated by careful government attention, of which there are at least incipient signs. The relatively harsh copyright law that is an obstacle to matriculated students and independent learners alike may, in the end, accelerate the development of open educational opportunities.
Brazil's steady rise in educational attainment and participation now needs to likewise accelerate to keep pace with the more rapid economic rise and shortage of various skilled and professional occupations. If Brazil adopts as a governmental imperative the capacity-building values of the TU Delft project in Indonesia or the AVU’s secondary math and science teacher education project, it will provide an example that the rest of the world will do well to emulate. African Virtual University Web site, http://www.avu.org/Press-Releases/press-release-avu- facilitates-virtual-training-for-teachers-in-10-african-countries.html CC Learn, “Otherwise Open: Managing Incompatible Content within Open Educational Resources”. September 1, 2009. http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp- content/uploads/2009/09/Otherwise_Open_report.pdf Cooperman, L. and Matkin, G. W., “The OCWC’s Next Frontier – Learning Ecosystems,” presented at OCWC Global conference. Monterrey, Mexico. April 23, 2009. Presentation Available Japan OCW Consortium Web site, http://www.jocw.jp/AboutJOCW.htm Mizukami, P. Lemos, R. Magrani, B. and Pereira de Souza, C., Exceptions and Limitations to Copyright Law,” Access to knowledge: New Research in Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development, (Edited by Shaver, Lea). Bloomsbury Academic (New York), pp. 71, CC (2010) Murakami, Y. and Blom, A., “Accessibility and Affordability of Tertiary Education in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru with a Global Context” p. 15, February 2008, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1099079877269/547664- 1099079956815/wps4517.pdf OpenCourseWare Consortium Web site, OpenCourseWare Consortium Timeline, http://wiki.ocwconsortium.org/index.php?title=Timeline OpenCourseWare Consortim Web site, “OCWC Meeting Starts in Hà Nội”, May 6, 2010, http://news.gov.vn/Home/OCWC-meeting-starts-in-Ha-Noi/20105/7272.vgp OpenCourseWare Consortium Web site, http://opencourseware.weblog.tudelft.nl/2010/01/18/evd-grant-for-development-educational- pr
Rossini, C., “The State and Challenges of OER in Brazil: From Readers to Writers,” published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, February 2010 Unsworth, John M., “The Next Wave: Liberation Technology”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2004. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Next-Wave-Liberation/9698
OPEN SCHOOLS AND LEARNING Fredric M. Litto Abstract Although there is considerable scholarly literature on the subject of “open” learning in higher education, it is not common for it to be studied in relation to basic and compulsory education – which is paradoxical in view of the disparity in student numbers. After defining characteristics of “open” education, this article identifies some important studies conducted in Brazil and abroad to inquire into “openness” in basic education. As examples, Mexico’s “Telesecundaria” and Brazil’s “Telecurso” are examined as successful models of open schooling in the past forty years. Keywords Distance learning, Open learning, Compulsory education, Educational technology, Educational television, Telesecundaria, Telecurso When one considers the student numbers in basic education in Brazil and elsewhere it is hard to understand why research and reports on “open” learning have focused predominantly on higher education. This may be because younger students are not motivated, disciplined or proactive enough to see a lengthy program of studies through successfully in an “open”, distance learning context. As a result, they offer researchers less potential for arriving at interesting, significant conclusions. It may be because, in Brazil at least, the most current technologies for study in educationally “open” environments have only recently begun to produce their “disruptive” effect on basic education; the studies will follow when the time is right. In any case, basic education is a strategic activity for all countries, because it begins to shape the minds of future citizens and prepare the “cognitive foundation” for subsequent learning. It is thus an area that deserves all possible attention from State and civil society, especially given the need to keep permanently up to date. In order to discuss “openness” in educational matters, first the salient features of the phenomenon have to be defined. Andréia Namorato dos Santos (2009) collected a wide range
of definitions circulating mainly in English and identified the aspects of the phenomenon where consensus exists among various authorities in education: • It has to do with practices that remove the traditional social and cultural barriers that form part of the “closed” education systems of the past; • It eliminates the barriers to accessing knowledge that result from financial difficulties, geographical distances or reasons of age, sex, ethnicity or social position; • It represents a supply of courses, mainly for students to take at home; • It enables students to learn at the time, place and pace best suited to their needs and circumstances, in addition to ensuring that they choose what and how they want to study; • It opens up the possibility of pursuing studies at all levels of education: formal education (basic, middle and higher); non-formal (continuing or professional development); or informal (independent, self-directed study); • It offers students programs of study with no minimum qualification requirement for admission; and • It normally provides students with materials specially prepared or adapted for this kind of learning. The concept or paradigm of “open” learning forms part of a worldwide progressive, democratic movement of recent years calling for radical change in access to knowledge and to the tools that facilitate the use of information and knowledge. Digital technologies make it easy to duplicate and transmit information and knowledge with no loss of copy quality and no transmission lag. That makes it possible to break out of the “society of scarcity” (where only the privileged have access to the most prized benefits) and enter the “society of abundance” (where all citizens have maximum access to the same benefits). That is an altruistic goal with a view to accelerating emerging country development by boosting the potential for individual knowledge. In 2009, for instance, UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector held a workshop to formulate a new project called the “UNESCO Open Suite Strategy”, involving Open Access (OA), Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Educational Resources (OER). In addition to these proposed areas of work, others are being developed by governments, non-governmental organizations and academic institutions, such as open files, open innovations, open patents, open journals, open training and open technology.
In the limited space of this article it is not possible to describe in any detail all the kinds of strategy for “openness” in learning, but it is possible to accompany progress in these endeavors (in Portuguese) by consulting the Universidade do Minho project, Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (http://projecto.rcaap.pt), the Brazilian government's websites for teachers and students in basic and higher education (http://portaldoprofessor.mec.gov.br and http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br), and the site of Brazil's only institutional participant in the international OpenCourseWare Consortium, the FGV Online (http://www5.fgv.br/fgvonline/cursosgratuitos.aspx), which offers a series of courses for the general public. Some important recent publications on open learning – which unfortunately do not include basic education within their scope, but deserve to be read – include Iiyoshi & Kumar (2008), D'Antoni & Savage (2009), and Rossini (2009). The latter concentrates on Brazilian production of OERs and has the virtue of bringing a useful legal perspective to the discussion, but omits some significant examples of ground-breaking work in this field. Fundamental reading, meanwhile, is the seminal work, Basic Education at a Distance: World Review of Distance Education and Open Learning (Yates & Bradley, 2000), which concentrates exclusively on basic education, as does The Open Classroom: Distance Learning In and Out of Schools (Bradley, 2003), and the International Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education (Voogt & Knezek, 2008). Also outstanding is the “Capetown Open Education Declaration”, a brief, thought-provoking document produced in 2008 by teachers, students, “web gurus” and representatives of several philanthropic foundations, calling for education to be transformed by expanding the supply of free, online educational materials relevant to local needs. The Associação Brasileira da Educação a Distância (ABED, http://www2.abed.org.br) is one of the signatories to the Declaration, which can be read online at http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration. Perhaps one effective way of understanding the potential of open learning for developing countries or for developed countries with large numbers of “excluded” individuals is to look at two successful experiences: Mexico's Telesecundaria and Brazil's Telecurso. Telesecundaria This government program started up experimentally in 1967 with only 83 students divided into four groups, all in Mexico City. Today it serves over a million students across Mexico, in addition to 30,000 young people in other Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. Durán (2001) writes that the program was originally planned for learners in rural villages in Mexico with populations of less than 2,500 where it was financially difficult to maintain a conventional public high school. It always used television broadcasts (more
recently supported by satellite), printed materials and in-person tutoring at student service centers spread across the country. Those responsible are proud of the fact that its students generally achieve better learning results than students in conventional education and at little extra cost per student. Another virtue of the system that Durán mentions is the important role it plays in non-formal education in the communities where the program operates. In 1968, the project served 6,569 students with the support of 304 teachers; by 1989, it had 453,030 students and 21,203 teachers; and in 2003 it reached 1,146,600 students through 54,872 teachers in 16,000 rural communities. Broadcasts go out Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and are then repeated from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. and on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. The local communities provide the classrooms for each grade, while the federal government furnishes the other system components: the satellite dish, television set, set-top box (signal decoder), the reading materials and the teacher. While in conventional schools the student-teacher ratio is 35 or 40:1, in the Telesecundaria it is 23:1. The teachers are specially trained for the specific type of teaching and learning involved. While 60% are sufficiently qualified to teach at urban public schools, 40% have not trained as teachers, but are graduates from higher education, who are recruited right after graduating, provided they are willing to live in isolated rural areas. Durán notes that the educational model comprises three components: broadcast 15- minute video classes (the central repository contains 4,600 videos produced and updated periodically) reflecting the official curriculum of three years of high school; textbooks (returned to the school on conclusion of the course and with a useful life of three generations of students); and the teacher, who in addition to answering students' doubts, organizes community citizen learning activities. Assessment is in three stages: an initial evaluation to identify each student's existing knowledge; their degree of “engagement” in the program; and the likelihood of their applying what they learn in their later life. Formative assessment is performed by way of student participation in various projects, especially those connected with community problem solving. There is also summative assessment by way of examinations (regulated by the Ministry of Education), which address actual learning outcomes. In general, the program is especially effective for students living in rural areas, because it encourages them to stay in school, with the result that students perform as well as, or better than, their urban peers. Even though the rural students may be behind at the outset, they soon catch up with their urban colleagues. Durán offers the following keen insight: ...[rural] isolation makes it easier for school teams to exert a high level of control over students, reducing absenteeism and maintaining discipline... Despite the low economic status of the students and their relatives, the teachers' presence in the community
means that the program is successful, personalized and effective. (DURÁN, 2001, p. 174) In 2001, Durán identified some of the problems suffered regularly in systematically operating the Telesecundaria: theft or malfunction of classroom equipment; text books not reaching the communities in good time; difficulty in keeping teachers in rural areas for long periods (because they miss their families); the need to develop the practice of reflection and critical thinking more among the students; and the rigid broadcast schedules for the televised classes. Telecurso Brazil's Telecurso has gone through several generations since the 1970s. From 1978 to 1995, the Telecurso 2º Grau high school course was introduced to help address the national problem that three quarters of Brazil's population between the ages of 70 and 90 never finished high school. From the outset, the project availed itself of the commercial television network of Grupo Globo, to which the Fundação Roberto Marinho (FRM) belongs. From 1978 to 1984, the FRM partnered with the Fundação Padre Anchieta of São Paulo (maintainer of TV Cultura, at the time the only educational TV station with a signal achieving wide coverage); and from 1985 to 1993, the partnership was with the Fundação Bradesco. The Telecurso model featured three key factors: • TV programs shown simultaneously over a wide network of television stations (39 commercial, 9 non-commercial); • primers published in weekly installments and sold at moderate prices at newsstands in 3,000 municipalities across Brazil; • broadcast schedule options and content of the televised classes are widely announced, as are the dates of the examinations, which are held by state education departments all over the country. In the first phase of the project, 432 15-minute programs were produced and broadcast in three 24-week blocks. One factor considered important for the project's success was that the televised classes featured actors from the Rede Globo's popular soap operas, who are well-known to the general public. By 1979, when the first phase of the Telecurso was concluded, five million copies of the primers had been sold, in addition to tests, exercises and other complementary materials. From 1978 a 1981, the Fundação Carlos Chagas of São Paulo conducted a survey to evaluate the Telecurso, concluding that its students performed better in the final exams than those in conventional schools.
