Chancengleichheit

4. March 202228. November 2023

Financing models for open textbooks

In 2017, Maximilian Heimstädt and Leonhard Dobusch presented their study “Perspectives of Open Educational Resources (OER) for (socio-) economic education at schools in NRW and in Germany“, formulating various models for funding OER textbooks. The study, which addresses educational policy in North Rhine-Westphalia, presents the current state of school education in NRW in 2017 as well as the challenges of digitization processes and develops solution proposals from the perspective of Open Educational Resources (OER). The central proposal of the study, in order to avoid untested, tendentious online materials in teaching, is the systematic promotion of the creation of official OER textbooks, which can be distributed, modified and recombined in a legally secure manner and have passed the quality test of the state of NRW. For this purpose, the authors design different scenarios for the (financial) promotion of textbooks under free license:

Call for proposals for pilot textbooks

Significantly more OER textbooks are pre-funded through public calls for tender. The concept has low implementation hurdles and ties in directly with successful OER projects. In Norway, for example, approximately 20 percent of the textbook budget – or 8.2 million Euros – has been invested in the development of OER materials since 2006. Following this example, the OER stock and corresponding competencies at publishing houses could be successively increased.

Usage-based refinancing of OER textbooks.

In this scenario, the public funding of OER textbooks is usage-based through the remuneration of OER textbooks that have successfully passed textbook approval and are actually used in school settings. The amount of compensation is determined on the basis of surveys and sample surveys of OER textbooks in the classroom.

Development of OER textbook ‘blanks’.

Instead of investing in ready-made OER textbooks, funding could also be provided for the creation of ‘blanks’ that can easily be adapted to the requirements in different federal states. What the blanks have in common are only minimum content requirements from the Ministry of Education, which are controlled for quality assurance. From then on, they can be individually supplemented by educational media providers with additional multimedia offerings, without them having to worry about open licensing of the basic content.

Introduction of an OER clause in the approval process.

In this scenario, providers would have to contractually commit through an OER clause in the textbook approval process by the state of NRW to make the textbooks available as OER after a defined phase of commercial distribution. The phase could be defined either temporally (e.g., after five years) or factually (e.g., when a certain number have been sold). Thus, after a short period of time, there could be OER textbooks for a wide variety of subjects in NRW.

The various financing models can be read in more detail here with recommendations from the authors.

What has happened since then and what’s next?

In 2020, the Ministry of Culture and Science, together with the Digital University NRW (DH.NRW), funded 18 concepts for digital teaching and learning formats with a total of 10.5 million euros in the “OERContent.nrw” (Open Education Resources) funding line as a result of the Corona pandemic, in order to expand the e-learning offerings of universities. The teaching and learning content was posted on the new online state portal ORCA.nrw (Open Resources Campus NRW) and is available to all students and teachers in NRW.

OERContent.nrw is the largest nationwide funding line for open educational resources. The funding line is intended to make the benefits of freely accessible teaching and learning offerings recognizable and tangible for teachers and students. But more offerings and funding initiatives are needed. The task of education policy is to adapt existing funding models to enable the professional creation of OER textbooks and learning materials.

Quellen:

http://www.fgw-nrw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/NOED-Studie-06-Dobusch-A1-komplett-Web.pdf

https://www.dh.nrw/kooperationen/OER-Content.nrw-42

28. January 202228. November 2023

From Open Access to Open Source: definitions of openness in diverse fields

Openness is a movement and a guiding principle that originated in the software field and has since found its way into a variety of other topics and fields of activity. In this article we present selected topics and the significance of openness in them.

Open Source

Open source is a movement, a way of thinking, and a way of working. Beginning in open source software (OSS), it now goes far beyond this frame of reference to find new ways to solve problems in communities and industries. Open source is also often used synonymously with open source software and open source hardware.

Open Source Software

The term open source originally goes back to open source software (OSS). OSS describes code that is accessible to the public and can be modified and shared, i.e. the software is published under an open license so that the source code can be displayed to all users or modified by them. Such software relies on transparency, collaborative development and peer review. Advantages of open, decentralized and collaboratively developed software are the often significantly lower costs as well as its flexibility and longevity. The freely accessible source code is constantly checked and improved through peer review processes. All changes are transparent and can be reviewed and tracked. By continuously updating the code through the community, bugs can be found and fixed quickly. The community makes its resources, help and perspectives available to everyone. Open source projects are often hosted on GitHub. Other well-known open source projects include Linux, Ansible and Kubernetes.

Emergence: peer-review and open feedback processes

In Internet forums, programmers were able for the first time to enter into a joint exchange worldwide and share their source codes with each other and develop them further. They took advantage of the open and collaborative environment, which favored open feedback processes, and created new standards for open communication and collaboration in the exchange.

Initially, OSS was referred to as free software – based on the freedom to use the software as you wish. But this caused some confusion in the meaning of “free” and “open”, so that it came to the final separation of the terms at the end of the 1990s. Today, however, free software does not mean the same as open source, because with free software only the owners are allowed to access its otherwise closed source code. This is not released for the community for changes. Open source, on the other hand, dispenses with such provider ties and does not primarily stand for the debates about user freedom, but mainly for methodological, production and business aspects of free software.

Open Source Hardware

Open Source Hardware (OSH) also follows the principle and values of Open Source Software. OSH is hardware that is constructed according to open or free blueprints, i.e. the blueprints are made available to the public so that they can not only be viewed, but also shared, further processed and adapted for various new purposes. In the case of modifications, preference is also given here to components that are openly licensed.

Open Government und Open Data

The two terms Open Government and Open Data, which are often used synonymously, originate from the field of politics and administration and stand for a movement to make government data available for the use of the democratic public.

