TechTalks Transcript
OCW and What Does it Mean to My Campus?
March 7, 2002
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 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Vijay Kumar [VK] |
 Phil Long [PL] |
JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for Spring of 2002 and to this session on �OCW and What Does it Mean to My Campus?� You are here because it�s time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host today, and our session is coming to you today with the support of the CREN member institutions and particularly with the support of MIT for the live audience which we have with us today and also the additional video streams. I understand these are low bandwidth and a high bandwidth video stream on the website for you to choose from. I�d like to just say how pleased I am and thanks to Phil Long here at MIT, and Vijay, for providing this opportunity for us to bring you a video Tech Talk which is so unlike our audio Tech Talks. We are coming to you from the MIT campus. We�re in Building 9 and we�re in what they call a Level 5 technology classroom, which is really an exciting place to be. With that, I�d like to welcome Howard Strauss of Princeton. I don�t know whether our audience will recognize Howard now that he�s here in video.
HS: I�ll just cover up the tie and you�ll probably know who I am.
JB: All right, Howard. Howard is a well-known web technology expert and also portal expert and just really pleased to be here. Welcome, Howard.
HS: Thank you, Judith. Where�s Vijay?
JB: Where�s Vijay?
HS: I don�t know.
JB: Vijay will be coming from this side.
HS: We�re sure he will. At any rate, I�m Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts and it is great to be here doing this webcast live from MIT, especially now that Vijay has arrived here. Today we�re going to engage our guest experts, Phil Long and Vijay, who is just sitting down over here, in a lively technical dialogue that will answer your questions about OCW�which we�ll tell you a lot about�and its relationship to OKI. And we�ll ask those very important follow-up questions. You can ask your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during the webcast. If we don�t get to your questions during the webcast, we�ll provide an answer in the webcast archive. Before we talk about OCW, I know that many of our listeners are very concerned that Ted Koppel�s Nightline might soon be taken off the air. If you�re looking for a worthy replacement, I suggest you consider Tech Talk! Like Nightline, we do in-depth analysis of serious issues that are of great concern to our audience. And today for the first time you can see us on streaming video. Let us know how that works out. And unlike Nightline, you don�t have to stay up until 11:35 p.m. to catch us and we have no commercial breaks. Once Nightline is gone, there really will be no viable alternatives to Tech Talk. Now we�ll address the topic of OCW, or Open Courseware. A great scholar was once asked, �Why do you always answer a question with another question?� �Why shouldn�t I?� he answered. When MIT announced the start of its OCW project on April 4, 2001, it raised more questions than it answered. Despite what MIT President Charles Vest actually said about OCW, the announcement was widely interpreted as meaning that MIT was going to put all its courses online and available free for everyone. Any day now, many people expected, you would be able to get your MIT degree in nuclear engineering free while accessing OCW from the comfort of your own couch, even if you live in Biloxi, Mississippi. A closer look at OCW reveals that what will be free and available is not courses, but course contents, whatever that means. However, just when we thought we understood the focus of OCW�remember, that was course content�MIT announced OKI, the Open Knowledge Initiative, which was focused on delivering courses online. In fact, it seemed to be focused on using OCW content in courses it offered. While shocking the academic and commercial worlds may have been the initial effect of OCW, if one believes the press releases, OCW actually has the lofty goal of sharing and encouraging scholarship both at MIT and for the entire world. Scholarship, however, like a university education, requires far more than even the best course content. Albert Einstein said, �It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative statement and knowledge.� How can OCW help awaken the joy of learning and get students to ask those questions never asked before, whose answers are really what is advances scholarship?. While some see this refusal to accept the accepted as a sign of intelligence, others view it as a sign of heresy that should be suppressed. Will OCW, by making MIT course content universally available, expose people to new information that results in increased scholarship or will the masses blindly accept OCW material without questioning it because of MIT�s prestigious stamp of approval? There�s no shortage of content on the web. Estimates are that there are about three billion web pages with about two hundred an hour being added. OCW will not significantly add to this total. What, then, will be its effect? Will other universities follow MIT? Will having a reading list online or even a transcribed video of every lecture online actually change the level of scholarship for anyone at MIT�or anywhere else? Isn�t OCW just a media shift from paper to online bits? Don�t we need a fundamental change in pedagogy, not just a media shift, to really improve scholarship? There are hundreds of questions that beg to be answered about OCW and I have over a hundred with me right here now. [Laughter]�
JB: They�ve grown by [inaudible] in the last five seconds!
HS: I know! [inaudible] Judith! Asking questions and discovering their answers is true scholarship, but only when that knowledge is shared. On today�s webcast of Tech Talk, we�ll ask those questions and have Vijay and Phil share their answers with you. Is this webcast a good way for us to inform you about OCW? Well, what would be a better way? Judith?
JB: Thanks, Howard, and for that, it will be freely available on the web, I�d like to remind you all. In preparation for today�s session, I too was looking for analogies to help understand this really unusual announcement about course�pardon me, I mean content being available on the web. You can tell, I almost slipped there, too, moving between courses being available and content being available on the web. And one analogy that perhaps�that I came up with and I was going to perhaps ask our experts during the course of the hour about it is that, you know, a hundred years or so ago, we had the Carnegie Library movement and I�m wondering whether we might want to compare what�s happening here with OCW to the providing a Carnegie undergraduate library for the twenty-first century, what analogies or comparisons might be drawn with that. But we�ll leave that aside as we get to the questions, so let me introduce our experts to you. I�d like to welcome the two of them here, Vijay Kumar to the immediate right of me, and then also Phil Long, with the bow tie, easily distinguishable! Let me introduce Vijay first. Vijay is the Assistant Provost and Director of Academic Computing here at MIT. In his many roles within MIT�s educational and technology organizations, he helps to influence the Institute�s strategic focus on educational technology and promote the effective integration of information technology into MIT education. Welcome, Vijay.
VK: Thank you.
JB: You�re here!
VK: I�m here, and very happy to be here! And my answer to Howard�s question is yes. [Laughter]�
JB: What was that again?
