Google Open Policy Fellow (Draft 2012)

The transformation of information into zeros and ones and the countless documents, pictures, and videos that are now at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection are democratizing learning, and have radically transformed the educational experience and  socialization of youth. Currently studying for a PhD in Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development at the University of Minnesota exploring the impact of Open Education on the poor, minorities, and developing countries, having an MA in Latin American Studies – Development, the influence of the internet and open content on the formal and informal education of individuals is a topic of academic interest and personal importance to me. The impact of openness to society has begun to be explored, but its transformative effect has yet to be fully understood. Having the opportunity to work as a Google Policy Fellow will further my involvement in open policy and my interest in increasing access to disconnected and isolated communities. When someone connects to the internet their access to information expands exponentially. Having conducted focus group and ethnographic studies of open access and open education resources, I feel I have the background experience and prior work in this field that will make me an asset to your organization. I have a strong interest in the transnational impact of openness but I have also worked on initiatives focusing on minority or undeserved populations, such as Upward Bound. I am committed to reducing both the digital divide and the achievement gap that currently affect society. My work as an IT Fellow for the University of Minnesota, video producer, and graphic designer will also hopefully be of help to your organization.

What is open? To me it means more than information being remixable, redistributable, reusable, and revisable. Rather, openness is an ethos,  a way individuals can reach out, beyond the boundaries of the physical, into the open cyberspace of the possible. Regardless of where a person is, they can impact society. Growing up in Venezuela with relatively limited financial means but with an internet connection, I was able to access large databases of information. Openness has helped shaped and defined me. However, the internet is more than openness, and what is open should be contextually defined. Through the internet information is transferred that can be beneficial to a community but this transfer can lead to challenges, such as copyright infringement, partially due to a lack of understanding of different copyright licenses among both American youth and populations around the world.

In the USA, the line between audio visual creativity and copyright infringement is sometimes hard to discern. While creative commons is increasingly providing an alternative for producers and remixers, more should be done to improve this balance, increase our understanding of the problem, and provide better alternatives to the threatened increased regulation, oversight and control of internet traffic. There is also an important transnational dimension to openness. It is not surprising that in a place where individuals live with only a few dollars a day that even discounted software and information prices may be a barrier to access. Having worked with a university department in Venezuela in updating their software when I was a teenager was a very interesting experience. While hardware had to be purchased, decisions regarding software were controversial. Staff members were left with 3 options, to purchase an expensive software (usually under a year license), use an openly accessible software (GNU license), or more often than not used a pirated version of a product. It was not hard to understand why some of these decisions were made. Yet, intellectual property should also be protected.

When I interviewed international scholars about open access policies, they expressed concern that, in certain fields with a strong public agenda, such as education and development, many of the highest quality journal articles are not accessible to the public. “Great discoveries are made, to then have a limited distribution and remain behind a closed box” expressed one participant. When information is not accessible, research projects could omit significant works in their literature review, and intellectual efforts can be duplicated or be poorly formulated. This is partly due to the current dominant position on intellectual property by major publishing houses, limiting access to premium institutions that can afford the subscription fees. Having followed a closed economic model for years, it is understandable that businesses have been reluctant to change their policies and find alternate revenue models, but in future years they may have no alternative but to change with the times. Some of the current policies are having a negative impact on innovation and international development. Openness has benefited me tremendously, as I have been able to learn valuable concepts and nuggets of information from Open Courseware courses, Wikipedia, and other open sources. I am deeply committed to using policy to improve the quality of the internet and positively impact the education of current and future students. By working as a fellow, I hope to benefit your organization and positively impact internet policy.

“The more ubiquitous and diverse the use of information and communication technologies, the more probable that we will develop new abilities and understandings that are invisible or ignored by the traditional instruments used to measure knowledge…. Even if they are if they are invisible for the formal system of education, they are not in any way in the professional and social life” (Cobo and Moravec, 2011, pg. 26)

2/2/12

Technologies represent tools that can have either a negative or positive impact on education in differen contexts, and while they can contribute to improving the education experience, their implementation needs to be carefully studied (Chapman and Mahlck, 2004; Kamenetz, 2011; Heeks, 2008, 2010; Unwin 2009). While scholars continue to debate whether modern technologies are influencing education in a positive or a negative way, the vast majority agree that our increasing interconnectedness has important impacts on nation-states throughout the world[JGD1] . Their impact in the Dominican Republic (D.R.) is not an exception. Over the last two decades the D.R. has invested heavily in information and communication technologies (ICTs) as it moves towards improving its economy by better integrating its work force into the information society. However, the impact that this investment has had on improving the formal and informal education of Dominicans remains in question. As the internet becomes a greater influence in individuals learning experience, it becomes more difficult to measure their learning experience. A learning experienced enhanced through the use of the internet can be referred to as invisible learning. Researching the impact of the Dominican Republic pro-ICT policy in Dominican’s invisible learning is important because of the country’s high investment in these policies in contrast to its historically low investment in its educational sector. In partnership with the Technological Institute of the Americas (ITLA) and the Office of the First Lady (OFL) this study will analyze how invisible learning takes place in the Dominican Republic through an analysis of the Community Technology Centers (CTCs) that have been built primarily in previously disconnected areas of the country.

Attempting to rapidly modify its educational system, in 1992, the Dominican Republic approved a major education reform through a 10 Year  Plan (Plan  Decenal) which promoted: 1) modernizing the educational structure, 2) the introduction of new technologies, 3) the promotion of literacy, 4) strengthening vocational education, 5) increased investment in education and 6) increasing community involvement (Wiley, 2007). However, despite moderate success in some areas, several indicators remain below expectations. By 2008, the average enrollment rate for Latin America and the Caribbean in secondary school was 94%, while in the D.R. enrollment was only 80%. The literacy rate remains below the regional average of 91% at 88.2% and total public spending on education (% of GDP) is low, at a level of 2.2% in 2007, compared to a world average of 4.6% in 2006 (World Bank, 2010). In addition, according to a 2001 assessment of education throughout Latin America  by PREALC (Regional Employment Program for Latin America and the Caribbean), urban children in the D.R. performed worst, and rural children only outperformed children in Bolivia and Peru, for whom Spanish is often a second language (Murray, 2005).

Despite the implementation of the second Plan Decenal (2008-2018), the government has not substantially increased average education expenditure, while it has strengthened its efforts to provide the general population with access to ICTs. The government’s investments in ICTs recently resulted in the First Lady of the D.R. receiving the 2007 World Information Society Award from the United Nations. She was honored for her contributions to building a more equitable and inclusive society by empowering Dominican families to improve their living standards  through  access  to  ICTs  at  Community  Technology  Centers  (CTCs[JGD2] )  (Cedeño Fernández, 2007). However, despite the emphasis given to ICT by the government of the Dominican Republic it is hard to assess to what degree these technologies are reducing inequalities and influencing formal and informal education[JGD3] .

Unlike other Latin American countries, the DR is one of the few locations where ICT development projects have been most closely linked to the government agenda. The increased investment and emphasis on ICT development has contributed to the rapid expansion of Internet use in the D.R. in recent years.  Based on the average users per Internet connection, INDOTEL believes that 33% of Dominicans, or 3,214,371 people, had access to the Internet by June 2010 (INDOTEL, 2010). The D.R. has a cell phone use rate of 0.91 cellular phones per person (INDOTEL, 2010), and mobile phone coverage is increasing in rural areas. In education, the government has promoted ICT through CTCs, the Educando.edu.do online community, Red-Wan, Virtual Areas for Education (AVES), and OER and software development at ITLA (ITLA, 2010; Khelladi, 2003) The most popular initiative in ICT for education has been the CTCs[JGD4] .

CTCs originated from the Costa Rican Little Intelligent Communities (LINCOS) initiative, which was built in partnership with the MIT. The project’s innovative approach of using decommissioned  shipping containers to house computer labs proved enticing to donors, but was perceived as foreign, temporary, and inconvenient to Dominican users (Granqvist, 2003; Granqvist, 2005; MIT, 2001). Granqvist (2005) argued that the lack of community participation in the planning stage of the program resulted in the project’s overlooking the fact that the containers quickly felt hot and crowded, and that some of the software and manuals, including the operating system, were not in Spanish. The container model was dropped and replaced with a traditional building and was further modified to include meeting rooms, libraries and a radio station (Prado, 2009[JGD5] ).

Working with the Technological Institute of Monterrey, a pioneer in virtual education and OERs, the CTCs include a variety of educational software and material (ibid). These courses include the use and creation of OERs[JGD6] . By the spring of 2009, there were 49 operational CTCs (Prado, 2009) and the Office of the First Lady has set a goal of building 135 CTCs in the upcoming years (Cedeño de Fernández, 2005). Comprehensively, the ICTs for Education initiatives in the D.R. are slowly bridging the digital divide. A prior survey-based study of the CTCs provided a few hints about the type of individuals that are mostly benefiting from the CTCs. Prado’s (2009) study provided a glimpse as to what is taking place within the CTCs, yet a more in-depth understanding of the CTCs would require a different methodology that provides for the use of ethnographic methods to obtain a thicker description (Geertz, 1973, 2003). Prado’s (2009) survey did not attempt to measure the extent to which CTC materials are contextualized, and how they are impacting education. This dissertation will provide the deeper, thicker, and more participatory analysis that is much needed but as yet missing from impact analyses of ICT projects in the D.R (Chambers, 1997)[JGD7] . During a 9 month visit, I will observe, interview, and live[JGD8]  with members of 3 different CTCs[JGD9]  as I attempt to better understand what invisible learning means to CTC users and how to them invisible learning is different from traditional formal and informal education.

Because of the extensive investment and effort the government has given to these projects, learning more about the ways in which they are influencing poor localities in the Dominican Republic can help to improve the future allocation of funds and increase the cost-benefit ratio of such investments. As a hypothesis, I am [JGD10] uncertain as to whether invisible learning is different from traditional formal and informal learning, and as to whether population near to the CTCs is benefiting from this and/or other ICT initiatives. How is invisible learning taking place within the three CTCs that were selected? I am uncertain as to what local Dominicans feel about these investments in ICT in comparison to local investments in education and the relationship that they notice between these two variables. These questions, coupled with the current relevance of the subject and its utility for Dominican policymakers are among the key motivations for advocating for this study.

Exercise – Fulbright Questions

January 20, 2012

With whom do you propose to work?

I intend to work with community members in the Dominican Republic where I plan on visiting three different locations.

What do you propose to do? What is exciting, new or unique about your project? What contribution will the project make to the Fulbright objective of promoting cross-cultural interaction and mutual understanding?

I propose conducting a mixed methods study about the impacts of invisible learning in these communities and how these communities use both open, closed, and pirated educational resources.

When will you carry out your study or research? Include a timeline.

This research will take place during the summer or 2012 and the summer of 2013

Where do you propose to conduct your study or research? Why is it important to go abroad to carry out your project?

Migration affects both the community of origin and the community where immigrants migrate to. The Dominican Republic is a good example of a country where a large percentage of its population lives abroad and many more hope to migrate. In addition the increased connectivity of individuals through the internet and other communication means is transforming communities throughout the world, impacting individuals’ formal and informal learning. To better understand the transnational impacts of invisible learning it is important to visit and study a country apart from the United States.

Why do you want to do it? What is important or significant about the project?

Increasingly open education has gained ground and is becoming a buzz word in education and technology sector. Individuals’ opinion of copyright and the right of access to information are being transformed in the digital age and the traditional boundaries which previously greatly dictated and influenced the transfer of knowledge are diminishing in relevance. What these new interactions and what the Web 2.0 internet means for learning, however, is yet to be fully defined. The rapid rate of change of the internet requires us to be constantly analyzing its impact. ICT and open, closed, and pirated educational resources have and will continue to become increasingly relevant to developing countries.

How will you carry out your work? All students should discuss methodology and goals in their statements.

I will carry out my work by being a participant observant, holding focus groups, conducting interviews, and asking the local population what these changes mean for them and what do these telecenters or community technology centers mean for their education, and their invisible learning. Statistical data will also be collected during the study.

How will your project help further your academic or professional development?

Understanding invisible learning and how the internet helps individual’s skill formation is pivotal for understanding learning in the 21^st century. Having a strong interest in openness and access, how these technologies can democratize learning and diminish social reproduction, increasing individuals equality of opportunity is the focus of my professional career.

Your project statement should contain a clear commitment to and description of how you will engage with the host country community.

I consider myself partially Dominican, at least in the broad sense of the world. My grandfather and uncle are buried in the “Plaza of the Immortals”. They lost their lives helping to organize and overthrow of a brutal dictator and fighting in an invasion of less than 300 men. While I grew up in Venezuela, because of the exile of my grandfather, I have always felt a strong affinity for the Dominican Republic. I consider myself in some way part of this community. Apart from this, I will be conducting a participatory study as it is their voices, not my opinions that will hopefully be better understood after completing this study. Whether or not the local community feels that these technologies are helping them and how the investment in ICT compares to other viable investments will contribute to the development of future policies..

How will the culture and politics of the host country impact your work?

Hopefully it will have mostly a positive impact. I expect to be considered a distant relative by them not just a foreigner. There is a high level of corruption in the Dominican Republic but having grown up in Venezuela, I have experience living in this type of environments. I will deal with these problems as they arrive. By visiting two the Dominican Republic two different summers, I will be able to learn over time which community technology centers will be the best one to partner with and study and which community technology centers despite their initial promise will not be good locations for my study.

How do the resources of the host country support your project?

I will be a guest and visitor of ITLA, the Technological Institute of the Americas. I will also be working with the Office of the First Lady and its Rural Connectivity and Community Technology Center (CTC) initiative. They will not provide me with financial support but their support of my project will increase my access and the overall reception of my study.

If employing such research methods as extensive interviewing and the use of questionnaires, how will you locate your subjects?

The subjects, or the participants, will be those individuals that are contacted during my visit to a number of CTCs. By observing and contributing to the CTCs, I hope to gain its visitors’ trust and have the opportunity to survey and interview a large number of community members who regularly visit the Community Technology Centers.

Is your language facility adequate? If not, how will you accomplish your work?

Spanish is my first language. I am a fluent Spanish speaker.

What are your plans for improving you language skills, if they are not adequate at the time of application?

I do not plan to take any additional course in Spanish. I will practice my Spanish colloquially and adopt new vocabulary by reading and listening to the medial

Media Viewing Habits Survey Report (12/8/11)

Elizabeth Hedin, Idris Kamara, Heather Keelon, Sarah Komperud,

Alfonso Sintjago, Maren Stoddard, Sarah Walker.

Introduction of Issues and Survey Development

In the non-stop world of entertainment, the ways in which we access and engage with entertainment is quickly evolving.  Our group developed a survey about Media Viewing Habits and a person’s change in habits and preferred media sources within the last five years.

