 Hi everyone, I'm Stephen Downs. Welcome to this presentation. I'll just begin by giving you the sound of a train going by. Because of course. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to present using slides. So I will share the screen. But before I'll do that, you can also obtain the slides from this link that I'm placing in the chat. As I do the presentation. It's kind of hard to, you know, have conversations, especially with a large group. Well, it's not that large at the moment. Many more people registered than showed up. I guess that's the norm for online conferences. So, given that please feel free either to post questions or comments in the chat. I will be watching it as we proceed as well. I have, well, 17 people now. If you want to jump in and talk, please feel free to jump in and talk. I know it's hard when somebody's presenting full steam ahead. But I do want you to feel free to do that. We're up to 19 now. Okay. The Here we go. And I'm looking for my presentation to share the screen. Where did it go. Now it's gone. Oh, there it is. All right. So here we go. And I need to remember to face the camera. So I'll just move the chat over here so I can see it a bit better. And I am screen sharing. Whoops. All right. So, where I want to begin is with a question and the question that I have for for us today is how open is open learning. When we access an open learning environment, say, Moodle or MOOCs or whatever future to learn. This is what we're usually presented with a sign in screen. And to me, this represents right away a barrier to people accessing online learning resources. And, you know, I mean, it's usernames to remember passwords to remember information to give all of that. And it bothers me. And so this presentation is a reflection on what I think about that. And what I'm doing about that and it kind of breaks naturally into those two parts. What do they want? Well, they want a little bit of everything. I looked at a whole bunch of registration forms, both from traditional institutions. Mood providers, open online courses, etc. And it seems like gathering registration information is just universal among education providers. It's universal indeed, almost among all publishers or presenters of learning content. There are very few places where they don't want this information. What do they want? They want your name, first name, last name, middle name in this case. This is an example from the Canadian College International Student Registration Form. They want your address, the city, province, postal code, country, your phone number, your email. They don't want your passport number and nationality. They want your gender date of birth, first language, where you heard about it, your photo. Now, not everybody wants all of this information. But not everybody wants only this information. I've seen requests for just about everything you can think of. What do they want it? Well, we know the answer to this, right? For evidence, for admissions, to provide billing information, yes, even for open online learning. For course communication, for marketing, which is a very common purpose of open online learning and upselling, so they can sell you extra things like credentials or whatever. Identity verification if they're doing proctoring or online assignments. Certification, it says credentialism, I meant credentials, like, well, degrees, certificate badges, whatever for and for their own reporting and their own statistics. And my question that I asked myself is in open online learning, do we need any of this? And for me, the answer is mostly no, we don't. Now, I know there are other barriers to accessing online learning. Funding, need for teacher classroom materials, the barriers facing the disabled, the barriers facing people based on gender, conflict, war, distance technology, even hunger and nutrition. And this is another one. I know it's not the most important one, but this is the one that I can do something about from where I sit here in my home office. I will point out that the requirement for all of this information makes many of these worse. Take someone who's a refugee and homeless, for example, how are they going to put in their address information. Take, for example, somebody who's disabled being required to provide all of this information. Take somebody who's at risk, where even studying is against the law, providing this information exposes them to more risk. Take somebody who just wants to casually learn something on the fly, the requirement to provide all of this minimally inserts a five minute barrier before they access it. I know it doesn't seem serious. But to me it is serious. And even more to the point. During this conference and other conferences like this, there's been a lot of discussion of open educational practices and the role that we play as educators providing open learning. When the first thing you see when you're signing up for a course is a demand for registration information. It sends to me a very clear message to the student, it says, we the provider are in charge. Our access is conditional and subject to our needs and interests. It also says we are watching you. This is the beginning of a surveillance kind of environment, and very often, not always but very often, it sends a clear message, you will be monetized one way or another, you will be monetized. We refer marketing will use you in our application process for federal funding. We will use you as a potential future fee paying student at our institution, one way or another, we will monetize this. And to me that sends the wrong message. Turning into something that's transactional and turns the student into a commodity. Some people argue that open access is all about licensing. And that institutions might choose a less open license and non commercial license specifically to prevent potential competitors from reusing their content. But I'm not so sure about that. I think that most providers don't want to be doing a commercial transaction when they're offering open learning or open education or resources. That I think is why the majority, the significant majority of licenses used by educators and authors. Stipulates a non commercial condition. And I think personally that requiring and monetizing students goes against the wishes of the people who are attaching non