I understand that the following article is written in a very personal way. But this thing seems to me so unjust that it is just unbelievable. So this is my sad story of me trying to bring free educational resources to the world and having Microsoft indirectly not allowing me to do so  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.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open format to be an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm

I go a little further than the definition and really require an open licence and also open formats of the documents:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open format to be is an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm

Taking this into account I’ll now compare OER platforms which offer services to host a MOOC. The upshot is that I would suggest to host your MOOC either on Khan Academy or on Wikiversity.

Kahn Academy

Khan Academy is a non-profit educational website created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The stated mission is to provide “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere”. It is strongly supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and won the Google 10 to the 100 award giving them 2 million dollars. Currently the content is translated to various languages including German. You can find more information for instructors on the website at https://www.khanacademy.org/about

1. Overhead: You have to learn the Khan academy software
2. Open: Anyone can create courses on Khan academy. I am note quite sure about including videos since khan academy seems to require some standard branding.
3. Licence: CC 3.0 by Share alike
4. Hosting time: As long as the project is founded.
5. Open Format: The website provides an API to obtain data at http://api-explorer.khanacademy.org/ also all (?) source code of Khan academy is available: https://github.com/Khan
6. Feedback:Various Feedback mechanisms are provided as explained on the website
7. Quizes: Yes
8. Community:As far as I understand instructors cannot collaborate within the software
9. Audience:Yes: more than a quarter billion lessons have been delivered.
10. Support: There are a lot of online courses training the coach
11. Online Meetings: There are Q&A style discussions related to every content created
12. Account Management:
13. Risk: Besides Khan Academy running out of money I don’t see any risks

Recommendation: Khan Academy is a very good platform to choose once you want to host a massive open online course. The material as free and open. The platform and community is very active and there is a lot of outside support. Exporting data doesn’t seem to work yet but there seems to be the will to be open in the future. Anyway Khan Academy is the only open educational resources platform that offers you a user experience that is closest to the otherwise commercialized MOOC format.

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than formal content. Like Wikipedia it is offered in several languages. The English version of wikiversity seems quite active where as the German version is currently being restructured.

1. Overhead: Wiki markup language is very easy to learn. also there is the network of wiki tutors that can come to your place and teach you how to use mediawiki
2. Open: Anybody can contribute to Wikimedia projects
3. Licence: CC3.0 SA BY
4. Hosting time: Forever as long as Wikimedia exists
5. Open Format: Data base dumps are available and the software is open source
6. Feedback: So far there is little feedback for instructors but there are potential ways of changing this.
7. Quizes: yes
8. Community:Instructurs help each other out and also share content among each other. Minor mistakes in the material are quickly corrected.
9. Audience:There is a large audience, if the video content is uploaded to wiki commons and included into related wikipedia articles there is a high visibility of the MOOC at the targeted audience.
10. SupportEspecially in Germany there is the Mentoring network of Media wiki users who teach best practices of using media wiki software.
11. Online MeetingsHolger Brenner also uses media wiki on wikiversity to create online meetings but this is rather tricky
12. Account ManagementThere exist different user roles in media wiki but those are not really reflecting a student / teacher relationship
13. RiskBasically there are none. The data base dumps as well as the software are available for download. Even if the platform closes oneself can still easily host the content.

Recommendation: Mediawiki software is very flexible and offers a lot of opportunities. The software itself is not best suited for the “commercialized” massive open online course format. The biggest drawback is the missing analytics for instructors to see how the course is proceeding. On the other side if one actively uses wikiversity (which I did on my last course) one gets a lot of personal feedback. Wikiversity has a lot of trust (provided by wikipedia) and users to explore content and attract many new people. Also wikimedia really follows the concept of free content without any limitations. Finally Mediawiki is open source and also extensions can be included into Wikiversity if the community agrees to that.