Our group took a multi-faceted approach to developing this survey.  First, to frame our survey questions, we defined our target as U of M undergraduate and graduate students.  Then, as a group we discussed overall themes of questions and areas of interest within media.  It was decided that our survey should focus on the kinds of media preferred, the vehicle used to consume the media, how these two factors have changed in the past five years, and how living situations affect media viewing.  Next, each group member individually contributed five questions to the preliminary survey.  Existing surveys about similar subjects were used as references for ways to write questions in a manner that will yield the most valuable information.  Next, with all of the group members’ questions amalgamated, final questions were written, sometimes as a combination of several individual questions.  We gave great consideration to the order of the questions, trying to build upon the previous question in a logical progression.  The final survey, titled Media Viewing Habits, was administered to the class on November 17, 2011.

Analysis and Results

Closed-choice options were tabulated by SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) to find frequencies and cross-tabulations, and open-choice options were coded to find prevalent themes.  We focused on differentiating the data by student status, grouping replies by undergraduate or graduate (including both Master’s and Ph.D. students) status, though a variety of other cross-tabulations are possible.

Although the sample size was not big enough to yield much statistical significance, we did discover some interesting relationships in our three main areas of questioning: media-viewing devices and methods, internet-based versus non-internet-based media, and the effect of living situation on media viewing.  Attached are data for the questions we found most interesting.

The first category of questions focused on media-viewing devices and methods. When asking respondents about media viewing devices, almost all stated they had access to television and a personal computer. Fewer respondents had access to smart phones, other mobile devices and gaming systems. Furthermore, when comparing which services respondents had personal access to today and what they had access to five years ago, the majority access to many of the services remained the same. However, there was an increase in access for services such as streaming video subscription services, digital video recorders, and smart phones. For example, only four respondents replied they had smart phone access five years ago when sixteen respondents currently have access.

When asked whether they preferred internet-based or non-internet-based media, most respondents replied that they had no preference, and of those who indicated a preference, it was split evenly between internet-based on non-internet-based.  Replies to the open-choice option indicate some of the reasons why respondents did or did not have a preference: those who preferred internet-based media tended to cite convenience, greater access, fewer commercials, and greater value for the money, whereas those who preferred non-internet-based media cited greater relaxation and problems with internet connections.  Those who indicated no preference responded that convenience was the biggest factor in determining how to view media, so they used a combination of internet and non-internet based media.  Responses to questions regarding the number of hours spent watching internet-based and non-internet-based media elucidate how these preferences are enacted in reality; see appendix for graphs of these data.

Additionally, when asked in an open-ended question how media viewing habits have changed since the introduction of watching television, movies, or other media online, the majority of respondents replied they watch more online then they have in the past. Some responses indicated this increase is due to convenience, lower costs, and ease of access on multiple viewing devices. The respondents who stated their habits only increased slightly also contributed this increase to the availability of television online. Very few responses indicated a decrease in viewing habits.

The final category of questions dealt with one’s living situation and the effect it has on media viewing habits.  The majority of respondents do not live alone, with undergraduates tending to live with non-family roommates and graduate students tending to live with either family or non-family roommates.  Few respondents lived in a home with children.  An open-choice option asked respondents to describe how their living situation affects their media viewing habits; responses were equally split between those who watch more media when living with other people and those who say their living situation has no effect on their media viewing.  Interestingly, no one reported watching less media overall as a result of living with people, although one respondent indicated that the type of media she watched was affected..  Also of interest is the language used when describing this effect; of the respondents who answered that they watch more media as a result of living with others, half of them used language that seems to blame their roommate(s) for this, stating that they “get sucked into what [roommate] was watching,” or “get hooked into watching media I otherwise wouldn’t.”

Limitations

While reviewing our survey after it had been administered we realized that we hadn’t collected gender demographics from the respondents.  That information could have potentially shown nuances that are hidden in the data due to the unbalanced sample population of our class the night our survey was administered; the majority of the sample being female.  Another limitation of our survey relating to the sample was the relatively small sample size, one group of 30 respondents, from which to draw any meaningful conclusions about media viewing habits today as compared to five years ago.

Limitations due to the survey questions themselves include a miscommunication of what information was sought after in question eight.  The phrasing of the question on the administered survey asks respondents to provide information about two separate questions within one answer.  Therefore it is not possible for us to use the data gathered from that question.

Implications and Recommendations

Our survey and others like it, i.e. studies conducted by Nielsen, report on a target population’s purchasing and media habits whose uses can reach far and wide; from research and development to marketing in areas from the entertainment industry to consumable products.

With the information gathered, it is inappropriate to make any recommendations on media viewing habits due to both the small and unbalanced sample, and infringing on people’s rights in choosing which activities to participate.  However, to improve the survey tool we recommend refining and piloting the survey questions before administering it to a larger and more balanced sample population.

Appendix A: Media Viewing Habits Survey

Demographics

1.     Which of the following best describes your student status?

□          Undergraduate

□          Graduate – Masters

□          Graduate – Doctoral

□          Non-degree seeking

2.     Which of the following best describes your age group?

□          18-22 years

□          23-27 years

□          28-32 years

□          33-40 years

□          41 year and above

Media-viewing methods and devices

We are going to ask you some questions about your media-viewing habits.  For all of these questions, we are interested only in your media-viewing habits during your personal time, i.e., in your home or on your personal mobile device.  Do not include media services or devices you have access to only at work or school.

3.     Which of the following media services do you have personal access to, and which would you like to have?  Score each media service with one of the following options:

A.    I get (or have regular personal access to) this service

B.     I don’t currently get this service, but I would like to.

C.     I don’t currently get this service and I do not want to.

D.    I don’t know.

_____              Broadcast television

_____              Cable television

_____              Internet

_____              Streaming video subscription service (ex: Netflix)

_____              Digital video recorder (DVR)

_____              Smart phone

4.     Which of the following media-capable devices do you have personal access to, and which would you like to have?  Rank each device with one of the following options:

A.    I own (or have regular personal access to) this device

B.     I don’t currently own this device, but I would like to.

C.     I don’t current own this device and I do not want to.

D.    I don’t know.

_____              Television

_____              Personal computer

_____              Smart phone

_____              Other mobile device (iPod, iPad or other tablet, or other)

_____              Gaming system (X-Box, PS3, or other)

5.     Which of the following media services and devices did you have personal access to 5 years ago (in 2006)?  Check all that apply.

□          Broadcast television

□          Cable television

□          Personal computer

□          Internet

□          Streaming video subscription service (Netflix or other)

□          Digital video recorder (DVR)

□          Smart phone

□          Other mobile device (iPod, iPad or other tablet)

□          Gaming system

6.     How has the quantity (i.e., number of hours per week) of your media-viewing habit changed in the past 5 years (since 2006)?

□          I watch more media now than I did 5 years ago.

□          I watch less media now that I did 5 years ago.

□          I watch the same amount of media now as I did 5 years ago.

7.     How much do you currently pay per month for internet and/or cable television at home?  Do not include mobile phone costs.

□          None

□          $0.01 – $20.00 per month

□          $20.01 – $40.00 per month

□          $40.01 – $60.00 per month

□          $60.01 – $80.00 month

□          More than $80.01

8.     How much do you currently pay per month for media services other than internet and/or cable at home?  This might include Netflix, Hulu, DVR How much are you willing to pay in total, per month, for entertainment media?

□          None

□          $0.01 – $10.00 per month

□          $10.01 – $20.00 per month

□          $20.01 – $30.00 per month

□          $30.01 – $40.00 month

□          More than $40.01

Internet vs. non-internet

9.     How many hours per week do you spend watching any internet-based media (i.e., streaming movies or television, Hulu, YouTube, or other)?

□          None

□          1-3 hours

□          4-6 hours

□          7-9 hours

□          10 or more hours

10.  How many hours per week do you spend watching any non-internet-based media (i.e., broadcast television, cable television, rented DVDs, other non-streamed television or movies)?

□          None

□          1-3 hours

□          4-6 hours

□          7-9 hours

□          10 or more hours

11.  Which statement best describes your preference for media viewing?

□          I prefer internet-based media over non-internet-based media.

□          I prefer non-internet-based media over internet-based media.

□          I have no preference between internet-based and non-internet-based media.

□          I do not watch any media.

12.  In question #10, you identified your preference for media viewing.  Why do you have this preference?

13.  Since the introduction of watching television, movies, or other media online, have your media viewing habits changed?  How so?

Living situation

14.  Which of the following best describes your living situation?

□          I live alone.

□          I live with one or more non-family members.

□          I live with one or more family members.

□          I live with a combination of family and non-family members.

15.  Do you live with children under the age of 18?

□          Yes

□          No

□          I live alone

16.  How does your living arrangement as described in questions #13 and #14 affect your media viewing habits (i.e., the amount of media, the type of media, the device(s) you use to watch media, or other)?

Open-ended Question Responses:

Question 12

Question 13:

Question 16

College of Education and Human Development Graduate Students’

Opinions about Open Access Journals

December 7, 2011

Most traditional academic journals, also known as toll-access journals, are accessible to the libraries that can afford to pay an annual subscription fee to a series of companies that sell journal access packages. Journal articles and subscriptions to individual journals can also be paid by either institutions or students, yet despite the possible contribution of many articles to broader society, they are not openly accessible, and this is particularly a problem for individuals who would like to contribute despite having limited financial resources or access to a subscribed institution. While information and communication technologies (ICT) has increased the reach of information, journal subscription fees have risen sharply in recent years (200% over inflation), resulting in many universities, including top tier research institutions, reducing their number of subscriptions (http://righttoresearch.org/).

Unfortunately, as subscriptions are cancelled by universities, the number of journal articles that researchers at that particular university are able to access decreases. Therefore, publishing in expensive toll-access journals can lead to a number of consequences which are both detrimental to the scholar who publishes an article and to those that are hoping to learn from the article or build on its findings. It affects the writer in terms of the visibility and impact of his or her work, while it affects the reader in the possible duplication of efforts. It can also result in the inability of the researcher to produce the most comprehensive or beneficial literature review, ignoring points of view that would have complemented the writer’s research. Fortunately, more information is becoming openly available, albeit much of it of limited quality.

To reduce these problems increasingly journals have decided to publish their articles openly by becoming an Open Access Journal (OAJ) or by allowing authors to retain some author’s rights and for the authors to be able to place a copy of the article that is accessible to the public through either their personal blog or their institution’s library website. By publishing openly, individuals across society could quickly access the scholar’s work and the benefit from understanding its implications, yet why is it that OAJ account for only ten percent of the total number of journals, according to recent Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) statistics (http://project-soap.eu/)? Part of the reason for the limited number of OAJs is because of the difficulties that a journal can face when trying to change its business model. Having a high quality peer review system and distributing articles to readers is very expensive. Editing is a time consuming and expensive process and should be adequately remunerated. However, because of ICTs, the cost of distributing articles to readers has been significantly reduced to the extent that they are usually only a minor expense. The rapid decrease of cost per calculation has reduced the price of hosting a site with the bandwidth needed for a journal to even less than $20 a month, depending on the journal. Being aware of the decreasing costs of running a journal, it is hard to justify the cost inflation of journal articles. In recent years, some scientist have promoted OAJ as an alternate journal business model, and have begun to campaign for increase openness within academia.

In particular the natural sciences have promoted an open access policy. The Arxiv (http://arxiv.org/) for example has over 719,000 academic pieces that are publically available and are published only months after the findings are obtained, instead of the longer periods of time of one or two year of administrative and editing processes that are needed to publish in more traditional journals. Particularly in fields such as information technologies, including the College of Education and Human Development’s (CEHD) program in educational technology, if an article takes two years to become available, that article is likely already out of date, and as such it is no longer of the highest quality or usability (For example the iPad version 1 is less than 2 years old). Unfortunately, while the natural sciences have promoted openness to increase the rate of innovation and their productivity, the social sciences and the humanities have attached more strongly to the traditional toll-access journal system. These focus groups tried to answer the why to that statement. Why would fields such as education, which hopes to improve the lives of others through their work and are not as concerned as the natural sciences in protecting patents, continue to primarily publish in traditional toll-access journals? With Open Access Week 2011 approaching, the UMN libraries decided to host a series of events (http://z.umn.edu/openaccess2011) for which I was asked to discuss my involvement on Reconsidering Development, an open access student run journal based at the University of Minnesota where I work as an assistant web-editor (http://journal.ipid-umn.org).  With this in mind, to supplement my presentation, I organized a series of four focus groups to discuss in greater detail CEHD students’ opinions about Open Access Journals

Recruiting of Participants

An invitation was sent to students two weeks before the focus group with a flier (http://z.umn.edu/oa2011poster) which directed them to the Right to Research Coalition website (http://righttoresearch.org/) as well as a Doodle poll where CEHD graduate students could register to attend to one of the four focus group sessions. The three in-person focus groups were held Thursday, October 20, Friday October 21, and October 24. An internet focus group was offered so that participants could join from October 21 to the 24 and answer the same questions in an asynchronous way ( http://oafocusgroup2011.freeforums.org). Another online focus group which answered a very similar set of question had also been held online from October 11 to October 14. Having held a total of 5 focus groups with CEHD graduate students discussing their opinions of Open Access (OA), this study feels that various saturation points have been reached and a subsequent study would benefit more in asking CEHD faculty members instead of students about their opinions regarding OAJ.

Participants did not seem to have any problems using the Doodle poll (z.umn.edu/openpoll2011). A couple of participants commented that they were attracted by the statements on the flier and having visited the included website before deciding to attend. A concern when selecting participants was that, despite regularly using open resources on the internet, participants did not generally consider themselves knowledgeable enough in the subject to openly share their opinion. Based on this concern, it is perhaps not surprising that various participants were members of the Learning Technology (LT) program within the Curriculum and Instruction (CI) department in CEHD. Purposely selecting participants, and sending every single participant a personalized email likely contributed to the high attendance rate. While there were only limited times when participants could attend a focus group and an email with a flier was sent to less than 100 students, 14 students signed up to attend the face to face (F2F) focus groups, while 10 students signed up to attend the online version of the focus group. The online focus group was held through freeforums.com. This site allows me to create user accounts and provide users with anonymity. This was mentioned to them before participating. In contrast to the online focus group, anonymity is not possible within the face to face version of the focus group. Out of the 14 scheduled face to face participants, one did not attend, resulting in 13 participants or two focus groups of 4 individuals and one focus group of 5 individuals. The online focus group had only two responses. Eight of the 10 students did not respond to the questions. However, based on the tone of their initial email response it is possible that some of these participants did not intend to participate online from the beginning. A number of them had mentioned that they couldn’t attend in person but would try to participate online. This could be interpreted as a way of expressing that they will likely be unable to participate. One of the two who participated mentioned that the questions scared him at first because being able to see all of them he felt it would take more than the time he could afford to share to answer them. However, after completing them, similar to the face to face participants, he expressed having enjoyed the focus group. Each face to face focus group lasted for two hours.

Below I summarized their responses into themes that were brought up repeatedly throughout the focus groups. In addition, for a visual overview of the different themes that were discussed in the focus group you can see or download a PowerPoint from the following link: http://www.slideshare.net/fastfonz/presentation-open-accessweek2011. It includes embedded audio clips of participants for most of the questions.