commercial labels to their content or courses. We could argue about this but that's for a different form. I think we still need to design for open regardless of licensing. I don't think that licensing gets us off the hook. It's about democratizing knowledge. It's about creating socially inclusive instructional design, including accessibility inclusive language. Activeness. It's about increasing social inclusion and providing opportunities for people to be not just consumers or receivers of a service, but actual participate participants in the creation of their own knowledge. This comes from even ironically. The article was open, but it was published in a PDF that was protected such that I could not copy the text from the PDF and so I had to provide a screenshot here. Bad eating bad. I want to go beyond the provider consumer mods model. An example of going beyond this is the open syllabus. And it invites students course leaders whomever to provide domain specific examples of course syllabi. Thus, making it clear what their what the courses are teaching what references they use, etc. Now, it's not so much the content of the syllabi that interest me here, but rather the mechanism that's being employed to create this capacity in the community. You have a way for people to contribute to the knowledge base. And you have an easy way via the open syllabus explorer and I checked and there's no login required for that. You can go in and explore the syllabi. And you can see the results of this, the graph kind of representation of all of this knowledge that just publishing this information just posting or allowing people to contribute this information provides. And I think that's a pretty good model generally. I think it's a model about working toward open and everyday practice. You know, things like and educating students about the benefits of openness, allowing them to contribute through open educational practices supporting and empowering students as public scholars. And this attitude that we take right off the bat. Instead of treating them like clients who must subscribe to our service. We're treating them as colleagues or collaborators in a wider social endeavor, and that is the model of education that I think more typifies what we ought to be thinking about when we're thinking about open learning. Now you're free to disagree with this assessment. But I think we have a point of discussion here right. I think we have a point where we need to bring out the arguments and the evidence for or against one way of thinking about open learning. And I think that this model, rather than a provider consumer model is probably a better more open model argument could be made. We only have 40 minutes and it's a lifetime kind of argument. We look at the trends that are happening in learning. And this is one that I saw in an article. Learning anytime personalized learning choices of how to learn project based learning less so but data interpretations, different ways of assessing student ownership of the curriculum. Some of these are still pretty prescriptive when you're saying you know you should take project based learning, you should do hands on learning. That's pretty prescriptive giving or allowing the option or don't even like the word allowing. Maybe how about enabling or supporting the option for project based or hands on learning are more in line with an open learning approach. Certainly things like learning anytime, everywhere, anywhere, things like student ownership of curriculum, etc. These are things that we support with open learning, and that begins with removing the registration requirement. Another example, the same sort of thing, learning circles, free facilitated study groups for people who want to learn. They have a peer to peer university, who while they have learning circles you'll notice down there in the lower left hand corner on the slide, they have, yes, registration. Why do we need that, even things like looking at assessments and statistics and of course that's one of the big reasons for requiring registration. Suppose we didn't look at grades and test scores. Suppose we didn't look at attendance graduation rates. Suppose we looked at what people actually did where they did it instead. The requirement of registration and tracking commits us almost to and is part of the commitment to things like grades, test scores, attendance, etc. So, I tweeted the other day and I don't have the slide of that tweet, unfortunately, but I tweeted the other day. I tweeted that I have worked with my online courses to remove all possibility of tracking things like grades, test scores, attendance, etc. Every way that I could think of to block my ability to know who's in the course. I've done that. I've been in a slide and it's not there so I'll just say this now. What has the result of that been. First of all, kind of an existential crisis in the sense that now it feels like nobody's taking the course. Which I know isn't true. I'm sure people are taking the course it's just I have no sign of them. I have no problem with reporting because I work for a research agency and anytime I tell them I'm offering a course the first question they ask is all great. How many people took it. And I have to answer them, I don't know, which makes them wonder whether they should continue funding me at all, but they trust me by now so they're not. That's a big problem and you know that's kind of the nice kind of relationship you want to have with your employer. The big thing I think is lacking a mechanism to actually improve the course. But it's not like people have no way of contacting me I've made some avenues available and we'll talk about those. So, but you know I should I assume that silence means everything's okay I guess this way I have to. So these are some costs to me of doing this. I don't think that these costs are onerous. And I think it's better that I bear these costs than imposing the requirement of registration subscription tracking etc. That's exactly right. Mark Wilson saying registration is for the allocation of resources. Some of us are self funded and do not need to be tracked. Again, exactly. So, this is my imperative. Open learning I say should enable enrollment without the requirement that information be provided, hence enabling legitimate peripheral participation