UNESCO – Abel Caine (Interview) – Spring 2011
Hi Mr. Caine, How are you doing today?
I am good. Just call me Abel. The interview can be CC-BY
When did you first become involved with Open Education Resources? How has your involvement changed over time? What attracts you the most about Open Education Resources?
Very easily, I first came across the term two years ago. Secondly, nothing has changed from my program just very briefly here at UNESCO we had a very long association with OER. It was at UNESCO in 2002 that the term OER was created, in a global forum here at UNESCO, 2002. For the first 9 years, the role of UNESCO was just awareness. Lots and lots of physical events as well as online events to spread awareness of OER, the meaning of OER as well as global perspectives and then about 2 years ago. Sorry all of that work for 8 or 9 years was being done by Susan Anthony. She is a member of the OER community and largely responsible for the global awareness of OER. So, Susan left and the OER program was recreated or reconstituted and it is now split between the two sectors here at UNESCO. UNESCO is made up of five sectors. I am in the communications and information sector, CI sector, and my colleagues in the education sector also do OER. So the division of labor is this, the Education sector works on top down policy development with government and national institutions. And the CI sector is working specifically on the CI platform, a new innovative OER platform that is quite unique and will showcase UNESCO OER publications. I think that answers the second part of your question. What is the third part of your question?
What attracts you the most about Open Educational Resources?
For 20 plus years, I have been working in ICT or information and communication technologies, and for many of those years I have been heavily working with free open source software so the notion of open educational resources, educational materials with an open content license in the public domain is the exact same fundamental rituals of open software just applied to educational materials. So it is a natural attraction for me and it is an area I will continue to work for, for the rest of my professional career.
How in your opinion do open education resources influence knowledge and technological transfers? And what in your opinion are the goals of the OER movement? Is OER a social movement?
Could you please ask me one question at a time?
Sorry, definitely. How in your opinion do open education resources influence knowledge and technological transfers?
Very much. Well, it depends. Right now in the world most of the OER development is happening in developed countries and globally that is really led by the United States of America. It was American institutions that are for many things the most innovative institutions in the world. So the global OER movement is not in a bad way dominated by US institutions. Therefore you could say, to answer your question, there really hasn’t been that much knowledge transfer, since most of these institutions are very smart and OER just allows them to work smarter. However, for the last couple of years, very slowly, a lot of many many more global institutions are picking up on OER. And the first institutions that they ask help from are the US institutions, that not necessarily for say technology, but for the models.
When MIT first released their low level courses under OCW, and the OpenCourseWare Consortium was formed, a lot of what happening from the MITs and the Yales and the Stanfords that was leaving the US to go to the rich non-American countries like Japan, Korea, and Australia, was at least the model. What models do they use in your country, can we take those models and adapt them. Not necessarily technology transfers because when OER left the United States it went first to other developed countries. The third part of your question is that OER are very very slowly moving into developing countries. The rate of adoption in developing countries is extremely slow. This is where UNESCO sees its competitive advantage. It will be here in the developing countries where we will need the greatest amount of technological transfers or expertise. This is where UNESCO’s CI sector which is working on a platform feels that a lot of the software products that were developed by the US institutions are not 100 percent relevant for the developing countries, you can’t take Curriki and transplant in the middle of Ghana, it just will not work.
I am particularly interested in that transnational aspect of Open Educational Resources and on that question?….. Hello
Hello Abel.
Yeah I am here. Alfonso, it may be better if you leave your internet off. For some reason I am struggling with my internet bandwidth.
Again, thank you for that answer, I am particularly interested in that transnational aspect of Open Educational Resources and I had the impression myself, that primarily the material that is developed, even the material that is developed in developing countries is primarily in English, should OERs, first should every country participate in the development of OER, and should OERs be produced in least spoken languages? As well as major languages?
I guess the first question, does UNESCO see a future where every country participates in the development of Open Educational Resources?
Absolutely, fundamentally, very simple, very powerful answer to that question is yes!. UNESCO is here to provide assistance especially to developing countries, especially in Africa in two parts. To assist the decision makers, the policy makers in developing their policy, which is locally relevant for them, and apliable policy and on the bottom to assist this institutions in the development of OER. And when we develop OER for these countries is to first look at what has already been developed and we provide them with assistance to rapidly attend what has already been developed to their local circumstances. You can imagine that there is only so many ways that you can teach basic accounting. There is absolutely no sense for a developing country to try to start the course for scratch.
Second, most of these countries, already have accounting software, to give you an example. The trick is to say, look you have some existing courseware, should we just take this accounting courseware that seems very similar to yours and upload it to your local repository so that you can start teaching from it.
Now, there is also the aspect that should the materials be contextualized, but more importantly, what is UNESCO’s view in OER in the production of OER in least spoken languages, as well as major languages, both short term and long term?