Defining Open: How do you define open, in terms of information? What qualities would you include in what it is to be open?

Students had similar opinions about the meaning of open. To them it meant that materials would get reused. A journal would be available from a computer and a mobile phone. They felt that it an article was open to the public, then it would reach a broader audience. Open access journals were also seen as helping individuals who are not academics to publish, allowing also for individuals to become a knowledge dispenser, as well as a knowledge receiver. One of the participants expressed how Open Access Journals helped increase transparency in the knowledge development process; “I can access it anywhere”. While to some participants it seemed that openness was linked mainly to greater accessibility, to others it included some of the other elements discussed within the open content literature and the benefit of being able to redistribute, remix, reuse, and revise information. Most of the participants expressed not being familiar with topics such as open education resources, open content, open data, and open courseware, but that they had found them interesting and were supportive of them after understanding them. In the online forum they were asked to visit links that explained the concepts after answering the question, then they were asked a subsequent question based on that experience.

Extent of the Influence: To what extent is the ability to access information freely on the internet influencing the type of information you consume? (not at all, some (little), a lot, a great deal)?

When asked to what extent having access influenced their research and education, most of them expressed an unwillingness to pay to read the news. While many used the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times, they used the free portions of the site or accessed them through the university. Despite her interest in the paper, a student expressed her unwillingness to purchase the Wall Street Journal. By being open content was more accessible and influential. In terms of their academic work, a couple of students mentioned that they would reorganize their project if they could not access a particular source or simply dismiss it and change it for a different one. For one student, if a site required subscription, then they decided that it was not worth examining. Students use what is available, and mentioned that without a UMN ID they would not be able to have the same access.

How is Access Important: To what extent is the lack of access to information a problem? (not at all, some (little), a lot, a great deal)?

This question was somewhat related to the one above. In general lack of access led to either students borrowing access from someone or for them disregarding the source and attempt to find a similar article. They expressed how at the University of Minnesota they have more access than at smaller schools. There also seems to be a growing lack of patience with internet articles, and a student mentioned becoming frustrated after losing twenty minutes trying to get through all the security and sign up requirements when accessing an article off-site. The need to sign up to access even if the article was openly available was problematic and a source of frustration for some students. However, they felt that not having access to one article was not necessarily a major problem since; they could read more articles and find other studies. There seems to be a problem with sorting out sources and finding the best pieces of information.

Impact of Open Access Outside of Academia

While it was not its own question, many students expressed a concern about the impact that open access could have outside of higher education institutions. One of the participants mentioned how her father was able to learn more about her mother’s medical condition thanks to Open Access articles. A student from Africa mentioned his frustration of only being able to share a few articles with students. With internet being a privilege where he worked as a teacher abroad he would print a couple of openly accessible articles and share them with his students. Various of the students attending worried about not being able to access articles once they graduated and how important and helpful it could be to access these materials as an educator, a researcher, or an employee of an NGO. Organizations with a smaller budget will be more handicapped as into what they can afford to purchase. A student from Asia mentioned how there is a black market for articles in his home country and how it was more important for him, and more beneficial for society, if people were able to pursue their interests and satisfy their curiosity instead of limiting themselves to whatever the local institution can purchase. As mentioned before, there was also a concern regarding what could be accessed at a smaller university and how it was probably impacting students’ quality of education.

Generational Differences: To what extent do you think there is a generational difference in the support for openness, and open access journals?

While students seem to think that professors were not against the idea of open access, they argued that they seemed to be less aware of how it works or less optimistic about open access journals’ potential. However, students did not think of it so much as a generational issue, but perhaps also a disciplinary issue. Students then mentioned some of their problems with open access, including the difficulty of finding quality articles. A student mentioned how her professor warned her against using open articles. Another student wondered if younger students who grew up with the internet would be supportive of the toll-access model. In general, they felt that professors within CEHD were not very supportive of open access journals but that they encouraged students to publish in traditional journals. Trying to improve their marketability and obtain a tenure track job, many doctoral students feel that therefore it may be best to primarily focus on toll-access journals because of their prestige and because of the recommendations of their professors. One student, however, argued that it was important for students and professors to know that they can reserve most of their copyright and that many publishers are allowing faculty members who want to to publish while retaining many of their author rights.

Sustainability of OAJ: To what extent do you consider Open Access Journals to be sustainable? What do you think needs to happen for them to be sustainable?

One of the most common critiques of OAJ was their quality. To many students this is linked to them being free and a sense that they would accept articles that would not be accepted elsewhere. For OAJ to be sustainable it is therefore important to develop a funding model that allows them to pay for the staff needed in order to retain the quality of the journal. While in many journals the editing staff is composed largely by some of its readers who work pro-bono, understanding the importance of editing the work of their colleagues, journals have other expense such as calling for articles and organizing who need to edits which article. In some cases reviewers are paid. For the quality to be maintained and for OAJ to be sustainable, one student argued that perhaps OAJ could imitate internet games that function under the 1% or 2% models and obtain valuable funds and human resources in this way. Other students wonder if OAJs could sustain themselves by asking individuals for donations. Overall, they felt that money needs to come from somewhere and that asking individuals to pay to publish does not seem fair, “they should pay us to publish”.

Public vs. Private: Is there a difference between privately sponsored research and publically sponsored research in terms of access by the public?

Whereas some companies sponsor their own research, participants felt that if the public is paying for research then it should be available to them. A few students argued, that in their opinion, the medical field had done a great job in becoming as open as possible. NIH grants require that findings are released publically. A couple of participants were aware of this change and felt that education research, and research in other fields should be open to the public.  A student joked about why restricting access to education research seemed ridiculous and to go against the accepted aims of the field; “We have to keep our secrets about teaching and learning, nobody can know.” One participant turned the question around and asked, “In terms of access, should anything be private?” while another participant asked “is there anything that shouldn’t be public?” In addition, another participant mentioned that even sensitive data should be public because criminals will likely obtain access regardless of official controls on access. One participant mentioned that if private research is not open then companies could simply discard trials that were not positive and publish only the trials that were beneficial for them.

To what extent do you feel openness increases the quality of scholarship? (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree)

Concerns about quality were likely the most negative attitudes students had regarding Open Access Journals. “The internet is filled with junk” was a common opinion and filtering this junk was a common concern. A student from Eastern Europe mentioned how she had difficulties accessing articles back home. In one instance, she found an archive with articles, but as she read through it, she noticed that it had not been accurately translated. This concern with accuracy and reliability was very common and led to one student repeating the advice given to her by her undergraduate instructor not to trust open access journals. However, a few students pointed out that they had used open access articles for their recent presentations and how some open journals have the same level of quality as toll-access journal articles. On a related theme another student argued that “if everybody was doing it, then there would be quality control. You want your stuff to look good anyway.” Another student also pointed out that while some online publications may publish anything they obtain, other open access journals have a very traditional peer review system. Because of the ease with which a site can be hosted, a journal with low quality can exist despite having a low quality product, yet other open journals can and do have the same level of quality as traditional toll-access journals. However, participants felt that many OAJ do not have the same level of credibility as traditional toll-access journals and, when most or all of the major journals in a field are subscription based, it is more likely that the faculty members, particularly older faculty members, will continue to publish in and advocate the use of these journals.

Moral Obligation: To what extent do you feel opening or increasing access to information is a moral obligation for educators, for the CEHD?

This question originated organically from the first focus group and was asked to the rest of the focus groups afterwards. One participant repeated various times during the focus group that access to education and knowledge should be a basic human right. In her opinion, without open access we are contributing to social reproduction as only the institutions where individuals with wealthier backgrounds attend will be able to access the most recent and relevant information. In her opinion piracy sometimes is warranted because we all have a responsibility to serve the common good. Another participant argued that if people felt that “they needed to follow unethical avenues; we need to restructure the way information is accessed.” During the focus group, information piracy was discussed as a social ill rather than an individual ill. Participants concluded that they needed “to make it possible for anyone who is seeking information to do so ethically… reworking the way we think…” Because of the moral benefits of openness and its relationship to the institutional goals of the University of Minnesota and the College of Education and Human Development one participant felt that the university itself should lead this transformation by encouraging faculty members and students to use and publish in Open Access Journals; “Academic institutions, humans, have a moral obligation to connect with each other and tell their stories”.

Innovation: To what extent do you think open access encourages or discourages innovation?

For most students open access would increase innovation because researchers could more easily develop accurate literature reviews and build upon the work of others rather than reinventing the wheel. One of the participants, explained it in the following way: “You see, we are doing something funny, we are trying to discover really good things, but then we put them in a box and lock them up. There are very wonderful things that haven’t been read…. I tried to access this article, and couldn’t access it. I thought this guy did a very good job, but what does that mean, I just forget it. I can’t pay the 39 dollars.” In this sense he and other students argued that open access contributed to innovation. Other students argued that it would increase competition and, as a consequence, journals would have to find ways to be innovative in order to increase their audience. Another student mentioned that capitalism and innovation thrive on competition so there would not only be innovation but that would also allow them to generate revenue and become sustainable. In conclusion, “if authors aren’t innovative (and if publishers aren’t innovative), readers will gravitate to other authors/publishers” Related to innovation, another student felt that open acess would result in a greater number of voices that would be heard internationally. Currently the World Bank and other major international organizations publish their voice, their viewpoint openly, but other voices are more silent. Openness would increase the visibility of other voices and, as a consequence, more countries may enact innovative policies and be themselves more innovative.

Future: Projecting yourself two, five and ten years into the future what role do you see open access playing for academia and society?

When discussing the future of OAJ, a few students pointed to how the natural sciences are at the forefront of the Open Access Movement, while the humanities, social sciences, and fields such as education are behind the curve. They argued that this is common with these fields as they are less technology oriented. However, in the future, they seemed to think that open access would likely be more commonplace. One of the students mentioned the rate of change would depend on key players in the various disciplines and their choices. Regarding quality concerns, students generally agreed that over time the quality of open access journals would likely increase. They questioned each other about how this could be done. “How were the other journals doing it… I just don’t know but it’s doable.” To various students it seemed as if the rate of change could snowball if more and more prestigious journals changed their financial structure or if authors increasingly became worried about being less cited if they only published in toll-access journals. “If everyone is invested in it, there would be a quality control. You want your stuff to look good anyway.” According to various participants, open access will probably develop layers or levels and through this system, some layers would use terms that are accessible to all while other layers would be more complex in terminology.

Choices: Which one of these three journals would you choose as the site through which to submit your article and what are some of the reasons you would chose this journal (please indicate what would be the most important aspect in making this decision)?

Despite the frequently expressed support for open access, CEHD graduate students were mostly concerned with publishing in a high impact journal or a “quality” journal at least during the first years of their careers. After obtaining tenure, they felt that they could more easily publish in open access journals. This was a very common statement, even among those that felt that open access should be a right. One of the few students that preferred an alternate route argued that her alternate route was not just in terms of publishing but because of the “academic game” and that she felt that she could accomplish more with her career elsewhere. To her, education should be about serving people, but writing for journals rather than the broader public was, she felt, a poor time investment. While she had been interested in academia before, the linking of success to publishing in prestigious journal steered her away from the profession.

Most other students, however, planned on becoming academics or publishing in their future careers. It is therefore important to create a strong professional image. One student mentioned that she would likely look at what the tradition is in a field. In a field with well-established traditions, even if it saddened her, she would likely publish in traditional toll access journals. Students expressed their interest in supporting open access journals, but at the same time were conscious of how important it is strengthen their CV. They stated that perhaps, over time, as the general trend changes, they will be able to publish more in open access journals, thereby supporting the initiative while not hurting their careers. Should open access journals become more accepted and gain prestige, students felt confident about the future of open access publishing and their ability to participate in it; “A hierarchy of journal prestige always exists.  Researchers are always trying to get their articles accepted by the most prestigious journal they can.”

Sophia.org 

Project Part 3: Exploring and Analyzing Data (40 points)

December 12, 2011

How did you come up with the idea? (2 points)

Computer enhanced learning has increased over the years. Currently online college courses account for close to 30% of student enrollment and has experience an average annual growth of over 10% per year since 2002 (http://sloanconsortium.org). While traditional higher education institutions have grown in average by 2% per year, including a growth of 1.2% from the fall of 2008 to the fall of 2009, in contrast online education grew by 21.1% from the fall of 2008 to the fall of 2009 alone.  Not only is formal online education growing, but information online education has also grown at a rapid pace. YouTube was created in 2005 by three former PayPal employees and it rapidly transformed into the second largest search engine experiencing a rate of growth of 65,000 new videos every 24 hours. While many of these videos are only seen by a handful of people, others are seen by hundreds of thousands and millions of users. Independent educators have seen decided to create educational videos to share freely online for anyone to use and benefit from their teaching methods and experience. One of the best known examples of these independent teaching initiatives has been Khan’s Academy by Salman Khan. Over the period of a few years Salman has created over two thousand videos covering hundreds of subjects and having thousands of viewers per video. Khan’s Academy has seen partnered with the Gates Foundation and was one of the inspirations for Don Smithmier, the CEO of Sophia for leaving his position as VP of Capella University to fund Sophia.org as an online educational packet sharing site were any individuals could develop an education packet covering an accepted educational topic, which then could be used by anyone over the internet and rated for quality by users and other instructors. Sophia.org potential is to decentralize and personalize learning by creating a site were hundreds of inspired individuals can openly share their knowledge and create educational packets.

Sophia.org, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, provides students all around the state and the world with the possibility of improving both their education and teaching skills by using and creating educational packets. A site such as Sophia, where developers can create educational packets that include videos, PowerPoints, essays, among other resources is now possible partly because of these recent technological changes and the implications of the continuously decreasing costs of processing power and computer size per dollar, the possibilities to which information and communication (ICT) technologies. As the price per calculation further decreases, and programmers build on the experience of other programmers, particularly when they are building on an openly available Open Source Software project, it becomes difficult to predict how these initiatives will impact education. There are many projects such as Sophia that are increasingly being used by learners and educators. So far, it is too early to tell which of these projects or companies will become the dominant players in this rapidly expanding market. Even perhaps more difficult that knowing which of these projects will become the next Dot Com success or Dot Com bust, is to measure what impact these initiatives are having in the educational achievement of its users. Because of the lack of understanding of their impact, it is important to further study and analyze these projects. This paper attempts to take on part of that challenge by helping to finding out more additional information about Sophia.org. It is important to better understand what is the appeal this site and learn a bit more about how it is being used by teachers and learners. While many questions would be best answered through a qualitative analysis, and through the use of other methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, among others forms of data collection, this paper looks at the quantitative data about the site and its resources is openly available on the internet and asks how this data can also help in improve our understanding of Sophia. Sophia was chosen because of my interest in the general area of study as well as due to the geographical proximity of Sophia. I had the opportunity of visiting Sophia.org earlier this semester to learn more about their project.