HS: Just read the wrap-up there [inaudible].
JB: All right, here we go! All right, our second expert here today is Phil Long. Phil is a �Senior Strategist� for the Academic Computing Practice here at MIT. He helps to co-direct the Academic Computing Support Team and also provides leadership in applying MIT information system resources to support the integration of technology into the curriculum. Both Phil and Vijay play key leadership roles in both the OCW we�re going to be talking about and the OKI project that we will hear much more about. Welcome, Phil.
PL: Thank you. Glad to be here!
JB: All right!
HS: Phil, you said that this is not about courses online. OCW is not about courses online. It�s about course content. Why did you�or why did MIT decide to make it about course content rather than to make it about courses?
PL: MIT�s view of what an education is and should be is relatively focused around the interaction of students, faculty, support and resources in an environment that sponsors and fosters scholarship. With that, content is an important addition, but only a portion of the equation and so from the perspective, I think, that MIT was viewing this, it made sense to take what is most easily transportable and demonstrable to others�which is, in fact, the content�and make that available to others to see as a window into�albeit a narrow one�what is important at MIT in terms of what education is addressing.
HS: Does that mean that MIT is not going to put courses online?
PL: It means that MIT is not going to be putting courses in the sense that you would take a course for credit at a distance learning education institution. That�s not what OCW is about.
HS: What�s the implications of that with respect to distance education for MIT? It sounds like you�re just not going to do I, then.
PL: Um, it sounds like�there may be aspects or parts of MIT that will engage in distance learning in one fashion or another, with a directed or small audience, but the OCW project specifically is not intended to provide courses online or anything around the notion of a directed experience guided by some expert to provide people with foundations for a degree from MIT.
HS: Okay. Vijay, I�ll�you�re welcome to answer whatever questions you�re going to answer, but OKI has something to do with putting courses online, so I mean, it�s something�you are doing something with courses online. How does OCW and OKI fit together?
VK: In a very, very broad way�and I am going to take you up on your offer for the previous question, too.
HS: Well, you can do that first.
VK: Okay, I mean, I think I will set the context appropriately because what preceded the OCW announcement was a considerable amount of reflection and strategic planning at MIT which talked�and one of the starting points of that reflection, navel-gazing thinking was to really focus on what constituted MIT values, educational values. And the net of that deliberation was to recognize that MIT value was largely derived from having excellent faculty co-located and interacting with excellent students and providing some very rich educational experiences. And understanding, as you pointed out, Howard, in your introductory statement you know that scholarship requires more than creative course content. The net of that deliberation was exactly that result and when we talk about distance education, we have some distance education initiatives at MIT. We have perhaps the Singapore MIT alliance where MIT offers courses both synchronous and asynchronous to Singapore, jointly with Singapore, is a very good example. In fact, it�s one of a kind in terms of its size and scope of the use of the Internet. And even that program, that distance education program amplifies this particular value proposition because we�re trying to see how you can use technology, how can you use the technology substrate in order to increase approximately interaction between very good students and very good faculty.
HS: If we look at MIT five years from now�and I know we can�t even predict what�s going to happen tonight�but what�s in OKI is out there and there�s lots of OCW material. Is all the OCW material going to appear on OKI? That is, is that going to be the only use of OCW at MIT, to offer courses on OKI or is it going to have other uses?
VK: Okay. We can write an algorithm around that question as a sequence. Now I�m going to answer the n minus one question which is--[Laughter] OKI is, as you know, as I�ve been publicized as trying to get through to the published world--OKI is about creating an infrastructure to enable educational applications. One particular educational application is what you would popularly term learning management systems. And OKI will be used as one of the mechanisms to post OCW content into this repository for OCW. OCW�s purpose is to make content from all or we say almost all of MIT�s courses available to the public, to the world. And I think that�s an important point to stress because we will have online content. We have online content for the five years which will be on an OKI compliant platform, but in some sense, we harvest that content and make it available in this repository called OCW so that the world can access it in different ways as different fields recognize it and find use for it.
HS: But is MIT going to be accessed by OKI?
VK: By an OKI-compliant platform. There is OKI, the infrastructure, and there are things that are built on OKI which are functionalities that course management systems provide.
JB: I�d like to go back and just clarify perhaps. We�ve talked about the difference between content and courses and so if we just re-emphasize that what OCW is about is about putting course content up, it turns out that we�re approaching, actually, the first year anniversary of the announcement, you know, and has anybody asked you yet for which content is already available and able to be accessed by the web right now? Is there anything up there right now?
VK: Yes. And you just did!
JB: I just did! Right! [Laughter] Where?
VK: Indeed. I mean, in fact, do we want to talk about the pilot?
PL: There has been a pilot program that has begun where some 20 courses, the content of 20 courses has been put together in an OCW framework and really that was a learning exercise about scalability, about the diversity of content, of the nature of content that comes with faculty in different courses. That stuff is not publicly available because it was intended to be, in fact, a learning experience to figure out how the scalability issues�which is a key component of an OCW magnitude project�were going to be addressed.
JB: Right.
PL: So the short answer to your question is, current OCW content available is not for the outside world.
JB: Okay, but
PL: Now, but there are�there has been significant effort. Some people that are even in the room with us today were a major part of that, you know, that project, have been engaged in going through the analysis of file conversion, scalability of file conversion, issues around meta-data acquisition, issues around managing the transition of the material from whatever state it comes out of the faculty member�s office into a place that can be presented to the world in a format that is suitably rendered, let�s say.
JB: Let�s follow that train of thought for just a moment, then. The 20 courses, 20 course contents that, in fact, you have been piloting, is that set of content going to be the first content that�s available to the world or�you don�t know yet on that.
PL: We don�t know.
HS: When will something be available to the world? When will be the first time I�ll be able to go over to something-slash-OCW?
VK: By
JB: Did you plan on us asking you this?
HS: No. [Laughter]�
VK: But that�s okay!
JB: We didn�t advise them.
