Background

This document was originally created at Open Education 2017 in Anaheim, California as part of a conversation on ethics and the direction of the open education movement. More about the session can be found here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/openeducationethics/

The below responses are raw data gathered from (1) all groups taking notes on a collective document and (2) facilitators taking notes during groups’ reporting back on their discussions. The three questions that frame the data were derived from liberating structures “TRIZ” to frame this collective process.

We invite you to participate in this ongoing conversation by commenting on this document, using the below data to inform future open education projects, or continuing the conversation in future conferences and venues.

All Group Notes

How do we ensure that Open Ed is not open?

Stop doing the work
Siloing of Open communities (OA, Open Source, OER, etc.)
Making OER not editable
Build walled gardens
Eliminate new entrants/diverse voices
Force control
Stop sharing / stop talking with each other/be competitive with each other
Raise barriers (or any kind)
Commercialize it
Dilute/confuse/limit definitions
Be acquired by Elsevier
Create open content and not share it in ways that people can find it
Narrow the definition of open
Not support lawsuits against Creative Commons
Expand commercialization
Forget that education needs to come from communities and not corporations
Ignore the software homework software movement
Have commercial publishers who already create open educational resource additives (that have a cost) take over the creation and sale of OER altogether.
Not empower teachers/teaching & learning
Engage in double-speak where my work is “not really open” because it is not available for a corporation to sell (CC-by-nc)
Completely defund SPARC, Hewlett Foundation, other funders
Narrow the definition of open
Put “article processing fees” (APC) (equivalent of in Open Access) on being able to share or access materials in the open)
Be overly reliant on commercial search engines
Don’t train students on Wikipedia
Incessantly fight among ourselves
By creating policies around open as it applies to faculty and students before understanding of ethos of open
Pick small fights with our allies rather than big fights engaging the issues (thanks keynote speaker)
Who gets to define when a fight is small?
A great question; perhaps best as self-reflection
End Net Neutrality
Intellectual property ownership
Patents
Get rid of fair use
Sabotage of OER.
Make participation entirely or partially fee-based /or/ make paying participation more valuable
Let PR and comms people control who is allowed to do it - controlling the “brand”
Conduct activities entirely in English
Continue to reinforce the wrong priorities among faculty (often teaching practice comes last
Become polarised with corporates providing low-cost content and equating open just with one form.
Ignore issues of data collection, ownership, and processing
Stop coming together with each other in conferences and meetings
Believe that “low cost” is the same as open.
Be complicit that venture philanthropies have underwrote so much of this movement
Being too restrictive in the definition of openness in order to limit involvement and appeal
Privatize education
Appropriate the language of “open” to be used by commercial interests to create confusion
Keep relying on a very few funding sources for all OE activities
Keep taking from the Commons, and stop contributing to it.
Government mandate of particular materials to be used in ed
Break Creative Commons licensing system through legal action/legislation
Characterize Open Ed as a threat to the traditional mainstream higher ed system; turn open movement into the “terrorists” of education in public opinion
Vilify open movement leaders
Sell shares in David Wiley to venture capital
Outsource to vendors and hinder professional development .
By embracing the oligarchic publishers and tech companies. Ignore capitalism.
By not directly confronting the power relationships that exist at the macro/personal level in this space.
De-validate OER, find studies that highlight flaws
Ending Foundational Funding
Allowing ourselves to be bought
Don’t pay it backward (help new folks like you were helped when you were new)
Defining open too narrowly/too broadly
Not considering people for whom traditional materials are inadequate
Staying within our community
Not asking critical questions of those who share our values who are entering our space
Politicizing the work, ramping up lobby efforts beyond publishers (finding a coalition of people who would benefit from the demise of open)
Difficult for big publishers to innovate, but new business models are closing the gap (automatic purchasing/inclusive access models)
Generating content without being mindful of community
Shutdown Creative Commons / devalidate the licenses
Encourage everyone to create their own open licenses
Remove faculty academic freedom by mandating OER
Infighting amongst open education community which leads to a complete rift
Failing to sustainably plan moving forward
Center Open discourses in elite academic spaces
Territorializing the expertise and practices; limit the growth to a few
Have a missionary zeal, missionary approach (with all implications of colonialism)
Make a lot of rules
Ignore alternative voices
Practice non-transparent leadership
Only listen to people you can use
Monetize the heck out of things
Use proprietary platforms
Focus too much on content
Focus on students already with access to universities on campus
Polarisation of voices - open falling into the hands of a few voices (US, white, Male)
Exclude students from the conversation
Destroy creative commons licenses
Not actively make people able to contribute to the open movement, keeping in mind their resources.
Not make it sustainable
Talk about diversity, but don’t include underrepresented voices in those discussions or plans
Excluding stakeholders: students, staff, faculty, admin
Propaganda to make people think that the quality is poor.
Arbitrary standards which exclude certain points of view.
Start charging for it.
Keep preaching to the open choir.
Increased institutional barriers.
Assume folks have access to technology
Lose the internet
Hand over leadership of OpenEd to R1s
Withhold our knowledge contributions
Centralize and standardize all OpenEd conference planning
Set arbitrary limits
Encourage a narrow definition of Quality
Sow skepticism, individualism, and ownership
Try to mimic commercial publishers
Have a slavish devotion to only one type of Open license (like what happened to BSD software licenses)
Act without having difficult conversations about values
Mandate file formats
Focus heavily on assessment and Big Data (tm)
Standardize all open infrastructure
Restrict all creation to THE EXPERTS.
Put all the labor burden on junior faculty.
Bar students from creating OER.
All open works are works for hire by the college.
Not link it to teaching and learning.
Look to publishers and traditional media
Look to thought leaders
Mining data
Create like a platform and take all the data to advertisers and then when I got tired of it sell it to Elsevier
Not allowing derivatives.
Create open content in a bad format
Password protected CC Licenses
Multiple confusing CC licenses
Software that changes -
Make open practice compulsory
Stop talking to my colleagues and stakeholders on campus about being open
Quit my job and get a job working for a commercial publisher
Contact the government and tell them to vote against open initiatives because they are destroying the economy
Stop advocating for open licensing
Stop having conferences like this, and professional education, make all conferences regional and factionalized
Defund K-12 education
Put OER behind paywalls and don’t allow platforms to talk to each other
Get rid of academic freedom for selecting course materials
Don’t translate resources into other languages
Adopt a strict and narrow definition - setting the bar too high for definitions and adoptions; not setting reasonable goals and make words not mean anything
Take away all grant, incentives, resources
Don’t talk to or involve students
Just kill higher ed and/or expand adjunctification
Question all science/facts
Expect rapid success & declare failure if progress is slow or messy
Never fund people to specialize in
Get rid of CC
No more funding from gov or foundation
Put a paywall up in front of our resources
Charge for OS software
Give it all to publishers
Use proprietary formats
Start fear mongering
Change copyright law
Have competition as a value
Promote discussion in only the “leaders” doing sexy stuff
Ignore critical convos about capitalism and higher education
Tie knowledge to commodity
Operate in closed spaces
Don’t share
Don’t think of ourselves as a collective
Deride the quality of oer
Disempower academic community