• What are your hypotheses (e.g., how you think the two samples will compare)?  Please write these hypotheses out in words AND using appropriate symbols.  You should include both a null and alternative hypothesis.      (2 points)

Using primarily data that is available to anyone that visits the site, this paper, compares 60 educational packets from two categories (Humanities and Sciences) that can be found by users visiting Sophia.org. These categories were created to guide both users and creators to where they can better locate the packet they are searching for. Sophia.org employs a taxonomy organizational system, which among many others includes 10 different major categories, two of which are Humanities and Sciences. While the project originally planned to compare Sophia.org with a different organization such as UDemy.com, Wikieducator.org or AcademicEarth.com, for the purposes of this assignment, the data gathered and compared is all from Sophia.org and was obtained by selecting two of the main categories at random and then comparing the popularity or the number of visits in a month Science packets had in comparison to humanities packets. The null hypothesis for this study is that both packets have in average the same number of visitors per month or H₀: µ = µ₀  (Null Hypothesis) which is to say that difference in the number of visitors between both samples is not statistically significant. In contrast, the alternate hypothesis argues that in average the number of visitors per month to Science packets is greater than the number of visits to Humanities packets or that vs. H_a: µ₁ > µ₀ (One-sided – Alternate Hypothesis). Since the packets are exclusive from each other, the samples are independent. To find the relationship I therefore used SPSS to calculate the p-value from a one-sided independent t-test.

• What is the reason for your hypotheses (e.g., why do you think the samples will differ in the way you predict)?  (2 points)

After randomly deciding on two categories to compare, I access the list of resources that were classified under each of the two categories. After a basic overview of the data, it appeared that the Science packets were reviewed more often, and visited more than the humanities packets. While there is no way of know whether the Science packets began to be developed first and therefore had a higher total number of viewers per packet or if one only a few packets that were very popular and had a large number of viewers were skewing the results, it was likely that in addition to the Science packets having in average a greater number of viewer per packet (statistic that has been collected by the site for each packet as soon as it is posted) that they also had a significantly higher number of viewers or users per month. While this project could not make comparison using the historical data and the average growth rate of the resources of each category it could collect information from a sample of resources of both categories and conduct and statistical test to find if there is a statistically significant difference in the degree of use of these two packet categories during the month the statistics were collected. After calculating this difference, if the alternate hypothesis is supported by the data comparison, it could therefore be argued that there is a greater demand or need for educational packets in the Sciences than there is in the Humanities? While after collecting the data, it appeared that this difference was there, but an statistical t-test was needed to determine the extent of this relation.

• How did you gather your data?  (2 points)

The data was gathered over a period of a month. While the project originally planned on collecting data from two different websites or projects and then comparing the usage of a similar type of educational packet from two different places (Use of history packets in UDemy.com vs. Sophia.org vs. AcademicEarth.com), after attempting to collect comparable data for multiple sites for a number of weeks, in the end, the data shared to the public by different programs was too different for an statistical comparison to be possible. Whereas UDemy.com focused on the number of registered users for a course, and some of the courses were only accessible for a price, Sophia.org does not require the user to register to use the resource and it focuses instead on the number of people who visit the webpage of the educational packet. In the case of Sophia.org a visitor may not intend to use the packet but may be instead reading to find out if it’s useful, whereas because of the need to register to use certain resources within UDemy.com, the user is more likely to use it. Because of these differences, as well as similar differences of other programs, this study decided to focus only on Sophia.

Once that decision was made, obtain the data required accessing the site and selecting the two categories then adding to a spreadsheet information about the top 30 packets that appeared when clicking on the category. It is possible that the website has an algorithm that determines which resources are displayed first. I was unable to therefore randomly select the samples. However, since the same criteria was used for selecting the Sciences and the Humanities packets the samples are therefore comparable. They also represent only a sample of what is available for each category. Once the 30 resources on each category were selected, I entered the resource and recorded a series of variables including: type of packet, packet name, packet URL, number of packet views, number of packet shares, number of packet followers, packet rating, number of packet ratings, copyright license used for the resource, Sophia user score of the packet creator, number of follower to the creator of the packet, and the number of people the creator of the packet is following.

Within these, various variables were collected in two occasions, collecting a value for September and a value for October. To improve the quality and reliability of the data the data for a whole month with be collected over a number of hours in a single day. The variables that were collected twice for the purposes of a future comparison were: number of packet views (Sept, Oct), number of packet shares (Sept, Oct), packet rating (Sept, Oct), and the average number of ratings (Sept, Oct). As mentioned before, once the packets were selected, gathering the data was single as the data is openly available.

Graphs and Descriptive Statistics (10 points)

Statistics for Science Packets:

OVERALL SHAPE: The three curves are unimodal, yet they do not resemble normal distributions. The three curves are skewed to the right. However, it seems that the science packet curves have a broader range than the humanities curve. The shape can be visualized in greater detail in the graphs below. The shape can be considered to be closer to a reverse j-curve than a normal distribution. This is probably because of the low entry cost of producing an educational packet. There is a large quantity of packages but there many of them have a small number of viewers.

Shape: The curve is unimodal. It could overtime look more as a normal distribution curve, yet because based on current trends it will likely increasingly resemble a reverse j-curve. If packets that were not visited were deleted over time, then the distribution would likely be different. Is skewed to the right.

Center / Location: It has a mean value of 615 which is to say that according to the statistics collected in September, out of the top 30 packets, the average number of views per packet was 615. The median or the value which is in between half of the value (half greater, half smaller) was 435.50 which indicates that there are some outliers to the right that are contributing to the skewness of the curve.

Spread / Variability: The curve has a range of 2178 and a standard deviation of 474.937. While the range includes over a 2000 viewers value difference, most values are located closer to the mean or a value of 615.

Shape: This curve is also unimodal. The curve is also skewed to the right, yet over the past month there seems to have been an increase in the range and an increase in the mean. Interestingly, there is also an increase in the standard deviation.

Center / Location: Unlike I originally predicted, this curve seems to more closely resemble a standard deviation and may be an indication of future trends, yet the mean (803.33) and the median (607) are very far from the maximum value.

Spread / Variability: It has a greater range than the previous month. The range is now of over 2300 views. The standard deviation also increased to 561.387 from 474.93. Along with this change, the variable has as expectedly increased.

Shape: When comparing the differences or the growth from September to October in views of science related videos, the curve continues to be skewed but the values are much smaller. It looks close to a standard curve and less like a reverse j-curve, a change that was noticed when analyzing the October views curve after analyzing the September views curve. The curve is once again skewed to the right. The curve is unimodal.

Center / Location: The center of the curve can be determined by the mean or median. As with the other two graphs the mode was not a relevant value since in two of the graphs no values were repeated.  The mean is of 187.93 while the median is of 142.5.

Spread / Variability: Unlike the other two graphs, the range of this graph is substantially smaller. Since it only represents the viewers over a month this is to be expected. The range is barely over 500 viewers. There is a much smaller variance than the other two graphs for Science packets, and the standard deviation is also much smaller, having a value of 134.56

Statistics for Humanities Packets:

Shape: While there are also 30 packets for the humanities graph, the graph is substantially more skewed (to the right). One outlier is having a major impact on the spread of the graph. This greatly affects the shape as the curve also resembles a reverse j-curve. The curve is unimodal. It does not resemble a normal distribution.

Center / Location: For this graph the median is a better indicator of the center than the mean. The use of the median as the most accurate center is due to the degree to which this curve is skewed. This curve has a mean of 383.5 and a median value of 104.

Spread / Variability: The variance of this curve is greater than the variance of any of the Science packet curves. This curve has a range of 3733 with a maximum value of 3737 and a large standard deviation of 726 despite half of the values being below 104.

Shape: This graph is the most skewed of all graphs. It is also skewed to the right and it also resembles a reverse j-curve more than a normal distribution curve. The curve is unimodal. There is again a very clear outlier which may or may not be indicative of a trend. It is possible that very high quality or valued Humanities packets obtain a much higher visibility than the other Humanities packets. The collection of future packets in the future as the population increase make help answer this question.

Center / Location: As with the previous graph, the most adequate unit of center for this graph is the media (127 views). While with a normal curve the mean may be a more adequate statistical variable, in this case having such a distant outlier influencing the curve, the median is more indicative of the center than the mean (481 views).

Spread / Variability: The variability of this curve is the most extensive having a range of 4616 views. The variance is also the most extensive as well as the standard deviation. While half of the values are below 127, the standard deviation is of 895.90 views.

Shape: This curve is also much skewed to the right and also resembles a j-curve although to a lesser extent than the two other curves for Humanities packets. Since this curve represents the difference, it has a smaller center and range of values. As with the rest of the curve, this curve is unimodal. It does not resemble a normal distribution.

Center / Location: For this curve the median is again more indicative of the center than the mean.  The mean value is of 97.8 views, while the median is of 32.5 views. As with the other curves, the mode is not practically significant since there are few or no values repeated for all six curves.

Spread / Variability: Being a curve based on the difference or the change in views from September to October of Humanities packets its range, standard deviation, and variance are small than the other two curve for the Humanities packets. It has a range of 894 views and a standard deviation of 172.32 views.

Verifying Necessary Data Conditions (4 points)

The data analyzed in this assignment is grouped in two independent pairs. When conducting a t-test it is important to have a large sample size. The larger than sample sizes the more indicate they are of the population distribution and the smaller the sample error. Some samples of populations resemble a normal distribution while others do not. In the cases discussed above, most of them resembled a reverse j-curve, as the number of cases decreases quickly when plotted by the number of viewers. Another problem with the data collected is that there are strong outliers particularly when looking at the Humanities data curves. Despite having had a sample size of 30 (usually consider large) because of the high level of skewness, having more cases would have been beneficial. Having mentioned some of the problems with using this data, I will now test for significant relationships between the two variables, Humanities to Science packets, yet it is important to keep in mind that the data is skewed and while part of the selection was randomized, since items were selected from a website with its own classification rules, those rules may have negatively influenced the selection process. However, many other variables were controlled for: the data has been collected from the same site, the site became live and started counting views for both categories simultaneously, and the selection rules of one group were exactly the same as the selection rules of the other group.

Conducting a hypothesis test (10 points)

A one-sided independent t-test was conducted to test for significant relationships between the variables.

Based on the results of the hypothesis test, do you reject or fail to reject Ho?  Why?  Do you feel your results are statistically significant?  Are they practically significant?  What is the p-value?  Interpret the p-value in your own words. You discuss the results of your hypothesis test.  What was the p-value?  Interpret the p-value in your own words.  Based on the results of the hypothesis test, do you reject or fail to reject Ho?  Why? Are the results statistically significant?  Are they practically significant?  (4 points)

Because of some of the differences in the variance of the data, I did not assume that they are from the same population. As such, the p-values were calculated with “equal variances not assumed”. The p-values obtained are .149, .102, .028. Since this was a one-sided t-test, those values can be divided by 2, but this also divides the alpha-level from .05 to .025 for significance. According to these p-values we can reject the null hypothesis when we compare the difference in the total number of viewers from Sept to Oct as the p-value is of .014 which is to say that in 1.4% of the time the conditions needed for the null hypothesis to be true are there. The p-value or probability values indicate how likely we are of obtaining a test statistics as extreme as the one obtained in this test. The other p-values obtained .075 and .051 are very close to the alpha-level yet, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected as it could result in a type 1 error.

The null hypothesis is rejected based on the results of the third t-test, yet the null hypothesis cannot be rejected based on the other two results that compared the total views from October and September for Humanities and Science packets. Because of the extent to which the values were skewed more cases would been beneficial to finding out if the first two test could also be significant. They were both very close to another commonly used alpha value of .10. However, using an alpha-value of .05, only the difference between the total number of views from September to October between Humanities and Science packets was significant. This is partly visible in the means of both types of packets. Humanities packets had a mean of 97.8 while the Science packets had a mean of 187.9. However similar ranges of difference were also visible in the mean for the total number of viewers. Yet, we can only safely conclude that having a p-value of .028, it appears that they number of views of Science packets is increasing statistically significantly faster than the total number of views of Humanities packets. Therefore, because of how unlike it is for this values to happen without, we can reject the null hypothesis –  H₀: µ = µ₀  (Null Hypothesis) and accept the alternate hypothesis – H_a: µ₁ > µ₀ (One-sided – Alternate Hypothesis) which as a one sided test has a p-value of .014. More cases are needed to have be certain that the other differences are or are not significant. To avoid a type 1 error, I cannot reject the null hypothesis with the other two tests, but I may be committing a type 2 error and would benefit from increasing the number of cases.

These results are also practically significant. It is clear that some types of packages are visited more often than others and this difference is linked to their category. While this difference may also be linked to their rating, it seems that more individuals visit Sophia to view and possibly use Science packets. This may be related to the relationship between computer science and mathematics and more directly to the relationship of the Open Source Software Movement to the Open Education Resource Movement. While it is not possible to determine this relationship from the data, understanding this difference could lead some business to market Humanities materials more aggressively to try to differentiate themselves, or have the opposite reaction and stop or reduce the production of Humanities materials so that the quality of the resources that are more likely to be used increases, the quality of Sophia increases, and marginal, low-quality products are discarded.

• Based on the results of your hypothesis test, what kind of error could you have made?  Please explain, and indicate just how you might control for this kind of error.  (3 points)

As previously explained because of the skewness of the data, more cases would have helped in increasing the validity of the t-test results, yet despite not assuming equal variances, the results of the third test are clearly significant. Since I selected an alpha level of .05, the other two test with results of .149 and .101 were not significant. While the .149 value would not have been significant if the alpha level was of .1, the .101 result could have been seen as significant or could have been determined either way. Yet, it may have resulted in inappropriately rejecting the null hypothesis and committing a type 1 error. It is also possible that not enough cases were included and had more cases been included both of those values would have been significant. If this is the case, then type 2 errors may have taken place, yet without further testing, this conclusion cannot be reached. The only conclusion that can be reached from the data using a .05 alpha level is that the third test was statistically significant and therefore it is appropriate to reject the third null hypothesis.

• A confidence interval is automatically generated when you conduct a t-test.  Please indicate what this interval is and how it should be interpreted.  (2 points)

The confidence interval is used to estimate the reliability of the data or the relationship between the sample estimates and the population estimate. For this test, I obtained the confidence intervals mentioned below. The greater the confidence level (usually it is either: 90%, 95%, or 99%) the greater the range of possible values. Confidence regions can help indicated if there are likely sampling errors as well as help indicate if one estimate for a quantity is unreliable, and as such if there are also others that may be unreliable.

Conclusion and Summary (8 points)

Did you discover anything that surprised you when you analyzed the data?  Do you think the results would have been different if you had bigger sample sizes?  If you had to do the project again, how would you do it differently?

