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Report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
A Review of the Open Educational
Resources (OER) Movement:
Achievements, Challenges, and
New Opportunities

February 2007

Daniel E. Atkins
John Seely Brown
Allen L. Hammond

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1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 Background 1
1.2 Approach and Structure of the Report 5
2 REVIEW OF INVESTMENTS TO DATE 7
2.1 Overall Impact of Investments 7
2.2 Highlights and Examples 8
2.2.1 MIT OCW 8
2.2.2 Connexions Project 10
2.2.3 Utah State University 11
2.2.4 Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative 12
2.2.5 Creative Commons and Internet Archives 13
2.2.6 Comments on Other Projects 15
2.2.7 OpenCourseWare Consortium 21
2.2.8 International Impact 23
2.3 Major Remaining Challenges 24
2.3.1 Introduction 24
2.3.2 Sustainability 24
2.3.3 Curation and Preservation of Access 25
2.3.4 Object Granularity and Format Diversity 26
2.3.5 Intellectual Property Issues 27
2.3.6 Content Quality Assessment and Enhancement 28
2.3.7 Computing and Communication Infrastructure 31
2.3.8 Scale-up and Deepening Impact in Developing Countries 31
3 THE BREWING PERFECT STORM 35
3.1 Introduction 35
3.2 Enablers 38
3.2.1 Open Code and Content 38
3.2.2 Participatory Systems Architecture 39
3.2.3 Improvement in Performance and Access to the Underlying ICT 42
3.2.4 Rich Media, Virtual Environments, and Gaming 43
3.2.5 Emerging Deeper Understanding of Human Learning 45
3.3 Other Complementary Transformative Initiative Areas 46
3.3.1 E-science and Cyberinfrastructure 47
3.3.2 Cyberinfrastructure-Enhanced Humanities 50
3.4 Concluding Remarks 53

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4 THE NEXT PHASE: OPEN PARTICIPATORY LEARNING
INFRASTRUCTURE (OPLI) INITIATIVE 55
4.1 Introduction 55
4.2 Understanding Infrastructure 55
4.2.1 Fostered, Not Built 56
4.2.2 Dynamics 57
4.2.3 Tensions 57
4.2.4 Design 57
4.2.5 The Long Now of Infrastructure 58
4.3 Learning Enabled by an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) 60
4.3.1 Peer Learning and Labs on the Wire 62
4.3.2 Exploiting Specialized Resources 63
4.3.3 Content + Context 65
4.4 Some Functional Attributes of an OPLI 66
4.5 Some Thoughts about How 68
4.6 Why Hewlett and Why Now? 69
5 APPENDIX: THE REALITIES OF INFORMATION AND
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY IN DEVELOPING REGION AND
IMPLICATIONS FOR OER INITIATIVES 71
5.1 The Reality of ICT Infrastructure and Connectivity in Developing Regions 71
5.2 New Technologies and Trends 74
5.3 Venues Ripe for Testing 78

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1 Introduction
1.1 Background
In 2002 the Education Program of the Hewlett Foundation introduced a major
component into its strategic plan Using Information Technology to Increase Access to
High-Quality Educational Content. This review1 begins with this plan as a baseline.
Hewlett program officers were motivated to initiate the component after
thoroughly examining content for K through 12 and post-secondary levels and
finding it “alarmingly disappointing.”
In 1992, when the World Wide Web was launched, open information resources
rapidly became freely available, although they were of widely varying quality.
With rare exception, the available materials neither promoted enhanced learning
nor incorporated the latest technological and pedagogical advances. Educational
institutions and publishers, lack of quality assurance for the content, and
information overload also impeded the educational impact. During the 1990s,
the funding for information technology in education primarily emphasized
access to computers and Internet connection and the basic literacy for their use.
The intent of this new Hewlett Foundation program component was to catalyze
universal access to and use of high-quality academic content on a global scale.
In the spirit of the work of Nobel economist Amartya Sen2, the plan is intended
to be a strategic international development initiative to expand people’s
substantive freedoms through the removal of “unfreedoms”: poverty, limited
economic opportunity, inadequate education and access to knowledge, deficient
health care, and oppression. The original goal for this program follows:

1 The review team members are:
ƒ Daniel E. Atkins, Professor of Information, Computer Science
and Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan and
Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, U.S. National
Science Foundation;
ƒ John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox and Director
of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); and
ƒ Allen Hammond, Vice President, Special Projects and Innovation
at World Resources Institute.

