The New York Times March 19, 2012 Open Resources: Transforming the Way Knowledge Is Spread By D. D. GUTTENPLAN
DELFT, THE NETHERLANDS — “Do you still remember Tipp-Ex?” For Anka Mulder, secretary general of the Technical University of Delft, the bottle of white typewriter correction fluid (the U.S. brands are Wite-Out and Liquid Paper) once found on the desk of every graduate student was as evocative of the past as the taste of a madeleine was for Marcel Proust. She interrupted her remarks, considered the average age of her audience, many of whom were tweeting her comments, and asked “How many of you remember typewriters?” About half the audience held up their hands. Ms. Mulder was speaking here at Open Education Week, an event held this month on campuses from the University of California, Irvine, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Cape Town, Leeds Metropolitan University, in England, and the National Science Library, in Beijing. At 47, Ms. Mulder can remember the days of typewriters and hardback textbooks. Yet as president of the Open Course Ware Consortium, a global group of universities devoted to expanding the amount of free, openly licensed educational material on the Internet, she is focused on the future. For thousands of years, she said, anyone who wanted access to knowledge had to first find a teacher or an expert. After the printing press was invented, libraries and universities became repositories of knowledge. But now with the Internet, “universities do not hold the monopoly on information anymore,” Ms. Mulder said. As a result, she said, the five functions now performed by universities — teaching; providing a space for social interaction; testing students’ knowledge and offering feedback in the form of grades; cultivating a reputation as a good place to learn; and certifying what graduates know through accreditation — will inevitably change. The goal of Open Education Week was “to make the process seem less scary, she said, adding, “We want to show how you as a student or an institution or a government can benefit from these changes.” That is also the goal of Whyopenedmatters.org, a competition begun this month by the U.S. Department of Education, Creative Commons and the Open Society Institute, which will award a prize of $25,000 for the best short video explaining the benefits of free, high-quality Open Educational Resources, or O.E.R., for students, teachers and schools. Entries will be judged by a panel that includes the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, the animator Nina Paley and the actor James Franco. In a speech announcing the competition, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said O.E.R. “can not only accelerate and enrich learning — they can also substantially reduce costs for schools, families and students.” Beginning in 2001, when M.I.T. announced that it was going to make some of its courses available online, the movement for O.E.R. has continued to grow. In October 2003, there were 511 courses available, all from M.I.T. According to Ms. Mulder, the current total is over 21,000 — with 9,903 in languages other than English, including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, Korean and Japanese. As the movement has gathered adherents, the material available has also changed. There are still thousands of courses on the Internet that amount to little more than a camera focused on a lecturer, or even just an archive of lecture notes. But as Ms. Mulder finished her remarks here, staff members from the University of Nottingham, in England, were presenting a Web seminar on how professors could use O.E.R. to produce custom-designed textbooks. The IE University, in Madrid, employs 14 people who work full time on producing O.E.R. “We have programmers, designers and writers working with our professors,” said Martín Rodríguez, director of multimedia content development. “If a professor comes to us with a specific need — for example on how to calculate the cost of capital — then we go to work.” Some of what they produce can be relatively basic — a tutorial on “positioning” for a marketing course, for example. But IE’s multimedia case study of the drug company Novartis, which includes videos, simulations, interactive graphs and survey data, puts students in charge of developing a commercial strategy for the company. The school’s Masters Series Madrid is a game — with soundtrack, 3-D graphics and interviews with executives — that allows students to manage an international tennis tournament. “It’s a great way for people to see our school,” said Matthew Constantine, a member of the IE staff. Although all of the material on IE’s Web site is free for individual use, he said, the school “avoided developing material for self-learning” because “we think class discussion is essential.” Mr. Rodríguez said IE also hoped to recover some of the cost of producing material by licensing it to other universities. Economics are one barrier to the growth of open resources. “Our business model is floppy,” said Fred Mulder, a professor of O.E.R. at the Open University of the Netherlands, pointing out that as more material becomes available free, universities will need to find alternative sources of revenue. “If you don’t ‘close’ education in certain ways then you are out of business.” Perhaps surprisingly, given his background as a former rector of the Dutch Open University, which like its British counterpart was a pioneer in distance learning, Mr. Mulder also emerged as something of a skeptic about the trend toward moving content online. “The completion rates for students in purely online programs are very low,” he said. “If a program is too open, too flexible, too ‘on demand,’ students won’t ever finish.” Mr. Mulder also warned against viewing O.E.R. as a panacea. “O.E.R. is” not education,” he said. “It’s only content. It becomes learning when you have good teaching. Yet all the speakers at the Delft conference agreed that by removing barriers to access, O.E.R. is already transforming the way knowledge is spread. “O.E.R. is important for rich countries,” said Greetje van den Bergh, chair of the Dutch National Commission for Unesco. “But it is even more important for the rest of the world.” In an interview after her speech Anka Mulder acknowledged that the trend to open resources “could be a threat to lower-quality universities.” “If you charge a lot of money, and you don’t deliver a good education,” she said, “students are going to go online and find somewhere cheaper and better.” “Universities haven’t figured out yet how to get people to pay you for what you do” if they are not enrolled as students, she added, but “I’m not particularly fearful.” Unlike M.I.T., Delft does not have the money to put more than a small fraction of its catalog online. “Instead,” Ms. Mulder said, “we focused on some master’s programs.” One of them, in water management — a historical strength in a country where 21 percent of the population live below sea level — has already been adapted by the University of Bandung, in Malaysia. And while that program was financed by a grant from the Dutch government, Ms. Mulder does not see the traffic as all one way. “Why shouldn’t we use good courses from somewhere else?” she asks. “We are a brick and mortar university,” she said, so there will always be a temptation to stick with traditional teaching methods. But global competition provides its own set of pressures and rewards for innovation. “A third of our M.A. students and 60 percent of our Ph.D. students come from abroad,” Ms. Mulder said, “so we want to be up there with the other pioneers.” FONTE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/world/europe/19iht-educlede19.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y _______________________________________________ Arquivos da Bib_virtual: http://listas.ibict.br/pipermail/bib_virtual/ Instruções para desiscrever-se por conta própria: http://listas.ibict.br/cgi-bin/mailman/options/bib_virtual Bib_virtual mailing list [email protected] http://listas.ibict.br/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bib_virtual