From 1981 to 1995, the FRM operated the Telecurso 1º Grau primary course, covering the 5th to 8 th grades. That project had technical and financial support from the Ministry of Education. By 1983, 851 television signal reception centers had been set up in 23 states, at which 91,400 students were receiving the televised classes. In the nine states where the Telecurso had partnered with local governments, Telecurso students graduated in droves with results ranging from 83% to 94% pass rates. By 1985, the Telecurso 2o Grau had benefited 3.5 million adults wanting to complete their secondary education (among them Marina da Silva, who later became a Senator and Minister of State, and Vicente Paulo “Vicentinho” da Silva, who also completed the Telecurso 1o Grau and was later elected to Congress). The Telecurso involved 60 television stations and 20 radio stations, serving a regular audience of 1.3 million viewers in 1,400 viewing rooms with television monitors. By 1989, the Telecurso 2o Grau had reached a public of 15 million viewers, enabling 4 million of them to gain a diploma. Using only open-circuit television with signals captured by the tele-classrooms, the FRM developed a specific methodology with students and the “builder” of their knowledge drawing on their life experiences and points of view to structure the actual learning. Remember that student activities had to be quite practical, while involving critical thinking and the application of experiences from everyday life. That methodology set in motion a process that permitted scalability to cater to millions of students. This was an alternative pedagogy for regular, formal education, too. The “dynamics” of the tele-classroom are as follows: the concepts to be learned are problematized; the televised class is shown; the images are “read”; textbooks are read; then there are activities relating to the texts, followed by any other appropriate activities; the activities are “socialized”; and students and teacher evaluate the process. Since its introduction in 1978 the Telecurso has revealed students generally considered to have been “excluded”: individuals more or less three years behind in their schooling (who have been failed two or three times), including people between the ages of 40 and 50. Telecurso students' family income and their parents' level of education are normally lower than those of students attending regular schools. Thirty percent, on average, already have children. At the regular schools in the municipalities where they live, student registers are irregular and there are many cases of “phantom” teachers. In that light, it is significant that Telecurso students offer very encouraging testimony about their success in their studies. There have been a number of successful projects in recent years. For example, in 2001, students of Acre State placed twenty-seventh in a Brazil-wide ranking of states by national examination results; by 2008 they had risen to ninth place.
From 1995 to 2006, the Telesaber project, in partnership with the corporation Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, brought 1 st to 4 th grade teaching to the television classroom, confirming that fundamental schooling could be given to adults in just one year by distance education combined with in-person components, while middle schooling could be completed in just a year and a half in the same conditions. Using the same methodology (“learning counselors”, textbooks, televised classes and activities relevant to the students' lives), the Telecurso started to become more attractive to state and municipal governments, and partnerships with the FRM started to become public policy. There were 27,714 tele-classrooms in operation: 5.5 million students had completed their courses, 30,000 teachers had been trained, 1,500 firms and other institutions (churches, trade unions, prisons, and many others) had taken part, and 24 million books and 1.8 million televised classes had gone out. Nationwide, Telecurso student pass rates averaged 92.6% in fundamental education and 94.4% in middle education. By 2006, 80% of Brazilian homes had a television, and 7 million people per week were watching the televised classes. As a result, it became necessary to rethink the program as a whole, leading to the development of a new model for the Telecurso, with new content and new focus. The outcome was the Novo Telecurso (www.novotelecurso.org.br), which began its activities in 2008. Unlike the practice of previous decades, the Novo Telecurso does not cover the whole country, but benefits only selected states and municipalities where the local partners represent the opportunity for the project to accomplish new educational achievements. Updated curricula, such as Tecendo o Saber (“weaving knowledge”), offer daring, diversified content, challenging a new generation of students. The tele-classroom is no longer a physical place, but rather a concept, as the virtual dimension has begun to penetrate the learning environment. In the states of Amazonas, Acre, Pernambuco and others in partnership with the FRM, students are encouraged to watch films, read classics of Brazilian literature, consult books and access websites. DVDs of 14 to 15 minutes permit students to review content as often as they wish (teachers' DVDs contain collections with 50 classes on each). All the DVDs are subtitled and include sign language for the deaf. All the installations where student services are concentrated offer graduation ceremonies for students who complete their courses of study. In addition, a process of “structural actions” was set in motion: the project coordination is shared with the local partners; the focus is on preparing local teachers and supervisors; and there are periods of pedagogical integration and monitoring, always followed by internal and external evaluation, and preparation of a final “memorial”. It is important to have local co-management and a regionalized pedagogical plan. The project is beginning to make use of virtual learning environments, at first with the teachers, and complementary
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January 2011 - Open Distance Education

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January 2011 - Open Distance Education

  • 1. ISSN 2179-8729 Year 1 Number 1 / January 2011 OPEN DISTANCE EDUCATION The dissemination of knowledge in a world without borders http://www.fgv.br/fgvonline/revista
  • 2. SUMMARY 04 - Treading new paths. Stavros P. Xanthopoylos 08 - Beyond Sustainability: The Emerging Institutional Imperative of OER-OCW. Gary Matkin 24 - New Directions for OpenCourseWare: Implications for Brazil. Larry Cooperman 38 Open Schools and Learning. Fredric M. Litto 50 Teaching Practices for the perspective of an open education. Renata Biscaia 60 Pedagogical practice in distance education: reflections on the open university and FGV Online. Edite Flora Sabbi Porciúncula, Eloíza Gomes de Oliveira and Francisca de Oliveira Cruz 76 - Book review: The 2020 Workplace How Innovative companies attract, develop, and keep tomorrow`s employees today. Cristina Massari
  • 3. FROM THE EDITORS With its debut issue, the Revista FGV Online examines one of the most thought-provoking and democratic aspects of EaD. Open Education (the Open Course Ware Consortium, OCWC) is a movement in which educators, students and others involved come together in an endeavor that crosses borders in the belief that it can unite and make education more accessible and effective on a global scale. Professor Stavros P. Xanthopoylos, who throughout his career as an educator and education manager has been a fervent advocate of this manner of delivering educational content. The - access courses. Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education and EaD and the University of California, emphasizes in his article that in spite of the major accomplishments to date both in forming consortia, such as the OpenCourseWareConsortium (OCWC), and in delivering Open Educational Resources (OER), there is still much to be done. The aim now is to grow by including new approaches to evaluation, accreditation and collaborative learning. Larry Cooperman, Director of OpenCourseWare (University of California), then describes the OCWC's history in the United States and the world and points up the wealth of opportunities for expanding this kind of course. He highlights particularly how institutions around the world has welcomed the proposal of offering open-access courses on subscription to the OCWConsortium it was the first Brazilian institution to develop an OCW website and signals some directions for this field in Brazil. Professor Renata Biscaia of the FGV Online examines the role of professor-tutors in their activities as mediators of the education process in on-line environments. She does this by drawing attention to the need for such educators to develop certain competences for on-line courses in general and, more specifically, for tutoring in distance learning of Open Education disciplines. Edite Flora Sabbi Porciúncula, Eloíza Gomes de Oliveira and Francisca de Oliveira Cruz, who are also professor-tutors with the FGV Online, take an innovative approach to language supports as an essential component of the on-line education environment. Language is adapting to the Internet era and that adaptation must be contemplated by the Open University, which the authors consider a vector in the democratization of education globally. In this issue you will also find a review of the book How Innovative , by Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd, due out in Brazil in March 2011. The book examines the not-too-distant future prospects for the digital environment and corporate labor relations under the direct influence of the new information technologies. As you explore these complementary themes, we invite you to participate in this new academic knowledge channel, not just as a reader, but as an author too. Revista FGV Online is open to your contributions and your suggestions. We are already preparing the next of our six-monthly thematic issues, which will deal with Corporate Education (see here how to submit your article). Pleasant reading!
  • 4. Institutional Fundação Getulio Vargas General Management President: Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal Vice-Presidents Francisco Oswaldo Neves Dornelles Marcos Cintra Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Sergio Franklin Quintella Instituto de Desenvolvimento Educacional – IDE (Institute for Educational Development) Executive Director: Clovis Lyra D. Faro Academic Director: Carlos Osmar Bertero FGV Online Director: Stavros Panagiotis Xanthopoylos FGV Management Director: Ricardo Spinelli de Carvalho FGV In Company Director: Antônio Carlos Porto Gonçalves FGV Online Executive Director: Stavros Panagiotis Xanthopoylos Academic Production Manager: Mary Kimiko G. Murashima Marketing and Commercial Manager: Felipe Spinelli de Carvalho Operations Manager: Antônio Carlos de Sá Leite Product Manager: Adriana Schneider Pedagogic Coordinator: Elisabeth Santos da Silveira Graduation Coordinator: Maurício de Brito Gomes Postgraduation Coordinator – Open Courses: Cláudia de Cássia Capello Postgraduation Coordinator – Corporate Courses: Maria Alice P. Mendes Postgraduation Coordinator – Satellite Communications Courses: Marcos de A. Reis Villela Assistant Postgraduation Coordinator – Satellite Communications Courses: Lygia Maria F. dos Santos Leite Postgraduation Coordinator – Webcast Courses: Maria Isabel Leal Giusti Corporate TV Coordinator: Erenice de Almeida Alencar Corporate University Coordinator: Josilene Marinho CTAE Coordinator: Tatiana Sansone Soster Customized Courses Coordinator: Letícia Borba Balceiro Tutor Coordinator: Maristela Rivera Tavares Production Coordinator: Renata dos Reis Vasques Resources Coordinator: Sandro Eymard F. Bonadia IT-RJ Coordinator: João Carlos da S. Freitas IT-SP Coordinator: Alexander Dubrowsky Academic Office Coordinator: Leslie de M. Moysés Technical Support Coordinator: Anderson R. Pimentel Logistics Coordinator: Vítor Araújo de Oliveira Financial Coordinator: Gustavo Silva Villela Commercial Coordinator: Sandro Alan R. Rabelo Marketing Coordinator: Alexssandra das Neves M. Conti Projects Coordinator: Lorena Breda de Carvalho
  • 5. About FGV Online Magazine 1. Presentation FGV Online Magazine is a biannual electronic publication, created under the responsibility of FGV Online, the distance education program of the Institute for Educational Development - IDE, which is responsible for the distribution of courses developed in partnership with the Schools of Fundação Getulio Vargas. It's a publication focused on issues related to education in general and more specifically to Distance Education. With the mission to disseminate the knowledge that has been generated under the Distance Education global environment, the FGV Online Magazine opens space to authors and experts in the area for publication of academic and scientific papers. 2. Editorial Body Editorial Council Clovis Lyra D. Faro IDE/FGV Director Gary Matkin Dean of Continuing Education at University of California, Irvine (EUA) Lindolpho de Carvalho Dias FGV Vice-President Stavros P. Xanthopoylos FGV Online Executive Director Marieta de Moraes Ferreira Editora FGV Director Flávio Carvalho de Vasconcelos EBAPE/FGV Director Yoshiaki Nakano EESP/FGV Director Celso Castro CPDOC/FGV Director Sérgio Guerra Vice-Director of PostGraduation at FGV Law-School-RJ Editorial Comission Fredric Michael Litto Abed/USP – Sao Paulo Mary Kimiko G. Murashima FGV Online Academic Production Manager Elisabeth Santos da Silveira FGV Online Pedagogic Coordinator Reviewers
  • 6. Elisa Maria R. Sharland IDE/FGV Assistant Academic Director Jacyara Carrijo R. Nasciutti Prof. of FGV Quality Central Cláudia Capello FGV Online Postgraduation Coordinator Maristela Rivera Tavares FGV Online Tutor Coordinator Raquel Villardi Instituto de Educação da UERJ Assistant Professor Chief Editor Severo Hryniewicz Assistant Editor Maria Cristina Massari Editorial Production Production Coordinator Sandro Eymard Fontenele Bonadia Copy-desk Andrea Patricia Tostes Rabello Teixeira Milena Clemente de Moraes Translation Christiane Cerboni – Portuguese/English Maria Helena Rangel Geordane – English/Portuguese Yuri Kitsutani – Portuguese/Spanish Peter Lenny – Portuguese/English Graphic Design / Desktop Publishing Design & Criação Clube Digital Plataform Implementation Digital Pages
  • 7. 3. Information to authors About the next issue FGV Online Magazine issue #2 will focus on Corporate Education. Articles must follow the submission guidelines, and be sent to severo@fgv.br. The final submission deadline is April 31st , 2011. Besides the articles, book reviews may be accepted for titles related to the subject in focus. In this case, refer to book reviews presentation guidelines.
