Christiansen, Erik G.

Although open licensing is a necessary component of open educational resources, the overall openness of a resource is determined by several factors beyond licensing. This paper examines the applicability of the “Open Enough” framework (McNally & Christiansen, 2019) for examining the openness of existing Open CourseWare (OCW). This previously published conceptual framework proposed eight factors that educators should consider when creating a new, or adopting an existing, open course. These factors include Copyright/Open Licensing Frameworks, Accessibility/Usability Formatting, Language, Support Costs, Assessment, Digital Distribution, File Format, and Cultural Considerations. In this study, the researchers aimed to answer the following three research questions. 1. Are these factors robust enough to analyze (or measure) the level of openness in existing OCW? 2. Are additional, or modified, factors necessary? 3. Are certain factors impractical for assessment? For this analysis, the researchers randomly selected five recent open courses from two prominent OCW databases - TU Delft and MIT OpenCourseWare. The researchers came to two broad conclusions following a thorough analysis of the OCW sample. Overall, the framework was an effective tool for analyzing open courseware, though cultural considerations and usability proved to be too subjective and were removed from the framework. The study revealed the level of openness among the sampled courses to be highly inconsistent. Some factors, assessment, for example, were consistently open across the sample while language, material costs and file format often quite closed. The consistent lack of editable materials was particularly surprising and led the researchers to draw some conclusions about what openness should mean for Open CourseWare. The researchers used the data to revise their existing conceptual framework into a more actionable guideline for open educators.

While open licensing is a foundational aspect of open educational resources, there are several "factors" that educators must use to achieve openness in their course design. This study builds on the previous work of the authors' conceptual framework, titled "Open Enough?," for evaluating the level of openness within Open CourseWare (OCW) (McNally & Christiansen, 2019). In the previous work, the authors proposed eight factors that educators should consider when undertaking OCW development. The authors also argued that these eight factors could be used to assess the openness of existing OCW. The goal of this pilot study was to answer the following question: 1) Is the "Open Enough" framework and its eight factors robust enough to analyze (or measure) the level of openness in an existing OCW? 2) Are additional, or modified, factors necessary? 3) Are the factors practical measures for the assessment of existing OCW? Are there particular factors which are too subjective or too broad? For this analysis, the authors randomly selected five recent open courses from two prominent OCW databases - TU Delft and MIT OpenCourseWare - for a total of ten OCW. Each course was assessed on each of the eight factors which included Copyright/Open Licensing Frameworks, Accessibility/Usability Formatting, Language, Support Costs, Assessment, Digital Distribution, File Format, and Cultural Considerations. The level of openness of each factor was classified as Closed, Mixed, or Most Open - recognizing that these buckets of analysis are broad and could further be subdivided. In general, the "Open Enough" framework was fairly effective for determining openness in existing OCW with some caveats. The Cultural Considerations and Usability factors were ultimately too subjective to measure and were subsequently removed from the revised version of the framework. The analysis of these OCW showed that openness among the sampled courses was inconsistent. Some of the factors were consistently open throughout the sampled courses while other factors, specifically Language, Materials Costs, and File Format, were quite closed. Overall, there was a lack of editable materials that led the authors to reconsider what openness should be in the context of OCW. The results of the analysis were used to revise the framework. This pilot study served as a proof of concept for using their framework as a tool for analysis. Learning Outcomes: After attending this presentation, participants will - develop a better understanding of the multitude of factors that influence openness, beyond copyright. - be able to articulate how to address OCW development pragmatically and holistically - understand the limitations of OCW and which factors of 'openness' require the largest time commitment to implement. Additional resources.