2 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Knopf: New York, 1999.

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To use information technology to help equalize the distribution of high-
quality knowledge and educational opportunities for individuals, faculty, and
institutions within the United States and throughout the world.
The initial theory and plan of action for the initiative is shown in Figure 1, a
precedence of activities culminating in free access to high-quality content to be
used by colleges and individuals in the United States and throughout the world
to increase human capital. The focus initially was on funding exemplars (living
specifications) of high-quality content and building community, collaboration,
and a shared knowledge base about the creation, dissemination, and use of open
educational resources. In the aggregate the program has addressed the
production, access, use, and evaluation of high-quality education content.

Figure 1—Theory of Action from original strategic plan.

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We have reviewed all of the funded projects to varying depths and have
reflected upon the extent to which the portfolio of projects cover the original
theory of action. As we discuss in Section 2, we find that it has covered quite
well the activities above the dotted line. The impact on the developing world is
still modest with respect to the enormous need.
The four activities below the dotted line were initiated more recently and are
sometimes supported jointly in the Instructional Improvement component of
the Education Group and the OER Initiative. For example, Hewlett is now
heavily involved in a language learning project call Chengo—Chinese English
on the Go. It has committed to completing the project in cooperation with the
Ministry of Education in China. Hewlett will also fund a version for Spanish
speakers and is attracting interest from many other language groups. The
Foundation intends to develop an open language platform and a half dozen or
more open, free English teaching programs for other languages. Hewlett
reports that a variety of countries are very interested in cooperating. Most of
the work it is funding for formative assessment is currently not focusing on
open resources but likely eventually will.
We have decided, however, not to dwell on a detailed analysis of the original
plan, but to base our review on the triad model featured on the Hewlett OER
website and illustrated here in Figure 2. A theme and implicit goal of this
model is to build a community so that the emerging OER movement,
stimulated by the Hewlett Foundation, will create incentives for a diverse set of
institutional stakeholders to enlarge and sustain this new culture of contribution.

Figure 2—Current Open Educational Resources Logic Model

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Figure 3 illustrates the relationship we are assuming between the model in
Figure 1 and that in Figure 2.
OER Logic Model Original Model
Sponsor high-quality open content a) Fund and promote exemplars of high-
quality open content; (f) Establish quality
benchmarks for various forms of
content.
Remove barriers (b) Create a web-based consumer guide
(barrier of discovery); this list was later
augmented to include the barriers of
intellectual property, interoperability,
multilingualism, culture (mix and remix),
and technology infrastructure
accessibility.

Understand and stimulate use (c) Create networks of builders and
users to share and collaborate; (d)
support R&D analyses of ways to
increase effectiveness and make
evaluation stronger.

Figure 3—Functional relationship between initial and current model.
The initiative is now often known as the Open Content Initiative or as the
Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiative. We will use what we consider
the more inclusive term, Open Educational Resources (OER). “Open content”
could also include content that is not necessarily educational although in this
report we will not make this distinction. The articulation of definitions, goals,
and frameworks has, as is appropriate in leading-edge emerging activities,
evolved as the Foundation has developed the program with its grantees and
others. The description of Open Educational Resources (OER) from the
Hewlett website is as follows:
1. What are Open Educational Resources?
OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the
public domain or have been released under an intellectual property
license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.3 Open
educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules,
textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools,
materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

3 But not necessarily for commercial use—it depends on which Creative Commons license is
used.

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2. What are our Goals?
The Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources Initiative seeks
to use information technology to help equalize access to knowledge and
educational opportunities across the world. The initiative
targets educators, students, and self-learners worldwide.
3. Why are we funding OER?
At the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is
the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public
good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in
particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share,
use, and reuse knowledge. OER are the parts of that knowledge that
comprise the fundamental components of education—content and
tools for teaching, learning, and research.
4. What Do We Focus On?
We support the development and dissemination of high-quality content;
innovative approaches to remove barriers to the creation; use, re-use
and sharing of high-quality content; and projects that seek to improve
understanding of the demand for openly available content.
We have conducted our review of several of the larger projects, a scan of all of
the funded projects through the study of internal Hewlett documentation,
external releases, and the websites of most projects. We participated in site
visits to MIT OCW,4 Rice Connexions Project,5 and Utah State6 and
participated in several of the emerging OCW Consortium7 meetings. We have
had ad hoc discussions with several of the leaders of current major grants and
extensive discussions with each other as well as with Marshall Smith and
Catherine Casserly.
1.2 Approach and Structure of the Report
In Section 2 we will review the portfolio of OER grants to date in the context
of the overall Technology/Open Educational Resources Logic Model and the
description and goals above. From 2002 to the present the Hewlett Foundation
has invested about $68 million in the OER program. We will comment on the
distribution of grants across the various activities of the model, focus on
important successes, and note areas that need more attention. We will
particularly emphasize the unique contributions that Hewlett investments have
made in both launching and moving forward the OER movement. We believe