Open Government

Open Government is a democratic approach to participation-oriented opportunities for civil society in the field of politics and administration. It means opening up government and administration – or, more precisely, disclosing their data – to the citizens of the state. In addition to participation, this opening is also intended to create transparency and new forms of cooperation between the state, politics, administration and civil society, to intensify the newly forged bonds and thus also to strengthen common interests and concerns as well as more legitimate political decisions. These goals are also reflected in the four substantive pillars that support the open government movement: citizen participation, transparency, anti-corruption and accountability. To achieve this, however, it is not only data that must be disclosed. The condition for this strategic project, which is intended not only to strengthen democracy but also to increase efficiency in administration, is collaborative cooperation with the population, based on transparency in all decisions and actions. In short, the aim is to use Web 2.0 technologies and an open way of thinking and acting to make administration and government more open and thus more transparent, participatory and cooperative.

Open Data

The Open Government movement is based on the concept of Open Data. Open Data is data of general public interest that is made freely accessible and may be freely redistributed and processed. The focus is primarily on official data, such as statistics, maps, laws, court rulings and other documents and information carriers (open government data). Personal information or other information subject to data protection is excluded. However, the approach is not limited to public administration, but also includes data from universities, non-profit institutions and private-sector companies. Overall, Open Data describes all data. In practice, the data is to be made accessible in as simple and structured a manner as possible, without legal restrictions, in a machine-readable form with the help of Web 2.0 applications. Here, too, the goal is to increase administrative transparency and the social control function.

Open Access

The Open Data ambition to be able to freely share and use data and findings led to the emergence of the Open Access movement, which aims to make public research freely available to the general public. Open Access (OA) means free and open access to scientific publications, such as literature, peer-reviewed research results or other materials for all interested parties worldwide. OA files are always online publications, as research results can be used more flexibly and freely on the Internet. The OA movement emerged in the 1990s on the premise that previous publication structures had led to a privatization of knowledge financed by the general public. In addition to financial aspects, rapid relevance checks, enabling and accelerating scientific collaboration, and better findability of OA publications also speak for the concept of sharing and advancing knowledge.

Publishing and licensing

If a scientific paper is published under OA conditions, anyone with Internet access is given the opportunity and permission to use it free of charge, i.e. to read it, save it, download it, link to it, etc. Further rights of free use, reproduction, distribution or modification of the publication are regulated by free licenses. In principle, this is done under Creative Commons licenses (CC licenses). The most free form of CC licenses, which corresponds solely to the OA claim, is the so-called CC-BY license, which ensures that the authors are legally protected and always named as authors of the work.
There are two primary ways of OA publishing: the gold way (Gold OA) and the green way (Green OA).

Gold OA

With golden OA, the final version of the publication appears directly in an OA medium, such as books or OA journals that use peer-review processes. In this case, publication fees are often charged to the author. If these are paid by publishers, we speak of Diamond Open Access – the simplest and most fairly perceived form of OA. On the golden way, authors also have the option of hybrid OA, in which they can “buy” their works from publishers. In this case, publishers earn twice.

Green OA

In green open access, the final version of a publication is not made freely available. Instead, parallel publications, secondary publications, or self-archiving on private or institutional websites of the authors occur in addition to the publisher’s version. This means that the authors do not incur any costs when they make their work available free of charge. Such green-published documents are mostly pre- or postprints that have been submitted to the publishers as copies.

Open Science und Open Education

Finally, let us turn to the field of education. Open Science is often used synonymously with Open Access and refers to a collaborative knowledge and science practice in which research data, lab reports, and other research processes are freely accessible. Data, documents, and other material are published for reuse, redistribution, and copying to advance and advance knowledge and research and its underlying data, methods, and concepts. The situation is similar in the field of Open Education, which aims to make education freely available. However, in terms of free access to education, open education is not limited to Internet-based knowledge transfer with the help of free teaching materials (OER) – and is therefore not to be equated with e-learning processes – but is also to be understood as a movement or concept for the development of models that enable all people to participate in education.

We have compiled further, detailed information on openness in education in the following articles:

Sources:

16. April 202028. November 2023

Why do we need open education?

“Open education can be defined as the [educational policy] effort to enable all people to participate in good education. In the Enlightenment tradition, ‘good education’ is defined as maturity: every person should be able to participate in society with his or her own mind and in an active way” [1] . So how must educational processes be designed in order to achieve this goal?

Vocational school teacher Astrid Wittenberg begins her input with this question. As an experienced expert in open education, she is an enrichment for the round of the weekly input lunch in April 2020, especially because of the current challenges posed by Corona. She points out the need for a change in teaching and learning based on digital development: Knowledge and ideas always exist, but the ways to disseminate, implement, and develop them are changing. The Internet makes it possible to exchange information worldwide and simultaneously. This also changes the nature and understanding of education away from a society that learns by heart from books to a digital transfer of knowledge. This also requires new competencies; in this context, Wittenberg introduces the 4Cs [2]: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity and Critical Thinking. On this basis, a discussion ensues about how these competencies can be learned and what opportunities and difficulties they entail. The participants in the discussion agree that the restrictions, not only, but especially, in state institutions such as schools and universities are often a hindrance. Certain guidelines on which programs to use, time and money as limited resources, and the lack of motivation to explore meaningful alternatives inhibit the move towards more open education. The conclusion of the discussion: much is still (or already) open. This is in part tedious, but for the most part gratifying, because there is much to be shaped. Therefore, it is important for the future to promote an awareness of open education and to conduct corresponding research.

The presentation on the input can be found here. We thank Astrid Wittenberg for her inspiring input.