You summarize your project and include some mention of how you came up with your idea, how you collected your data, and what you found when you explored and analyzed your data.  (3 points)

After collecting the data and analyzing the samples, we can conclude that there is a relationship between the types of packets that are viewed by users most often. As previously mentioned, this may provide a market advantage for those that produce high quality Humanities packets, or more likely lead for business to consider expanding their Science packets since there seems to be a greater use and demand for these packets. This is not to say Humanities packets should generally be discarded, but only that currently they are less viewed than Science packets. This is not a surprise as Khan’s Academy, one of the inspirations for Sophia.org primarily focuses on Science packets. In addition, the university that began the Open CourseWare Movement by opening their courses to the public is also a Science packets oriented institution. Sophia.org is experiencing the same trend and it may be due to Science packets not being as contextual as Humanities packets. Humanities packets may be more political and site specific. In addition, Humanities instructors tend to not be as technological oriented and innovation oriented as Science instructors. Sophia.org itself may be capitalizing of this trend as they recently began offering a paid service of over 20,000 math only videos to supplement classroom and home school instruction. The findings of this study were helpful in illustrating this trend.

• You discuss any shortcomings of the methods you used to gather data.  (3 points)

Unfortunately, being only in its first public year, despite the rapid growth of the site, there are only a limited number of packets within the Sophia website. Because of the small number of packets, the packets are more indicate or more closely resemble the population, but they were selected via the ranking of the website instead of a randomizing process. While the categories were randomly selected, the site classification also influence the data selection process.

• You talk about how you would do the project differently if you were to do it over again (2 points)

If this project was conducted again, additional data would be gathered. In addition, I would communicate with Sophia.org so that they would allow me to access their site analytics. While I collected the data that was openly available in a per month basis, this data is collected every day by the Sophia.org servers. Having access to their servers and site analytics would increase the depth and quality of the study. Another path to follow is to possible compare a different site or more categories. However, as I experienced initially when constructing this study, the differences in how sites are organized makes it difficult to compare between sites. Waiting until more data is available would help to more comprehensively develop a study of Sophia.org.

Project Part 3: Exploring and Analyzing Data (40 points)

12/2/11

How did you come up with the idea? (2 points)

Computer enhanced learning has increased over the years. Currently online college courses account for close to 30% of student enrollment and has experience an average annual growth of over 10% per year since 2002 (http://sloanconsortium.org). While traditional higher education institutions have grown in average by 2% per year, including a growth of 1.2% from the fall of 2008 to the fall of 2009, in contrast online education grew by 21.1% from the fall of 2008 to the fall of 2009 alone.  Not only is formal online education growing, but information online education has also grown at a rapid pace. YouTube was created in 2005 by three former PayPal employees and it rapidly transformed into the second largest search engine experiencing a rate of growth of 65,000 new videos every 24 hours. While many of these videos are only seen by a handful of people, others are seen by hundreds of thousands and millions of users. Independent educators have seen decided to create educational videos to share freely online for anyone to use and benefit from their teaching methods and experience. One of the best known examples of these independent teaching initiatives has been Khan’s Academy by Salman Khan. Over the period of a few years Salman has created over two thousand videos covering hundreds of subjects and having thousands of viewers per video. Khan’s Academy has seen partnered with the Gates Foundation and was one of the inspirations for Don Smithmier, the CEO of Sophia for leaving his position as VP of Capella University to fund Sophia.org as an online educational packet sharing site were any individuals could develop an education packet covering an accepted educational topic, which then could be used by anyone over the internet and rated for quality by users and other instructors. Sophia.org potential is to decentralize and personalize learning by creating a site were hundreds of inspired individuals can openly share their knowledge and create educational packets.

Sophia.org, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, provides students all around the state and the world with the possibility of improving both their education and teaching skills by using and creating educational packets. A site such as Sophia, where developers can create educational packets that include videos, PowerPoints, essays, among other resources is now possible partly because of these recent technological changes and the implications of the continuously decreasing costs of processing power and computer size per dollar, the possibilities to which information and communication (ICT) technologies. As the price per calculation further decreases, and programmers build on the experience of other programmers, particularly when they are building on an openly available Open Source Software project, it becomes difficult to predict how these initiatives will impact education. There are many projects such as Sophia that are increasingly being used by learners and educators. So far, it is too early to tell which of these projects or companies will become the dominant players in this rapidly expanding market. Even perhaps more difficult that knowing which of these projects will become the next Dot Com success or Dot Com bust, is to measure what impact these initiatives are having in the educational achievement of its users. Because of the lack of understanding of their impact, it is important to further study and analyze these projects. This paper attempts to take on part of that challenge by helping to finding out more additional information about Sophia.org. It is important to better understand what is the appeal this site and learn a bit more about how it is being used by teachers and learners. While many questions would be best answered through a qualitative analysis, and through the use of other methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, among others forms of data collection, this paper looks at the quantitative data about the site and its resources is openly available on the internet and asks how this data can also help in improve our understanding of Sophia. Sophia was chosen because of my interest in the general area of study as well as due to the geographical proximity of Sophia. I had the opportunity of visiting Sophia.org earlier this semester to learn more about their project.

• What are your hypotheses (e.g., how you think the two samples will compare)?  Please write these hypotheses out in words AND using appropriate symbols.  You should include both a null and alternative hypothesis.      (2 points)

Using primarily data that is available to anyone that visits the site, this paper, compares 60 educational packets from two categories (Humanities and Sciences) that can be found by users visiting Sophia.org. These categories were created to guide both users and creators to where they can better locate the packet they are searching for. Sophia.org employs a taxonomy organizational system, which among many others includes 10 different major categories, two of which are Humanities and Sciences. While the project originally planned to compare Sophia.org with a different organization such as UDemy.com, Wikieducator.org or AcademicEarth.com, for the purposes of this assignment, the data gathered and compared is all from Sophia.org and was obtained by selecting two of the main categories at random and then comparing the popularity or the number of visits in a month Science packets had in comparison to humanities packets. The null hypothesis for this study is that both packets have in average the same number of visitors per month or H₀: µ = µ₀  (Null Hypothesis) which is to say that difference in the number of visitors between both samples is not statistically significant. In contrast, the alternate hypothesis argues that in average the number of visitors per month to Science packets is greater than the number of visits to Humanities packets or that vs. H_a: µ₁ > µ₀ (One-sided – Alternate Hypothesis). Since the packets are exclusive from each other, the samples are independent. To find the relationship I therefore used SPSS to calculate the p-value from a one-sided independent t-test.

• What is the reason for your hypotheses (e.g., why do you think the samples will differ in the way you predict)?  (2 points)

After randomly deciding on two categories to compare, I access the list of resources that were classified under each of the two categories. After a basic overview of the data, it appeared that the Science packets were reviewed more often, and visited more than the humanities packets. While there is no way of know whether the Science packets began to be developed first and therefore had a higher total number of viewers per packet or if one only a few packets that were very popular and had a large number of viewers were skewing the results, it was likely that in addition to the Science packets having in average a greater number of viewer per packet (statistic that has been collected by the site for each packet as soon as it is posted) that they also had a significantly higher number of viewers or users per month. While this project could not make comparison using the historical data and the average growth rate of the resources of each category it could collect information from a sample of resources of both categories and conduct and statistical test to find if there is a statistically significant difference in the degree of use of these two packet categories during the month the statistics were collected. After calculating this difference, if the alternate hypothesis is supported by the data comparison, it could therefore be argued that there is a greater demand or need for educational packets in the Sciences than there is in the Humanities? While after collecting the data, it appeared that this difference was there, but an statistical t-test was needed to determine the extent of this relation.

• How did you gather your data?  (2 points)

The data was gathered over a period of a month. While the project originally planned on collecting data from two different websites or projects and then comparing the usage of a similar type of educational packet from two different places (Use of history packets in UDemy.com vs. Sophia.org vs. AcademicEarth.com), after attempting to collect comparable data for multiple sites for a number of weeks, in the end, the data shared to the public by different programs was too different for an statistical comparison to be possible. Whereas UDemy.com focused on the number of registered users for a course, and some of the courses were only accessible for a price, Sophia.org does not require the user to register to use the resource and it focuses instead on the number of people who visit the webpage of the educational packet. In the case of Sophia.org a visitor may not intend to use the packet but may be instead reading to find out if it’s useful, whereas because of the need to register to use certain resources within UDemy.com, the user is more likely to use it. Because of these differences, as well as similar differences of other programs, this study decided to focus only on Sophia.

Once that decision was made, obtain the data required accessing the site and selecting the two categories then adding to a spreadsheet information about the top 30 packets that appeared when clicking on the category. It is possible that the website has an algorithm that determines which resources are displayed first. I was unable to therefore randomly select the samples. However, since the same criteria was used for selecting the Sciences and the Humanities packets the samples are therefore comparable. They also represent only a sample of what is available for each category. Once the 30 resources on each category were selected, I entered the resource and recorded a series of variables including: type of packet, packet name, packet URL, number of packet views, number of packet shares, number of packet followers, packet rating, number of packet ratings, copyright license used for the resource, Sophia user score of the packet creator, number of follower to the creator of the packet, and the number of people the creator of the packet is following.

Within these, various variables were collected in two occasions, collecting a value for September and a value for October. To improve the quality and reliability of the data the data for a whole month with be collected over a number of hours in a single day. The variables that were collected twice for the purposes of a future comparison were: number of packet views (Sept, Oct), number of packet shares (Sept, Oct), packet rating (Sept, Oct), and the average number of ratings (Sept, Oct). As mentioned before, once the packets were selected, gathering the data was single as the data is openly available.

Graphs and Descriptive Statistics (10 points)

Statistics for Science Packets:

OVERALL SHAPE: The three curves are unimodal, yet they do not resemble normal distributions. The three curves are skewed to the right. However, it seems that the science packet curves have a broader range than the humanities curve. The shape can be visualized in greater detail in the graphs below. The shape can be considered to be closer to a reverse j-curve than a normal distribution. This is probably because of the low entry cost of producing an educational packet. There is a large quantity of packages but there many of them have a small number of viewers.

Shape: The curve is unimodal. It could overtime look more as a normal distribution curve, yet because based on current trends it will likely increasingly resemble a reverse j-curve. If packets that were not visited were deleted over time, then the distribution would likely be different. Is skewed to the right.

Center / Location: It has a mean value of 615 which is to say that according to the statistics collected in September, out of the top 30 packets, the average number of views per packet was 615. The median or the value which is in between half of the value (half greater, half smaller) was 435.50 which indicates that there are some outliers to the right that are contributing to the skewness of the curve.

Spread / Variability: The curve has a range of 2178 and a standard deviation of 474.937. While the range includes over a 2000 viewers value difference, most values are located closer to the mean or a value of 615.

Shape: This curve is also unimodal. The curve is also skewed to the right, yet over the past month there seems to have been an increase in the range and an increase in the mean. Interestingly, there is also an increase in the standard deviation.

Center / Location: Unlike I originally predicted, this curve seems to more closely resemble a standard deviation and may be an indication of future trends, yet the mean (803.33) and the median (607) are very far from the maximum value.

Spread / Variability: It has a greater range than the previous month. The range is now of over 2300 views. The standard deviation also increased to 561.387 from 474.93. Along with this change, the variable has as expectedly increased.

Shape: When comparing the differences or the growth from September to October in views of science related videos, the curve continues to be skewed but the values are much smaller. It looks close to a standard curve and less like a reverse j-curve, a change that was noticed when analyzing the October views curve after analyzing the September views curve. The curve is once again skewed to the right. The curve is unimodal.

Center / Location: The center of the curve can be determined by the mean or median. As with the other two graphs the mode was not a relevant value since in two of the graphs no values were repeated.  The mean is of 187.93 while the median is of 142.5.

Spread / Variability: Unlike the other two graphs, the range of this graph is substantially smaller. Since it only represents the viewers over a month this is to be expected. The range is barely over 500 viewers. There is a much smaller variance than the other two graphs for Science packets, and the standard deviation is also much smaller, having a value of 134.56

Statistics for Humanities Packets:

Shape: While there are also 30 packets for the humanities graph, the graph is substantially more skewed (to the right). One outlier is having a major impact on the spread of the graph. This greatly affects the shape as the curve also resembles a reverse j-curve. The curve is unimodal. It does not resemble a normal distribution.

Center / Location: For this graph the median is a better indicator of the center than the mean. The use of the median as the most accurate center is due to the degree to which this curve is skewed. This curve has a mean of 383.5 and a median value of 104.

Spread / Variability: The variance of this curve is greater than the variance of any of the Science packet curves. This curve has a range of 3733 with a maximum value of 3737 and a large standard deviation of 726 despite half of the values being below 104.

Shape: This graph is the most skewed of all graphs. It is also skewed to the right and it also resembles a reverse j-curve more than a normal distribution curve. The curve is unimodal. There is again a very clear outlier which may or may not be indicative of a trend. It is possible that very high quality or valued Humanities packets obtain a much higher visibility than the other Humanities packets. The collection of future packets in the future as the population increase make help answer this question.

Center / Location: As with the previous graph, the most adequate unit of center for this graph is the media (127 views). While with a normal curve the mean may be a more adequate statistical variable, in this case having such a distant outlier influencing the curve, the median is more indicative of the center than the mean (481 views).

Spread / Variability: The variability of this curve is the most extensive having a range of 4616 views. The variance is also the most extensive as well as the standard deviation. While half of the values are below 127, the standard deviation is of 895.90 views.

Shape: This curve is also much skewed to the right and also resembles a j-curve although to a lesser extent than the two other curves for Humanities packets. Since this curve represents the difference, it has a smaller center and range of values. As with the rest of the curve, this curve is unimodal. It does not resemble a normal distribution.

Center / Location: For this curve the median is again more indicative of the center than the mean.  The mean value is of 97.8 views, while the median is of 32.5 views. As with the other curves, the mode is not practically significant since there are few or no values repeated for all six curves.

Spread / Variability: Being a curve based on the difference or the change in views from September to October of Humanities packets its range, standard deviation, and variance are small than the other two curve for the Humanities packets. It has a range of 894 views and a standard deviation of 172.32 views.

Verifying Necessary Data Conditions (4 points)

The data analyzed in this assignment is grouped in two independent pairs. When conducting a t-test it is important to have a large sample size. The larger than sample sizes the more indicate they are of the population distribution and the smaller the sample error. Some samples of populations resemble a normal distribution while others do not. In the cases discussed above, most of them resembled a reverse j-curve, as the number of cases decreases quickly when plotted by the number of viewers. Another problem with the data collected is that there are strong outliers particularly when looking at the Humanities data curves. Despite having had a sample size of 30 (usually consider large) because of the high level of skewness, having more cases would have been beneficial. Having mentioned some of the problems with using this data, I will now test for significant relationships between the two variables, Humanities to Science packets, yet it is important to keep in mind that the data is skewed and while part of the selection was randomized, since items were selected from a website with its own classification rules, those rules may have negatively influenced the selection process. However, many other variables were controlled for: the data has been collected from the same site, the site became live and started counting views for both categories simultaneously, and the selection rules of one group were exactly the same as the selection rules of the other group.

Conducting a hypothesis test (10 points)

A one-sided independent t-test was conducted to test for significant relationships between the variables.