What things are we doing that resemble, in any way, the list we just created?

Being too busy with other thing; cluttering our priorities
Not making content accessible
Not making the effort to curate openly licensed ancillaries/test banks/etc.
Creating things not designed for reuse (e.g. pedagogical and technical openness)
Not making content available.
Not think about how easily things can be co-opted
Focusing more on massive
Only listening to people who share the same ideas
Not converting commercial publishers :)
Not training students on Wikipedia
Creating content in proprietary systems and those that require high skills to use
Not being aware of our caring about “open washing”
Not taking the time to talk with current commercial textbook authors
Not taking time to listen to people who don’t seem interested
Not valuing faculty work by forcing them to license with CC BY
Infighting within the community
Trying to make a name for myself
Creating a “caste” system (of licenses or people who adhere to them)
Being competitive with others instead of sharing
Not welcoming people for whom it is “day 1” of open (e.g. ignoring people who are just starting out) / lack of hospitality
Infighting / being publicly critical to others in a way that is disrespectful to others
Creating a cult of personality (without archiving or replicating your work)
Confusing information about copyright/ Creative Commons
Not contributing to others as a mentor
Not sharing the knowledge I have with others
Not writing about issues pertaining to commercial vendors
Being insecure about my contributions and not sharing
Make it obscure
Not seek out other people’s input and voices, but rather focus on working with people to get things done.
Too lazy to figure out where to share out and make findable the open content that I create.
Not make our content relatable to students so that they feel that they belong, fit in, and can do it.
Taking a black and white approach to commercialization
Not finding a balance between context-specific understandings and broadening the movement to cross borders
Duplicating efforts
Not allowing enough time to think critically and decompress ideas
Tyranny of the majority
Mocking mistakes (examples formatting that many newbies make)
Funders facilitating the silos (those within and between OER)
Infighting
Open is made too complex to be approachable
OA/OER/FOSS are siloed, we need to have open analytics supporting our efforts
Too much emphasis on business models, public finance drives this sector for both proprietary and open materials.
Stewards of public funding are not requiring open
Over-reliance on CC
Too much one-time grant funding
Lack of attention to metadata and frameworks
Open working often occurs outside of roles / institutions (well, it does for me in the UK) - not sustainable
We do not build ladders of participation
Customizing for you, academic freedom, too much of a clash between individualism and collectivism
Many of the thought leaders are men, champions on the ground tended to be women
Not enough K12 presence and voices
The Othering of entire positions, like policymakers and administration
Hardly any adjunct faculty. No students beyond the invited panel.
Funding limits from colleges restrict adjuncts from participating
Institutions are copyrighting entire shared works and not giving permissions
Not making enough incentives for authors
Placing to many expectations on our own faculty or on new instructors/adjuncts
Not making things editable or accessible
Remaining bound by big subscriptions and for-profit companies/ relying on commercial solutions
While tension can move things forward, it can also exclude people
Not thinking enough about sustainability
Make sure all keynotes continue to be white
Continuing to see instructional materials as limited to a textbook
Continuing to have expensive and difficult to attend conferences
Not taking education research into account enough when discussing OER impacts in education-- presentations talk about the educational without without locating in educational research
Don’t have policies around creative commons licensed in our university library
Staying in a filter bubble, an echo chamber
Sluggish contributions to the open movement more generally
Only talking to other people already in the open ed movement about open ed
Not taking full advantage of what can be done in the open ed space: e.g., doing a fair bit with OER but not so much with Open Educational Practices
Designing OER for people like me because I create them for my courses; not really that relevant for people who aren’t like me, in my particular context; how to make them more reusable? ARchitecture concept: design for reuse.
Assumptions that different cultures will have same understanding of value of sharing/protecting IP
Not integrating accessibility and UDL into the process
Junior faculty do most of the OER work
Create content in proprietary systems and those that require high skills
Not sharing as much as we could - process and product
We have only just started talking about inclusiveness