  • 8. Treading new paths Stavros Panagiotis Xanthopoylos In its 15 years of existence, FGV Online has written a successful story in making flexible, quality education available in Brazil. In pursuing that goal it is totally aligned with the principles that make the Fundação Getulio Vargas a reference institution in professional development for executives who will contribute to building a scenario in which Brazil's economy is increasingly solid and trusted worldwide. The information and communication technologies (ITCs) and educational foundations used by the FGV Online, developed by acknowledged authors at the Fundação Getulio Vargas, are designed not just to reach those in the big cities whose more comfortable social and economic contexts enable them to attend the FGV's schools in person. The FGV's distance learning program permits high-quality content to be accessed at quite reasonable cost from the most remote localities in Brazil. Much more than that, in a country where demand for specialist skills is growing steadily, but which still requires its citizens to reconcile study time constantly with time at work, the FGV Online offers the possibility of professional development and capacity-building on a flexible model that makes allowance for the present- day lack of time. The FGV Online's reach is not limited to Brazilian territory. Given that all of its content is offered in Portuguese, other Portuguese-speaking countries can access its courses. Meanwhile, although Portuguese-speaking users are our main target public, language has not been an impediment, because FGV Online is constantly working to tailor its strategies to the present, strongly globalized world context. In that regard, a series of partnerships are being forged with prestigious international institutions, such as the University of California at Irvine (UCI) and the Manchester Business School (MBS), the largest school of Business Administration in the United Kingdom. In 2005, the Fundação Getulio Vargas reached an agreement with the University of California, at Irvine (UCI) with a view to offering a quality, internationally recognized MBA to Brazilian executives and liberal professionals. The content of the International Executive MBA in Project Management was produced by FGV and UCI professors. The MBA is offered totally in Portuguese, making it possible for knowledge constructed in international contexts to come into the hands of Brazilian students in their native tongue. Understanding that in a globalized world – an environment that calls for constant information exchange and for difference to work together – the notions of space and time are being reconfigured and the notion of unity, reconstructed, the FGV also signed an agreement with the Manchester Business School (MBS). That agreement is designed to make the Global MBA available to Brazilian executives, with all content completely in English. This course was maintained in its original language, because today English holds a key position in international negotiations. The Global MBA meets demand from executives seeking international projection in their careers.
  • 9. It can thus be seen that FGV Online is concerned to construct products to match the new demands of the market, suiting them to the wide diversity of conditions represented there. The FGV Online is evidently striving to make quality content as widely available as possible. Accordingly, it is only natural that the program should make a variety of content available free of charge. In 2001 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) founded OpenCourseWare (OCW), which provides free access to learning assets from the university curriculum. Following in its footsteps, in 2008, FGV Online joined forces with the University of California at Irvine (UCI) to offer access free of charge to high quality content, especially for the Brazilian and other Portuguese-speaking publics. By joining the OpenCourseWareConsortium (OCWC), FGV Online has managed to popularize substantial knowledge on a vast scale, far exceeding all expectations of success. In the first 10 days after the free courses were made available on line, they received more than 20,000 visits. To date, the FGV Online courses accessible through the OCWC have received nearly five million hits, which have brought 1,1 million people to complete one or other of the courses on offer and visit the FGV Online website to post declarations about their participation in the courses. To the Brazilian public, which represents both huge demand for training and high education costs (approximately 35% of national GDP is directed to higher education), the free FGV Online courses are an appropriate and necessary response to Brazil's education needs in a certain sphere. The OCWC courses offered by the FGV, more than affording limited qualification to those who complete them, foster a movement of ongoing education, given that in the last two years more than 1,000 enrollments in paid courses originated from students who had concluded free courses. In this way, the FGV Online is building a solid structure that incorporates factors such as: • open-access content; • the mission of developing and managing distance education technologies, methodologies and solutions, under the academic responsibility of the schools and institutes of the FGV, one of Brazil's most prestigious educational institutions; • future outlook – to be an international reference in the distribution of innovative, high quality distance education products and services. In that context, the FGV Online has become a provider of high value-added educational solutions, as confirmed by the leading corporate sector awards granted in recognition of its achievements: • the 10 Melhores Fornecedores de RH, awarded to Brazil's top ten human resource providers; • Top of Mind, five times running; • E-Learning Brasil – National Reference in T&D; • The Prêmio de Destaque Educacional Nacional - prize for outstanding achievement in Brazilian education. In the wake of this history of successes as a provider of education solutions and education as such, the FGV Online is making available yet another means of popularizing high-quality
  • 10. content. The e-zine Revista FGV Online is a space reserved to circulating current thinking on EAD, business schools, the world panorama and education in general. With collaboration from leading Brazilian and international names, the Revista FGV Online aims to foster discussions that contribute not only to analyzing the status quo, but also to outlining possible future trends. In that light this first issue focuses on essential points in present-day education: • All the various facets of Open Educational Resources (OERs); • The place Brazil occupies in response to this movement towards open-access content; • How the profile of the distance education professional is being reconfigured by the new scenario that is forming. Observing how the Revista FGV Online has gained form and content confirms, once again, our certainty that we are moving steadily towards providing content of excellence on a major scale, always in partnership with leading institutions and individuals like the ones that have contributed to the making of this first issue.
  • 11. Beyond Sustainability: The Emerging Institutional Imperative of OER/OCW By Gary W. Matkin, Ph.D., dean of continuing education, distance learning and summer session, University of California, Irvine Abstract The development of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Open Educational Resource (OER) movements of the last three years clearly indicates that all major universities are or will become producers and publishers of OCW and OER and that these efforts will become a feature of organizational life for these institutions. This statement and prediction is supported by both strong current evidence and a projection of major trends in higher education that will inevitably intersect with the OCW and OER movements. This paper makes the institutional case for developing some form of OER soon. Key Words Open Educational Resources, OpenCourseWare, Higher Education Trends, MIT OCW, UCI OCW, Institutional Case for OCW
  • 12. The development of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Open Educational Resource (OER) movements of the last three years clearly indicates that all major universities are or will become producers and publishers of OCW and OER and that these efforts will become a feature of organizational life for these institutions. This statement and prediction is supported by both strong current evidence and a projection of major trends in higher education that will inevitably intersect with the OCW and OER movements. This paper makes the institutional case for developing some form of OER soon. 1. The Early Institutional Case Of course, this is not the first article on this subject. In fact, several major international studies describe the involvement of, and illuminate the case for, university involvement in OCW/OER. In 2007, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development issued a report “Giving Knowledge for Free” (OECD, 2007) which offers a strong context for institutional engagement in OCW/OER. Also in 2007, Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services, funded by the European Commission, published “Open Education Practices and Resources” (OLCOS, 2007), a comprehensive report with recommendations for institutions on the use of OCW/OER in Europe. Generally, these reports mix high-minded, public policy motives with very practical reasons for institutional involvement in OCW/OER (quotes from OECD, 2007, pages 64-65): 1. “…Sharing knowledge is a good thing to do” and “in line with academic traditions.” 2. “Educational institutions should leverage taxpayer’s money by allowing free sharing and reuse of sources.” 3. “By sharing and reusing, the costs for content development can be cut, thereby making better use of available resources.” 4. “It is good for public relations and it can function as a showcase to attract new students.” 5. “Free content lowers the cost not only for institutions but also for students.” 6. “Open sharing will speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation, and reuse and help the institution to keep good records of materials and their internal and
  • 13. external use. These records can be used as a form of market research if one is interested in the commercial potential of individual resources.” These reasons have some overlap with the factors that prompted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to initiate a university sponsored OCW in 2001, an initiative that set the movement on a spectacular and highly successful start. Charles Vest, then president of MIT, lists five reasons for MIT’s pioneering effort to “give away all its course materials via the Internet” (Vest, 2004): 1. To advance education and widen access 2. To provide greater opportunity for MIT faculty to see and reuse each other’s work 3. To create a good record of materials 4. To increase contact with alumni 5. To help MIT students become better prepared MIT followed its land-grant mission, carved out some very high moral ground and markedly enhanced its image as a generous university. Indeed, MIT’s success in OCW/OER continues to this day, evidenced by the shear volume of its published open materials and the number of users. As of August 9, 2010, more than 90 percent of MIT’s tenured and tenure-track faculty have shared their materials on the MIT OCW Web site. The site features 2,003 courses with syllabi and reading lists, notes from more than 17,500 lectures, 9,500 assignments and 1,000 exams. (MIT, 2010). 2. Intersection with Long Term Higher Education Trends The early (2001-2004) institutional impulses for institutional involvement-in and sponsorship- of OER/OCW intersected with some compelling long-term trends in higher education—trends with a strong supporting context for university-sponsored open materials. Perhaps the most compelling is the world-wide need to reduce the costs of higher education. Sir John Daniel and his colleagues have identified higher education’s “iron triangle” in which the overwhelming world-wide demand for higher education (access) is met with the financial realities (cost) of providing that education effectively (quality). With an estimated one billion students effectively denied education world-wide, the world is faced with unfathomable problems associated with frustrated ambitions and ignorance. (Daniel, et. al., 2009). OER/OCW appears to offer at least part of a strategy to break this triangle. A second trend is the increasing global institutional competition for students, faculty and resources. This trend places a premium on positive world-wide institutional visibility and reputation building—