4 http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
5 http://cnx.org/
6 http://ocw.usu.edu/
7 http://ocwconsortium.org/

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it has achieved a nascent movement status. A field of OER activity—a new
culture of contribution—is emerging. The initiative has invested internationally
in a way that builds capacity for engagement based on mutual benefit between
people and institutions between and within developed and developing regions.
In the next section we look in more detail at the portfolio of grants.
In Section 3 we describe threads of activity that we believe complement the
OER activities supported by Hewlett and that provide Hewlett and other
funders the opportunity for convergence into the next phase of investment and
impact. The OER initiative has nurtured a culture of sharing, not only within
individuals, but also within major institutions of higher education. It has helped
shift faculty perspectives from this courseware is mine to this courseware is for (open)
mining. The next phase is to nurture a culture of learning in which both
intellectual capital (content) and human capital (talent) spiral upward, together.
The conditions now exist, we believe, to consolidate understanding, technology,
and incentive from multiple threads of activity into an open participatory
learning infrastructure (OPLI).
A socio-technical initiative to form an open participatory learning infrastructure
is critical to this culture of learning. By open participatory learning
infrastructure we mean the institutional practices, technical infrastructure, and
social norms that allow a smooth operation of globally distributed, high-quality
open learning. We include the word “participatory” to emphasize that the
focus is not just on information access, but on the role of technology in
supporting the social nature of learning. An OPLI can leverage diversity of use,
radical repurposing of content, and critical reflection.
This perspective is consistent with collaboratories in science and humanities
communities and the social software and the Web 2.0 movement more generally.
Such an infrastructure supports diverse ecosystems of people and learning
resources that could have profound implications for preparing people for a
rapidly evolving knowledge-based world, one demanding creativity, innovation,
and entrepreneurialism from us all. The OPLI should provide participatory
architectures for emerging visions and concepts such as the meta-university, the
university in and of the world, “learning to be” sooner rather than later, and
global-scale massification of higher education.8 It also extends across level and
age: K–12, higher education, and lifelong learning.
Finally, in Section 4 we elaborate on some of the opportunity resulting from the
convergence of the threads of activity described in the previous section and we
suggest a next phase for Hewlett educational investments. We also make
specific suggestions about how Hewlett might approach defining, awarding, and
managing the initiative.

8 Charles M. Vest, “Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University,” EDUCAUSE
Review, May/June 2006, http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0630.asp?bhcp=1

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2 Review of Investments to Date
2.1 Overall Impact of Investments
In this section we present a qualitative retrospective evaluation of the Hewlett
OER program. The evaluation is based on a survey of 134 grants and their
websites made in 2002 to 2006, in-depth reviews of some of the largest and
most significant grants, ad hoc conversations with grantees, and extensive
discussions with Marshall Smith and Catherine Casserly.
We began with a review of Component 2 of the Strategic Plan for the
Education Program, which is dated October 2002 and titled Using Information
Technology to Increase Access to High-Quality Educational Content. This
plan, which is summarized in the Theory of Action drawing in Figure 1, has
served well as a framework for the portfolio of OER investments from 2002 to
2006. In reviewing the grant portfolio with respect to the original Theory of
Action, we decided to adopt the later simplified model shown in Figure 2. We
have done a first-order classification of the 134 grants with respect to the three
goal components in service of equity of access: providing high-quality open
content, removing barriers, and understanding and stimulating use. We
associated reducing barriers with technology issues and understanding and stimulating
use with R&D, feasibility studies, plus awareness creation. In the final analysis,
however, we could not make a clear distinction between these later two and
thus merged them.
Under these assumptions we estimate that of the total of $68 million in grants,
$43 million has gone to the creation and dissemination of open content and $25
million into reducing barriers, understanding, and/or stimulating use. Of the
total, about $12 million has gone to non-U.S. institutions primarily in Europe,
Africa, and China for capacity building, translation, and/or stimulation of
established institutions such as the Open University in the United Kingdom and
Netherlands so they will be more aggressive in providing open content. About
half of the $12 million has gone to enhance the ability of developing countries
to take advantage of the open content and contribute to it.
The goal of high quality has been achieved largely by supporting branded
content from well-established, high-reputation institutions. This is a reasonable
starting point, but as we will discuss in later sections, in the future Hewlett
needs to find additional mechanisms for vetting and enhancing educational
objects in social settings, ways to close loops and converge to higher quality and
more useful materials.
Overall we are impressed with the systematic balance of the OER portfolio and
the effort that has gone into creating a microcosm of a global-scale activity. We
note here a point we will reinforce later: private foundations like Hewlett have