How are you going to stop doing these things? What are the first steps?

Nothing about us without us - global south - seeing ourselves as saviours instead of partners or supporters
Try to learn more software tools
Consider the role of researcher - who can be one - try to change that paradigm away from the western approach
Be intentional - institutional policy - build it into the mandate of the institution, dept budgets fund it
We need to begin building ladders for participation for different groups while also not siloing them
Resist all-or-nothing thinking; acknowledge that OER and open practices can always be more open, more inclusive, more accessible, etc. Ethical stance is important
Being aware of what the problems are is a good first step
Listen to (and try to understand) faculty who are non-adopters/non-OER authors (learn)
Passing the information forward / mentoring
Allowing newcomers to express their opinions (trying to understand where they are coming from)
Build new frameworks for presenting OER online (Better technological backends that result in better looking products)
Curation of resources, peer review of resources, metadata
Reach out to grad students
Run a wikipedia editathon
Mentor others
Support sending people from underserved populations to OpenEd
Not insist that your viewpoint is the only one that matters
Say something when someone says something hurtful/disrespectful (instead of retreating into my shell)
Talk with commercial publishers about what we value and why
Take baby steps and don’t get overwhelmed, keep going a little bit at a time.
Continuously monitor what is getting better and what is getting worse in open education (OE radar screen/weather map)
Assume good faith when you have disagree with other participants’ decisions or approaches - engage in debate, but not you’re with me or against me.
Recenter on culture of professionalism - its not a “family reunion”
Build accessibility into the OER creation/production cycle
Being more conscious about time management and carving out time to work on these larger issues and backlogs.
Invite criticism of our work as a way of getting feedback
Volunteer to create intro track about OER for newbies during Open Ed (make sure it is during actual conference, not a pre-conference)
Develop other leaders around you.
Be inclusive and structure conversations/efforts/teaching as a learning community
Actively create opportunities for those new to OER, those who are experienced, ft, pt, junior, senior faculty
Put cultural diversity and relevance in the foreground
Talk to as many discrete groups w/in your institution as possible
Make better use of resources that we already have (e.g., repositories), don’t reinvent the wheel. Make it more accessible to people.
Mentorship opportunities
Concrete next steps following this conversation. Who will be leading the next charge in guiding this process
Find opportunities to have these conversations at conferences related to open as well as those that are not; give practitioners a place to reflect
Allowing time for critical thought and reflection
Look back and look forward in every conversation/track/presentation for those who are new and veterans
Find ways for people to voice new ideas without being concerned that they were tried before
Cost and benefit analysis - we can’t do all oier in all ways at all times
Shift the incentives and costs of textbooks to the groups/people deciding what content to use
Move away from conflating OER and “free” - recognize that there is a cost - frame as “wise use of taxpayer $” instead of none
Build new leadership consistently and regularly
Find opportunities to talk through these issues
Modulate distraction of marketing/PR side of things
ReR
Listen more — a lot of talking in OER
Be sure to value outsider “fresh eyes” view, questions, challenges to how things are done
Collaborate more
Discipline frameworks, less focus on general education
More than lipservice needed for DEI
Although we may want more folk to engage, it is important that we let people start where they are
Decentralize OpenEd. Get stuff done through distributed committees.
Demand diversity at your events individually (e.g. Ryan Merkley not participating on all white male panels)
Create conference scholarships to expand conference diversity - NCOR
Even more variation in conference session formats in OpenEd18. No full days of talking heads. Don't throw an intro session outside of the official conference dates.
We need to go meta and make a set of tools for everyone to make Open easier. Similar to a Linux distro on WordPress.
But! Make this usable for all!
Work very hard to cultivate inclusion and diversity in our talks – actively seek out groups and people who are not represented.
Look at non-commercial platforms and tools
Bring OER ideas to all conferences, not just OpenEd. Find conferences where there is not yet a lot of recognition or understanding.
Explore more accessible formats
Find platforms that are interoperable or encourage ones that are not to become so
Embrace messiness
Explode the textbook
Fight for more professional development funding
Make sure we’re sharing our strategies, not just content; OER as process, not just content
Breaking down the research culture status quo reward collaboration
Going to pay much more attention to making my OER accessible and learning about Universal Design for Learning