HS: No. [inaudible]�
JB: That wasn�t one of the 65 questions!
VK: Let me put it this way. I think the plan that you�re asking is this, for the plan of meeting Howard and I [inaudible] [Laughter] And so I planned on surprises.
JB: Okay, all right.
HS: [inaudible] pleasant surprises, Vijay?
VK: Absolutely, very pleasant. This is indeed a very pleasurable initiative. [Laughter] This is something when Phil described the process of the traditional courses, the 20 or 22 courses, we�re trying to understand the lay of the land. We�re trying to understand, what are the formats? How do people offer materials? Okay? What are the support implications? Because the output of OCW, because there is an ambition over here not just to put materials from MIT courses and have them available to the world but to enable and encourage others in the world to follow suit. The ultimate subset of such an initiative is derived from more people doing things like this. There is enough key leaders of OCW that�s a subset [inaudible]. And for that to happen, in order to increase that kind of activity more widely, we have to understand and be able to tell a story about what the process entails. What is a reasonable way of doing it in the long haul? What are scalable mechanisms to implement it? And the pilot exercise is baby steps in our understanding it so that we can take it to the next step as a step toward an ultimate [inaudible], not just to produce the course work��
JB: So some of these things
VK: But to be able to tell the story of how to do things like OCW.
JB: So some of these tools in the pilot then will help?
HS: We have some e-mail here, a question from Molly Ruggles here from, let�s see, MIT actually! And Molly says she�s curious about intellectual property issues that may arise when MIT course materials become freely available on the Internet through the OCW initiative. Molly says, �Currently, many MIT course web pages are restricted only to students enrolled in these courses. My understanding is that these restrictions are due in part to professors� concerns around access to their writings and research. How will OCW address these issues?��
VK: OCW first of all has done a considerable amount of homework in trying to address these sort of large conflict areas of intellectual property and the good news is that what has come out is quite consistent with the kinds of mechanisms or positions that are in place with other published materials. Before I get to the restrictive part, OCW�faculty, the faculty will retain copyright of the materials that will publish on OCW, that is the position of the [inaudible]. What faculty do is give MIT an [inaudible] license to distribute these materials. Okay? Similarly, students who hold materials will retain the copyright.
JB: Um-hum.
VK: And in that sense, I would [inaudible]�is it Molly? Molly�s question. In that sense, OCW actually points to a very fine separation between copyright and control. Faculty will still retain the copyright but by giving the [inaudible] permission to make materials available quite widely. Now, not to pick upon something that [inaudible] with Howard but I�what would ask Molly is if faculty, by publishing all their materials in textbooks [inaudible] stricter in terms of what they shared with the students of the kinds of materials they provide and the answer is probably no. In that sense, by making materials available on the OCW repository, I do not anticipate that we�re going to somehow be more constrained in how much material was shared or not any more than they have been, in how much material they share whether in class or making it available. One of the difficulties might happen is those materials whose intellectual property arrangements that are not controlled, and it�s quite conceivable that the materials that are available in the OCW repository do not represent the confidential [inaudible] set of materials that are used in the classroom because some of them might be governed by intellectual property and applicable permission might not be available to make them available, in which case, I�m sure, alternate, even if somewhat inadequate arrangement might be made to [inaudible] the contents of the [inaudible] material.
HS: To follow up on Molly�s question, doesn�t that imply then that OCW might look different to people at MIT than outside of MIT because folks inside MIT might have access�in fact, would have access to licensed material, they might just see some video that only people in a course could see, but people outside would see that missing. How are you going to deal with that when I from the outside look in? Am I going to see that this part of the OCW has been intentionally left blank or, I mean, how am I going to know this thing is missing?
JB: It sounds like we�ve got three or four different versions or different views to the content.
PL: Right. In some sense, one way to think about it, perhaps, is that the full richness of the content that would be viewable by a student, for example, at MIT might be that portion of the content that is actually coming from the course learning system, the learning management [inaudible] which would be the framework of OKI and in fact, in those contexts, you have all of the general restrictions about access to the class that is maintained by class control lists and all the privacy issues associated with online discussion that may be happening in a discussion [inaudible] and in the class and the like. Certainly, what happens in that space is likely to be different from that which is viewed from the lens of OCW and part of the OCW interesting challenge is figuring out how to move and abstract that content that is used in the interactive sense in the teaching environment into a position that can be viewed externally that does preserve the individual rights of students and does preserve the issues and copyright of producers of material that may not be within MIT. And at the same time, provide something that is cohesive and interpretable for what that course is about with the content [inaudible].
HS: How is OCW different that some of the stuff we�ve already see like Merlot which is a collection of stuff aimed at instructional technology? What are you doing that�s different from that?
VK: Merlot, I mean, if there�s a--[inaudible].
HS: [inaudible] I mean, we can pick on Merlot, but I�m really only using it as an example of that kind of thing.
VK: Let�s see what they might have in common. They are both repositories, right? Merlot says here are�here is�here are some useful materials that this is, I guess, a prospect Merlot addresses which is here a set of useful materials on a particular topic.
HS: Right, in different disciplines.
VK: In different disciplines. But let�s take a discipline. Here are some useful materials as offered by or as harvested by us and [inaudible] by some people [inaudible] being useful and here�s some way to get to them. OCW, MIT�s OCW is putting MIT�s course content on it. It�s not about harvesting all kinds of useful materials for any particular subject. It is�and this is also a statement about it being a window on MIT�s courses. It�s very important. And I also talked to [inaudible] about the fact that what you�d really like to do is, you know, down the road, you�d like other institutions to do OCW-like things. And at that point, you might see something that approaches the Merlot [inaudible]. Right now, it is about MIT�s courses and MIT�s course content or course materials and having that. It�s not about all useful material on a particular topic. Or a set of useful materials on a particular topic. That�s one thing. It�s also�Merlot does not necessarily�Merlot has course materials, but OCW by its content will have�when you look at the presentation�it actually�there is structure of how a course is conducted as represented through this course material and the way they outline. And that�s not�that�s not a Merlot [inaudible].
