Our Journey, Day 77
Day 2 of OE Global 2023
Day 2 of OE Global 2023 in Edmonton began with a performance by a faculty member at NorQuest College who is a Blackfoot flautist. She played some very nice music and talked about ceremony and relationship. At lunchtime we had a keynote talk by a hoop dancer who performed some really elaborate dances. At the end of the day there was a reception at NorQuest, which was about a 20-minute walk from the event center. That featured art by native students and a Métis fiddle player and dancer. The indigenous flavor of the entire event has been really positive. I'm enjoying it in the same way I'd be enjoying expressions of Celtic culture if the event had been held in Ireland.
The other keynote of the day was a talk by Cable Green, the Director of Open Knowledge at Creative Commons. CC is one of the sponsors of the conference, and Cable talked mostly about a new Open Access program for scientific publishing that CC is collaborating with several other international groups to create. His argument was that "publicly-funded knowledge should be open by default" and should never be extracted and commodified. CC has decided that global warming and life underwater and on land are three elements of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 13, 14, and 15) they want to focus on. The issue they're addressing is that action can't be taken on climate change if all the data is unavailable. Of the 169,000 articles published between 1980 and 2020, he said, nearly all of them were funded with public money but 53% are closed behind expensive paywalls, making the information inaccessible to people who can't afford the fees (which don't support the research but only enrich the publishers). As a result, half the world's schools can't teach anything about climate because they can't afford access to the info. Over the last couple of years, the White House has issued a memo requiring open publishing of results from publicly-funded research. The publishing industry lobbied Congress, which added a section (552) to their appropriations bill specifying that none of the money covered by that bill could be used to "implement, apply, enforce, or carry out" the order in the memo. Really!
Because they have historically been barred from participating in this academic publishing club, nations in the global south and especially Latin America have gone their own way and created open journals. By 2021, there were twenty-one thousand journals publishing openly and allowing authors to retain their copyrights. This has formed the core of a new movement, and Cable will be going to a conference in Mexico next week to continue this work. He closed with the motto, "Buy what you need, own what you buy, share what you own." Good advice.
The next session I attended was a panel about community colleges, which have their own organization called CCCOER.org. The moderator claimed that because community colleges were "designed to provide access to people who do not have a chance at the universities", this means the original intent of them was to address DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). While I agree that's the effect, I think the claim that DEI was the cause is a bit anachronistic. I actually think the cause was more about class, but we're not very good at talking about class in today's society. It's interesting to me that DEI now sort-of trumps class, which in addition to creating this revisionist history may also misrepresent some of the issues. When an educator from Arkansas mentioned that they were banned from using DEI language by state regulators, another person asked, "what about talking about socioeconomic inequality instead". The moderator pooh-poohed this approach, insisting that they should find a way to insist on using DEI terminology.
But there were some really interesting findings about open ed, along with the generous helping of wokeness. Montgomery College in Maryland, which has 43,000 students, found that student success rates were consistently higher in ZTC (zero-textbook-cost) courses than traditional. They have created faculty fellowships to promote development of open content. NorQuest College, more than half of whose 12,000 full-time students are immigrants, is mostly focused on ESL and vocational education. In their "ReImagine Higher Education 2030" plan, they have set the goal of publishing three OERs annually and reaching 80% ZTC courses in seven years. And California Community Colleges (the world's largest system with millions of students) has a Virtual Campus that focuses on OER and specifically on making ZTC courses available to students at other California institutions who can't afford the high textbook cost in an equivalent course. This is a pretty aggressive way of disrupting faculty who resist change, and I like it! California found that ZTC courses filled faster and higher than competing courses.
In a later session, Paola Corti from Milan reported on work being done by librarians in Europe, which impressed on me what an ideal population library faculty are, to focus efforts and resources on. There are so fewer librarians on a campus than instructors and they seem to be a natural catalyst to disseminate both information and excitement about open ed. It also struck me that they are usually teaching general skills (reading, research, study, writing) rather than disciplinary content. This is something I ought to think about, in my own situation. And in one of the last sessions of the day, we brainstormed about a study being designed to assess the reactions of students when courses (or at least syllabi) are shifted to forms that focus on what the presenters called "redistributive, recognitive, and representational justice." In their brief review of the literature, they mentioned a finding that instructors using OER in their courses were regularly rated by students as being more kind and more interested in the students' well-being. This seems like the message we want to send to our students, in addition to giving them confidence they will learn what they want or need to learn and move forward in their educational journey.