8.1 Learning design and open source teaching  (Page 2/18)

The vision of how Learning Design could contribute to improving education was, for me, best articulated by Diana Laurillard in the UK Government e-learning strategy in 2005. Point 89 says:

“We want to stimulate greater innovation in e-learning design to accelerate the development of the next generation of e-learning. The focus should be on design flexibility for teachers and engaging activity for learners. Flexible learning design packages would enable teachers in all sectors to build their own individual and collaborative learning activities around digital resources. This would help them engage in designing and discussing new kinds of pedagogy, which is essential if we are to succeed in innovating and transforming teaching and learning.”

The benefit of Learning Design is that it provides educators with a way to describe and share the educational process (not just content). By fostering sharing, we not only improve education through open dissemination, but as educators can adapt and improve the Learning Designs they receive, and share the improved version back with a global audience of educators. This could lead to improved educational outcomes while at the same time reducing preparation time.

Open source teaching?

If Learning Designs capture the heart of the education process, then could we, by analogy, call them the “source code” of teaching? And if teachers then share their Learning Designs with each other under open content licenses, then does this represent the birth of open source teaching?

I put forward this idea in a keynote presentation for ED-MEDIA in 2006 .

The emphasis, for me, is on Learning Design as the “Source (code of) Teaching”, and then applying an open content license makes it Open (Source (code of) Teaching) - rather than the emphasis being “Open Source” for/of Teaching. As ugly as this close textual analysis is, it turns out to be important.

I am happy to call the Creative Commons BY-SA-NC (Attribution, Share Alike, Non-commercial) license (the typical license used in the LAMS Community) an “open” license. But when I ran the terms “open” “source” and “teaching” together, some colleagues took exception to this phrase being applied to Learning Designs that are licensed in a way that is incompatible with the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition (ie, no restriction on fields of endeavour, including commercial endeavours).

On the other hand, I’ve spoken to many educators who are comfortable with open sharing of their educational work for non-commercial purposes, but would be uncomfortable with a blanket license that permits any kind of commercial use as well (in passing, I should note that the issue here is rarely that users of the non-commercial clause are against any kind of commercial use; rather, they would like to be asked first, and have the option to negotiate terms on a case-by-case basis, typically with the implication that if someone else makes money from their work, they’d like a cut).

So I remain uncertain how to address this challenge: if most of my colleagues only feel comfortable to share their work on a non-commercial basis, then is it better to encourage them to share their work (and hence ultimately improve education) rather than trying to persuade them to change their mind about allowing commercial use (and run the risk of them not sharing if they are not persuaded)?