/Work: The Open University’s Open Universities Project

Last week, I started work with the Open University in the UK on a new project. There is some bland, internal name for the project — ‘Phase 3 of Alternative Strategic Visions’ or some such — but the team relatively quickly started to call our effort “Open Universities”. This may sound like a manifesto for opening up existing universities, but in fact we intend something else altogether.

The team I mentioned include Tony Walton, a member of the strategic planning group at the Open University; Hardin Tibbs, a UK-based strategy consultant, formerly of GBN; Euan Semple, a social technolgy consultant and formerly of the BBC, Jamais Cascio, a futurist and consultant, Stuart Sim, elearning consultant and former chief architect of Sun’s elearning efforts, and Stephen Heppell, learning consultant and visiting professor at Bournemouth University. A great bunch of minds to throw at the future of online learning.

After only a few hours we had converged on a shared vision: an open, extensible online environment for learning, building on a purpose-built social networking platform. The core ideas include these:

• Peer-based interaction among the participants, avoiding the hierarchical and stratified notions of ‘teacher’, ‘student’, ‘courses’ and so on. In the Open Universities model, a participant can play many roles: at times creating or mashing up learning modules, at times participating in learning projects (either accredited or not), and at other times perhaps leading a learning project, helping others to learn.
• An “ecology of participation”, where individuals or groups can make money for their efforts, such as creating and/or leading purpose-built learning projects. Consider the scenario where Motorola (or any other organization) might post a call for proposals in the Open Universities environment, and various individual, groups, or organizations could offer proposals.
• Portfolio-based learning, where each participant aggregates the history of activities within Open Universities, such as learning projects accomplished or created. Specialized portfolio templates could be created, for example by a real-world university or by a sponsoring organization like Motorola, and these templates could be used by participants to represent learning goals. As the various elements of these templates are realized, the progress being made relative to the template would be reflected in the participant’s portfolio.
• It’s likely that the platform we envision would be created and then released as open source. We envision creating a global community of developers on the platform, and building extensions to it.

I intend to keep blogging on the project as we move forward. It’s very exciting, and I haven’t really had a chance to even read through the notes and photos of whiteboards from our meetings. More to follow.

I noted that one of the folks that we breifed at the end of the meetings has posted some observations:

[from New university model by Martin Weller]

The resulting suggestion was a social space, with the emphasis on helping others to learn. Such a space is populated by remixable, flexible content and also by learning narratives that guide learners and a range of social connections such as mentors, peers, experts, etc. None of this is particularly surprising given the people there - the solution wasn’t going to be a physical campus with lectures now was it.

The critical mass issue was significant for me. Such a system is very long tail - it meets the needs of the few people who want to learn about Ukrainian knitting patterns, radio programmes of the 1950s, the novels of William Boyd and the influence of Krazy Kat cartoons on modern culture. This is good, because such needs aren’t met in any current system, but it really needs a large mass to support. And this is where the Catch 22 is - if you have the critical mass the system works well, but the system doesn’t function until you get the critical mass. Sites such as YouTube could afford to be a bit more experimental, and just let their system grow since the investment on the part of the user was small. They could also populate it reasonably quickly with a mass of music videos. Learning is more complex, and thus getting the good content and the right connections is more difficult to establish.

Also, although the social networking stuff is important, I think the significance of content is underplayed in such a vision (I even got to use my ‘content may not be everything’ jibe I mentioned yesterday). For a lot of social networking sites, such as LastFM people don’t go there primarily for the social networking, what they go for is the content (ie to be able to listen to a good range of music). This is enhanced (and to some extent enabled) by the network effects. In short they go for the content and stay for the social networking.

While I don’t agree with Weller’s comment about Last.fm, per se, in general I agree with his conclusions: people will join Open Universities to learn, and if the social network supports that, great. I am less of a believer in the primacy of content, but content matters a great deal, so to a large extent, our visions coincide.