Based on the results of the hypothesis test, do you reject or fail to reject Ho?  Why?  Do you feel your results are statistically significant?  Are they practically significant?  What is the p-value?  Interpret the p-value in your own words. You discuss the results of your hypothesis test.  What was the p-value?  Interpret the p-value in your own words.  Based on the results of the hypothesis test, do you reject or fail to reject Ho?  Why? Are the results statistically significant?  Are they practically significant?  (4 points)

Because of some of the differences in the variance of the data, I did not assume that they are from the same population. As such, the p-values were calculated with “equal variances not assumed”. The p-values obtained are .149, .102, .028. Since this was a one-sided t-test, those values can be divided by 2, but this also divides the alpha-level from .05 to .025 for significance. According to these p-values we can reject the null hypothesis when we compare the difference in the total number of viewers from Sept to Oct as the p-value is of .014 which is to say that in 1.4% of the time the conditions needed for the null hypothesis to be true are there. The p-value or probability values indicate how likely we are of obtaining a test statistics as extreme as the one obtained in this test. The other p-values obtained .075 and .051 are very close to the alpha-level yet, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected as it could result in a type 1 error.

The null hypothesis is rejected based on the results of the third t-test, yet the null hypothesis cannot be rejected based on the other two results that compared the total views from October and September for Humanities and Science packets. Because of the extent to which the values were skewed more cases would been beneficial to finding out if the first two test could also be significant. They were both very close to another commonly used alpha value of .10. However, using an alpha-value of .05, only the difference between the total number of views from September to October between Humanities and Science packets was significant. This is partly visible in the means of both types of packets. Humanities packets had a mean of 97.8 while the Science packets had a mean of 187.9. However similar ranges of difference were also visible in the mean for the total number of viewers. Yet, we can only safely conclude that having a p-value of .028, it appears that they number of views of Science packets is increasing statistically significantly faster than the total number of views of Humanities packets. Therefore, because of how unlike it is for this values to happen without, we can reject the null hypothesis –  H₀: µ = µ₀  (Null Hypothesis) and accept the alternate hypothesis – H_a: µ₁ > µ₀ (One-sided – Alternate Hypothesis) which as a one sided test has a p-value of .014. More cases are needed to have be certain that the other differences are or are not significant. To avoid a type 1 error, I cannot reject the null hypothesis with the other two tests, but I may be committing a type 2 error and would benefit from increasing the number of cases.

These results are also practically significant. It is clear that some types of packages are visited more often than others and this difference is linked to their category. While this difference may also be linked to their rating, it seems that more individuals visit Sophia to view and possibly use Science packets. This may be related to the relationship between computer science and mathematics and more directly to the relationship of the Open Source Software Movement to the Open Education Resource Movement. While it is not possible to determine this relationship from the data, understanding this difference could lead some business to market Humanities materials more aggressively to try to differentiate themselves, or have the opposite reaction and stop or reduce the production of Humanities materials so that the quality of the resources that are more likely to be used increases, the quality of Sophia increases, and marginal, low-quality products are discarded.

• Based on the results of your hypothesis test, what kind of error could you have made?  Please explain, and indicate just how you might control for this kind of error.  (3 points)

As previously explained because of the skewness of the data, more cases would have helped in increasing the validity of the t-test results, yet despite not assuming equal variances, the results of the third test are clearly significant. Since I selected an alpha level of .05, the other two test with results of .149 and .101 were not significant. While the .149 value would not have been significant if the alpha level was of .1, the .101 result could have been seen as significant or could have been determined either way. Yet, it may have resulted in inappropriately rejecting the null hypothesis and committing a type 1 error. It is also possible that not enough cases were included and had more cases been included both of those values would have been significant. If this is the case, then type 2 errors may have taken place, yet without further testing, this conclusion cannot be reached. The only conclusion that can be reached from the data using a .05 alpha level is that the third test was statistically significant and therefore it is appropriate to reject the third null hypothesis.

• A confidence interval is automatically generated when you conduct a t-test.  Please indicate what this interval is and how it should be interpreted.  (2 points)

The confidence interval is used to estimate the reliability of the data or the relationship between the sample estimates and the population estimate. For this test, I obtained the confidence intervals mentioned below. The greater the confidence level (usually it is either: 90%, 95%, or 99%) the greater the range of possible values. Confidence regions can help indicated if there are likely sampling errors as well as help indicate if one estimate for a quantity is unreliable, and as such if there are also others that may be unreliable.

Conclusion and Summary (8 points)

Did you discover anything that surprised you when you analyzed the data?  Do you think the results would have been different if you had bigger sample sizes?  If you had to do the project again, how would you do it differently?

You summarize your project and include some mention of how you came up with your idea, how you collected your data, and what you found when you explored and analyzed your data.  (3 points)

After collecting the data and analyzing the samples, we can conclude that there is a relationship between the types of packets that are viewed by users most often. As previously mentioned, this may provide a market advantage for those that produce high quality Humanities packets, or more likely lead for business to consider expanding their Science packets since there seems to be a greater use and demand for these packets. This is not to say Humanities packets should generally be discarded, but only that currently they are less viewed than Science packets. This is not a surprise as Khan’s Academy, one of the inspirations for Sophia.org primarily focuses on Science packets. In addition, the university that began the Open CourseWare Movement by opening their courses to the public is also a Science packets oriented institution. Sophia.org is experiencing the same trend and it may be due to Science packets not being as contextual as Humanities packets. Humanities packets may be more political and site specific. In addition, Humanities instructors tend to not be as technological oriented and innovation oriented as Science instructors. Sophia.org itself may be capitalizing of this trend as they recently began offering a paid service of over 20,000 math only videos to supplement classroom and home school instruction. The findings of this study were helpful in illustrating this trend.

• You discuss any shortcomings of the methods you used to gather data.  (3 points)

Unfortunately, being only in its first public year, despite the rapid growth of the site, there are only a limited number of packets within the Sophia website. Because of the small number of packets, the packets are more indicate or more closely resemble the population, but they were selected via the ranking of the website instead of a randomizing process. While the categories were randomly selected, the site classification also influence the data selection process.

• You talk about how you would do the project differently if you were to do it over again (2 points)

If this project was conducted again, additional data would be gathered. In addition, I would communicate with Sophia.org so that they would allow me to access their site analytics. While I collected the data that was openly available in a per month basis, this data is collected every day by the Sophia.org servers. Having access to their servers and site analytics would increase the depth and quality of the study. Another path to follow is to possible compare a different site or more categories. However, as I experienced initially when constructing this study, the differences in how sites are organized makes it difficult to compare between sites. Waiting until more data is available would help to more comprehensively develop a study of Sophia.org.

College of Education and Human Development Graduate Students’

Opinions about Open Access Journals

December 2, 2011

Most traditional academic journals, also known as toll-access journals, are accessible to the libraries that can afford to pay an annual subscription fee to a series of companies that sell journal access packages. Journal articles and subscriptions to individual journals can also be paid by either institutions or students, yet despite the possible contribution of many articles to broader society, they are not openly accessible, and this is particularly a problem for individuals who would like to contribute despite having limited financial resources or access to a subscribed institution. While information and communication technologies (ICT) has increased the reach of information, journal subscription fees have risen sharply in recent years (200% over inflation), resulting in many universities, including top tier research institutions, reducing their number of subscriptions (http://righttoresearch.org/).

Unfortunately, as subscriptions are cancelled by universities, the number of journal articles that researchers at that particular university are able to access decreases. Therefore, publishing in expensive toll-access journals can lead to a number of consequences which are both detrimental to the scholar who publishes an article and to those that are hoping to learn from the article or build on its findings. It affects the writer in terms of the visibility and impact of his or her work, while it affects the reader in the possible duplication of efforts. It can also result in the inability of the researcher to produce the most comprehensive or beneficial literature review, ignoring points of view that would have complemented the writer’s research. Fortunately, more information is becoming openly available, albeit much of it of limited quality.

To reduce these problems increasingly journals have decided to publish their articles openly by becoming an Open Access Journal (OAJ) or by allowing authors to retain some author’s rights and for the authors to be able to place a copy of the article that is accessible to the public through either their personal blog or their institution’s library website. By publishing openly, individuals across society could quickly access the scholar’s work and the benefit from understanding its implications, yet why is it that OAJ account for only ten percent of the total number of journals, according to recent Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) statistics (http://project-soap.eu/)? Part of the reason for the limited number of OAJs is because of the difficulties that a journal can face when trying to change its business model. Having a high quality peer review system and distributing articles to readers is very expensive. Editing is a time consuming and expensive process and should be adequately remunerated. However, because of ICTs, the cost of distributing articles to readers has been significantly reduced to the extent that they are usually only a minor expense. The rapid decrease of cost per calculation has reduced the price of hosting a site with the bandwidth needed for a journal to even less than $20 a month, depending on the journal. Being aware of the decreasing costs of running a journal, it is hard to justify the cost inflation of journal articles. In recent years, some scientist have promoted OAJ as an alternate journal business model, and have begun to campaign for increase openness within academia.

In particular the natural sciences have promoted an open access policy. The Arxiv (http://arxiv.org/) for example has over 719,000 academic pieces that are publically available and are published only months after the findings are obtained, instead of the longer periods of time of one or two year of administrative and editing processes that are needed to publish in more traditional journals. Particularly in fields such as information technologies, including the College of Education and Human Development’s (CEHD) program in educational technology, if an article takes two years to become available, that article is likely already out of date, and as such it is no longer of the highest quality or usability (For example the iPad version 1 is less than 2 years old). Unfortunately, while the natural sciences have promoted openness to increase the rate of innovation and their productivity, the social sciences and the humanities have attached more strongly to the traditional toll-access journal system. These focus groups tried to answer the why to that statement. Why would fields such as education, which hopes to improve the lives of others through their work and are not as concerned as the natural sciences in protecting patents, continue to primarily publish in traditional toll-access journals? With Open Access Week 2011 approaching, the UMN libraries decided to host a series of events (http://z.umn.edu/openaccess2011) for which I was asked to discuss my involvement on Reconsidering Development, an open access student run journal based at the University of Minnesota where I work as an assistant web-editor (http://journal.ipid-umn.org).  With this in mind, to supplement my presentation, I organized a series of four focus groups to discuss in greater detail CEHD students’ opinions about Open Access Journals

Recruiting of Participants

An invitation was sent to students two weeks before the focus group with a flier (http://z.umn.edu/oa2011poster) which directed them to the Right to Research Coalition website (http://righttoresearch.org/) as well as a Doodle poll where CEHD graduate students could register to attend to one of the four focus group sessions. The three in-person focus groups were held Thursday, October 20, Friday October 21, and October 24. An internet focus group was offered so that participants could join from October 21 to the 24 and answer the same questions in an asynchronous way ( http://oafocusgroup2011.freeforums.org). Another online focus group which answered a very similar set of question had also been held online from October 11 to October 14. Having held a total of 5 focus groups with CEHD graduate students discussing their opinions of Open Access (OA), this study feels that various saturation points have been reached and a subsequent study would benefit more in asking CEHD faculty members instead of students about their opinions regarding OAJ.

Participants did not seem to have any problems using the Doodle poll (z.umn.edu/openpoll2011). A couple of participants commented that they were attracted by the statements on the flier and having visited the included website before deciding to attend. A concern when selecting participants was that, despite regularly using open resources on the internet, participants did not generally consider themselves knowledgeable enough in the subject to openly share their opinion. Based on this concern, it is perhaps not surprising that various participants were members of the Learning Technology (LT) program within the Curriculum and Instruction (CI) department in CEHD. Purposely selecting participants, and sending every single participant a personalized email likely contributed to the high attendance rate. While there were only limited times when participants could attend a focus group and an email with a flier was sent to less than 100 students, 14 students signed up to attend the face to face (F2F) focus groups, while 10 students signed up to attend the online version of the focus group. The online focus group was held through freeforums.com. This site allows me to create user accounts and provide users with anonymity. This was mentioned to them before participating. In contrast to the online focus group, anonymity is not possible within the face to face version of the focus group. Out of the 14 scheduled face to face participants, one did not attend, resulting in 13 participants or two focus groups of 4 individuals and one focus group of 5 individuals. The online focus group had only two responses. Eight of the 10 students did not respond to the questions. However, based on the tone of their initial email response it is possible that some of these participants did not intend to participate online from the beginning. A number of them had mentioned that they couldn’t attend in person but would try to participate online. This could be interpreted as a way of expressing that they will likely be unable to participate. One of the two who participated mentioned that the questions scared him at first because being able to see all of them he felt it would take more than the time he could afford to share to answer them. However, after completing them, similar to the face to face participants, he expressed having enjoyed the focus group. Each face to face focus group lasted for two hours.

Below I summarized their responses into themes that were brought up repeatedly throughout the focus groups. In addition, for a visual overview of the different themes that were discussed in the focus group you can see or download a PowerPoint from the following link: http://www.slideshare.net/fastfonz/presentation-open-accessweek2011. It includes embedded audio clips of participants for most of the questions.

Defining Open: How do you define open, in terms of information? What qualities would you include in what it is to be open?

Students had similar opinions about the meaning of open. To them it meant that materials would get reused. A journal would be available from a computer and a mobile phone. They felt that it an article was open to the public, then it would reach a broader audience. Open access journals were also seen as helping individuals who are not academics to publish, allowing also for individuals to become a knowledge dispenser, as well as a knowledge receiver. One of the participants expressed how Open Access Journals helped increase transparency in the knowledge development process; “I can access it anywhere”. While to some participants it seemed that openness was linked mainly to greater accessibility, to others it included some of the other elements discussed within the open content literature and the benefit of being able to redistribute, remix, reuse, and revise information. Most of the participants expressed not being familiar with topics such as open education resources, open content, open data, and open courseware, but that they had found them interesting and were supportive of them after understanding them. In the online forum they were asked to visit links that explained the concepts after answering the question, then they were asked a subsequent question based on that experience.

Extent of the Influence: To what extent is the ability to access information freely on the internet influencing the type of information you consume? (not at all, some (little), a lot, a great deal)?

When asked to what extent having access influenced their research and education, most of them expressed an unwillingness to pay to read the news. While many used the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times, they used the free portions of the site or accessed them through the university. Despite her interest in the paper, a student expressed her unwillingness to purchase the Wall Street Journal. By being open content was more accessible and influential. In terms of their academic work, a couple of students mentioned that they would reorganize their project if they could not access a particular source or simply dismiss it and change it for a different one. For one student, if a site required subscription, then they decided that it was not worth examining. Students use what is available, and mentioned that without a UMN ID they would not be able to have the same access.

How is Access Important: To what extent is the lack of access to information a problem? (not at all, some (little), a lot, a great deal)?

This question was somewhat related to the one above. In general lack of access led to either students borrowing access from someone or for them disregarding the source and attempt to find a similar article. They expressed how at the University of Minnesota they have more access than at smaller schools. There also seems to be a growing lack of patience with internet articles, and a student mentioned becoming frustrated after losing twenty minutes trying to get through all the security and sign up requirements when accessing an article off-site. The need to sign up to access even if the article was openly available was problematic and a source of frustration for some students. However, they felt that not having access to one article was not necessarily a major problem since; they could read more articles and find other studies. There seems to be a problem with sorting out sources and finding the best pieces of information.