Facilitator Notes

If we were invested in ensuring OpenEd is not open, what actions would we take?

Stagnate, like myspace
Tie knowledge to commodification
Characterize Open Ed as a threat to mainstream: make us terrorists of higher ed, vilifying OE leaders
Fund projects that are not sustainable
Attack CC licenses
Make words not mean anything
Take away all grants/incentives
Remove faculty academic freedom, mandating OER
Infighting in movement--- let it lead to a giant rift
Not maintain net neutrality
Openwashing
Defund Hewlett, Sparc and other funders
Lose access to open source infrastructure
Eliminate new entrants, diverse voices
Create open resources not linked to teaching and learning
Be Facebook (ha ha): make a beloved platform then sell it off to advertisers
Silo our related open communities
Make noneditable OER
Centralize all open ed conf planning
Narrow definition of quality
Mimic commercial publishers
Not talk about hard things
Don’t connect with broader education community

What things are we doing that resembles, in any way, the list we just created?

Copyright and cultural ideas
OER in the developing world where access to tech is not a given, and need for materials in more languages
Not taking full advantage of what we can do in open space: not as much with OEP as OER
I make stuff for my course and put it out there, but that isn’t necessarily good for reuse: how can I design for reuse?
Thought leaders are white men, champions on ground are women
Not enough k12 voices
Restrictive file formats on OER
Adjuncts not funded for conferences and grants
Not making content accessible
Not taking Ed research into account when doing research on OER
Overreliance on CC
Lack of attention to metadata and frameworks
Open is made too complex to be approachable
We silo into aspects of open (OA, OER etc)
Bound by for-profit companies
Rely on commercial solutions
Not actively seeking out other people’s voices (we are too focused on what needs to be done)
Not having the hard conversations
How to strike a balance: most items on list: purity not possible
Inclusiveness is a new conversation
Content in proprietary systems that require high tech skills
Junior colleagues doing more work
Acronyms that nobody knows what they mean, exclusivity
Professional movement: cult of personality makes things disappear when one champion leaves and moves on to another gig

How are you going to stop doing these things? What are the first steps?

Hard to know what you don’t know, didn’t see-- need new voices
Need ALL THE STUPID QUESTIONS session or confessional booth
Being intentional within institutions: build into mandates and departmental budgets, not grant funding
Global north and south issues, indigenous culture issues: seeing ourselves as partners and supporters not saviors
Assume good faith even in earnest disagreements
Practices shift, and be aware and ok with that
Choose safe spaces inside community to air grievances
Bring OER to all conferences, not just Open Ed
Embrace messiness
Reward collaboration, break down research status quo, include in tenure and promotion
Inviting people in to be leaders in the work, distribute leadership
Bring in student activists and let them direct our work: shorter term end goals will help us get stuff done now
What happens after this panel??????
More listening, less talking
Outsider and fresh eye views
Acknowledge our own shortcomings
Reach out to grad students
Build new frameworks to house OER, better tech backends, get away from 2002 aesthetics
Find ways to be authentically inclusive to all voices
Space for new participants
More conscious on time management: carve out time for larger issues and backlogs
Fund diversity at conference through scholarships
We need to go meta and make useable tools to make open easier, esp with accessibility
Step out of the shadows and be more visible when needed, possible
Distributed leadership needed for movement
Need open org, not hierarchical org that mimics orgs that close things up in the first place