  • 14. clearly something enhanced by providing free online learning material. Another trend is the demand for increased institutional accountability, to students, parents, governing boards, governments and the general public. In public perception, accountability and openness go hand-in-hand. Associated with this accountability is the increased attention being given to the continuous improvement of the learning process, practiced first on an institutional level and then at a more granular level by individual faculty members. Open expression of materials allows larger groups to contribute to the improvement process. Higher education can’t ignore the emergence of learning communities and serving these communities will be added to the agenda of universities. Finally, something that has not been fully recognized or written about is that the market for instructional content has changed. One indication of this is the continuing issue of the high costs associated with scholarly publication. Universities and their libraries are encouraging and producing open journals because publishers charge very high prices for journals, sometimes over $10,000 per year. Initiatives such as the Public Knowledge Project which helps scholarly communities develop open peer-reviewed journals are growing in influence and effectiveness as university budgets shrink and developing nations are disadvantaged by being effectively cut off from the latest research. (Schmidt, 2010). Thus, university scholars understand the market realities for their intellectual product, a market with high costs associated with the marketing, production and distribution of intellectual property, but with low costs of its content. The open textbook movement is another case in which educators are attempting to wrest the control of the market from the hands of for-profit publishers, this time in the instructional rather than the research realm. At a time when the commercial value of content produced for the teaching/learning process is in question and even declining, the social value, including the social value to developing countries, is increasing. With these forces acting simultaneously, the ground for the expansion of OER/OCW has been cleared. 3. Progress of the Movements MIT’s example inspired many institutions to follow it into the OER/OCW movements. MIT took the lead in the formation of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) which today has approximately 200 institutional members that have now posted over 14,000 open courses on the Internet. But factors independent of MIT’s example have also proliferated. For instance, the University of California, Berkeley now has over 8,000 courses posted on iTunes U (UC Berkeley, 2010), joining 600 other colleges and universities (including Yale, Stanford, Oxford and MIT) in contributing over 350,000 educational materials. (iTunes U, 2010). YouTube
  • 15. EDU, http://www.youtube.com/education, counts over 300 universities and subscribers among its contributors and offers over 65,000 individual videos and over 350 complete courses. (You Tube EDU, 2010). Within the OER movement there are strong and growing sub-movements. Of particular note is the open textbook movement. Fueled by the high cost and ever-increasing price of textbooks, there are many initiatives dedicated to placing textbook material online for free. It is estimated that U.S. K-12 public schools spent about $4.4 billion for textbooks in 2006-07. In response, the state of Florida created Free-Reading, believed to be the first free, open- source reading program for K-12 public schools. (Toppo, 2007). The $400 million that California spends on textbooks in its K-12 system is the target of the California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) (http://www.opensourcetext.org/index.htm). The majority of higher education textbook costs fall on students rather than institutions, but these institutions are acting aggressively. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is funding a major open textbook effort focused on the community colleges. Individual campuses such as North Carolina State University is trying to help students reduce the total cost of their education by using open texts. (Laster, 2010). Despite this clear evidence of the health and continued growth of the OER/OCW movements and the widespread institutional publication of open educational material, there remain barriers to the formal adoption of OER/OCW by higher education institutions. The primary barriers appear to be the perceived cost of creating and sustaining open resources and the failure of higher education leaders to see the potential institutional uses of open content. 4. The Perceived Cost Barrier In an era of sharply reduced funding for higher education (in the U.S., at least) the notion of providing free material to the public seems counter to the cost saving measures widely in place today, particularly when universities are cutting staff and reducing wages. Indeed the issue of “sustainability” has dominated the attention of those involved in the OER/OCW movements, and has attracted criticism from outside those movements. Under a front page headline “Open Courses: Free but Oh, So Costly,” (Parry, 2009) the Chronicle of Higher Education reported predictions of the sharp decline in the movements based on the inability of institutions to continue to fund those efforts. In this article, David Wiley, now at Brigham Young University predicts: “Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit will be dead by the end of calendar 2012.” Since that article was published, the number of active universities on iTunes U (as of August 2010) has increased from 222 to 600 and education materials available on the site increased from 200,000 to 350,000.
  • 16. While predictions of decline in open educational materials seem quite contrary to hard evidence, the cost issue remains important and, indeed, underlines a problem that has dogged the OER/OCW movements from the beginning. Despite the high minded purposes clearly articulated for the movements, OER/OCW seem to be solutions in search of a problem. In fact, sustainability for the efforts will not come from identifiable and separate sources of external funding such as providing students with distance learning courses as Wiley suggests, but from the normal carrying out of day-to-day institutional activities. The “imperative” in the title of this paper derives from this circumstance—current functions and obvious improvements in those functions will be served best by the institutional publication and maintaining of open content. 5. The Failure of Imagination Barrier Despite its immense contribution to the OCW movement, MIT’s OCW model has so dominated the press and overall conception of OCW that it has served as a barrier to the imagination— even as MIT itself pushes at the edges of that model. That model is defined for all on the MIT OCW Web site (http://ocw.mit.edu/about): MIT OCW “is a free publication of course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.” “OCW is not an MIT education” “OCW does not grant degrees or certificates” “OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty” “Materials may not reflect entire content of courses” These explanations are quite reasonable and necessary from MIT’s perspective but they are not limits that must be adopted by all universities—even the most prestigious. Other institutions may choose not to limit their OER/OCW offerings only to degrees they provide their own students, choosing, for instance, to share with and target their expertise to deserving non-student audiences. They may add instructional services, including learning assessments and certifications to their open offerings, so that the open material does constitute an institutional educational offering. Some open material may be intended to foster external involvement with faculty members. And finally, institutions may decide to define what a “course” is to distinguish it from materials that are less complete in order better to serve their users. So, the institutional case for OER/OCW should use the MIT OCW as a sound but also limited model for what can be accomplished.
  • 17. 6. The New and Improved Institutional Case The experience of the last four years has added substance to the case that can be made for institutional involvement in the OER/OCW movements. This experience has supported and reaffirmed all of the early objectives for higher educational institutions to become actively involved in sponsoring and publishing OER/OCW and, in addition, presented new examples of the benefits that institutions can derive from such involvement. As these new uses emerge, so does the justification for the financial support of them, support that results in revenue generation, cost savings, and service improvements that are so compelling as to demand funding and support from institutional leaders. The case for institutional support of OER/OCW falls under several categories which are listed and described below. There is no more compelling a case to be made for OER/OCW than its ability to serve the core instructional mission of the institution. As indicated earlier in this paper, Charles Vest describes why MIT chose to give its materials away for free and lists two of his five reasons under this category—to provide MIT faculty the opportunity to view each other’s work and to help MIT students be better prepared. In fact, these two reasons are clearly manifested in the MIT experience and in the experience of other universities, some of which have taken an even more active role than MIT. For instance, UC Berkeley has created an infrastructure whereby course lectures are automatically recorded and then posted to iTunes U, available for viewing by students in the course soon after the lecture is complete. Individual students and study groups can review lectures as they prepare for exams. This same service can also serve students who miss a class and, in one case at a major university facing a classroom shortage, an alternative delivery system to the classroom. New York University (NYU) recently announced plans to video capture lectures in ten courses, add learning assets to them and place them online in an open format for its fall 2010 term. The professors teaching the courses will use the time gained by not having to deliver the lecture for one-on-one interactions. (Parry, 2010). Of course, these examples could be provided by the institution without offering the material in an open format. The advantage of the NYU and UC Berkeley models is that they utilize a free, publically available distribution site (YouTube EDU or iTunes U). These sites are easily accessible by students from anywhere and can remain in place along with later versions of the same course beyond the current term, serving as a continuing reference for subsequent students. And the institution gains the benefits of wide-spread exposure to its instructional product. Serving Current Students and Faculty (Supports Teaching and Learning)
  • 18. The earlier mentioned open textbook movement comes into play here also as the distinction between textbooks and Web-based and digitized materials of all types begin to blur. Universities are seeking to provide students with the material needed for their courses in cost effective ways. Last year, University of California’s (UC) chair and vice chair of the academic senate wrote an “open letter” to the UC faculty saying “now it’s our turn to cut the cost of textbooks for our students.” One way they suggest for cutting such costs is to “try to identify open resources textbooks (OER) or other published material that is freely available in digital form.” (Croughan, Powell, 2009). This notion of a designated open Web site for a commonly taught course is being exploited in even more innovative ways. At the University of California, Irvine (UCI), the faculty of a department responsible for a major introductory course with a high volume of students each year and faced with budget reductions have worked together to design a course that can be taught by faculty on a rotating basis without the high personal cost in development time. Faculty are free to make modifications to the course when they teach it and may (and do) add their modifications it. They are now considering making it a “canonical” course, open to all. Once placed in OCW, modifications to the course may be posted in a manner referenced at the appropriate point in the course so that subsequent students benefit from multiple approaches to the same topic. Sometimes these additional materials take the form of a video lecture by the professor that term. A possible extension of this process when presented in an open format (not contemplated in this example) is that viewers from outside the university, including other academics, might comment on the material and perhaps even contribute material to the course. Thus the faculty course authoring process has changed as a result of faculty being “able to view the work of others.” Another, this time institution-wide, example of aiding course authoring can be seen at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Monterrey, Mexico, with its project know as the “knowledge hub,” http://www.temoa.info/cache/normal/khub.itesm.mx/_.html.gz. Individual and teams of faculty members have created their own course materials, reviewed open material from other universities, and categorized the material by university course number in a repository ready for the use of both students and faculty. This institutionally sponsored project promises to drive down the time, effort and cost of developing institutional courses by harvesting vetted material from other institutions while making their own material available to others. They have kept this “hub” open for others to use as well. Another service to students performed by OER/OCW turned up as an unexpected result early in MIT’s experience. With a significant amount of material about a particular course