with the with the option of greater engagement entirely at the discretion of the learner. With the option of greater engagement entirely at the discretion of the learner. The web used to be like. In a sense that's what the world used to be like and you know I'm not trying to say, you know, let's all go back to burning wood and cooking over open fires. I still think that this is a value that maybe we should be getting back to. And I think that within the open open learning community we should certainly be asking the question, why are we having people enrolling in these courses, registering applying. So, this is the second part of the talk. My MOOCs and currently my ongoing MOOC code ethics analytics and the duty of care is an ongoing experiment in open where I am deliberately trying to resist every possibility of tracking and knowledge collection and commodification of the participants. This is the home page for the course notes, although I provide a mechanism to allow people to sign up for email notifications. This is completely optional. And I am disappointed to say, although there's a lot that can be said about this, I use MailChimp for my notifications. That's terrible. Yeah, it is terrible. Email has been, if I may say, wrecked by both the spammers, but even more significantly by the anti spammers, such that if you're using email notifications, if you don't go through one of these providers, you're flagged as a spammer, which is a problem. But anyhow, it's there, it's optional, but I also immediately after provide an alternative. RSS, which is a syndication format, people can use what are called feed readers in order to access this. They can either use a web based feed reader, they'll have to sign up the web based feed reader provider where they'll be monetized, or they can use a feed reader that they just download and install on their desktop. Either way, they can access the entire contents of the course from this feed ethics.mooc.ca slash feed. And so they can keep up with the course without requiring email, and I consider that a win. I've also shared the process of setting up this mooc. So I issue a public apology for the number of hours of video have produced, but there is a playlist that I've created called Making a Mooc. That's the link to it there in the slide. And I talk about all of these issues that I'm covering over the next few slides in much more detail. These are stream of consciousness videos. I'm record actually recording them as I'm building these courses, and I'm going through the decisions that I've made and why I've made all of these decisions about how to create open access. For example, I have one slide where I talk about setting up zoom. Well, first of all, why I had to create my own zoom account in order to access the admin options and then I go through every option in the zoom setup, explaining why I chose this option rather than that option. So there's much more. I have a free RSS reader to install. Yeah, and I have that on my desktop and it works like a charm. I love it. And, you know, I have anonymous access basically to any RSS feed I want. So, grasshopper and I see Alex anchorly linked to grasshopper. This is my own application. Now, before you ask, it's not a commercial application it is open source the code is available and Docker Docker containers are available so that you can run this on your own, but this isn't a product. This is my research lab. And it's important to understand that because, you know, it's if you use it it has bugs, and it has bugs because I'm constantly tweaking the code to try this that and the other thing and even with this course. As you'll see if you look at my videos, every once in a while I stop and say well I got to stop here go make some changes to the grasshopper code, and then we'll come back and I'll continue. And that's what I've been doing for a number of years. So in grasshopper. There are different types of data. One of the types of data is a course module. Here are the modules in the ethics course. And so I make each of these modules available as a separate page or as a separate piece of data. The modules, in turn, are linked to other course components, they might be linked to individual posts, they might be linked to, well they're linked to the course as a whole, they're linked to things like presentations. And as I as I talked about these modules and course structures. I want you to think about what do we mean by an open education resource because here I consider each one of these modules to be an open educational resource. Each one of them has a specific location on the web. Each one of them has content, and each one of them has links to other resources. So you could access the ethical practices and learning analytics module. But you're going to get some content, but you're also going to get some links to other resources and that's in the central part of thinking of that module as an open educational resource. So that's not the model of what we are so we have where each of them is a standalone thing, and you assemble them like bricks. This is different. This is a different way of thinking about it. And that's how I build the courses in Grasshopper. There are three different ways of looking at the assembly, or the linking of course components. Each of these each box represents a different standalone type of thing, an institution, for example, is a separate object and author is a separate object, each of the modules is a separate object. The modules link up to things like activities, which are live events, resources, which might be media or whatever tasks, etc. They link back to things that might be skills or I could take you back into competency definitions, etc. I'm building here not like, not like a textbook, but these interrelated connections of modules and you might say well, why does this have anything to do with not needing registration. Well, I make this entire structure available to students so that they can access any or all of it without any barriers. So, the other thing I do is to support syndication. So, this is this is one of the major requirements for registration I should have put that back on that second slide one of the reasons why people require registration, and the reason is, if you want to add any content to the course. You have to log in with your user