Alright to answer your first question about contextualization, absolutely. We call them transformations, which we have 3 types. The first transformation we are looking for is translation, which kind of answers your other question. The second one is what we call localization, or what you call contextualization, what that means is in the material that you are borrowing that has examples from another country, that you should localize them to your country. The third transformation that we look for is what we are calling customization. What that means is that well you know, you teach accounting that way in your country, we teach it this way in our country, so we need to develop a unit that is customized to our local needs.
To answer your second question, the first transformation or translation answer your question of major languages, or minority languages or etcetera. At UNESCO one of our major pieces is culture. And a major part of our culture program are languages, protecting languages, preserving, and promoting language development. As much as possible, every time we walk into a country, we say to them, what are your official languages, what are your spoken languages, what are your languages of instruction, and as much as possible we want all of the materials to cover all of the official languages, and all of the languages of instruction as possible.
Thank you. How do you envision the OER movement to be 2 years from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now? What role do you see organization like the Open Education Resource University and Wikieducators to play?
I think there will be steady growth. The trajectory is certainly on the way upwards. I cant say it is rapid, and I cant say is accelerated growth, it will be steady growth. I hope we will approach a tipping point in about 5 years time. In about 5 years time there should be enough OER worldwide where we will see a major transformation in the way education is delivered to students. The role of the OER university and wikieducators. Let me answer first wikieducators. Wikieducators is one of the world’s leading. One of the world’s largest OER repositories, and Wayne Mackintosh just happened to choose the Wiki format for his repository. We hope that it will continue to grow. Not only do they use the same open wiki technology as Wikipedia, but they have the same open philosophy as Wikipedia as well. Where everbody is a contributer. Where they leave the gates open, and they improve the quality later on.
Open Education Resource University is a subset, a sub project of the base wikieducator model. How familiar are you with the OERU?
I attended the planning meeting online. I am interested in the process for accreditation.
OERU, you have to remember, is the small u. It is not an institution that confers degrees or provides accreditation. OER University is a partnership, a consortium of real world universities that will confer degrees that have all agreed to create a set of standardized degree accessment. What that means is that we have to start small.
Hypotetically lets just think that there are 3 founding partners. Which is the open polytechnic of new Zealand, the University of Southern Queensland from Australia, and the Atabasca Open Univesity from Canada. This three institutions have agreed to create a set of agreed accessed degrees. The first one they are going to start with is a very simple diploma of accounting, because you know accounting is a very common course throughout the world.
Definitely (me)
What they said is right, for every student in the world that wants to obtain a degree of accounting, our 3 universities have agreed that this is the minimum set of concepts, minimum set of papers, that any student should have taken in order for any of us to confer a diploma of accounting. They agreed to a set of standards then any student from around the world who has managed to do and pass the set of accounting papers can apply to any of these three institutions, provide the essays, and have any of these institutions confer the diploma. So the OERU is a very unique model, compared to University of the People. Have you heard of University of the People by Shay Rusa.
Yes
Alright, Shay is not the opposite, but a different model. Shay says I am a university. He hasn’t received his accreditation yet but he is working on it. And he says “All my courses that you ever take with me are OER, but if you want your diploma of accounting that we could say, consists of 16 courses then you have to do all courses with my university. You have to enroll in all 16 of those papers and progressively pass or graduate from all those papers, before I will confer on you, the university of the people, diploma of accounting. So that’s the difference between the two models. One is basically the online completely OER, the U of P, is the completely OER university were the tuition is free, you simply play for some small administrative fees, where the OER University turns it around 180 degrees, we a student can go off and do a whole lot of courses from anywhere in the world using OER which are free, assemble all these different courses together and then apply to one institution to have them accredited. So do you understand that?
Definitely, and thank you for the clarification.
When looking at other consortiums such as the OpenCourseWare Consortium, Connexions Consortium, what do you think are the greatest barriers for universities when considering to join or not the OER movement?
They main concern is loss of revenue. What they feel is that if there are so many universities that are offering courses as OER. And remember OER are typically meant to be free of course as well as freely licensed, and all of these students study free of cost also, and could simply go to an institution lets say the OER U and have them accredited for a very small fee, why then should all these students enroll in a normal university, in a traditional university.
However, and I believe that is their biggest fear, you can talk to any normal university or traditional university and that is their biggest fear. However, that fear is a miss, is a red hering and the reason is number, demographics. You call pull out some very strong statistics that indicate that we do not have enough universities for all of the students in the world. Now, we simply do not have enough for all of the students that are going to be born in the future, or are going to come out of high school in a couple of years. You can pull a lot of statistics from all over the place. Did you watch Jim Taylor’s presentation from the University of Southern Queensland.