  • 19. available, students were able to “shop” for the classes they wanted, prior to the enrollment period, to reduce the flurry of activity during the traditional “drop and add week.” This advantage to students was also a boon to MIT in cutting down its transaction costs associated with student schedule changes. Obviously being able to examine the details for a particular course beyond the description in the catalog is a benefit both to students and their counselors, enabling them to design their academic careers with more information. While an argument might be made that an institutional open resource Web site seems to duplicate what most colleges and universities already provide—technological and Internet- based support for instruction, usually through organizational units called teaching and learning centers—the open dimension adds significantly to the utility of the effort. As indicated above, open course materials are generally more permanent and enduring than materials created only for the teaching of one instance of the course. Free public utilities such as iTunes U and YouTube EDU can be used and students from outside the institution can both benefit from and even contribute to the material. This opening is gained primarily at the cost of relinquishing most of the rights to control the material, but, given the commercial issues mentioned above: this cost is usually lower than the value of the benefits gained. Recent studies by MIT indicate that 79 percent of entering freshman report that they visited the MIT OCW site before deciding to attend MIT. Frequently their parents also visited the site. Seeing “how MIT does it” makes sense as part of the decision-making process. Clear statistics on this benefit are difficult to gain since it is difficult to track enrollments back to particular visits to a Web site, but some data is available. The Open University of the Netherlands estimates that 10 percent of the people who visit their free online courses go on to pay for online courses. (Aujla and Terris, 2009). The University of California, Irvine (UCI) placed a series of public health seminars on its OCW Web site, and professor of public health Oladele Ogunseitan reports that “applications at the undergraduate level and the graduate level have all increased over the past year.” Attract Students http://learn.uci.edu/ucionline/. Also at UCI, the continuing education unit of the University reports that traffic from its OCW site (http://ocw.uci..edu) is the largest source of referral traffic to its catalog site. It uses its OCW Web site to capture leads for its online courses and programs and as a demonstration site for those who want to understand what kind of experience they will have in an UCI online course. Stimulates and Facilitates Accountability and Continuous Improvement
  • 20. In the U.S., the regional accrediting bodies are requiring that desired student outcomes (DSOs) be articulated for each degree program as a whole and for each course, and that metrics, preferably external metrics, be adopted for the measurement of those outcomes, and that the results of those metrics be translated into action that improves the educational product of the university. Similar regulations are beginning to be promulgated in Europe partly as a result of the Bologna Process. But the calls for accountability go beyond educational organizations. A recent law passed in the state of Texas, HB2504, requires institutions to post a public Web site for every undergraduate course taught for credit by public institutions (except medical and dental schools). Included in the posting must be the course syllabus, departmental budget (if available) and the curriculum vitae of each regular instructor. The information must be easily accessible to the public no later than seven days after the academic term begins, must be updated as appropriate, and must be maintained for two years. While this is an extreme example, the trend is toward more openness in the instructional function. Data from student performance can more easily be used to improve courses that are open. But even in its most passive form, OCW improves instruction. Faculty will pay more attention to the quality of their efforts when faced with the knowledge that their courses will be exposed to full public scrutiny. An OER/OCW Web site immediately pays dividends in terms of recognition at the institutional, school, department, center and individual faculty levels. The impressive statistics of the use of MIT OCW clearly enhanced MIT’s already strong image and recognition. But there are more such examples, including the astounding response to FGV’s launch of its OCW site in 2008. The launch was accompanied by significant coverage in the popular press providing highly positive messages about FGV’s contribution to education in Brazil. Since that launch, FGV has recorded over 3.6 million visits, registered over 1.4 million interested people and issued almost 800,000 declarations of completion for its open courses. Significant in its own way is the experience of UCI, which was the first campus in the UC system and the first west coast university to join the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). UCI’s OCW site features over 50 full open courses and is consistently ranked alongside MIT, Johns Hopkins, and other major institutions within the top ten U.S. OCW Web sites. The existence of an OCW Web site enables the institution to regularly and with little cost provide contributions to the public welfare, attracting positive stories in the news media. Advances Institutional Recognition and Reputation The reputation aspects of OCW do not stop at the institutional level. Components of the university—colleges, schools, research centers—also gain in visibility. For instance, Johns
  • 21. Hopkins University has concentrated its OCW in the area of public health, benefiting its Bloomberg School of Public Health. Individual faculty members can also gain very high recognition for their efforts. UC Berkeley’s Professor Marion Diamond’s human brain video lectures have gained her an international following. Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University drew more than 400,000 views to his video describing Web 2.0. (Young, 2008). OER and OCW supports the ability of the university to serve the public. While this purpose was an underlying impulse of MIT’s pioneering project, the expression of its OCW did not directly address specific public service efforts. But the large mass of material ultimately produced by MIT naturally put pressure on it to adapt the material for deserving audiences. The most ambitious effort is MIT’s Highlights for High School project, an effort to provide a “lens” on the mass of MIT material in science and mathematics that might be useful to high school teachers and students. Supports Public Service Role http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/. A related example is UCI’s OER material designed specifically to help California’s K-12 teachers prepare for the state’s examinations in order to teach science and mathematics. Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Boeing Company, UCI’s effort continues to serve thousands of teachers and receives more visits than any other collection of courses on the UCI OCW site. Every large university has many initiatives that call for dissemination of parts of the knowledge base created and maintained by it. Sometimes the need for dissemination is internal, such as the sharing of learning materials among colleagues even when they are in the same department or located close by. But most universities continually produce material useful to the public. For instance, universities often produce learning objects useful to the K- 12 educational segment. Even when they can find funding to produce or publish the material, delivery methods remain cumbersome and expensive. The main issue is not so much OER production as its disposition. An institutionally sponsored OER/OCW Web site is a convenient “default” repository, but one that also automatically serves as a low cost publication and dissemination mechanism. With the establishment of an open Web site there is immediately a place for much of the production of the university. Default Repository with a Purpose For research universities, an open site can become a powerful competitive advantage in gaining research funding. All federal agencies and many foundations now emphasize and Research Dissemination Mechanism
  • 22. reward sound plans for getting the results of research funding into practical use as quickly as possible. Sometimes, the creation of high-quality learning materials for use by institutions and individuals is the best mechanism for dissemination, with the greatest impact. At the beginning of this paper one trend cited was the emergence of learning communities as a force to be recognized by universities. Part of the emergence of these communities is being stimulated by OER/OCW. The existence of high-quality learning materials available for free, anyplace, anytime has naturally led people to seek some form of valid learning assessment and certification. But there are several more serious efforts at encouraging this kind of learning. For instance Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is organized to help learners connect with subject experts in a temporary learning community, but the effort is searching for ways to legitimize the learning accomplished. The University of the People hopes to gain accreditation for the learning experiences it organizes around courses purchased by other universities. (Abramson, 2010). OpenLearn, an initiative of the Open University (OU) of the UK “is working toward creating a truly interactive and collaborative learning experience.” OU students can meet up in chat rooms to discuss their lessons and the university is working on what will be the educational equivalent of Facebook to allow users to create profiles, find, and communicate with others studying similar material. (Aujla and Terris, 2009). Some instructors are opening their online courses to the world, joining the open teaching movement and spawning the term “Massive Open Online Course” (MOOC). (Parry, 29 August 2010). Serving Learning Communities While none of these major efforts can yet be termed a success, there is enough impetus to indicate that something will happen soon that will be important to higher education. And, there are enough potential learning communities within or associated with the university to warrant attention, including matriculated students, alumni and friends, scholarly communities and professional societies. These communities are logically served by OER/OCW. Through participation in the OER/OCW movements, institutions become automatic members of a powerful but informal international club. To remain on the sidelines of OER/OCW risks exclusion from the club or may necessitate a scramble to get in when opportunity knocks. Many national governments, including the U.S., with now a somewhat diminished initiative to foster open education for the community colleges, are adopting OER/OCW as part of a Membership in the International Club
  • 23. national education strategy. Brazil and Vietnam are certainly poised for such an effort as are several governments of Southeast Asia and Africa. Indeed, the African Virtual University is focused on institutional sharing of resources through an open exchange. With such powerful patrons, universities should prepare themselves for what is inevitable—calls for sharing their instructional materials with the world. The “iron triangle” will be addressed and institutions around the world will be pressured to be become either suppliers or users of OER/OCW (or both). The interaction among international partners has already stimulated innovation and excitement. Those features will accelerate the movements further in the very near future. 7. Conclusion There is no way that higher education institutions around the world will be able to avoid becoming a part of the OER/OCW movement. The form of that involvement may not be clear today and no one can predict or describe the future clearly, but the pathway toward openness in instructional material and the learning/teaching process is already well paved. The combination of current activity, long term trends and institutional necessity make involvement in OER/OCW an imperative. Such activity will be sustained out of a montage of funding sources—the most important of which will be institutional resources that fund instructional support and innovation on campuses today. This category of funding will be joined by new funding sources and income streams stimulated by the powerful idea of openness combined with targeted, cost-effective services. The future shape of OER/OCW is not clear but its essence has already entered the bloodstream of international higher education. Abramson, L. “Global University Eliminates Barriers to Education,” National Public Radio, 10 March 2010. http://www.npr.org/templates.story/story.php?storyId=124008749 Aujla, S., and Terris, B. “Around the World, Varied Approaches to Open Online Learning,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 October 2009, p. A20. Croughan M., and Powell, H. “An Open Letter to Members of the Faculty,” University of California Academic Senate, 11 August 2009. Daniel, J., Kanawar, A., Uvalic-Trumbic, S. “Breaking Higher Education’s Iron Triangle: Access, Cost and Quality,” Change, 2009, April/May, pp30-35. Hubbard, B. “A Year to Remember for webcast.berkeley,” January 2010. http://ets.berkeley.edu/blog/year-remember-webcastberkeley-itunes-u-and-youtube
  • 24. Laster, J. “North Carolina State U. Gives Students Free Access to Physics Textbook Online,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 February 2010. Open Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS), Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 Toppo, G. “Free Online Materials Could Save Schools Billions,” USA Today, 6 November 2007. , 2007. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-11-06-freereading_N.htm Organization for Economic Co-operation and Economic Development, Giving Knowledge for Free Parry, M. “Open Courses: Free, but Oh, So Costly,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 October 2009, p. A 1. , 2007. Parry, M. “Mass Video Courses May Free Up Professors for More Personalized Teaching,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 August 2010. Parry, M. “Online, Bigger Classes May Be Better Classes: Experimenters Say Diversity Means Richness,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 August 2010. Schmidt, P. “New Journals, Free Online, Let Scholars Speak Out,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 February 2010. Vest, C. “Why MIT Decided to Give Away all Its Course Materials via the Internet”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 January 2004, p.20 Young, J. “YouTube Professors: Scholars and Online Video Stars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 January 2008, p. A9.