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much more flexibility (and thus we would argue, the responsibility) for
investment both inside and outside the United States than do, for example,
government institutions like the National Science Foundation. Hewlett also has
more flexibility and freedom to take risks in a global grantee community. What
it has done with OER would be impossible for NSF. We are very impressed
with how well Hewlett has engaged in strategic but risky projects and nurtured
them when necessary. We think this is why it has accomplished so much in
such a short time, especially with respect to the global nature of the
investments.
Although we surmise that some of the smaller grants did not meet expectations
and that some opportunities were missed, the yield on the overall investment
portfolio is spectacular. Hewlett has more than met the goals of the original
strategic plan and in fact has been a major catalyst (arguably the major catalyst)
in advancing OER into a growing movement. Most remarkable is the extent to
which OER has moved education institutions, not just individuals and small
groups, to embrace a new culture of IT-enabled contribution and sharing. The
impact of the Hewlett OER investments now go well beyond the institutions it
has directly funded.
For example a quick browse of the website of the OpenCourseWare
Consortium9 reveals a collaboration of more than 120 higher education
institutions and associated organizations from around the world “creating a
broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.”
The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and
empower people worldwide through open courseware. Only a small fraction of
these 120 organizations10 have received direct funding from Hewlett. And of
course the OpenCourseWare Consortium does not include all the recently
established OER type activities, for example, the Curriki11 activities initiated by
Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems. Hewlett has played a true
leadership role in building both a field and a community.
2.2 Highlights and Examples
2.2.1 MIT OCW
The flagship of the OER investments is the MIT OpenCourseWare Project.
This world-changing project emerged from MIT faculty and administrators who

9 http://www.ocwconsortium.org
10 We have not looked carefully at the density of participation in OCW at all of these
institutions. We understand, however, that to belong to the OCW, Consortium institutions
must offer at least ten open courses and confirm institutional, rather than just individual
faculty commitment.
11 http://www.curriki.org/

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asked themselves the following question: “How is the Internet going to be used
in education and what is our university going to do about it?”
The answer from the MIT faculty was this: “Use it to provide free access to the
primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our
educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere
in the world, at any time, for free.”
Atkins chaired an in-depth review of the OCW project in the fall of 2005 and
Brown serves on the OCW advisory committee. The OCW project at MIT has
created a very successful, compelling, living existence proof of the power of
high-quality open educational resources. It is a pioneering project that has now
become a catalyst for a nascent open courseware movement in service of both
teachers and learners. Borrowing from the review by Atkins, et. al. we
summarize impact as follows:
ƒ Creation and continuing execution of a well-tuned process to
obtain and convert most of the MIT course material to
consistent .pdf formats, and to make this material freely available,
to the extent possible without copyright violation, to the world.
ƒ Commitment by a growing number of U.S. higher education
institutions (community colleges through research universities) to
an OCW Consortium offering open access to at least some of
their courseware. There is a growing sense that there is room in
the world for more than MIT courses and a growing diversity in
both the topic and level of available open courseware.
ƒ Commitments by non-U.S. higher education institutions to build
new curriculum or transform current curriculum using open
courseware resources.
ƒ Investment by non-U.S. institutions to translate courseware from
the United States into local languages and to make the
translations also openly available.
ƒ Early commitments by non-U.S. institutions to add to the store
of open courseware in their local language.
ƒ Encouraging signs of positive impact of OCW on education in
developing countries.
ƒ Growing evidence of positive impact on the students and faculty
at the OCW supplying institution.
ƒ Development of tools intended to facilitate the production
(including IP scrubbing) of open courseware, e.g. eduCommons,
as well community authoring and reuse of open educational
objects, e.g. Connexions.

