Thank You, Pearson: OER, Metadata, Gateways, and Elephants
5 min read
Lisa Petrides, the president and founder of ISKME, has a new post up on her blog titled The Elephant in Education: Open Source Pillaging. In this post, she explains why OER Commons (one of the first - and certainly one of the best - OER repositories) is licensing the metadata around the content shared in OER Commons under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license:
Organizations like ours (and we are not alone) are having second thoughts about how much metadata we share and with whom. Some are becoming skittish, because the tides have turned once again and quality metadata is in high demand. We decided at OER Commons, for example, to place an "all rights reserved" notice on our website (meaning, you can’t scrape metadata and reuse it), and a license for non-commercial use on our metadata, with the goal of working with partners who desire something more than faux collaboration.
This is a very acceptable use of a Non Commercial license: OER Commons is clearly stating that they want to support organizations that are committed to openness, and that they want people to ask permission before taking their work. And from a you-should-only-get-what-you-earned place, that makes sense.
Moving on, Petrides also states:
But so far, about 90% of the re-use of OER metadata I have seen in action (not in theory) is about commercial publishers looking to resell it, disguised as a service. If you don’t believe me, see how our non-commercial resources are used inappropriately here. That is not the spirit of OER as some of us intended it.
The link highlighted in her post points to - and admittedly, for some people (myself included) it's more than a little galling to see the Pearson brand featured prominently on a subdomain that starts with "oer". And it's even more galling to see this list of partially closed sites using OER content. Pearson acquired EQUELLA in 2009; it appears that they are using the platform to display links to openly licensed content, and to sell access to the Pearson-branded platform seeded with Pearson's content and with OER. It also appears that, in addition to LMS integration, Pearson is attempting to sell access to community sites.
Pearson is scraping metadata to get information to which they can sell access. Initiatives like the Learning Registry encourage the use of metadata around open educational resources in order to support discovery and reuse on an institutional scale, and this will be of immediate benefit to major textbook publishers. I would be astonished if openly licensed resources (especially those licensed under the Attribution license) aren't regularly used in textbooks from all of the major publishers in the next few years.
However, taking a longer view, what Pearson has done is awesome. Pearson has done exactly what Petrides warned us about: they have resold OER disguised as a service. In the process, Pearson has done a few very valuable things:
- By bundling up OER en masse, Pearson is helping to expose more people to OER, and subsequenty increase the adoption of OER;
- By selling access to a community around the OER, Pearson is showing that the value of OER increases when there is a community of people working with OER. Most of us working with OER already know this, but to people just starting to work with OER, this type of collaboration can be incredibly empowering;
- By using OER as the central piece of their platform, Pearson has provided a clear point of refutation for the "OERs are of lesser quality" FUD that is often spread by traditional publishers.
By selling access to communities around OERs, Pearson provides a gateway, exposing many people to OER who might never have used them otherwise. Just like people who first found their way online via AOL, many EQUELLA users will discover that there is more to OER than what Pearson offers. And, just like people who experienced their first taste of online learning via an LMS, many EQUELLA users will discover that there is more to OER than Pearson's branded content silos. Over time, people will reach the inevitable conclusion that they can get their community and their OER without Pearson. EdCamps provide one model of doing exactly that, as do open content authoring events. But, in the interim, more people learning about OER is a good thing, full stop.
Pearson's approach to OER puts the content as the most important piece of the equation, which - for Pearson - makes sense. Pearson sells content and products that control access to that content. If one takes the view that OER is primarily about content, then yes, from that perspective, Pearson has "taken" something. But, Pearson using openly licensed content doesn't preclude the rest of us from using it. We are still free to use, modify, adapt, and distribute openly licensed content, and for many of us, that is the value: Open Educational Resources are less about the resources, and more about the process by which we come to use - and reuse - a resource. Over time, as more people become more familiar with OER and how they work, decision makers within organizations will realize that they don't need to spend millions of dollars over multiple years to have community around OER. In the meantime, Pearson is providing a clear example that OERs work at scale.
And for that, I thank you.