  • 25. New Directions for OpenCourseWare: Implications for Brazil By Larry Cooperman, director, University of California, Irvine OpenCourseWare Abstract OpenCourseWare has gone in 10 short years from the preserve of a single university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to a global movement of hundreds of universities and over 14,000 courses written in every major language of the globe. More recently, governments have begun to understand the importance of free and open access to the teaching and learning materials that make up university coursework. This paper proposes that we are entering into a new phase in the lifecycle of OpenCourseWare and its potential implications for Brazil. Key Words OpenCourseWare , Open Educational Resources, Economic Development, African Virtual University, Learning Object Repositories, Creative Commons
  • 26. 1. Introduction OpenCourseWare (OCW) is the branch of open education that concerns itself with the production and reuse of university-level course content. OCW is a social movement to open the firewalls of higher education — if not the physical doors themselves — to all who seek to better themselves or others. With this growing library of syllabi, course outlines, readings, presentation slides, exams, data sets, simulations and textbooks, OCW providers target independent learners, current secondary, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professors looking for materials to enrich their teaching. Today, there are over 14,000 sets of teaching materials available for the 200+ university and affiliate members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). In fact, if all available outside material was included in this organizational context, the number would be even greater. OCW’s original expression was very much a publishing project, initiated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At the time, the mere idea of OCW sent tremors throughout higher education, some believing that the open sourcing of university content would destroy a thousand business models that kept universities afloat. But OCW can better be seen as a reaction to the commercial failure of a series of prominent dot-com era Web-based higher education projects and the growth of open source software. On the institutional side, MIT founded a consortium, originally composed of a number of international partners who had translated portions of the MIT OCW Web site into a number of languages, including Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin. In addition to these translation sites, the notion of publishing course materials with an open license permitting free reuse was beginning to spread. In May 2005, the Japan OpenCourseWare Alliance was started by six universities. Today, in addition to 212 English-language courses translated to Japanese, there are 1,285 courses published by Japanese universities in the Japanese language. Universia, a consortium of universities supported by Banco Santander, began its affiliation with the OCW movement (and later the Consortium) by translating MIT courses. Today, it publishes course content from the Iberian peninsula and Latin America in Spanish, Portuguese, and in translated versions for some 16 languages. From this internationalization of OCW came a new organization, the OCW Consortium (OCWC), founded by MIT in February 2005. The Consortium’s growth has been rapid in terms of its own institutional members, who are required to have at least 10 courses available within the first two years of membership and pay the modest dues required. As of July 2010, the OCWC Web site lists 178 institutional members, nine associate consortia and 46 affiliate
  • 27. members. While, in its early years, the majority of published OCW came from MIT, current production of OCW is now spread throughout the world. 2. Creative Commons Licenses Good, Not Great At the heart of open education is the issue of overcoming the strict regime of “all rights reserved,” imposed by U.S. copyright law and enshrined in World Trade Organization treaties on intellectual property. By default, a scribble that a professor draws on a blackboard — a fixed expression — is not shareable unless he or she expressly licenses it as such. Someone who wanders in from the hallway, sees the scribble, copies it and then publishes it is guilty of copyright infringement. He has not sought prior permission, so, regardless of the professor’s intentions, his scribble has become legally trapped. Of course, millions of people copy things from the Web and share them freely. However, in institutions such as universities, embedding such practices outside of limited frameworks such as “fair use,” leaves the institution vulnerable. The second problem in using “all rights reserved” as the default arrangement is that it impedes innovation, despite the fact that the justification for intellectual property laws in the first place is to incentivize innovation. As Larry Lessig, a founder of the Creative Commons non-profit organization, stated at Brazil’s 2004 Free Software Conference, “creativity has always been about building upon other people's creative work.” Creative Commons licensing (CC) allows the reservation of specific rights, particularly the requirement that licensed works be properly attributed (BY), that the license terms may not be changed when incorporated in other works (SA), that no commercial use be made of the work (NC) and that the work remain as a whole and not be subdivided and reused (ND). In practice, the combination of Creative Commons licenses can be complicated. First, there is the issue of national borders. While the licenses themselves have been successfully ported to many countries, including Brazil, a remixed work produced in one country may not travel well. Second, there are national complications even when copyrighted works are considered, such as the varying definitions of when a work has entered the public domain or whether a work produced in a country that is not a signatory to the World Trade Organization is protected. Even the definition of what is in the public domain is bound to legal interpretations in each jurisdiction. 3. The Challenge for OCW Even in a perfect world where no gray areas existed around licensing, OCW would still need to undergo a sort of punctuated equilibrium, an evolution from being an ill-defined set of
  • 28. course materials, to a useful narrative about a subject matter that is more easily transportable between countries, institutions and intended audiences. Within the OCW community, much attention has been devoted to the problem of discoverability. Some projects have focused on providing quality indicators, such as adoption by professors1 Discoverability remains an important problem for the consumption by learners of OCW. Part of the problem is that a course is found principally through search engines and that, in turn, relies on the learner to make good use of keywords. As a result, most proposals to enhance discoverability of OCW or open educational resources (OER) have centered on better use of metadata. In practice, it is very difficult to enforce consistency and quality in metadata production on a large, global community of producers. , peer review (Merlot), “lenses” or sets of recommended modules (Connexions). In the end, the challenge of discoverability is related to the absence of context for most courses – the extraction of an OER or an OCW from broader curricula designed to produce engineers, teachers or health professionals. Perhaps the solution is to build a global university catalog, in which courses are found within schools and departments, and their relationship to other courses and paths of study are transparent. This idea that the course-level organization of assets may be too finely grained for maximum utility may, at first, appear strange. However, it is much clearer when seen from the vantage point of using open education to leverage cost efficiencies, introduce new curricula or train an existing workforce in new areas. There are increasing glimpses of the transformative power of open education. In the next section, two examples are provided where OER/OCW are being used to drive economic development and workforce training. They achieve this through moving from open courses to open curricula. 4. OCW for Economic Development In the beginning, OCWs were produced for incorporation into university courses, translated versions of courses, or for use by professors and students. There has already been a substantial social benefit from this. However, the most recent OCWC global conference held May 2010, in Hanoi, Vietnam, turned its attention to government as an OCW consumer and producer. Brazil was represented by Anna Cristina Nascimento of the Ministry of Education. 1 The Open Educational Resources Portal of the Tecnológico de Monterey surveys OCW Web sites and stores their description and URL in a database. They compensated professors to evaluate useful assets they found and created a ranking based on the review, and an indication whether a specific OER within the open course had been adopted for use by one of their professors.
  • 29. What typically limits the reuse of OCW is a mismatch between the intended educational audience and the new target audience. The transfer of materials involves not only translation, but a transition between cultures, prior levels of educational attainment, university policies and a handoff to a different instructional staff. If educational opportunity is expanded, it inherently creates a shortage of qualified instructors. The pent-up demand for education cannot immediately be met due to the imbalance between the new learners who will now have access and the existing background, training and professional development of the instructional staff. This paper argues that when the granularity of resources is too small, the labor involved in piecing together the relevant OERs can be overwhelming. That is why so many professors and universities simply start from scratch in building new courses, while commercially published textbooks that match the scope of typical courses are adopted so easily. 5. African Virtual University The African Virtual University (AVU) is a unique distance education institution, similar to the Associação Brasileira de Educação a Distância (ABED) that incorporates open education into the core of its mission. It is a pan continental project, incorporating 53 universities from 27 countries. It operates in conflict and post-conflict zones as well as in stable countries. Its most recent project was the completion of 70 modules in math and science secondary teacher education. Each of the modules was produced and peer-reviewed by African professors. Where facilities don’t exist, including basic connections to the Internet, the AVU develops them. Included in its services is the development of what they term “open and distance education” learning centers, or ODELs. Among its accomplishments, it lists the graduation of 4,000 Somali students, of which 30% are women. The AVU produces full curricula — tracks or degrees of study — rather than individual courses. It starts from the standpoint of the degree or certificate to be offered and then works backwards to produce the necessary modules in an open format. The fragmentation of most OCW collections is avoided through the scope of the project itself, for example, preparing prospective teachers with content knowledge in math and science2 2 The participants in this project are comprised of 12 universities in ten countries. The 70 modules are available in three languages – Portuguese, French and English. At the February 2, 2010 meeting of the new consortium, the university vice chancellors became the signatories. They were joined in the meeting by deans, professors, project team members, and even union leaders. at 12 universities in 10 countries in three languages. The openness of the assets becomes more important when the assets have to live in so many different environments throughout Africa.
  • 30. 6. TU Delft Transfers Its Water Management Courses to Indonesia TU Delft represents one of the most impressive examples of the transfer of OCWs (http://ocw.tudelf.nl) from their master’s degree in water management to a different educational and cultural context. The project, recently funded, is described below: The faculty of Civil Engineering obtained a grant from the EVD to develop an educational programme on Water Supply and Sanitation in Indonesia making use of OpenCourseWare. The project is carried out in collaboration with Stichting Wateropleidingen and ITB Bandung, Indonesia and aims at accelerating the achievement of the Millennium Development Water Goals by capacity building in the field of education and research on drinking water production/distribution and waste water collection/treatment through open, practice oriented education and applied research on appropriate water technologies. The project builds on experiences of Delft University of Technology and Stichting Wateropleidingen with educational and research concepts (training the trainer in both technical knowledge and didactical skills, OpenCourseWare practice orientedness of trainings, active learning, modelling and cooperative applied research) and aims to make these experiences available in education and research in the Indonesian setting. In both cases, it is the scope of the project that provides the educational benefit and the cost efficiencies. Both the AVU teacher project and the TU Delft/ Stichting Wateropleidingen collaboration build capacity. AVU builds distance learning centers and trains professors and staff in the use of technology. And the TU Delft/ Stichting Wateropleidingen collaboration trains instructional staff to deliver the curriculum and graduate water management professionals and technicians. 7. National Opportunities in OCW From the cases previously described, we can begin to outline how OCW/OER initiatives can embed themselves successfully in national education systems. These successful transnational projects have in common certain key elements: 1. They solve the problem of granularity. Much of the cost of OER/OCW reuse is incurred during assembly. That is, there is a cost of incorporation of an externally developed learning object into another environment. However, the cost of integration or creation is lessened when dealing with an entire program, not just a module or a course.
  • 31. 2. They address the problem of instruction. OER/OCWs remove barriers to access. Imagine the best possible world in which all of the resources themselves are of the highest quality and match the target audience in their depth and scope. While this provides an opportunity for learning, such learning would be amplified many times over by capable instruction. Yet, by its very nature, overcoming barriers to university coursework creates an instructor shortage. 3. They demonstrate a clear fit — not with university education in the abstract — but with clear locally determined needs. The topics chosen, though locally determined, tend to have global importance: water resource management, for example, or math and science teacher education. 4. Capacity building is a core value. This goes beyond the previously mentioned issue of development of a cadre of instructors/professors to meet the demands of the larger student base created by open access. Capacity building refers to the development of the institutional infrastructure for successful open education with the requisite governmental support. 8. Can Brazil Successfully Develop Open Education? From the examples above, it should come as no surprise that this article argues that the primary opportunity for Brazil is to adopt open education as a national strategy and tie it to rapid workforce development. Brazil's educational and economic strides in the past decade have been accompanied, to some extent, by a rapid increase in the participation rate, the rate at which students of university age are enrolled in tertiary institutions. However, because Brazil started at a low rate, there is an inevitable lag as the formal educational system strives to keep pace with the economic opportunities available. OCW is inherently a good fit for this situation. The development of teaching materials and open textbooks is a relatively inexpensive investment compared to the ongoing infrastructural investments that the government has to make, such as the high-speed rail planned to connect Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo. The response to FGV Online's OCW is without parallel in the world. MIT and Open University (OU) have the same scale of response, but both with significantly larger libraries of courses. How can we understand this phenomenon? It has to be that the demand for educational opportunity is quite high. Unlike the global reach of MIT or OU, FGV Online reaches only a Portuguese-speaking audience, most of which is Brazilian. The original impulse for the adoption of OCW generally starts with foundations and universities. There is a point of hand-off, however, in which the initial work “goes mainstream” and formalizes the commitment through the activities of the Ministry of
  • 32. Education, as in the case of Vietnam, or through a pan continental approach, as in the case of the African Virtual University. In the U.S., the Obama administration has committed to provide $500 million for the development of the most commonly taught community college courses and to provide these as free, open resources. While it is still too early to see how and if this initiative will play out, it is symbolic of a growing recognition that open education provides: 1. cost efficiency through development for audiences that already have standardized educational goals; 2. an improved path from secondary to tertiary education through public visibility of course content, and; 3. greater flexibility in usage through open licensing. Brazil's landscape, despite its various challenges, has some interesting characteristics that can make open education a powerful contributor to national educational and developmental goals. First, it is by far the most economically important in the Portuguese-speaking world. This makes its efforts in open education – whether by university or government initiative – much more likely to become global centers of open education in the Portuguese language. This is especially true about repository creation, in which the flow of educational objects will be toward Brazil from the rest of the lusophone world. The AVU typically produces materials in English and then translates to French and Portuguese. The problem is not the burden of translation of the original materials. What confounds the translation effort is the use of links in the original to English-language Web sites and other sources. Translators in Mozambique, for example, need to substitute those links with equivalent Portuguese-language materials, and the likeliest source of those will be from Brazilian repositories3 Second, it is an uncluttered landscape. That is, in contrast to the U.S. where there are many and often conflicting initiatives around OCW, Brazil has the opportunity to set up the rules of engagement for the players in this space — to the effect that interested non-governmental organizations, public and private universities and companies serve a broader national and educational purpose. To that extent, the clarification of the legal foundation for open education is critical as is the ability of the government through the Ministry of Education to assist with development and distribution of OCW. . 3 See two learning object repositories in particular – a university effort known by the acronym Proativa - Grupo de Pesquisa e Produção de Ambientes Interativos e Objetos de Aprendizagem (http://www.proativa.virtual.ufc.br/oa.php?id=0) and the Ministry of Education’s Banco Internacional de Objectos Educacionais (http://objetoseducacionais2.mec.gov.br).