HS: But would��
JB: Phil�s been trying to jump in here.
PL: I simply�actually, there�s also Merlot as a referatory.
HS: Referatory? Sounds like a very religious thing.
PL: It does. That�s Carl�s description of it. But it is, in fact, pulling together contents from a variety of different sources and making it available organized around a disciplinary theme. OCW is actually making a systemic commitment from an institutional perspective to put the large majority of the 2,000 courses that constitute MIT education together, not just for today and tomorrow, but for the long haul. And I think that there�s a sense about the permanence and the richness of that that distinguishes it from any of the previous efforts in this arena.
HS: Many faculty members, as you know, see potential profit in taking their course materials and publishing them on the web. My understanding is that with OCW, faculty volunteered to do this and you didn�t need to coerce anybody, like saying you�d send them to a community college or something if they [Laughter] didn�t [inaudible].
JB: That�s not essentially true!
HS: But I wonder, why would a faculty member give up potential royalties, profits, etc.? They don�t do that when they publish a textbook. They get the royalties from it. Why would they give this up voluntarily for OCW?
PL: First of all, I think there is a more realistic perception of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that comes from [inaudible].
HS: [inaudible] small pot.
PL: It�s a small pot. It can even�it is a thimble, perhaps, at the end of the rainbow. So this perception that there are riches to be had from this particular mine of resources is something, I think, that is less well-founded and I think the faculty at MIT are sanguine about that. But I think it�s also�I mean, I have to fall back on the discussions that Vijay had characterized of the group of faculty that really got together to think this through in a deep way to come up with the idea. This was really�there was really a perception that there was value in making this contribution to this statement, that the fact that there is copyright retained by the individual faculty members doesn�t preclude doing something else some of this material later. There are, there will be those kinds of option. But it�s more important to get this material out, to make it available to folks, not just at MIT but for anywhere in the world that doesn�t have the access to the resources and the capabilities of institutions like MIT. And that there was really to some extent a statement of value, that it is more important to get it out into the public domain so that it can be built upon by others. And that�s an important message I think they wanted to send.
VK: Yeah, I would�in fact, that�s very good because both the earlier notion of sustainability�and I know [inaudible] reading stuff about how it is [inaudible] different and we�ll talk more about that, I�m sure. But so the faculty go. I think there�s also realization that there�s going to be much more conversation and communication around how they teach through OCW than how they would�than otherwise. And that�s a value added. I mean, if you look at your checks and balances, your debits or credits, work is published, as Phil pointed out, you know? The pot of gold, the small pot of gold, but then you look at what else is on the credit side of the house. And the fact that there is much more engagement, much more attention, much more visibility to the course, much more conversation around it, much more [inaudible] teaching than [inaudible] because of this public�much more extensive public exposure.
HS: Yeah, just to follow up on this thing. One of the other things that a faculty member gets besides a pot of gold or a thimble of silver or whatever at the end of the rainbow is a faculty member gets tenure or gets prestige for publishing in journals, publishing books, getting articles out there. It doesn�t seem�if I�m a junior faculty member and I put all my stuff on OCW, it doesn�t look too good on my CV and probably won�t get me tenure. How do we replace that kind of thing? Why give it up to OCW when I can put it in a journal? Or are you saying we�ll do both?
PL: I think that it�s incumbent on the faculty to engage in their community in practice, and their community in practice involves communicating the research and investigative work that they�re doing to their peers. And they do that through journals or peer review articles in various publications and the like. That will continue. That remains an important mechanism for them to build the scholarship of their area. I think not just at MIT, but at institutions all over the country from community colleges on up, there is an increasing recognition that the role of the faculty is multiple and that it includes making their materials available in some fashion or another to the students electronically, more now than ever and that adding to this responsibility in the OCW sense is a systemic and thoughtfully constructed way of doing it. And OCW does, in fact, have provisions as part of the process to try to facilitate that transition and population of material and equipment, of thoughts and ideas in the form of the content in OCW through help from an infrastructure, a simple infrastructure that is going to be available to [inaudible] them.
JB: Let me�we�ve got a question that�s coming in from Ronald Bolander from Georgia Tech that actually picks up on the question of scholarship and publication, etc. And I�d like to ask this question, but also at the same time, I would like to invite those folks that are in our live audience today to�if you�ve got a question�to go ahead and put it out on a piece of paper and just we�ll take them here. Here is the question from Ron. �Do you anticipate that content in OCW might be referenced in other people�s scholarship and may then imply a need to clearly mark and archive different editions of the content?� So you know, it�s one of those nice questions that has about five components and layers in it. So you know, one thing is how is the content going to be referenced and referred to and used by other people in other places, and then also how�what mechanisms have you been looking at�maybe it�s too early�but to look at identifying versions and archiving, etc., of the contents. Both of you are kind of nodding. Who would like to take that?
VK: Well, I�m nodding because I�m agreeing with the question and your answer.
JB: I didn�t mean to answer it yet!
HS: You mean the answer is in the question [inaudible]?
VK: Yes, because she mentioned, you know, maybe this is too early. The thing is, have you talked about different versions, of archiving different versions?
PL: Yes.
VK: Do we know�and this is something that�s very important to point out at the outset. It has to do with the [inaudible] courses, it has to do with the next two years, it has to do with the OCW project [inaudible] to the pilot phase.
JB: Right.
VK: And we are putting all these courses on and our intent is to understand what�not only how to produce and populate this repository, but how people are going to access it, how they are going to find it meaningful. There�s a lot to be studied and understood and it would be rash on our part to say that we have thought about every conceivable version because these issues have come up. How do people reference materials? In some cases, they will look no different from how they do it now.
JB: Yeah, all right.
VK: The medium has changed, but not necessarily the mechanism.
JB: What about going back to�I think this goes back to the timeline and the pilot that we were talking about, you know, and also the title of our talk today is �What Does It Mean to Our Campus?� I mean, as people are looking at planning, you know, a year into the future, two years into the future, is there a timeframe that they might anticipate being actually able to access the content in OCW?
