Séminaire e-learning, contenus ouverts et droit d'auteur organisé par l'ADIJ
Sommaire |
Programme
Speakers:
- Hal Abelson, Chair of MIT's Council on Educational Technology, MIT OpenCourseWare initiator
- Paula Le Dieu, Creative Commons International Executive Director
- Danièle Bourcier, Creative Commons France Scientific advisor
MIT OpenCourseWare case study, by Hal Abelson
History
MIT OpenCourseWare was initiated in April 2001. Initially, the plan was to open an MIT e-learning service. After a consultant-driven market study, it was found that such a project would cost 2 million $ and that the dead point would not be reached within the first five years. A single course should be followed by 25000 students to be economically viable.
The project was not considered to have a sufficient return on investment rate. This is why MIT began to think about releasing their content for free: if it wasn't going to be lucrative, why not use e-learning as a political statement?
The underlying political statement
In the US, some consider academic "contents" as great products that should be valued in the information economy. Some universities (USC) stated that their primary role was to create intellectual property, confusing a university with a publishing company.
According to Hal Abelson, when MIT decided to give its contents for free, it was not out of altruism, but in order to make sure that the academic tradition and values would survive in the information economy. It made the statement that "contents" are not the real value that universities produce: what makes their quality is the educational relationship with students and the values allowing research and innovation to develop freely. MIT was mainly protecting itself by deciding to perpetuate the academic tradition of knowledge sharing in the Internet era.
MIT OpenCourseWare's approach
At the beginning, nobody knew if it would work, if professors would participate. It was decided to start slowly and to make it open to voluntary contributions of professors. Another focus for the project was to make it fast and easy to publish contents: contributors only have to review the content they transmitted, so most of them spend less than 8 hours a year to participate.
MIT is a leader university asking for competition: a full guide to help other universities to undertake an opencourseware initiative was made available on the web. It also holds a record of other initiatives around the world, which are developing quickly, especially in China. Around 36 OpenCourseWare or similar projects are now running.
MIT OpenCourseWare's contributors
Around 70% of professors are now contributing.
Students are not involved in contribution.
MIT OpenCourseWare's public
500 000 visitors/month, among which:
- 52% are self-learners (82% of them using it for their personal culture and knowledge)
- 31% are students from other universities
- 13% are educators
MIT encourages other universities to reuse its contents or to translate it. See Universia (in Spanish and Portuguese) and Core.org (in simplified Chinese) for examples.
Relation with MIT Press
There was no conflict with the MIT Press activities, for two main reasons:
- MIT Press is a company among others for professors who want to publish their work, it has no priority in publishing MIT works.
- It is often not lucrative to publish text-books, so the Press and the OpenCourseWare do not have the same role and the same type of contents to offer.
On the other hand, there is no real synergy between paper and web publications.
MIT OpenCourseWare's budget
Annual budget is around 4 million $.
Hal Abelson's recommendations for success
- Success depends primarily on the image that the university staff has of the university: is it a resource for the world or an institution delivering contents to its students?
- Use an opt-in, voluntary participation system and let the social pressure for professors to participate grow.
- Keep the participation cost in time as low as possible.
- Go for it! ;-)
MIT Dspace
Dspace is a digital repository system that "captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material", based on a free software developed by MIT and HP.
It is another project in the field of knowledge sharing, particularly adapted to the publication of data in non-web formats such as pdf...
It allows universities and other institutions around the world to organise their documents and to make them available to the public, thanks to the search engine and metadata. See MIT's Dspace for an example and this workbook for an explanation on how to set up an institutional repository .
Creative Commons and iCommons : what can Creative Commons do for educational resources?
Educational resources need to be used and reused by people, therefore a Creative Commons license is perfectly adapted to its diffusion.
This is why Creative Commons licenses are used by the two leading universities in the field of knowledge sharing: the MIT and University of Rice.
Using a Creative Commons license has the following advantages:
- Creative Commons licenses already exist and are juridically robust, so that you can focus on your project and not on spending time with your lawyers.
- Creative Commons licenses allow the modulation of the rights you grant: you can adapt it to your needs.
- Creative Commons licenses are designed to be human-readable (with an easy to understand summary of what you can do), lawyer-readable (with a full contract attached) and machine-readable (with rdf tags that identify the license of a content for search engines to find a content that you can use and reuse).
- Creative Commons licenses are well-known and popular, which is essential for interoperability: it will be easy for others to reuse and publish derivative works based on your content.