Yes
He has some excellent statistics, and these are verifiable statistics. A country like India would have to create like 1 new university a year or something like that, I cant remember the exact statistics. But a country like India cant. They don’t have the money, no one has the money, for any country, just to keep up with the students who are qualified to enter university. So that demographic number 1. We cant even keep up with students who are qualified. Demographic number 2, is that our education system is also failing a very large number of students who could qualify to go to university. These are the kids who fall through the cracks. These are the kids whose teachers are not good enough for them, the subjects are not good enough for them, the system isn’t good enough for htem.
Now, the number of students who we fail, are the number of students who will never go to a regular university. Conversally a regular university will always have, no not always, but many of them will always have a good number of students who want to be in a traditional university environment. They want face to face interaction. They want to go to the clubs, the drinking, the partying. They want to be able to talk to a teacher anytime by walking up to the teacher at the end of the class. So it is an irrational fear that normal universities have about OER and that is holding up the level of adaptation by traditional universities of OER.
Just to give you a very good example, the Open University of the UK, they have adopted creative commons for any new material. Very unfortunately, they have chosen a restrictive creative commons license. They chose BY-NC. When I ask many, I am sure you are going to interview a lot of the Open University OER patenters. If you ask them why did you choose NC. They will answer, look our students enroll, they pay us the enrollment fees but they do not necessarily complete the course. There are many reasons why students do not complete the course. A lot of them just want to study, its like buying a book. You buy a book and it may come with an examination deadline, but you just choose optionally not to submit before the deadline.
I was actually teasing that many of their students don’t actually make it to the exam because they feel the coursework was too hard for them. By imagine if the open university said. Ah, our courses are now free. What that means is that all those students who enrolled do not have to pay any money and if they still find the course to hard, then well they don’t do not turn up for exams anyway.
So for institutions like the OU, giving away their courses free of cost, is too scary for them to contemplate.
I want to be aware of your time. I only asked for 30 minutes.
I appreciate it if we can wrap up very shortly.
Regarding the issue you just mentioned, in England for example, they recently just had budget cuts to state universities, and has led to many universities raising their tuition fees. In the current economic state of affairs, what do you see as the ultimate goal. Are OERs sustainable, why or why not?
There are many parts to that question. I am not a real expert in education but its expensive to provide high quality education. Number 2, a lot of the expense is probably, could probably be reduced. Your PhD supervisor is probably a tenured professor. Its paid 170,000 US or more just to turn up to work.
A lot of money (Me)
Tenured professors are the largest expense for any university. And that expense comes largely from government grants and to a lesser extent I think about recent statistics that show that tuition only gives most universities 30% of their revenue. 70% of their revenue comes in the form of government grants, or private sector research grants, etc. The education model, education around the world is going to change, and OER are one of the major factors in that change. Say we talked to senators and we would say OER are 7% of change of the books, the other changes like this, aspects like, just being able to come, just being able to afford the change.
Will OER help in terms of making education more accessible. Yes, from a technical point of view. I do not know if it is going to be fundamentally change education culturally, and I do not think it is going to change education economically. Nobody will know the answer to this question I believe until we have a critical mass, where OER have a 7% influence, and a 25% influence in the delivery of education. We have to remember that OER is ultimately just a tool, you know its ultimately an awesome textbook, an awesome set of lecture notes, an awesome set of assignments, etc. But it is one of many tools required to deliver excellent education, a great teacher is also important. So it will have a good impact but never a major impact, because it is one of many resources required for excellence in education.
Thank you very much. Again, I appreciate your time. One last question I had was if there is one variable missing at the moment regarding Open Education Resources that its hindering its growth and expansion, what would that be? What is currently the greatest missing piece?
Not necessarily a missing piece but hurdles. For OER to achieve mainstream status, to achieve critical mass, there are about six hurdles in the way. The biggest, the first biggest hurdle is that red hearing myth that I was talking about. The indolence of OER. That OER is going to hurt their reputation. There are several other hurdles in the way. UNESCO and the Hewitt Foundation are all working on different hurdles in different ways. Once we get rid of the hurdles, simultaneously. We need to not only work in getting rid of the hurdles but we have to also work on development the OER as well. Not just the resources, but the policy, and the practice. So it is a one / two combination. Get rid of the hurdles. Evangelize or advocate to the people that need to know about OER and simultaneously work with the winners, the converts to build up a critical mass of OER.
Thank you very much for your time again. I may later be conducting focus groups, or larger discussions, I will contact you about in case you are interested. The data will be openly available online, the interview. I appreciate your clarification and also your insight about current developments.
Alfonso, just one last request. It would be great if not necessarily related to your research, if you could post some of your thought to the OER community. Start first by filling out your profile.
I will add more to it, and appreciate the comment.