VK: Well��
JB: Didn�t mean to bring you back here, but
VK: Let�s look at it, and I�ll be rash. [Laughter]�
JB: All right!
VK: Our hope is that in the next year, we will have a hundred courses.
HS: You know this is being archived, people will be able to look at this a year from now.
VK: That�s right!
HS: And see whether this is true or not.
JB: [inaudible]�
VK: And then I�m hoping to [inaudible] from the version from back then.
JB: And you�ll edit it, right?
VK: And so the intent is�there�s a schedule. I can pull it up. It�s not all [inaudible] and perhaps someone in the audience here might be able to help me. But there are a hundred courses that we plan to put out in the next year.
JB: In the next year?
VK: The next semester.
HS: You�ve got to watch that, Vijay. You keep saying [inaudible].
VK: By September.
HS: When we say �courses,� you mean the content of courses.
VK: Content, that�s absolutely right.
PL: Course materials, right.
VK: The course materials from [inaudible].
JB: [inaudible]. September, 2002?
PL: Yeah.
VK: And what we hope is by that time, we�d have worked out�when we have these hundred courses, which I expect will include the [inaudible] courses.
JB: Pilot, okay.
VK: [inaudible] that they will be available to the�to the external world.
HS: How did you choose which hundred courses to do?
PL: [inaudible] [Laughter]�
VK: Well, we had, when we talked about it initially, about selecting these courses, we wanted to select courses first which we wanted to represent the MIT education. The different disciplines, the different kinds of pedagogical modes, the different kinds of�when I say �modalities�, lecture-based, [inaudible], we want to make sure that in the hundred courses a sufficiency of the presented examples of the kinds of courses, of the kinds of pedagogy, instructional modalities that are represented in a MIT education. So that�s an important criteria, plus we are also trying to understand a lot of things because there are some which are very, very lecture-oriented, some which might be very media-rich courses, because we want to understand what kinds of technologies to employ in the beginning to [inaudible] so that we have some way of selecting appropriate tools. Because again, there�s a process goal over here which is to come up with an organizational makeup, with a production framework, that lowers the threshold for faculty to participate, for us to be able to [inaudible] content and lowers the threshold for people outside to access this material.
JB: Well, you know, it still is a little bit of work for the faculty to put content up on the web, so basically, that�s what you�re doing in phase one is figuring out here, seeing how can I make this easy.
VK: Easier.
HS: We�ll come back to that. But there�s a question from someone at Princeton University which�I have to handle the questions at Princeton University. Otherwise, I can�t return! And we have a��
VK: We will gladly keep you, Howard. [Laughter]�
HS: I�ve never��
JB: There you go!
HS: No one has ever made me an offer on video! [Laughter] That�s certainly a first. Thank you, Vijay! Kirk, I guess I�m not coming back! We have a question from Kirk Alexander from Princeton University, and Kirk says, �How is the OCW initiative different from public access to other institutions� course content via a different course management system such as Blackboard?��
VK: Well, one answer, I think Phil has already pointed to or hinted at which is MIT has committed to OCW as a permanent sustainable activity. You might use different kinds of courseware engines, if you want to call them that, to populate content. But the structure, the framework, the template, the presentation and the commitment to maintain it over variations in technology and over time is a commitment. And in that sense, it�s remarkably different from other materials that might have been put up through other course engines. That�s one kind of difference.
PL: Yeah, the material putting up by the courseware du jour for the moment is one thing and lots of people are trying to do that. But once again, material put up in a context of a courseware system is constrained by the intent of that courseware system, which is to try to engage in an educational interactive process with the students, presumably, in those cases, Princeton who are also attending class occasionally. But in the case of OCW, there�s no intent to provide a mechanism by which the ongoing instructional process that involves interaction and discourse and the like is to be modeled. So we�re looking at the aggregation of that content and presumably there will be different characteristics that flow from that. Secondly, I think I means, in the OCW context there is going to be attention to things like how they go about searching that material, how they go about looking at that material in various comparative ways that might not have meaning in the context of a particular course for Physics 101, which have a great deal of meaning for someone who�s looking at how physics is taught and wants to compare concepts perhaps across multiple courses or look at the way different concepts appear within a given course.
VK: Howard, if I may, because I think it�s a very important question.
HS: Now that you�ve made me an offer, I�ve got to give you the floor, right? [Laughter] We�ll negotiate the price here.
VK: You have to [inaudible] negotiations. At MIT, [inaudible] might not be offering [inaudible]. [Laughter] Here�s the thing. There are a couple of dimensions over here, I think, that need some comment on. OCW�this is about access and I think we�ve got it going that we might use different courseware engines. There are different ways in which content population of the OCW repository can happen. It can happen through engines, a lot [inaudible]. I want to come back to that. It can come through [inaudible]. There are a gazillion courseware engines out there, courseware management engines out there. But they can come through other sources also, right? And they might be various site clients that feed, let�s say, an intermediate repository. And there�s a lot of what we call post-production work. Tagging meta-data, tagging so that these materials become useful to a very varied audience and to make sure that there�s quality assurance of these materials. And I think it�s very important to recognize the publishing aspect of OCW. From different engines to tools that can be used to publish materials in the OCW repository, there�s a lot of post-production fixing that has to be done because the ambition was here also to make it extremely usefully available [inaudible] to a variety of audiences. So all the post production tagging, etc., the quality assurance to make sure the different technologies and different media can handle it, all that is not part of other courses or materials that might be produced using Blackboard and other platforms. The other aspect has to do with the OKI compliant aspect of it, the OKI compliant platform, which is�the hope is that by making�and you know, this where you had started this session, I guess, and it bears some comment. The idea of having OKI compliant tools, OKI compliant infrastructure elements and components in open source is�and then building OCW that�to enable the usefulness or increase usefulness of these materials by [inaudible]. And that is [inaudible] to create materials like this. For OCW like [inaudible]. And this is�so there are two dimensions of response to�what�s his name, from Princeton?