Impact of Open Access Outside of Academia

While it was not its own question, many students expressed a concern about the impact that open access could have outside of higher education institutions. One of the participants mentioned how her father was able to learn more about her mother’s medical condition thanks to Open Access articles. A student from Africa mentioned his frustration of only being able to share a few articles with students. With internet being a privilege where he worked as a teacher abroad he would print a couple of openly accessible articles and share them with his students. Various of the students attending worried about not being able to access articles once they graduated and how important and helpful it could be to access these materials as an educator, a researcher, or an employee of an NGO. Organizations with a smaller budget will be more handicapped as into what they can afford to purchase. A student from Asia mentioned how there is a black market for articles in his home country and how it was more important for him, and more beneficial for society, if people were able to pursue their interests and satisfy their curiosity instead of limiting themselves to whatever the local institution can purchase. As mentioned before, there was also a concern regarding what could be accessed at a smaller university and how it was probably impacting students’ quality of education.

Generational Differences: To what extent do you think there is a generational difference in the support for openness, and open access journals?

While students seem to think that professors were not against the idea of open access, they argued that they seemed to be less aware of how it works or less optimistic about open access journals’ potential. However, students did not think of it so much as a generational issue, but perhaps also a disciplinary issue. Students then mentioned some of their problems with open access, including the difficulty of finding quality articles. A student mentioned how her professor warned her against using open articles. Another student wondered if younger students who grew up with the internet would be supportive of the toll-access model. In general, they felt that professors within CEHD were not very supportive of open access journals but that they encouraged students to publish in traditional journals. Trying to improve their marketability and obtain a tenure track job, many doctoral students feel that therefore it may be best to primarily focus on toll-access journals because of their prestige and because of the recommendations of their professors. One student, however, argued that it was important for students and professors to know that they can reserve most of their copyright and that many publishers are allowing faculty members who want to to publish while retaining many of their author rights.

Sustainability of OAJ: To what extent do you consider Open Access Journals to be sustainable? What do you think needs to happen for them to be sustainable?

One of the most common critiques of OAJ was their quality. To many students this is linked to them being free and a sense that they would accept articles that would not be accepted elsewhere. For OAJ to be sustainable it is therefore important to develop a funding model that allows them to pay for the staff needed in order to retain the quality of the journal. While in many journals the editing staff is composed largely by some of its readers who work pro-bono, understanding the importance of editing the work of their colleagues, journals have other expense such as calling for articles and organizing who need to edits which article. In some cases reviewers are paid. For the quality to be maintained and for OAJ to be sustainable, one student argued that perhaps OAJ could imitate internet games that function under the 1% or 2% models and obtain valuable funds and human resources in this way. Other students wonder if OAJs could sustain themselves by asking individuals for donations. Overall, they felt that money needs to come from somewhere and that asking individuals to pay to publish does not seem fair, “they should pay us to publish”.

Public vs. Private: Is there a difference between privately sponsored research and publically sponsored research in terms of access by the public?

Whereas some companies sponsor their own research, participants felt that if the public is paying for research then it should be available to them. A few students argued, that in their opinion, the medical field had done a great job in becoming as open as possible. NIH grants require that findings are released publically. A couple of participants were aware of this change and felt that education research, and research in other fields should be open to the public.  A student joked about why restricting access to education research seemed ridiculous and to go against the accepted aims of the field; “We have to keep our secrets about teaching and learning, nobody can know.” One participant turned the question around and asked, “In terms of access, should anything be private?” while another participant asked “is there anything that shouldn’t be public?” In addition, another participant mentioned that even sensitive data should be public because criminals will likely obtain access regardless of official controls on access. One participant mentioned that if private research is not open then companies could simply discard trials that were not positive and publish only the trials that were beneficial for them.

To what extent do you feel openness increases the quality of scholarship? (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree)

Concerns about quality were likely the most negative attitudes students had regarding Open Access Journals. “The internet is filled with junk” was a common opinion and filtering this junk was a common concern. A student from Eastern Europe mentioned how she had difficulties accessing articles back home. In one instance, she found an archive with articles, but as she read through it, she noticed that it had not been accurately translated. This concern with accuracy and reliability was very common and led to one student repeating the advice given to her by her undergraduate instructor not to trust open access journals. However, a few students pointed out that they had used open access articles for their recent presentations and how some open journals have the same level of quality as toll-access journal articles. On a related theme another student argued that “if everybody was doing it, then there would be quality control. You want your stuff to look good anyway.” Another student also pointed out that while some online publications may publish anything they obtain, other open access journals have a very traditional peer review system. Because of the ease with which a site can be hosted, a journal with low quality can exist despite having a low quality product, yet other open journals can and do have the same level of quality as traditional toll-access journals. However, participants felt that many OAJ do not have the same level of credibility as traditional toll-access journals and, when most or all of the major journals in a field are subscription based, it is more likely that the faculty members, particularly older faculty members, will continue to publish in and advocate the use of these journals.

Moral Obligation: To what extent do you feel opening or increasing access to information is a moral obligation for educators, for the CEHD?

This question originated organically from the first focus group and was asked to the rest of the focus groups afterwards. One participant repeated various times during the focus group that access to education and knowledge should be a basic human right. In her opinion, without open access we are contributing to social reproduction as only the institutions where individuals with wealthier backgrounds attend will be able to access the most recent and relevant information. In her opinion piracy sometimes is warranted because we all have a responsibility to serve the common good. Another participant argued that if people felt that “they needed to follow unethical avenues; we need to restructure the way information is accessed.” During the focus group, information piracy was discussed as a social ill rather than an individual ill. Participants concluded that they needed “to make it possible for anyone who is seeking information to do so ethically… reworking the way we think…” Because of the moral benefits of openness and its relationship to the institutional goals of the University of Minnesota and the College of Education and Human Development one participant felt that the university itself should lead this transformation by encouraging faculty members and students to use and publish in Open Access Journals; “Academic institutions, humans, have a moral obligation to connect with each other and tell their stories”.

Innovation: To what extent do you think open access encourages or discourages innovation?

For most students open access would increase innovation because researchers could more easily develop accurate literature reviews and build upon the work of others rather than reinventing the wheel. One of the participants, explained it in the following way: “You see, we are doing something funny, we are trying to discover really good things, but then we put them in a box and lock them up. There are very wonderful things that haven’t been read…. I tried to access this article, and couldn’t access it. I thought this guy did a very good job, but what does that mean, I just forget it. I can’t pay the 39 dollars.” In this sense he and other students argued that open access contributed to innovation. Other students argued that it would increase competition and, as a consequence, journals would have to find ways to be innovative in order to increase their audience. Another student mentioned that capitalism and innovation thrive on competition so there would not only be innovation but that would also allow them to generate revenue and become sustainable. In conclusion, “if authors aren’t innovative (and if publishers aren’t innovative), readers will gravitate to other authors/publishers” Related to innovation, another student felt that open acess would result in a greater number of voices that would be heard internationally. Currently the World Bank and other major international organizations publish their voice, their viewpoint openly, but other voices are more silent. Openness would increase the visibility of other voices and, as a consequence, more countries may enact innovative policies and be themselves more innovative.

Future: Projecting yourself two, five and ten years into the future what role do you see open access playing for academia and society?

When discussing the future of OAJ, a few students pointed to how the natural sciences are at the forefront of the Open Access Movement, while the humanities, social sciences, and fields such as education are behind the curve. They argued that this is common with these fields as they are less technology oriented. However, in the future, they seemed to think that open access would likely be more commonplace. One of the students mentioned the rate of change would depend on key players in the various disciplines and their choices. Regarding quality concerns, students generally agreed that over time the quality of open access journals would likely increase. They questioned each other about how this could be done. “How were the other journals doing it… I just don’t know but it’s doable.” To various students it seemed as if the rate of change could snowball if more and more prestigious journals changed their financial structure or if authors increasingly became worried about being less cited if they only published in toll-access journals. “If everyone is invested in it, there would be a quality control. You want your stuff to look good anyway.” According to various participants, open access will probably develop layers or levels and through this system, some layers would use terms that are accessible to all while other layers would be more complex in terminology.

Choices: Which one of these three journals would you choose as the site through which to submit your article and what are some of the reasons you would chose this journal (please indicate what would be the most important aspect in making this decision)?

Despite the frequently expressed support for open access, CEHD graduate students were mostly concerned with publishing in a high impact journal or a “quality” journal at least during the first years of their careers. After obtaining tenure, they felt that they could more easily publish in open access journals. This was a very common statement, even among those that felt that open access should be a right. One of the few students that preferred an alternate route argued that her alternate route was not just in terms of publishing but because of the “academic game” and that she felt that she could accomplish more with her career elsewhere. To her, education should be about serving people, but writing for journals rather than the broader public was, she felt, a poor time investment. While she had been interested in academia before, the linking of success to publishing in prestigious journal steered her away from the profession.

Most other students, however, planned on becoming academics or publishing in their future careers. It is therefore important to create a strong professional image. One student mentioned that she would likely look at what the tradition is in a field. In a field with well-established traditions, even if it saddened her, she would likely publish in traditional toll access journals. Students expressed their interest in supporting open access journals, but at the same time were conscious of how important it is strengthen their CV. They stated that perhaps, over time, as the general trend changes, they will be able to publish more in open access journals, thereby supporting the initiative while not hurting their careers. Should open access journals become more accepted and gain prestige, students felt confident about the future of open access publishing and their ability to participate in it; “A hierarchy of journal prestige always exists.  Researchers are always trying to get their articles accepted by the most prestigious journal they can.”

ICT and the Digital Divide – A Participatory Solution with a Dominican Flavor

11/29/2011

The Digital Divides – The Ownership of Knowledge in the 21^st Century

The “digital divide,” a term coined in the late 20th century, highlights the growing disparity in access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) between and within countries (Norris, 2001; Compaine, 2001; Warschauer, 2003).  This concept, its meaning, and its implications for states across the world have been topics of widespread research and debate since the beginning of the 21^st century (OECD, 2000; Attewell, 2001; Goldfarb & Prince, 2007; Katz, 2008; Trucano, 2005; Mar, 2004; Chapman & Mahlck, 2004). Within the United States and abroad, public libraries and public computing centers have attempted to diminish the gap between technology haves and have-nots, yet many still lack access to computers, broadband Internet, and even mobile phones (Krebeck, 2010; InfoDev, 2010; The Economist, 2010; The Economist, 2005; Richardson et al., 2000). In addition, while the use of mobile phones is growing; smart phones remain inaccessible for the majority of individuals in developing countries. It is unclear whether reducing these inequalities will help countries to “develop” and “modernize” or whether it will increase reliance on imports, and promote capital flight while perpetuating global inequities.

Despite the promise of ICT, various studies of programs implemented in OECD states and LDCs found the initiatives had a debatable impact, obtaining only marginally positive results (Trucano, 2005). Studies surrounding the overall costs of ICT programs are also limited and only 10 to 15% of the total cost of ownership is attributed to the initial set up of the program (ibid).

Warschauer (2003) criticized the discourse of the “digital divide” and contended that the term should not be seen as a binary conception. He argued that such a notion “can even be patronizing because it fails to value the social resources that diverse groups bring to the table” (pg 7). The relationship between different groups of people and technologies vary and the development of a new technology does not by definition imply a benefit to the society. While Warschauer (2003) reminds us that technology is not a panacea, the material realities of ICTs extend beyond the discourse and its semantics (Peet & Hartwick, 2009). Unequal access to ICTs helps to perpetuate the economic differences between the core and periphery states, as the periphery continues to be dependent on the industries and products developed as a result of the knowledge accumulated by the core (Peet & Hartwick, 2009).

One of the primary reasons for the difficulties faced by poorer states in catching up with richer states has been the rapid, usually exponential, rate of innovation in technology through improvements in circuit technology. Since 1965, Moore’s law, or the exponential rate of technological innovation, continues to be supported by quantitative studies (Schaller, 1997; Kurzweil, 2005). Countries have increased their access to technology worldwide, yet the “divide” is a dynamic concept that changes as new technologies develop. ICT programs traditionally include radio, television, personal computers, the Internet or sharing of materials through a network, and mobile phone technology (Trucano, 2005).

In a study of 179 countries, Norris (2001) illustrated that there were three main “digital divides”, one between countries, or a “global divide”, one between social classes, or a “social divide,” and one between those who use resources and those that do not, or a “democratic[CEHD1]  divide.” Access to ICTs could be categorized in a different number of ways, and Norris’ categories highlight some of the differing implications of the “divide” depending on how it is conceptualized. It is also important to note that, similar to the use of the term “globalization,” the division between “information haves” and the “have-nots” is not a new concept; rather modern technologies have accentuated historical trends (Friedman, 2007; Sheppard et al., 2009; Compaine, 2001).

ICTs allow people to connect instantaneously worldwide, flattening certain aspects of international trade and communication (Friedman, 2007). Individuals can now find information about a large number of subjects without going to a library. Technology has transformed society, and it will continue to do so for years to come, and at a very fast pace. As such, Friedman (2007), along with other writers (Steinmueller, 2001; Friedman, 2007; Norris, 2001), has encouraged countries to invest in ICTs. To some, such investments are seen as a “stage” or objective to be met for a country to modernize and develop.

The rapid growth of ICT industries and their implications for states have led to transformational changes in society (Moravec, 2009). The first Apple personal computer, Apple Lisa, was released in 1984, the Internet was created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, and the first mobile phone was developed by Motorola in 1974. Within just a few decades, mobile phone subscriptions extended from 12.4 million in 1990 to 4.6 billion by 2009, the Internet has reached most places in the world, and “research firm Gartner, Inc., predicts that there will be 2 billion computers in use worldwide by the year 2014” (Katz, 2008; Heeks, 2008; ITU, 2010). Facebook, a social network site which launched only in 2004, already has an estimated value of over 30 billion dollars (Hardy, 2010).

In some fields, ICTs have brought very positive changes, such as improvements in disability learning tools, distance education tools, long distance communications, and media creation. In various areas of the world citizens are becoming amateur reporters, recording and blogging about events that repressive governments attempt to censor (Diamond, 2010). Yet despite a large number of positive possibilities, some of these technologies are still used principally for entertainment purposes, and their potential for societal transformation and development has not been fully utilized. As long as states remain primarily importers of technology, rather than developers and producers, ICTs will perpetuate inequality. When the technologies are fully appropriated and the local population not only modifies and improves on the technology, but generates new technologies, the “digital divide” and knowledge dependency will diminish. To reduce inequality, education policy experts should focus on increasing access to Open Education Resources (OER) rather than simply attempting to “catch up” with richer societies by emulating their current use of ICTs [CEHD2] (Downes, 2007).

