So I decided to spend some time together with Sebastian Schlicht (my student assistant, who did an excellent job) to build a little bit more of infrastructure on top of the mediawiki on wikiversity to provide a better interface for learning. Watch the demo here:
As you can see we created a platform that supports:
- A click and point experience for teachers to create classes
- On page discussion for students which supports the standard discussion system in Mediawiki
- a nice modern navigation which adapts to users while interacting with the page
For me with this system our videos, quizes and scripts content shines in a much brighter light than it did before. For the first time I have fun consuming our the content of the MOOC.
For me this was an important step towards my goal of freeing educational content. Not only that our MOOC is completely OER we now also create core infrastructure for any teacher to create more classes that are OER. If you consider doing such a class feel free to drop be a message and receive free support. You could also start reading the documentation of the MOOC-Interface or see the slides(:
I am looking forward to hear back from you.
The following article is dedicated to Aaron Swartz:
Background:
- I fought hard to be able to create a massive open online course on web science.
- I compared platforms to host the MOOC and brought up good strong and valid arguments for our university to allow me to go for an open variant instead of the proprietary way.
- I am even supervising my student Sebastian Schlicht to implement a lot of features on Wikiversity to create a better user experience for content creators and learners.
- Wikimedia Germany asked me to write a guest article about the first real OER MOOC and I got a talk accepted at OERde14 where we present a way for others to easily follow our path in creating open educational resources on wikiversity.
- Related to similar problems I have been co-organizing an open access conference at oxford and helping to set up related work.
Copyright is f*** up on this planet.
We have been creating almost all of our so far 69 produced videos by ourselves. The videos which which we did not produce ourselves have been published under a creative commons by licence by the copyright owners. In one case I even called a professor in the united states and asked him to change the licence of his videos on Youtube such that we could reuse them within the Wikimedia commons ecosystem which he did (:
So you might think everything is alright. The guys paid attention to proper licences if they used material by others and for the rest they created everything themselves. Unfortunately this is not true.
For some of our Flipped classroom sessions we created hangouts on air with screen casts of our Smartbord. Currently our university only supportes the smartboard software SMARTNotebook on Microsoft Windows. Creating a Screencast on a Microsoft operating system is critical since there is the Microsoft Start button visible and also the user interface of SMARTNotebook. At least the microsoft interfaces are protected under copyright and I belief similar constraints will hold for SMARTNotebook. This has the consequence that we cannot put a creative commons licence to these materials. Consequently we must not host the materials on Wikimedia Commons as wikimedia commons supports only free content.
What we can do now is to move the videos to Wikiversity which allows material with a fair use licence. Ok great I can still host my course but parts of it are not free anymore. Don’t be afraid you don’t have to pay, like you have to at other sites. But you loose a lot of your freedom. You cannot remix, correct, translate, […] the videos. In particular I am not even sure if I am legally allowed to publish the videos under the terms of Fair Use. I am not an American citizen and my university clearly is a German institution. The Fair Use law is an United States law. Ok we are hosting the materials on an American Website but will this be sufficient? Last time I had a similar law problem and asked the law consultants from our university the only answer I received was: “Better take the material down. You don’t want to end up in a law fight”. Ok so not only we have absurd laws influenced from money making industries, we are also scared of the industries.
On the other side being forced to move to Fair Use licence will allow me to include a lot of creative commons materials where the NC tag is placed to the licence. Not that I now don’t want to do any open educational resources. But the quality of the MOOC also suffered from not being able to include CC-NC material.
Think about this again:
We as a university – and in the very end as a society, since the university is payed by tax money – pay high licence fees to Microsoft in order to be allowed to use their crappy Software. We are then forced by the administration that if we want to use modern technology like smartboards we have to use Microsoft Software. We pay high wages for professors, me and technical staff to create an free and open online course. And now Microsoft – which I did not even choose to use but was forced to use by our university which is just following the the majority vote of computer users – is telling me that I cannot publish the content I created under the license that I want.
You might say: Hey guy calm down. What’s the problem? The course is still online and nothing has changed. But that is the problem that everything has changed. We don’t pay attention to the subtleties as a society and wonder why we are having unjust laws.
Conclusions:
We need to think about our law. It is us who makes them anyway! Regional laws are conflicting with the idea of a global network (Fair Use for example). Many ideas of copyright are just not suitable to a tech driven world in which sharing, citing and giving attribution and fame to people who create something has been fundamentally changed. These laws like the ones mentioned are just outdated an ridiculous. Also other laws like https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren (sorry for a link to German wikipedia. I might translate the article at some point in time) fall into this category.
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