HS: Kirk Alexander.
VK: Kirk. One is that it�s more than just posting content to a courseware engine, OCW. More than that. Two is the OKI compliant platform, and OKI compliant [inaudible] enables some other kinds of useful things to happen to [inaudible].
JB: Okay, I�d like to depart from custom for just a moment and offer the opportunity for a live question from our audience here in Building 9 here. I believe, David, do you have a question? [Inaudible speaker]�
PL: [Inaudible phrase�microphone not on] What we�ve found [inaudible] various projects before, even if we don�t publicize it, [inaudible], in fact don�t put any external links to it, people come across it or the search engines come across it and when you change the site, you start getting lots of e-mails about people that have used it as part of their curriculum.
HS: Why don�t you repeat the question because I don�t think we�re going to pick it up otherwise.
JB: Oh, that�s a��
PL: [inaudible] earlier.
JB: The mic is right there.
HS: That�s great. That�s [inaudible] picked it up. X: [Question is inaudible for several seconds, then mic clicks on] and have you decided on a specific set of standards that you�re going to follow for the timing and the format? And how have you operated�have you looked at the libraries at all to establish successful standards for the tagging of the data.
HS: We sure hope [inaudible].
JB: [inaudible] So, Dave, we�ve got lots of wonderful questions
VK: A fund of questions.
JB: A fund of questions, right!
VK: [inaudible] Have we decided on a standard? No. Is this an MPEG 7 question? No. I mean, the standards, the meta-data standards are evolving standards and the answer is no, we have not arrived at a standard. There�s a very important initiative that�s going on at MIT, the [inaudible] initiative, which is looking at how to archive materials [inaudible] and then�and relying on [inaudible] and standards [inaudible] put out by the W3C. So there�s a lot of thinking in this domain. Not [inaudible] thinking about what to do, but all these considerations [inaudible] and I�ve been working with the library, yes, indeed. In fact, even the pilot�the interim production group or the pilot production group, it has a complement of people from�all sort of production people were involved in the production of the [inaudible] material. People from the library, people from [inaudible] and people from Information Systems and it reflects the kinds of competencies that are important.
PL: But one of the thing�s your question�s pointing out is an area that we don�t have�not just we, but no one has a particularly well-formed idea about how to manage in the long term and that is, at what point is material appropriately moved into a V-Stakes [?] like archive? When you move it, what attributes are you moving? Are you moving entire representation of its original form, are you moving some sort of abstracted description of it? What are the elements that you�re preserving? What do you mean by preservation of this in the long-term sense? Are you preserving the user experience of it as they would flip through from a browser available to us in 2002 or what? And of course, while we don�t have answers to that, we certainly are very, very conscious that these are questions that we�re going to have to be solving as we go through this process.
JB: Now we�re getting--you know, we probably have enough questions here for about three hours and we�ve got a lot of questions on OKI, but we also, I think we�ve got a couple of additional questions coming in on OCW that I think we�d like to just kind of maybe you could have a wrap up on the OCW piece. And these questions are from Ed Goray at University of Illinois. He asks a couple of questions. One is, can we take OCW content and modify it and repackage it for your own uses? And I think that�s a question that just a lot of folks have. What do you say to folks when they ask that?
VK: First you ask them, �What do you mean we, Kemosabe?� [Laughter] Because the answer changes depending on��
HS: More [inaudible] on who �we� is or what we�re going to do with it?
VK: [inaudible].
HS: So anybody can do their own thing with it. If it�s for me, it doesn�t matter who I am.
VK: Right. You go to the OCW site and, well, you can access the materials. The very broad statement that we use is that the materials can be accessed, okay, and be taken for non-commercial purpose is what we say. And what that means is the kinds of arrangements you worked out in order to reflect the faculty retaining the copyright and being given MIT license to publish it, that covers people being able to access these materials and use it for non-commercial purposes. If people�if there is an interest in using it for--you know, in copyrighting it in packages [inaudible] sold it, those arrangements will have to be negotiated on a case-by case basis, you know, with the creator. They don�t�we have not covered those��
HS: Yeah, we can understand that you can�t sell it. You can�t take it and then package it and sell it.
PL: But if Ed wants to take that material, for example, and you see something of value in a problem set in chemistry that he saw on the OCW site, then we encourage him to [inaudible] the open source [inaudible] that he should be able to do that.
JB: But he could take that and, for example, I know that Michigan, I think, is doing a big thing on chemistry so they could take that�folks at Michigan could take, for example, a chemistry simulation or animation, etc., incorporate it into their stuff on campus and do that. But if they wanted to sell it, then?
HS: Isn�t he kind of selling it anyway? I mean, if he takes Chemistry 101, the OCW version of the course content, and he teaches Chemistry 101 at University of Illinois using those materials as close as he has, somebody�s paying tuition to look at
PL: [inaudible]. I know--
HS: �Chem 101. And that�s okay? If he works for Ford Motor Company and he teaches it to a bunch of engineers?
PL: We don�t know!
JB: Are we [inaudible] money? [Laughter] I don�t know!
HS: Okay, great. So there�s these grey areas out there and you�re going to��
PL: [inaudible], absolutely.
HS: But your lawyer will deal with them.
JB: We�ve got an awful lot of questions about OKI that came in and we haven�t really
HS: Oh, from Ed? [Laughter]�
JB: Well, from�yes, a lot from Ed but lots
VK: I just�I�m just pulling out some papers and this has to do with an earlier question about value and so on.
JB: All right.
VK: John Maynard [?] is an MIT professor of mechanical engineering and he noted that publishing his undergraduate heat transfer textbook online, the reach of his ideas was much broader than it had been had he published the book the traditional way. And it speaks to the relative value added which comes with [inaudible].
HS: Well, sure, and if he appeared on Nightline while it�s still on the air��
VK: [inaudible]�
HS: �he�d reach an even broader audience and�okay.
VK: Yes.
