[Oer-community] Is MIT thinking of putting its OCW material behind a pay wall?

[Stephen Downes]

  On 10/11/2010 11:36 PM, Steve Foerster wrote:
> Hi Stephen,
>
> The ideological difference we seem to have here is that I don't believe
> that decisions are made by "society" or that "society" has values.
> Instead I see there being networks of individuals, who make individual
> decisions based on their different goals and values.  Similarly, events,
> policies, and so forth are neither good nor bad for "society", most are
> presumably good for some individuals and bad for others.
I am well known in my own circles for advocating a network view of 
society. So this is not the difference that we are having. I also agree 
that society is made up of a network of individuals, who make decisions 
individually. And when I speak of a 'decision made by society' what I am 
describing is an emergent phenomenon, a pattern that though attributed 
to society as a whole, and recognizable only when viewing society as a 
whole, nonetheless represents a set of individual decisions, as we would 
see when, for example, a flock of sparrows suddenly changes direction in 
mid-flight.

This description of society as a network does not counter the assertions 
I made in my previous email; indeed, it supports them. When I describe 
the decisions made in a society, I am describing the wider set of 
decisions - social, cultural, political, economic. The market-based 
approach you described in your previous email, however, takes into 
account only economic decisions. This, because of the extreme inequality 
of economic power in some societies, distorts the depiction of what we 
would call the decisions made 'by society', greatly weighing it in 
favour of the rich. Thus, the patterns found in the network as a whole 
are determined by only a few, who distort the network to support their 
own individual self-interest (this is how they became rich in the first 
place).

When making decisions about education, if we attend only to economic 
decision-making, and not the other sorts of social, cultural and 
political decision-making, we are establishing a framework for policy 
that is at the outset distorted in favour of a subset of society, and in 
all probability harmful to society as a whole. It diminishes to 
insignificance the wider social, cultural and political wishes of 
society, as expressed by the individual decisions of members of society 
participating (as well as they can) in this network.

The argument from the perspective of individual freedom is not an 
argument in favour of market determination of educational policy; it is 
an argument against it.

> It's interesting that you note that the Americans are unique in
> believing that education can be provided privately.  This is much more
> the case at the higher education level than at the primary and secondary
> levels, and sure enough our universities habitually top international
> rankings, while our primary and secondary schools fare poorly against
> other developed countries' systems.

One of the characteristics of a system managed by economic priorities, 
rather than social, cultural and political priorities, is that it 
amasses wealth and influence in a few. We see this most clearly 
economically, where the United States also has the most billionaires in 
the world. And that is why we also see a number of elite post-secondary 
institutions located in the United States. I have no doubt that if we 
looked for them, we would also find the most elite primary and secondary 
schools in the United States, though they prefer to operate under the radar.

But what is very good for some operates at the detriment to the larger 
whole. As noted, the primary and secondary system is in trouble in the 
United States. The higher education system is also not healthy. Though 
there is no shortage of MBAs and lawyers in the U.S., there is a chronic 
shortage of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates. 
And even when it is operating as it should, the American system offers a 
post secondary education to much fewer of its citizens than Canada. And 
when looked at from the perspective of graduates per per-capita GDP, a 
measure that takes national wealth into account, the U.S. fares poorly 
against a number countries. Here is the 'educational index'(1) of 
various countries

US                7.5
Canada        11.0
Ireland        9.2
Japan            10.4
Finland         9.5
Australia     7.5
France           6.8
Italy              3.4

So it cannot be argued that the American system of offering 
post-secondary education is the most successful at serving the needs of 
its citizens. It is already the case that the United States is trailing 
those countries that it trails (not coincidentally) in PISA rankings. (2)

> Now, with all that said, I'm not saying that all education *has* to be
> about the profit motive.
And let me be very clear in saying that education should not be subject 
to the profit motive, that even in cases where private suppliers are 
involved, these suppliers should be subject to a set of constraints 
determined by a wider range of decision-making, and more purely market 
factors.
> There's obviously a role for non-profit action
> in a marketplace.
I do not deny this. I expect commercial companies to continue to 
manufacture chalk brushes, computers, bricks and windows, and a wide 
variety of other materials purchased and used by the educational system.
> In particular, I was drawn to OERs in part because of
> my dislike for commercial textbook and journal publishers.  In an era
> when online collaboration is readily accessible, I see them as an
> unnecessary middleman that offers little.
In this we agree.

But we need to be clear. There are different models of supporting OERs 
in education. For example:

a. the private sector creates OERs, which are purchased by public 
institutions and distributed for free to students (this is in fact how 
library books and primary school textbooks are sources in Canada today)
b. the private sector creates OERs, which are purchased by charities and 
distributed for free to students (this is the philanthropic model; 
notice how the 'puchase' decision-making has shifted from public to 
private institutions)
c. the public sector (ie., governments, colleges and universities) 
produces OERs directly, and distributes them for free to students (this 
is the non-commercial institutional model of OER production in the 
favour of many today)
d. the public sector (ie., governments, colleges and universities) 
produces OERs directly, and they are distributed to both commercial and 
non-commercial education providers (this is the model that requires 
CC-By licensing, specifically to allow commerical companies to resell 
OERs at a profit)

The model I advocate is none of these. The model I advocate is:

e. (i) the production of OERs is crowd-sourced; public institutions 
provide policies, (iI) resources and tools to support this production; 
resources are vetted and selected through a society-wide network-filter 
process (which is the natural point at which qualified and expert review 
takes place) and (iii) distributed through the educational process itself.

> We don't agree that open educational resources should be the property of
> those who learn from them, since I don't accept that ideas should be
> property at all.
Probably more accurately, you support a licensing scheme consistent with 
model (c), above. But note that in option (e) resources may remain the 
property of those who produced them, and may be distributed through a 
variety of licenses, including CC-NC. Because there is no need for 
commercial providers to be implicated in the production and distribution 
of educational resources at all, there is no need for licensing that 
supports commercial distribution.

>   But I do appreciate your vision of this movement being
> geared toward creating a collaborative culture in which all can
> participate rather than just a top down curriculum delivery system.  It
> almost sounds like a free market. :-)

It is exactly a free market, but with the following vital caveats:

1. It is composed not simply of economic decision-making, but of social, 
cultural and political decision-making. That is the point of the 
society-wide vetting process (stage (ii) in my model). Decisions about 
the selection of learning resources are not made on the basis of 
economic considerations, or even partisan political considerations, but 
as the result of the wider variety of factors deemed important by 
society as a whole.

2. The network structure itself is tended and maintained. Free market 
capitalism may form a network-like decision-making process, but as 
suggested above, the network is distorted and ultimately damaged by 
participants with excess wealth, and therefore, excess control. Just as 
excesses in capital markets ought to be managed through taxation and 
regulation, so also constraints ought to be placed into educational 
content networks, precisely in order to ensure that the networks are 
stable, and promote the maximum participation from all sectors of society.

-- Stephen




(1) Educational index = GDP per capita divided by percent of population 
with PSE, x 10,000
US   GDPpC: 49K    %Edu: 37    %Edu/GDPpC: 7.5 e-4    (ie., 0.0007)
Canada   38K  42  11 e-4    (ie., 0.0011)
Figures from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita
and 
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_att_ter-education-educational-attainment-tertiary

(2) PISA rankings 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment

-- 
Signature 	Stephen Downes
Research Officer, National Research Council Canada
100 rue des Aboiteaux, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada E1A 7R1
Website: http://www.downes.ca ~ Email: stephen at downes.ca 
<mailto:stephen at downes.ca>

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