  • 33. Third, the costs associated with higher education in Brazil as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) are relatively high. In a World Bank research paper comparing select Latin American countries to high income countries, these countries share a high cost of education relative to per capita GDP, approximately 35% for the higher education sector, despite notable successes in improving enrollment rates in primary, secondary and tertiary education. With a low 12% participation rate and a relatively high total cost of education (tuition, living costs, textbooks, fees, etc.), Brazil can benefit more than most countries from a strategy that lowers educational costs. The same study notes that while Brazil has free tuition for public universities, there has been growth in private higher educational institutions with average tuition levels. Therefore, the potential benefits of OCW are relatively high and can lead to a virtuous cycle of capacity building, quality improvement, and lowering associated costs of curriculum development, instructor development, materials and textbooks. In recognition of these potential advantages, Brazil’s principal distance education association, the ABED, has incorporated into its mission the notion of open and distance learning. ABED has a potentially important role to play in the dissemination of open education since its membership regroups professors from not only the elite public universities, such as the University of Sao Paulo, but also a broad representation from the federal system. Fred Litto, president and founder of ABED, in his introductory remarks at the 2009 ABED conference in Fortaleza, noted that open education is “free and democratic” in its essence, there is a match between often-stated public policy goals and the universal accessibility of open education. 9. Challenges to Brazil's Capacity to Adopt OCW/OER as an Educational Strategy Carolina Rossini, in a brief “green paper” updated in January 2010, presents the case that Brazil requires a national policy around OER. Her list of recommendations, while specific to Brazil could be generally applied to most countries of the world: 1. Strengthen requirements for open access to materials already funded by public institutions and governments. 2. The infrastructure for open education is based on content and repositories, which should have standardized methods of access and data collection, the latter to inform public policy, among other objectives. 3. The educational system should be directed at all levels to develop and incorporate open materials, including instructor training, student access and provisioning of instructional technology — all through a systemic and transformative plan.
  • 34. 4. Transformation of copyright law to eliminate ambivalence in its application to author rights, exceptions for educational use, and legal obligations of service providers. In the list above, it is the area of copyright law itself in which Brazil's history diverges from the general trend. Beyond World Trade Organization-imposed limitations, Brazil has never clarified key issues in copyright law. Mitzukami, Lemos, Magrani and Pereira de Souza tie the Brazilian copyright regime directly to the cost of university textbooks, “books in Brazil may be cheaper than in many other countries in absolute terms, but when purchasing power is taken into account, they are much more expensive.” Most interesting is the way in which Brazilian law has differed from cultural norms around sharing. If the laws are so vague that even the owners of copy shops cannot be sure of what they can legally copy, then inevitably those who seek to access knowledge and culture will find ways to avoid the law's limitations.” A simple Google search with a few keywords – such as “emule,” “torrents,” “brasil,” “br,” “p2p” and “comunidade”– will point the way to the many Web sites, forums and blogs that form the infrastructure used by Brazilians for file sharing, gateways to vast global repositories of content spread throughout millions of computers. The authors conclude with a harsh indictment of Brazilian copyright law: Exceptions and limitations in Brazilian copyright law are inadequate on many accounts. They are excessively restrictive and anachronistic – in some cases incoherent – and offer no opportunity for balance through interpretation. To make things worse, they are often misinterpreted by the content industry to pose even greater limitations on users. As a framework for public rights of use and access to culture and information, the current lists of exceptions and limitations are unacceptably limited. Brazil’s opportunity stems from this dismal state of affairs. Consider the predicament of textbook authors. High textbook prices have shut out a large group of users. To maintain the same level of profitability faced with a declining market, they raise textbook prices, yielding fewer users4 4 Eric Frank, a former junior executive at a major textbook company, frequently cites this spiral as the reason for the creation of Flat World Knowledge, a publisher that offers open textbooks and makes its money principally on the demand for printed versions. Authors receive 20% of a typical U.S. $30 price, one-third to one-sixth of the pricing for similar texts by the principal textbook companies. . Brazil stands out as the only country in which one of the largest global publishing companies, Pearson, has created a CopyLeft Web site, in which anyone can freely upload or download. Whether publishing companies can maintain themselves by tying auxiliary “open” content to their textbooks is, as yet, an untested model.
  • 35. From this unmet user demand for educational materials comes perhaps the greatest success of an OCW Web site — FGV’s granting of free certificates of completion. 10. The Case of FGV Online FGV Online was the second Brazilian university to join the OCWC in 2008, but the first to develop an OCW Web site. FGV Online has experienced explosive demand from over three million visitors to its open courses. Beginning with a translation of two University of California, Irvine courses and then posting its own material, it is one of only two OCW Web sites in the world that generates significant tuition fees for its for-credit courses from visitors attracted to the free courses. FGV Online innovated by allowing those who finished a course to print out a certificate of completion. This provided FGV with the ability to survey those learners requesting the certificate of completion, ultimately to understand its OCW users in a way that few other universities have been able to do. Among their findings was that single women were the largest group of users of its OCW. It also points to a conclusion about Brazil. The demand for education is so great that hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have taken at least one full course in order to get a paper certificate of completion. Another example of Brazilian demand for OCW is Peer2Peer University (P2PU)—a project that seeks to tie together learners around open content and open courses. Already, the largest courses are being organized by Brazilians in Portuguese and attendance is out of scale with the classes offered in English. 11. Conclusion OCW is the organization of open materials as courses. It is most effective when delivered as part of a curriculum, both in its portability across national borders and in its reusability from institution to institution. Following the creation of some 14,000 courses by member institutions of the OCWC, attention is being turned by both individual members and the organization to a next phase, in which its current scope—course materials—gives way to curated collections and learning paths, such as degree majors and specializations. The value for the end user of this development is that individual courses appear in a learning pathway that better guides the learner to a useful outcome. This development, already begun in places like Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam, could be accelerated by careful government attention, of which there are at least incipient signs. The relatively harsh copyright law that is an obstacle to matriculated students and independent learners alike may, in the end, accelerate the development of open educational opportunities.
  • 36. Brazil's steady rise in educational attainment and participation now needs to likewise accelerate to keep pace with the more rapid economic rise and shortage of various skilled and professional occupations. If Brazil adopts as a governmental imperative the capacity-building values of the TU Delft project in Indonesia or the AVU’s secondary math and science teacher education project, it will provide an example that the rest of the world will do well to emulate. African Virtual University Web site, http://www.avu.org/Press-Releases/press-release-avu- facilitates-virtual-training-for-teachers-in-10-african-countries.html CC Learn, “Otherwise Open: Managing Incompatible Content within Open Educational Resources”. September 1, 2009. http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp- content/uploads/2009/09/Otherwise_Open_report.pdf Cooperman, L. and Matkin, G. W., “The OCWC’s Next Frontier – Learning Ecosystems,” presented at OCWC Global conference. Monterrey, Mexico. April 23, 2009. Presentation Available Japan OCW Consortium Web site, http://www.jocw.jp/AboutJOCW.htm Mizukami, P. Lemos, R. Magrani, B. and Pereira de Souza, C., Exceptions and Limitations to Copyright Law,” Access to knowledge: New Research in Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development, (Edited by Shaver, Lea). Bloomsbury Academic (New York), pp. 71, CC (2010) Murakami, Y. and Blom, A., “Accessibility and Affordability of Tertiary Education in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru with a Global Context” p. 15, February 2008, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1099079877269/547664- 1099079956815/wps4517.pdf OpenCourseWare Consortium Web site, OpenCourseWare Consortium Timeline, http://wiki.ocwconsortium.org/index.php?title=Timeline OpenCourseWare Consortim Web site, “OCWC Meeting Starts in Hà Nội”, May 6, 2010, http://news.gov.vn/Home/OCWC-meeting-starts-in-Ha-Noi/20105/7272.vgp OpenCourseWare Consortium Web site, http://opencourseware.weblog.tudelft.nl/2010/01/18/evd-grant-for-development-educational- pr
  • 37. Rossini, C., “The State and Challenges of OER in Brazil: From Readers to Writers,” published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, February 2010 Unsworth, John M., “The Next Wave: Liberation Technology”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2004. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Next-Wave-Liberation/9698
  • 38. OPEN SCHOOLS AND LEARNING Fredric M. Litto Abstract Although there is considerable scholarly literature on the subject of “open” learning in higher education, it is not common for it to be studied in relation to basic and compulsory education – which is paradoxical in view of the disparity in student numbers. After defining characteristics of “open” education, this article identifies some important studies conducted in Brazil and abroad to inquire into “openness” in basic education. As examples, Mexico’s “Telesecundaria” and Brazil’s “Telecurso” are examined as successful models of open schooling in the past forty years. Keywords Distance learning, Open learning, Compulsory education, Educational technology, Educational television, Telesecundaria, Telecurso When one considers the student numbers in basic education in Brazil and elsewhere it is hard to understand why research and reports on “open” learning have focused predominantly on higher education. This may be because younger students are not motivated, disciplined or proactive enough to see a lengthy program of studies through successfully in an “open”, distance learning context. As a result, they offer researchers less potential for arriving at interesting, significant conclusions. It may be because, in Brazil at least, the most current technologies for study in educationally “open” environments have only recently begun to produce their “disruptive” effect on basic education; the studies will follow when the time is right. In any case, basic education is a strategic activity for all countries, because it begins to shape the minds of future citizens and prepare the “cognitive foundation” for subsequent learning. It is thus an area that deserves all possible attention from State and civil society, especially given the need to keep permanently up to date. In order to discuss “openness” in educational matters, first the salient features of the phenomenon have to be defined. Andréia Namorato dos Santos (2009) collected a wide range
  • 39. of definitions circulating mainly in English and identified the aspects of the phenomenon where consensus exists among various authorities in education: • It has to do with practices that remove the traditional social and cultural barriers that form part of the “closed” education systems of the past; • It eliminates the barriers to accessing knowledge that result from financial difficulties, geographical distances or reasons of age, sex, ethnicity or social position; • It represents a supply of courses, mainly for students to take at home; • It enables students to learn at the time, place and pace best suited to their needs and circumstances, in addition to ensuring that they choose what and how they want to study; • It opens up the possibility of pursuing studies at all levels of education: formal education (basic, middle and higher); non-formal (continuing or professional development); or informal (independent, self-directed study); • It offers students programs of study with no minimum qualification requirement for admission; and • It normally provides students with materials specially prepared or adapted for this kind of learning. The concept or paradigm of “open” learning forms part of a worldwide progressive, democratic movement of recent years calling for radical change in access to knowledge and to the tools that facilitate the use of information and knowledge. Digital technologies make it easy to duplicate and transmit information and knowledge with no loss of copy quality and no transmission lag. That makes it possible to break out of the “society of scarcity” (where only the privileged have access to the most prized benefits) and enter the “society of abundance” (where all citizens have maximum access to the same benefits). That is an altruistic goal with a view to accelerating emerging country development by boosting the potential for individual knowledge. In 2009, for instance, UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector held a workshop to formulate a new project called the “UNESCO Open Suite Strategy”, involving Open Access (OA), Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Educational Resources (OER). In addition to these proposed areas of work, others are being developed by governments, non-governmental organizations and academic institutions, such as open files, open innovations, open patents, open journals, open training and open technology.