HS: Well, I don�t know. I don�t know if he�d be paid for that, but that�s off the issue here. Do you want to do OKI questions? I have more OCW questions.
JB: Well, all right, why don�t you go ahead? Let�s take one more OCW question.
VK: [inaudible]�
HS: This one is from David Wiebe�David, we won�t pronounce your name, however it�s pronounced. He says, �How do OCW and OKI reduce the current high cost of entry into academia?� And what his question goes on to talk about is, he�s saying, are you going to be able to get this MIT education at home? He�s skeptical. He says when he reads some article from the Encyclopedia Britannica, it doesn�t really educate him, or not much.
PL: Absolutely right. And again, we are not making any claim or staking any particular claim that the content of the course materials at MIT will�if it�s material in bioengineering, will make him a bioengineer by having read it from the OCW site. Indeed, that�s the value proposition that distinguishes the content from the learning of the profession and the discipline that goes with being in the educational program at MIT here or at other institutions. So will it inform him about what the bioengineering program at MIT thinks is important information and the sequence of it and the relative selection of topics? Yes, he�ll learn a great deal about that and about what the faculty member in bioengineering thinks is important for scholarship and teaching of the students at this institution. He�ll learn about that from�by seeing the collection of materials and how it�s juxtaposed, by seeing the components and how they�re arranged. Will he learn how to do a wave-form analysis? Who knows?
VK: But will he get the richness of the experience? The answer is no.
HS: Right, and he certainly won�t get the MIT stamp of approval. He won�t get a degree or course credit or anything like that.
VK: And we have to go back, again, to this whole context about�about the faculty and the students that comprise MIT and, you know, the statement I made earlier that recognizing that MIT�s value is realized by co-locating excellent faculty and excellent students [inaudible]. And it is, it�s something important to consider even when we talk about the real [inaudible] of OCW materials. And I�m remembering your opening statement, you talked about is it possible to just take these materials and use them outside and get an education. These materials that MIT faculty select or produce or get together, they create--you know, keeping the audience profile in mind, these are MIT students or selected for MIT and there�s a threshold�they have a makeup, a natural makeup of [inaudible] which need not be the characteristic of all the audiences we teach. So even if you take these materials and use them elsewhere, there is some amount of contextual input missing that will need to be done. Different kinds of examples, if you�re talking [inaudible], the reference [inaudible]. I think it is important to recognize that even content, although it might be valuable, is not transportable and reusable.
JB: I think you�re really bringing up the point that education�and I think you got this in the announcement, you know, that education is really a process. It�s not content.
VK: Right.
JB: So that as students learn, we have to have content that�s customized to the particular students and what their goals are, etc. And that�s where that�s going to change [inaudible].
HS: Yeah, I mean, I think the jury�s still out on distance education over the web. And it seems to me if you step back��
JB: Oh, no, the jury is in! [Laughter]�
HS: Well, a lot of people are saying, �Yes, it�s wonderful,� but this seems to fly in the face of it. This seems to say that unless we have the high degree of interaction with the faculty, unless we have the equipment, the labs, the facilities that a place like MIT brings, that you�re not going to get this quality education. And I think there�s a lot to be said on that side. There�s a lot of folks today are saying, �No, we�re going to do distance education. You can sit in front of your terminal, on your couch in Biloxi and can be educated as well as you could have if you came here.��
VK: Absolutely, and I will concede that it could be education. What you have to qualify is that it would not be the education you got if you had come to MIT and that�s not the kind of education that MIT [inaudible] degrees, MIT degrees in.
JB: Well, I think we�re talking here, though, about the various�this co-location. That was one of the terms that you had mentioned.
VK: Right.
JB: That an MIT education depends on co-location. But we�re getting to the point where we�re really redefining and redefining co-location.
VK: Co-location, there are many things you can do, for example.
JB: Exactly, you know, so just what does that all mean? And it can mean different things.
VK: Right.
JB: Okay. Let me see, we�re getting close to the end and at this point we do want to ask perhaps one question on OKI because we want to��
HS: [inaudible]�
JB: Well, you can ask it, Howard!
HS: No, you ask it. I have no��
VK: [inaudible] OKI�s project leader has just walked into the room.
HS: [inaudible]�
JB: All right.
HS: You can as the question.
JB: One of the questions that our audience has been asking�we�ve got a couple good questions on here is just what is OKI, like in ten or 12 words so that people can really remember it? And then in that case, we had a question having to do with how to gain access into OKI? So I actually want to ask a two-part question here. What is OKI and just so the people can really get the distinction between OKI and OCW, what is it? And then��
HS: Are you really asking when it�s going to be available?
JB: And then�well, not necessarily.
HS: We should, though. We should ask that.
JB: We can ask that afterward!
HS: When is it going to be available?
JB: But then how are people going to go about getting access to OKI?
VK: Well, we�re going to put it in OCW! [Laughter]�
JB: Now that everyone is thoroughly confused!
PL: We need another three-letter acronym beginning with O.
JB: All right, what is OKI? Ten, 15 words, what is OKI?
VK: I�I probably [inaudible]. OKI is a project that is aimed at creating an infrastructure to enable diverse educational applications with creative efficiency. And one of those applications is learning management systems.
HS: That�s fine. If you had done that in German, you could have done that in one word! [Laughter] [inaudible]�
JB: And does the project manager agree with that statement? All right. X: [inaudible] some place we can go back to in [inaudible].
JB: That�s right. And your name? X: Jeff Merriman.
JB: Jeff Merriman, all right, thank you.
HS: And then when it�s going to be available, Jeff?
JB: And how are you going to get access? This is from Richard Danielson.
VK: So when you say when is it going to be available, that�s what I�m [inaudible] your question.
JB: Okay.
VK: It�s easy to say [inaudible], OKI delivery comes in, I�m going to say, two flavors. The first flavor, the basic flavor is that it has some architectural specifications that are represented through what we call API�s. And these are for common [inaudible] of services that all kinds of educational applications access. The API�s which are general [inaudible] actually provide ways of [inaudible] these common services and mechanisms for applications to access them. And those [inaudible] applications, the common service applications, the initial set of them, we hope to have for public viewing [inaudible] by the end of this month. And a whole set of them��
JB: The API�s?