The proper use of ICTs could help bridge the knowledge and information gap, and aid in achieving a “new stage” of development. States could leapfrog past other states through a not yet developed, advanced system of online education which builds and intertwines aspects of Open Education Resources such as OpenCourseWare, Open Source Software, Open Books, Open Access Journals, Creative Commons licenses, and the cumulative creations made through Open Resource Economics (Jonestone, 2005; Downes, 2007; Benkler, 2008). By following Ted Berners-Lee’s call to “raw data now” and taking advantage of free materials such as YouTube EDU, ITunes U, and Connexions, as well as the future development of more open and freely accessible universities, poor states could use the Internet to perhaps eventually provide higher education for all, lifelong learning for all, and possibly reduce the costs of obtaining a high quality higher education degree (UNESCO, 2009; Faber, 2002; Lubas et al., 2004; Baraniuk, 2006; Berners-Lee, 2009). [CEHD3]

By using ICTs to create a more open and equitable society, and increase the local development of knowledge, states could move towards the development of “critical consciousness” and create their own path toward the future (Freire, 1974).  The growing use of technologies will also allow for the strengthening of local voices. ICTs are increasingly allowing its users to “rip”, “copy”, “reuse”, “mix”, and “burn” (Baraniuk, 2006). As Napster and peer-to-peer sharing transformed the Music industry, OER may transform our understanding of education. In his recent book, The Tower and The Cloud, Richard Katz (2008) wondered: “if a 300-year-old institution like Encyclopedia Britannica [could] be threatened in five years by Wikipedia, [could] other aggregators of expertise (aka colleges and universities) be similarly challenged?” (Katz, 2008).    Wikileaks?   J

Yet, more than a challenge, OER offers an alternative. OER can help local communities preserve their documents, materials, and extend the reach of their limited human capital through initiatives such as HP Brain Gain, the African Virtual University OER initiative[CEHD4] , and other programs which focus on increasing access to education for all. Rice University Connexions initiative of freely accessible textbook materials allows for the customization of chapters, free digital access to quality educational resources, and printing of cheaper materials (Connexions, 2006).

This essay will address how the Dominican Republic (D.R.) is attempting to reduce the digital divide through the use of ICT, in particular through the building of Community Technology Centers (CTCs) across the country and through the use of OERs. Yet while the D.R. has invested significant amounts of money on the development of ICT technologies, limited improvements in their public primary and secondary education may result in ICT benefiting primarily a certain sector of the population, while the poorest members of society continue to be excluded from the best schools and ICT technology. This essay overviews the educational system in the D.R., recent ICT developments, and policies that could be implemented to ensure that current investment in ICT reduces rather than increase inequalities.

The Dominican Republic – Rapid but Limited Growth – ICT for Education

With 10% of the population receiving close to 40% of the country’s GNP in 2007 (San Roman, 2009), the high level of inequality in the D.R. raises questions as to whether expenditure on ICT, rather than on improving the quality of the primary and secondary education levels, represents the best way for the country to increase equality while improving its economic outlook[CEHD5] . Yet, as technology plays an ever increasing role in modern society, it could also be argued that in order to leapfrog into the future, the D.R. needs to prepare its workers for the increasingly knowledge and innovation driven nature of the economy (Moravec, 2008; Davison et al, 2000), attempting not to imitate the west, but develop in its own style. With a limited tradition of research and innovation, the D.R. could invest in the development of OER to not only increase access to quality education material for all, but also to promote innovative and more constructive ways of teaching and learning. However, without an increased investment in education, present reforms will likely have a limited impact within the poorest sectors of the population.

The high level of inequalities in the D.R. dates back to the colonial era. Despite governmental efforts, the educational system and economic system developed by European colonists made increasing economic prosperity and reducing inequality a difficult challenge for former colonies to overcome (Bulmer-Thomas, 1994). The D.R. and neighboring Haiti had in place a plantation system in which only a small number of whites, constantly fearful of a revolt, controlled a much larger black slave population, who were constantly monitored and whose education was not encouraged (Moya Pons, 1992). As argued by Rodney (1972), the colonizers were fearful of educating slaves as it would make them more difficult to control. Out of up to 400,000 “taino” natives that inhabited Hispaniola when it was “discovered” by Columbus in 1492 only 3,000 remained by 1519 (Ibid. p. 29). Most of the natives died from epidemics as well as from the harsh treatment to which they were subjected by the colonists.

To continue the economic production and “development” of the island, the Spanish crown quickly began to import slaves from Africa and organized the island’s economy along various agricultural plantations. According to local documents, by 1546, black slaves accounted for around 12,000 individuals and were controlled by a white population of only 5,000 (Ibid. p. 34). While over time most of the population intermarried, and 84% of the population considers themselves mixed or of African ancestry, vestiges of the colonial system remain (CIA, 2010).

Just a few decades ago, in 1937, the then Dictator of the D.R,. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930-1961), ordered the massacre of over 15,000 Haitians for having migrated to the D.R. without authorization. It is believed that many Dominicans with darker skin, and who resembled Haitians, also lost their lives. Trujillo’s government encouraged Europeans to migrate and open businesses with the aim of increasing the business sector as well as whitening the Dominican society. As a consequence, to this day, the poorest citizens of the D.R. are often of Haitian origin and tend to be of darker skin than wealthier families (Prado, 2009; Lozano, 2008; Murray, 2005; Lilon, 1999).

Recent demographic trends as well as a transition to a service economy have also increased the challenges faced by the government in fostering development. In recent years, the Dominican economy has transformed from a primarily agricultural economy to a service economy. Primarily through the growth of tourism, the service industry has grown to over 66% of GDP. This change has been beneficial to the D.R.’s economy, which has grown steadily since the 1980s, having an average economic growth rate of 5.43% from 2007 to 2009 and a Per Capita GDP of $8,300 (CIA, 2010). Free trade policies have led to the improvement of aggregate economic statistics for most Latin America countries, including the D.R.(UN Millennium Project, 2005). However, in 2008, 42% of the population lived below the poverty line (World Bank, 2008). In 2007, 11.2% of the population continued to live with less than a dollar a day (UNESCO, 2010), and the country had an unemployment rate of 14.9% (CIA, 2010).

Rapid urbanization and population growth has contributed to the government’s difficulties in developing the human resources needed to deal with the demands for new skills from the changing economy (OECD, 2008). While in 1950 the D.R. had a population of 2.134 million, of which 23.8% were urban dwellers, by 2010 the population had increased to 10.169 million inhabitants, with 68.54% living in urban areas (CEPAL, 2010). Similar to other developing countries that rapidly urbanized, the D.R. was faced with a complicated development challenge, a challenge that could be best met over time by empowering individuals to be creative and critical thinkers through a student-centered, progressive and competitive education system.

Previous governments attempted to increase both quality and access to primary and secondary education through a number of reforms (OECD, 2008, p. 92). In 1992, the country approved a major education reform through a 10 Year Plan (Plan Decenal) which promoted: 1) modernizing the educational structure, 2) the introduction of new technologies, 3) the promotion of literacy, 4) strengthening vocational education, 5) increased investment in education and 6) increasing community involvement (p. 104). The government programs yielded various positive results. Among them, the literacy rate increased steadily from 60.8% in 1980 to 70% in 1990, 78.5% in 2000, and 81.6% in 2008 (World Bank, 2010). Through Plan Decenal, the proportion of children between 6 and 17 that were attending school increased from 71.3% in 1991 to 86.4% in 2002 (p. 10).

However, despite moderate success in some areas, several indicators remain below expectations. By 2008, the average enrollment rate for Latin America and the Caribbean in secondary school was 94%, while in the D.R. enrollment was only 80%. The literacy rate remains below the regional average of 91% at 88.2% and total public spending on education (% of GDP) is low, at a level of 2.2% in 2007, compared to a world average of 4.6% in 2006 (World Bank, 2010). Primary education enrollment rate is also lower than the regional average at 104% compared to 116%[CEHD6] . In addition, according to a 2001 assessment of education throughout Latin America  by PREALC, urban children in the D.R. performed worst, and rural children only outperformed children in Bolivia and Peru, for whom Spanish is often a second language (Murray, 2005). The limited quality of the public education system has led to the rapid growth of private education institutions. While there were only 24 private schools in 1961, there were at least 2,500 by the year 2000 (Murray, 2005).

In recent years, however, the despite the implementation of the second Plan Decenal (2008-2018), the government has not substantially increased its education expenditure, instead focusing to a large extent on increasing access to ICT technologies for the general population. The government’s investments in ICT technologies recently resulted in the First Lady of the D.R. receiving the World Information Society Award in 2007 from the United Nations. She was honored for her contributions to building a more equitable and inclusive society by empowering Dominican families to improve their living standards through access to ICTs at Community Technology Centers (CTCs) (Cedeño Fernández, 2007). However, it is hard to assess to what degree these technologies are reducing inequalities and influencing primary and secondary education.

Other recent technological initiatives include the establishment of the Technological Institute of the Americas, (ITLA) founded in 2000, the Dominican Telecommunication Institute (INDOTEL), established in 1998, the Cyberpark of Santo Domingo, founded in 2001, and the new Network Access Point (NAP) of the Caribbean built in 2008 (INTEC, 2010; INDOTEL, 2010; PSCD, 2010; Dominican Today, 2008; ITLA, 2010).

The increased investment and emphasis on ICT development has contributed to the rapid expansion of Internet use in the D.R. in recent years, increasing from 183.687 Internet accounts in 2006 to 508.603 Internet accounts by June 2010.  Based on the average users per Internet connection, INDOTEL believes that 33% of Dominicans, or 3,214,371 people, had access to the Internet by June 2010 (INDOTEL, 2010). The D.R. has a cell phone use rate of 0.91 cellular phones per person (INDOTEL, 2010), and mobile phone coverage is increasing in rural areas. In addition, through the rural connectivity program, INDOTEL hopes to bring broadband access to every town with over 300 inhabitants by 2012 (San Roman, 2009; INDOTEL, 2010). The telecommunications industry has grown by over 15% annually between 1997 and 2004 with most of the traffic from the D.R. is destined for the United States (Stern, 2006). With 1 million, or 9%, of Dominicans living outside the country, most of them in the United States, the D.R. received 3.477 billion dollars in remittances in 2009 (World Bank, 2010). Remittances are not only a major source of foreign revenue but they have also fueled the growing development of ICT as families are in favor of investing to increase communication with their loved ones.

Regarding ICT and education, the government has promoted ICT through CTCs, the Educando.edu.do online community, Red-Wan, Virtual Areas for Education (AVES), and OER and software development at ITLA (ITLA, 2010; Khelladi, 2003) The most popular initiative in ICT for Education has been the CTCs. CTCs originated from the Costa Rican Little Intelligent Communities (LINCOS) initiative which was built in partnership with the MIT.  The project’s innovative approach of using decommissioned shipping containers to house computer labs proved enticing to donors (Granqvist, 2003; Granqvist, 2005; MIT, 2001).

This model was appealing to donors, but it was perceived as foreign, temporal, and inconvenient to Dominican users. LINCOS originated in Costa Rica, but it was exported soon after to the D.R. where it was subsequently modified. Granqvist (2005) argued that the lack of participation by the community in the planning stage of the program resulted in designers ignoring the fact that the containers felt hot and crowded[CEHD7] , and that some of the software and manuals, including the operating system, were on some occasions not in Spanish (Granqvist, 2005). The container model was dropped and replaced with a traditional building during the Hipolito Mejia administration (2000-2004), and it was further modified during the second presidency of Leonel Fernandez (2004-2008) to also include meeting rooms and a radio station (Prado, 2009). They are also hoping to include libraries and other educational materials within the CTCs. Working in collaboration with the Technological Institute of Monterrey, a pioneer in virtual education and OER, the CTCs include a variety of educational software and material (ibid).

Originally, most of the software and manuals were in English and they were limited in quantity and scope, yet that has increasingly changed as the initiative has developed (Granqvist, 2005). By the spring of 2009, there were 49 operational CTCs (Prado, 2009) and the Office of the First Lady has set a goal of building 135 CTCs in the upcoming years (Cedeño de Fernández, 2005). Comprehensively, the ICTs for Education initiatives in the D.R. are slowly bridging the digital divide. More and more individuals are obtaining access to advanced technologies, in doing so, the D.R. is meeting the the last Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 8-8f, which promotes increasing access to telephone lines, cellular subscriptions, and Internet use per 100 population (UNDP, 2010). The likelihood that OER and other educational technology tools will improve over time and the constructionist nature of their design allow for individuals who were previously unable to study to have the opportunity to learn how to use computers, operate a radio, learn how to read, as well as use the educational software within the computer. [CEHD8] Such resources provide a one of a kind opportunity for the individuals that have access to these newly built centers (Lozano P., 2007).

However, are the centers visited by a large percentage of the population? Who visits them? Prado’s (2009) study showed that, despite being located in rural areas where there is a higher poverty rate than in the cities (54.1% live under the poverty line),  most of the users of the three CTCs she surveyed had a higher level of education than the average population (World Bank, 2010; World Bank, 2008; Prado, 2009). According to Prado (2009) , 61.5% of the CTC users in the locations she studied had completed high school, a level which is significantly higher than the national average in 2004 of 40%. In addition, 12.8% of the CTC users had a university degree, in comparison to the 3% nationwide enrollment rate in higher education in 2008 (pg 80).

Therefore, are these ICTs programs reducing or increasing the digital divide? Being unable to find a job with computer or IT skills in rural areas, individuals who become competent in ICT are likely to migrate to the cities. ICT also do not seem to be targeting individuals of Haitian descent. Prado’s (2009) studied showed that, as a result of anti-haitianismo, individuals were hesitant to label themselves as Haitian or of Haitian [CEHD9] descent (Prado, 2009). Similar to previous studies mentioned within the InfoDev’s ICT Knowledge Map (Trucano, 2005), studies of the D.R. and the effectiveness of ICT are not supported by education outcomes data[CEHD10] . After modifying the LINCOS project and increasing the participatory element of the CTC establishment process, individuals appear to be more supportive of the project (Prado, 2009; Granqvist, 2005) yet the initiative appears to be serving only a limited number of individuals, at high operating costs.

While CTCs and increased broadband access, as well as the introduction of educational programs through mobile phones, could, in the future, extinguish the digital divide and promote lifelong learning, current international indicators show that the D.R. public education system is failing to meet the MDG for universal primary education, while only a few students are benefiting from their ICT initiative. As such, the D.R. could pursue two courses of action; either increase, and perhaps as much as triple, the budget allocated to public education in an attempt to better national results, and/or increase access to ICT for every individual in the country by joining the OLPC initiative and providing every single child with a laptop and CTCs in all communities. In order to leapfrog and properly meet the challenges facing the D.R. in the 21^st century, a much greater national emphasis needs to be given to all areas of education, not just ICT. This effort should be linked to the national Dominican identity, by promoting athletic activities such as baseball, and music education after school programs similar to Venezuela’s “El Sistema”, but with a bachata or merengue emphasis. While there have been noticeable improvements during the past decades, the D.R. continues to lag behind in educational achievements compared to other Latin American countries (Murray, 2005). ICT development and reducing the digital divide are part of the solution, but to fully reduce the inequality that have plagued the D.R. since the colonial years, a greater expenditure on education and improved relationships with Haiti would be beneficial.

Very well written. The next great frontier for ICT research is to follow up with users on the impacts of ICTs. You aptly noted that this is missing in the field, but I hope you will help fill this void in the years ahead.

A

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