  • 40. In the limited space of this article it is not possible to describe in any detail all the kinds of strategy for “openness” in learning, but it is possible to accompany progress in these endeavors (in Portuguese) by consulting the Universidade do Minho project, Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (http://projecto.rcaap.pt), the Brazilian government's websites for teachers and students in basic and higher education (http://portaldoprofessor.mec.gov.br and http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br), and the site of Brazil's only institutional participant in the international OpenCourseWare Consortium, the FGV Online (http://www5.fgv.br/fgvonline/cursosgratuitos.aspx), which offers a series of courses for the general public. Some important recent publications on open learning – which unfortunately do not include basic education within their scope, but deserve to be read – include Iiyoshi & Kumar (2008), D'Antoni & Savage (2009), and Rossini (2009). The latter concentrates on Brazilian production of OERs and has the virtue of bringing a useful legal perspective to the discussion, but omits some significant examples of ground-breaking work in this field. Fundamental reading, meanwhile, is the seminal work, Basic Education at a Distance: World Review of Distance Education and Open Learning (Yates & Bradley, 2000), which concentrates exclusively on basic education, as does The Open Classroom: Distance Learning In and Out of Schools (Bradley, 2003), and the International Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education (Voogt & Knezek, 2008). Also outstanding is the “Capetown Open Education Declaration”, a brief, thought-provoking document produced in 2008 by teachers, students, “web gurus” and representatives of several philanthropic foundations, calling for education to be transformed by expanding the supply of free, online educational materials relevant to local needs. The Associação Brasileira da Educação a Distância (ABED, http://www2.abed.org.br) is one of the signatories to the Declaration, which can be read online at http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration. Perhaps one effective way of understanding the potential of open learning for developing countries or for developed countries with large numbers of “excluded” individuals is to look at two successful experiences: Mexico's Telesecundaria and Brazil's Telecurso. Telesecundaria This government program started up experimentally in 1967 with only 83 students divided into four groups, all in Mexico City. Today it serves over a million students across Mexico, in addition to 30,000 young people in other Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. Durán (2001) writes that the program was originally planned for learners in rural villages in Mexico with populations of less than 2,500 where it was financially difficult to maintain a conventional public high school. It always used television broadcasts (more
  • 41. recently supported by satellite), printed materials and in-person tutoring at student service centers spread across the country. Those responsible are proud of the fact that its students generally achieve better learning results than students in conventional education and at little extra cost per student. Another virtue of the system that Durán mentions is the important role it plays in non-formal education in the communities where the program operates. In 1968, the project served 6,569 students with the support of 304 teachers; by 1989, it had 453,030 students and 21,203 teachers; and in 2003 it reached 1,146,600 students through 54,872 teachers in 16,000 rural communities. Broadcasts go out Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and are then repeated from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. and on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. The local communities provide the classrooms for each grade, while the federal government furnishes the other system components: the satellite dish, television set, set-top box (signal decoder), the reading materials and the teacher. While in conventional schools the student-teacher ratio is 35 or 40:1, in the Telesecundaria it is 23:1. The teachers are specially trained for the specific type of teaching and learning involved. While 60% are sufficiently qualified to teach at urban public schools, 40% have not trained as teachers, but are graduates from higher education, who are recruited right after graduating, provided they are willing to live in isolated rural areas. Durán notes that the educational model comprises three components: broadcast 15- minute video classes (the central repository contains 4,600 videos produced and updated periodically) reflecting the official curriculum of three years of high school; textbooks (returned to the school on conclusion of the course and with a useful life of three generations of students); and the teacher, who in addition to answering students' doubts, organizes community citizen learning activities. Assessment is in three stages: an initial evaluation to identify each student's existing knowledge; their degree of “engagement” in the program; and the likelihood of their applying what they learn in their later life. Formative assessment is performed by way of student participation in various projects, especially those connected with community problem solving. There is also summative assessment by way of examinations (regulated by the Ministry of Education), which address actual learning outcomes. In general, the program is especially effective for students living in rural areas, because it encourages them to stay in school, with the result that students perform as well as, or better than, their urban peers. Even though the rural students may be behind at the outset, they soon catch up with their urban colleagues. Durán offers the following keen insight: ...[rural] isolation makes it easier for school teams to exert a high level of control over students, reducing absenteeism and maintaining discipline... Despite the low economic status of the students and their relatives, the teachers' presence in the community
  • 42. means that the program is successful, personalized and effective. (DURÁN, 2001, p. 174) In 2001, Durán identified some of the problems suffered regularly in systematically operating the Telesecundaria: theft or malfunction of classroom equipment; text books not reaching the communities in good time; difficulty in keeping teachers in rural areas for long periods (because they miss their families); the need to develop the practice of reflection and critical thinking more among the students; and the rigid broadcast schedules for the televised classes. Telecurso Brazil's Telecurso has gone through several generations since the 1970s. From 1978 to 1995, the Telecurso 2º Grau high school course was introduced to help address the national problem that three quarters of Brazil's population between the ages of 70 and 90 never finished high school. From the outset, the project availed itself of the commercial television network of Grupo Globo, to which the Fundação Roberto Marinho (FRM) belongs. From 1978 to 1984, the FRM partnered with the Fundação Padre Anchieta of São Paulo (maintainer of TV Cultura, at the time the only educational TV station with a signal achieving wide coverage); and from 1985 to 1993, the partnership was with the Fundação Bradesco. The Telecurso model featured three key factors: • TV programs shown simultaneously over a wide network of television stations (39 commercial, 9 non-commercial); • primers published in weekly installments and sold at moderate prices at newsstands in 3,000 municipalities across Brazil; • broadcast schedule options and content of the televised classes are widely announced, as are the dates of the examinations, which are held by state education departments all over the country. In the first phase of the project, 432 15-minute programs were produced and broadcast in three 24-week blocks. One factor considered important for the project's success was that the televised classes featured actors from the Rede Globo's popular soap operas, who are well-known to the general public. By 1979, when the first phase of the Telecurso was concluded, five million copies of the primers had been sold, in addition to tests, exercises and other complementary materials. From 1978 a 1981, the Fundação Carlos Chagas of São Paulo conducted a survey to evaluate the Telecurso, concluding that its students performed better in the final exams than those in conventional schools.
  • 43. From 1981 to 1995, the FRM operated the Telecurso 1º Grau primary course, covering the 5th to 8 th grades. That project had technical and financial support from the Ministry of Education. By 1983, 851 television signal reception centers had been set up in 23 states, at which 91,400 students were receiving the televised classes. In the nine states where the Telecurso had partnered with local governments, Telecurso students graduated in droves with results ranging from 83% to 94% pass rates. By 1985, the Telecurso 2o Grau had benefited 3.5 million adults wanting to complete their secondary education (among them Marina da Silva, who later became a Senator and Minister of State, and Vicente Paulo “Vicentinho” da Silva, who also completed the Telecurso 1o Grau and was later elected to Congress). The Telecurso involved 60 television stations and 20 radio stations, serving a regular audience of 1.3 million viewers in 1,400 viewing rooms with television monitors. By 1989, the Telecurso 2o Grau had reached a public of 15 million viewers, enabling 4 million of them to gain a diploma. Using only open-circuit television with signals captured by the tele-classrooms, the FRM developed a specific methodology with students and the “builder” of their knowledge drawing on their life experiences and points of view to structure the actual learning. Remember that student activities had to be quite practical, while involving critical thinking and the application of experiences from everyday life. That methodology set in motion a process that permitted scalability to cater to millions of students. This was an alternative pedagogy for regular, formal education, too. The “dynamics” of the tele-classroom are as follows: the concepts to be learned are problematized; the televised class is shown; the images are “read”; textbooks are read; then there are activities relating to the texts, followed by any other appropriate activities; the activities are “socialized”; and students and teacher evaluate the process. Since its introduction in 1978 the Telecurso has revealed students generally considered to have been “excluded”: individuals more or less three years behind in their schooling (who have been failed two or three times), including people between the ages of 40 and 50. Telecurso students' family income and their parents' level of education are normally lower than those of students attending regular schools. Thirty percent, on average, already have children. At the regular schools in the municipalities where they live, student registers are irregular and there are many cases of “phantom” teachers. In that light, it is significant that Telecurso students offer very encouraging testimony about their success in their studies. There have been a number of successful projects in recent years. For example, in 2001, students of Acre State placed twenty-seventh in a Brazil-wide ranking of states by national examination results; by 2008 they had risen to ninth place.
  • 44. From 1995 to 2006, the Telesaber project, in partnership with the corporation Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, brought 1 st to 4 th grade teaching to the television classroom, confirming that fundamental schooling could be given to adults in just one year by distance education combined with in-person components, while middle schooling could be completed in just a year and a half in the same conditions. Using the same methodology (“learning counselors”, textbooks, televised classes and activities relevant to the students' lives), the Telecurso started to become more attractive to state and municipal governments, and partnerships with the FRM started to become public policy. There were 27,714 tele-classrooms in operation: 5.5 million students had completed their courses, 30,000 teachers had been trained, 1,500 firms and other institutions (churches, trade unions, prisons, and many others) had taken part, and 24 million books and 1.8 million televised classes had gone out. Nationwide, Telecurso student pass rates averaged 92.6% in fundamental education and 94.4% in middle education. By 2006, 80% of Brazilian homes had a television, and 7 million people per week were watching the televised classes. As a result, it became necessary to rethink the program as a whole, leading to the development of a new model for the Telecurso, with new content and new focus. The outcome was the Novo Telecurso (www.novotelecurso.org.br), which began its activities in 2008. Unlike the practice of previous decades, the Novo Telecurso does not cover the whole country, but benefits only selected states and municipalities where the local partners represent the opportunity for the project to accomplish new educational achievements. Updated curricula, such as Tecendo o Saber (“weaving knowledge”), offer daring, diversified content, challenging a new generation of students. The tele-classroom is no longer a physical place, but rather a concept, as the virtual dimension has begun to penetrate the learning environment. In the states of Amazonas, Acre, Pernambuco and others in partnership with the FRM, students are encouraged to watch films, read classics of Brazilian literature, consult books and access websites. DVDs of 14 to 15 minutes permit students to review content as often as they wish (teachers' DVDs contain collections with 50 classes on each). All the DVDs are subtitled and include sign language for the deaf. All the installations where student services are concentrated offer graduation ceremonies for students who complete their courses of study. In addition, a process of “structural actions” was set in motion: the project coordination is shared with the local partners; the focus is on preparing local teachers and supervisors; and there are periods of pedagogical integration and monitoring, always followed by internal and external evaluation, and preparation of a final “memorial”. It is important to have local co-management and a regionalized pedagogical plan. The project is beginning to make use of virtual learning environments, at first with the teachers, and complementary