VK: There are several of them that are ready. We are fine-tuning them and putting some documentation [inaudible].
JB: So are those going to be, if we just�we talked a lot about open source. Are those going to be put on a site and licensed with the regular open source licensing arrangement?
VK: Yeah, that is [inaudible].
PL: And then some of the API�s, I believe, will be available tomorrow? Monday?
JB: Monday.
HS: So they�ll be published.
PL: On the OKI website for people to take a look at, with a description and then the actual�the actual��
JB: Is the OKI website really easy?
PL: It�s very easy.
JB: Are you going to tell us what it is?
PL: It�s web.mit.edu/oki.
JB: All right, good. I think we have Terry Calhoun who might be [inaudible] been up there already.
HS: [inaudible]�
VK: [inaudible] Howard, and just is what you call educational components that a lot of educational applications need. [inaudible] we have just started doing is defining those tools because the specifications and showing how to implement those specifications is the first layer, okay? There are specifications of the documents, there are specifications with reference implementations [inaudible] the first layer. The second layer is common tools, components that a lot of educational applications employ. And those we expect between�in about a year�s time, to have them available. And they will be open source as well for anybody to try to use and implement as they see fit.
JB: So everybody, bottom line to our listeners and to the folks on campus is to really watch the OKI website, then.
PL: Indeed. And it will be actively managed so that the information is there as soon as possible.
JB: All right, good. Howard, you always want to ask a very good question at the very end.
HS: I always have another question, that�s for sure! I have hundreds of them here. [Laughter] One question that comes to mind here is I�ve looked at a lot of things that faculty, many universities have put online and the quality is spotty. Pedagogically, some of the stuff is good, some is awful. Some of the online design is fine, some is not. What are you going to do to try to insure the quality of the stuff that OCW does?
PL: Vijay referred earlier to the fact that there�s a lot of post-production work associated with bringing material that is coming from OKI-compliant learning environments on campus into the pipeline and from other outside [inaudible] as well, other entry avenues. But one of the issues is to put it into a context that is reflective of the quality that we�d like�the faculty might [inaudible] yourself is interested, I�m sure, in making sure is conveyed and projected and doing so in a way that contextualizes it so that the material is not so narrowly defined that it�s nonsensical outside of the context of the particular slice of course [inaudible].
HS: So you�re going to have some essential group of people��
VK: Absolutely. This is a distinguishing characteristic between OCW materials
PL: [inaudible]�
VK: And then generally having [inaudible].
HS: [inaudible] my 1.1 question.
VK: And the whole organization�OCW, the whole organization has been created to provide support to the faculty in order to make it [inaudible] criteria, to provide support to the faculty and then to do a lot of the post production work that [inaudible] we call post production, [inaudible] the quality assurance [inaudible].
JB: How big is this [inaudible] going to be, can you say?
VK: Well, first I�ll say that the OCW work will actually try to leverage existing organizations and existing [inaudible] responsible. However, this separate group, you know, on a�it could be more than 15 people, the central organization. But when we think about OCW as�the organization [inaudible] will include the central organization as well as people who might be available in the localities to help with processes.
JB: But it sounds like it�s [inaudible] recognition that support is needed.
VK: It is. It is.
JB: And I think faculty is going to be glad to hear that.
VK: That was their biggest need.
JB: That was their biggest need, all right. I think we probably need to wrap up here. We could go on for a very long time, but Phil, do you have any final comment or statement you might like to make before we wrap up?
PL: Well, I mean, there�s been a lot of confusion about OCW and OKI but I think in the end, as people will begin to see the material emerge from the work that�s going on on campus, the point will become clearer that OKI is in fact a standard, a framework for application development. It�s meant to be allowed the creation of interesting pedagogical tools and structured in such a way that facilitates its integration into the campus infrastructure. Whereas OCW is, in fact, the content that faculty provide and has its own scholarly value and attributes which we hope will stimulate people in other institutions to thinking that if that�s what MIT thinks is important in a particular discipline or a particular topic, then perhaps it�ll be worthwhile for those institutions to [inaudible] that.
JB: All right, good. Vijay?
VK: I�m going to ask people to look at�I think a pointer was sent. President Vest, in his report�MIT�s President Chuck Vest in his annual report, which was entirely centered on educational technology, which also speaks to how MIT�s [inaudible] work towards educational technology and [inaudible] in particular. I�d really encourage them to take a look at that. The title, �Disturbing the Educational Universe.��
JB: Yes, there is a link to that.
VK: OCW, you know, in a very big way and perhaps [inaudible] OKI are two significant events which surely will have an impact, will disturb the educational universe. Steve Lehrman who leads the internal management group, OCW, who is one of the people who wrote the proposal, he and I worked�now have been talking to a lot of small groups who are thinking about how it is going to change education, [inaudible], and one thing becomes very apparent. That the discourse about education is already changing because of what�just because of the announcement and because of OCW�s ambitions. And that�s a very, very significant statement.
JB: Okay. Well, with that, we�d like to really thank Phil and Vijay for being here and thank also the audience here in the room here. It was fun having a live audience and we�ll hope to do that again another time. So join us again, for all of you out there. Join us again in two weeks. We�ll go back to our regular audio-only format on March 21st for an emerging technology discussion. And this time we�re going to be talking about Voice Recognition Technologies�Is It Time? Our guest expert will be John Morris from Drexel University and we�d like to have you all join us. Many thanks to the CREN member institutions for support of today�s program and also, as I mentioned earlier, to MIT for their support to help make this happen. Many thanks to our Tech Talk experts, Phil and Vijay; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun on the other end of that great website; to Jason Russell who experimented with his audio stream today; to Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit; to Susie Berneis who will be transcribing this show. She�ll have a great time, I�m sure! And finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it�s time. Bye, now. Bye, Phil. Bye, Vijay.
END OF WEBCAST