OER Commons

OER Commons is a freely accessible online library located at www.oercommons.org that provides a web-based infrastructure for teachers and others to search and discover Open Educational Resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials. OER Commons is a project created by ISKME, an independent non-profit organization based in Half Moon Bay, California, founded by Lisa Petrides in 2002. Launched in 2007, OER Commons aggregates Open Educational Resources, which are teaching and learning materials that are openly licensed for anyone to use and reuse, in order to support a global network for engaging with flexible, adaptable curriculum

1. Overhead: No at all
2. Open: to anybody. I don’t know about content moderation
3. Licence: Creative commons
4. Hosting time: hosting can be on any website.
5. Open Format: all formats supported
6. Feedback: No
7. Quizes: No
8. Community: Yes
9. Audience:not of students but rather of teachers collecting teaching material
10. Support: No
11. Online Meetings: No
12. Account Management: No
13. Risk: No

Recommendation: OER Commons is a very interesting approach since a lot of content that is needed for an open MOOC can be drawn from OER commons. All of the MOOC content can be integrated into OER commons and from this hub being spread to other instructors again. The platform itself doesn’t seem suitable to host an entire course. I think anybody who does a MOOC should submit his material to OER commons. This works really easily even if the content is just provided as a web link. I did this with my last course which was hosted on wikiversity

European MOOC platform open up ed

The european union created its own mooc platform under www.openuped.eu/.

1. Overhead: No at all
2. Open: only selected partners
3. Licence: partner choice
4. Hosting time: you host the mooc yourself
5. Open Format: your decision
6. Feedback: possible
7. Quizes:possible
8. Community: There is a network of partners but it’s hard to say how much collaboration exists
9. Audience:your own students
10. Support: n/a
11. Online Meetings: possible
12. Account Management: possible
13. Risk: None

Recommendation: This platform seems interesting since there is political will behind. Right now it seems to only aggregate MOOCs from various partners so there is no hosting service offered. On the other side you maintain the licence of everything and can probably add an existing MOOC to the index of the platform ==> Nice to have but for now it cannot work as a standalone hosting service. Also it is not clear if you can participate since they work only with selected partners.

P2P University

Peer to Peer University (P2PU) is a nonprofit online open learning community which allows users to organize and participate in courses and study groups to learn about specific topics. Peer 2 Peer University was started in 2009 with funding from the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation. The main learning management system for P2PU courses is called Lernanta (the Esperanto word for “learning”). P2PU also hosts a wiki and an OSQA server for questions and answers.

1. Overhead: low
2. Open: Anybody
3. Licence: CC SA BY
4. Hosting time: I did not spot video content
5. Open Format: As far as I see there is no standard format used
6. Feedback: through discussions
7. Quizes: no
8. Community: there are strong partners like mozilla connected to the project
9. Audience: doesn’t seem too large
10. Support: there is a lot of teaching about the platform in courses on the platform. since courses are p2p I assume there is quite some support
11. Online Meetings: possible
12. Account Management: probably not
13. Risk: This platform doesn’t seem to be mature yet. Will it survive?

Recommendation: I like the approach of this learning platform but I have the feeling it is much more targeted towards learning groups from students. It also doesn’t seem to be very mature and it is not quite clear to what place it will develop. Also I could not find data base dumps on the website which decreases my trust into the platform.

Summary

I hope I did not oversee any platform. My advice is to go for either Khan Academy or Wikiversity and submit your entire course as well as pieces of the material to OER Commons. In that way I would also suggest to add part of the content of your course to wiki commons if can enhance any given wikipedia article. I think it is probably personal choice whether to go for Khan Academy or for Wikiversity. Personally I would probably go for Wikiversity since I already had good experiences and my trust to this platform with respect to long term sustainability is higher. Also out of the box more languages are supported. In any case: When you want to create a MOOC don’t let yourself be blinded by commercialized platforms and offers just because they look nicer. Education is something that belongs to the citizens!