ID and password and be approved before you, you know, before you put content on the course website and that's a, you know, that's a legitimate concern, because as we've learned if you don't do that you're going to get a pile of spam. The second thing of UNESCO definition says Alex anchor Lee, it does sound like core structure could qualify as a we are. It's not just about granularity. Absolutely. Um, so, I don't think I should set up a course like a discussion board or like a social media site where everyone comes to me and put content on my website which I will then lock down and make disappear at the end of the course that just seems to be wrong. The way my MOOCs are set up the way they've always been set up, you use your own website, or your own application to create content. If you want, you can share that content with us. It's not required by any means. But if you want you can share that content with us just tell us where it is. So that we can go and get it. So, and that's what this supports. I do syndication through a two step process. First of all, I ask people to provide their. I'm trying to click on something here on a forum of course it's not a form it's a slide provide your RSS feed Adam or Jason feed link so that we know where your content is. And then the course harvests it and presents or stores a list of feeds and then the contents of these. You know, these are all blogs provided by individuals. They use a course tag, in this case, hashtag ethics 21 which believe it or not when I searched on Twitter was not being used by anyone so bonus. So people just do their, they write their blog post, they use the tag ethics 21 my harvester harvests it brings their content into the course or more accurately brings a link to their content into the course and makes that link available to everyone else. Of course, shouldn't have to depend on the course for that list of links. So you can download the list of feeds in a format called OPM L load them into your own RSS reader. And now you're reading everybody else's contributions to the course without ever accessing the course. And that's a no registration mechanism. Similarly, the course newsletter takes all of these different course elements modules presentations, videos, the links that are provided by people that have been harvested, put some off together here is a HTML version of the newsletter. Not only that, but also I provide an RSS version of the newsletter and even a JSON version but nobody uses the JSON version, just too early for that. So that people can access this again with zero registration. Activities and events. I've integrated with calendar options. I've tried to keep activities and events as non connected to the course as possible so the course provides access to these but we use things like zoom or whatever, but I've set up a mechanism so that you can go to what I call the activity center. That's the thing in the middle, and watch the activity and even participate in the activity through comments without actually registering anything at all. And the list of activities can be harvested and put into your own calendar, either one by one, or as a whole set and I use a thing called the calendar ICS format for that. And then adding and sharing media. This is what I call a presentation page and honestly, I don't know why every conference, and every, every individual making presentations doesn't provide this thank you Lisa. This is my, these are my slides I was using slide share but then it was sold and now they throw up a great big barrier, asking you to subscribe to other things that they offer. I was using Microsoft, but for various reasons that was horrible. Now I simply use a plugin offered by Mozilla that allows me to put in my presentation as a PDF. This is a video embedded in YouTube, not ideal, but I'm still working on that activities and looks wrong way. Mechanisms to upload and share media to support this presentation page so I'm making these original format documents widely available so that you don't have to subscribe to get at them. This is a podcast and transcript same sort of thing I record audio of all of these presentations I recorded the transcript. This is the Google recorder that records the transcript, again, making these accessible without login, so that you have a variety of ways of accessing the course. I can talk for a whole hour about how I change the flow so that you can choose how you go through the course rather than having it prescribed for you. Publishing. This is the way to break the sign in barrier. Publishing is just the place where I work on the course and create and organize the content, but then I send it out to the world. And ideally in the long run, it eventually lands in your personal learning environment. For importing imagine this flow reversed where you can contribute to the course through any of these mechanisms, and by that way, add your content to the course content. Next phase and this is what I'm experimenting with this course is to actually take the content types and making them elements in the same way so for example, we have a module called applications analytics so an application is a data type. Each application becomes an individual piece of data with its own address with its own acts free and open access with its own participation in this network of linked data. And the entire structure of the course contents can be organized into Jason distributed and ultimately once people have these things imported into their own PLE. The, that's what I'm trying to build a grasshopper it's not all there yet, but that's the vision that I'm working toward. That's the talk the presentation and I do still have some time for questions. And I'd be happy to take them. I know it felt a bit rushed but I actually finished with two minutes left in my time so comments, questions, I'd love to hear them, and the audience has been stunned into silence. Either that or they're fleeing. Well, okay. Thanks everyone I hope you found this interesting. You can still join the course. Am I affiliated with the UNESCO open education project. I'm not know, but I'm certainly supportive of it. Thanks everyone. It's been a pleasure having you here. I'll stay on after the session and session recording ends in case anyone wants to talk a little bit more formally or chat in the chat.