Linux free ware

When the lure of profit is not a great incentive, one alternative is forming a cooperative effort to serve a common goal. Miles of open farmland were necessary to grow prosperous crops, for instance, but it also put so much distance between neighbors that wiring for electric and phone service was a money-losing proposition. The solution? Rural residents banded together to form telephone and electric cooperatives that brought these 20th-century amenities to farm country.

Today, most computing software is created and owned by a single company and the software code is a closely guarded and jealously protected secret. However, the open-source movement uses the opposite approach and is a more recent example of cooperatives being formed to serve a common goal.

Open-source software means a piece of code is distributed in an openly accessible format so that anyone can use it and distribute it to others. However, anyone using the software is also asked to contribute updates and improvements. Collectively, a stronger product is created. Some examples include:

* The IBM PC--In the early 1980s, IBM decided to openly release the details of the architecture of its new entry into the personal computing field. The software developed by many third-party companies created a strategic advantage for the IBM PC.

* Shareware--Jim Knopf, under the alias Jim Button, became the father of "shareware" (www.shareware.org) when he created a database program for the early version of the IBM PC. In distributing his program, he asked for voluntary contributions to maintain and improve the program. Following a positive review in a magazine, his basement overflowed with mail offering money and assistance.

* Linux--The Internet proved an excellent tool for quickly distributing and sharing open-source software updates. Linux (www.linux.org) is a Unix-type operating system that makes its source code freely available and has become popular in certain applications.

In recent years, academia has found the Internet to be a natural forum for creating a sharing cooperative that follows the open-source spirit. Faculty and instructional designers on individual campuses often work long and hard to create lessons, simulations, and other "learning objects" for class use. Given the amount of time the creators invest, many seek ways to share their creations with others and suggestions for improvements.

David Wiley of Utah State University defines learning objects as "any digital resource that can be reused to support learning." While there have been other collections of learning objects (such as Apple Learning Interchange and MERLOT), the announcement by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative is the most intriguing. Other collections contain isolated learning objects, which means individual faculty members may find it difficult, or at least very time-consuming, to figure out how to incorporate these elements into the overall curriculum. MIT's OpenCourseWare will develop the first comprehensive set of integrated learning objects.

Over the next 10 years, as part of this initiative, MIT will post on the Web the substance of more than 2,000 courses. It will make them available to anybody anywhere in the world at no cost--thanks to the support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

OCW does not mean online courses. The typical offering will consist of lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, assignments, and similar course elements, as well as experiments, demonstrations, and students' work. At institutions embracing OCW, as MIT has done, the courses will be in the context of sequences and programs at these institutions. Thus the institution' s academic offerings will be fully exposed to the world.

OCW is conceptually straightforward: Put course material on the Web and give it away as a worldwide educational resource. Its implications for higher education, however, are anything but simple. What are the possibilities for local and regional colleges and universities? What will make OpenCourseWare a useful resource for faculties and institutions?

Within MIT, the intent of the program is to improve teaching and learning. While its foundation-based funding is for the external applications, MIT expects OCW to result in significant internal improvements, department by department. OCW can improve teaching by encouraging reflection: course materials are available to the community. The program also is expected to increase communication across the disciplines and improve transparency across the departments. For example, when instructors of upper-division classes can easily access the content of lower-division required courses, they will better understand what they can expect their students to know.

Last December, Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET) hosted a forum sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation to examine some of the issues that may arise as OCW becomes a reality. Our colleague, John Witherspoon, created a record of the conversations, some of which are reproduced here. The full report is available through the WCET Web site (www.wihe.edu/wcet). Here are some of the issues we explored:

Implications of OpenCourse Ware for Traditional Institutions. Most American higher education institutions have long followed a cottage industry model: those within an individual institution have defined, designed, implemented, and assessed the entire process of teaching, research, and service conducted by the faculty. They have used technology to enhance the existing cottage-based product rather than to consider their product's implications for the future of the institution.

Recently, there has been pressure to change that model. The University of Phoenix, other entrepreneurial specialized institutions, and the corporate purveyors of postsecondary courseware have demonstrated key characteristics of information-age organizations: they are oriented toward broader (sometimes global) markets, they focus on functions in which they excel and can compete effectively, and they often are built on technology platforms.

Gradually, many old-line colleges and universities are moving into the mode defined by Arthur Levine of Columbia Teachers College as "brick-and-click"-- adding a significant layer of technology-based services to the traditional structure. Some have launched virtual universities that operate entirely online.

With its OCW initiative, MIT is using the same technologies to pursue a different path. While other institutions seek to enroll students in their courses and programs, MIT is giving the substance of its courses to others, inviting them to make appropriate local adaptations. In a forum we hosted recently on this topic, it was suggested that there might be pressure to use the MIT material because of the assumption that courseware from an institution of MIT's stature must be the best available choice. MIT, of course, makes no such claim: material prepared by its faculty for its students will not be appropriate for all others. Instead, it offers the material as a potentially useful library of ideas, examples, and references.

In many ways, OCW's success will be measured by the skill of local instructors who use the courseware as a professional resource, building it appropriately into courses designed for their population of students, for the cultures reflected in their institutions, and to advance their specific curricula. In designing their courses, these faculty members incorporate textbooks and audiovisual materials. MIT adds a wealth of courseware and a helpful set of curricular benchmarks for faculty users.

OCW Implications for Copyright Law. As already mentioned, MIT and its faculty are posting the substance of the Institute's courses online, available to users worldwide at no cost. But that is not to say that this material is therefore in the public domain, unprotected by copyright law. Rather, pursuant to the law, the copyright owner grants permission for a wide range of uses. However, there are constraints: those using the material are expected to give proper attribution to its authors, and commercial uses require a written license from the faculty owners.

Just as U.S. copyright law has as its purpose the advancement of knowledge, so does academe. Copyright achieves its purpose by balancing the interests of copyright owners with public interests. It provides an incentive to authors, encouraging them to create; however, the works have to be distributed and available for the public in order to derive the defined benefit: increased knowledge. Thus, there is an important interplay between the rights of authors and the rights of the public to use their works to improve themselves, scholarship, and society.