1. Free content: The focus of these platforms (Khan Academy, Wikiversity, OER Commons, P2P university,…) lies in freeing educational content from the publishing industry. In most cases the focus seems to be on content and not so much on learning paths or didactics or pedagogy. The argumentation seems to be like: “first we need the content, next we can think about how to use it”. Have alook at my blog post: http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/comparison-of-open-educational-resources-services-to-host-your-mooc/ to see which open platforms perform well.
2. Commercial: There is a rising industry (Coursera, Udacity, edX, iversity,..) trying to commercialize massive open online education. Commercial platforms usually have high quality content and strong relationships with universities (most often ivy league) serving a lot of classes in this new format. Courses are usually not available under an open licence. So far most content is available at no cost and the business model is related to certification but also sometimes to tuition fees.
3. Self hosted with the use of a learning management system: There are various learning management systems (OLAT, Moodle, Google Course Builder, ILIAS,…) available as open source software which enables one to host a MOOC oneself. Most of these systems are made for eLearning and but lack this MOOC feeling of excellent usability. Often their intent also is not primary to be open.

This means besides this article I will publish three blog articles comparing platforms for each of the 3 different approaches. There is a German list of Learning platforms on Wikipedia as well as the MOOC Template in the English wikipedia from which I extracted the following lists

Platforms for online education

• MIT OpenCourseWare 
• Khan Academy 
• China Open Resources for Education 
• OpenCourseWare 
• Peer to Peer University 
• Academic Earth 
• Edulanka 
• ALISON
• Udacity 
• Coursera 
• Duolingo 
• edX 
• Canvas Network 
• Futurelearn 
• OpenHPI

People related to online education

• Anant Agarwal 
• Stephen Downes 
• Salman Khan 
• Daphne Koller 
• Peter Norvig 
• Andrew Ng 
• George Siemens 
• Sebastian Thrun

Not all of the platforms are relevant for a Web Science MOOC but still I extracted some of the most relevant sites and added a fiew others. As for the evaluation methodology we did a little survey and identified some possibilities. Since there are so many hosting services and possibilities we tried to find some dimensions that are important to us in order find which hosting service makes the most sense. We will use the following dimensions for our evaluation:

1. Overhead: How much overhead is associated providing the content for a certain platform infrastructure?
2. Open: Will the platform accept our course?
3. Licence: Who has the copyright and how is the licencing model?
4. Hosting time: How much time of hosting does the platform guarantee?
5. Open Format: Will the course content be in an open format so that we can easily export the data from the host and take it to some other service?
6. Feedback: Feedback for instructors like how long do people interact with some content?
7. Quizes: Will quizes be supported in the Platform
8. Community:Is there an active community and exchange of instructors?
9. Audience:Is there a large audience using the platform?
10. Support: is there active support from the platform?
11. Online Meetings: Does the platform support meetings of students and teachers on the cyberspace?
12. Account Management: Is it possible to have different roles for the accounts (e.g. student, tutor, creator,…)?
13. Risk: What are the risks of using this particular platform?

At least my goal would be to find a service with the following answers to our dimensions:

1. Overhead: Little overhead to submit the course material.
2. Open: The platform should be open to any course.
3. Licence: We should maintain the copyright or the licence should be at least creative commons
4. Hosting time: forever
5. Open Format: data export of the material is needed. e.g respecting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMS_Global
6. Feedback: In order to improve we need Feedback
7. Quizes: We need various forms of quizes
8. Community:A community of instructors with which one can exchange and from which one can learn would be amazing.
9. Audience:In the end good content will win but the larger the audience the better
10. Support: A platform that offers support with problems is preferable
11. Online Meetings: It would be nice if the platform supports online meetings of users with Q&A systems or even with video chat.
12. Account Management: Multiple account roles would support the learning process.
13. Risk: Obviously we want the risks to be minimized

I am looking forward to your feedback of missing platforms or other dimensions for the evaluation of the learning platforms.