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ƒ Emergence of searching tools for open educational resources, for
example, a subset of the Internet Archive.
ƒ Increasing attention to the relationship between open courseware
production and the development of open source course
management systems (e.g. the Sakai Project).
ƒ The growing appreciation of the Creative Commons project,
including most germane to OCW, the attribution and share alike
licenses
ƒ Strategic visions about the future of higher education and
concepts of global meta universities from academic thought
leaders such as Charles M. Vest (President Emeritus of MIT) and
James J. Duderstadt (President Emeritus of the University of
Michigan) fueled in part by the OCW movement.
MIT is now reporting close to 16 million visits since October 2003; these visits
are split about evenly between first-time and repeat visits. The site now
includes some material for most every course taught at MIT. Although the mix
of material varies by course, the overall mix now includes the following:
syllabus, course calendar, lecture notes, assignments, exams, problem and
solution sets, labs and projects, hyper-textbooks, simulations, tools and
tutorials, and video lectures. There is extensive detail on the use and impact on
the MIT OpenCourseWare website.
2.2.2 Connexions Project
The MIT OpenCourseWare Project is noteworthy in its scale, completeness,
quality, and positive influence on others. It is, however, basically a digital
publishing model of high-quality, pre-credentialed, static material. The
Connexions Project complements the MIT project in that it provides not only a
rapidly growing collection of free scholarly material but also a set of free
software tools to help authors publish and collaborate; instructors build rapidly
and share custom courses; and learners explore the links among concepts,
courses, and disciplines. It focuses on building and supporting communities of
digital object consumers and producers who credential material.
Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing,
and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Although Connexions
began with a focus on digital signal processing, its Content Commons now
contains educational materials for a wide audience, from children to college
students to professionals, organized in small modules across growing topic
areas that are easily connected to larger courses. All content is free to use and
reuse under the Creative Commons attribution license.
Connexions feels more like an ecosystem than a library with rich cross links that
can compose new learning objects from old ones. It is thus a start toward an

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infrastructure that enables one to remix and compose new objects from old
ones. It has been especially effective in exploring modularity and granularity:
What is the right grain size that enables maximal reuse of the material? The
project has also started exploring the significance of integrating the tools for
design with the material to understand (e.g. the DSP material plus a system
design toolkit).
The project leaders now report that Connexions has become internationally
focused, interdisciplinary, and grassroots organized. More than one million
people from 194 countries are tapping into the 3,755 modules and 197 courses
developed by a worldwide community of authors in fields ranging from
computer science to music and from mathematics to biodiversity. In addition
to modules written in English, one can find modules written in Chinese, Italian,
Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai.
2.2.3 Utah State University
Utah State University has been a major grantee in the OER program as a
provider of open content12 and as a free source of open learning support
through the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL).13 The Center
provides support to others interested in starting OCW at their institutions. It
has developed eduCommons, an OCW management system with workflow
process that guides users in publishing materials in an openly accessible format.
This includes uploading materials into a repository, dealing with copyright,
reassembling materials into courses, providing quality assurance, and publishing
materials.
We understand that COSL is now moving toward a clearinghouse for inventory
and evaluation of OER tools, systems, and best practices other than those it
creates. It will focus on open tools that will be especially useful in the
developing world where access and bandwidth are limited.
eduCommons is intended to reduce technical barriers and cost for creating
MIT-type OCW websites and to enforce a workflow model that supports
quality control and scrubbing the content clean of intellectual property (IP)
infringements. Initially, at least, it seems to focus on helping institutions move
web-based course material to open access with a more homogenous look and
feel. The workflow model enforces a set of human roles with varying rights of
review, editing, and publishing. This model is intended to provide an institution
with the means to assure academic and pedagogical quality, and to assure that
no material is used that violates terms and conditions of copyright or licenses.
eduCommons is also the production environment from which course material
is served to the world.

12 http://ocw.usu.edu/
13 http://cosl.usu.edu/projects

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The philosophy of the COSL team is that all resources emitted by
eduCommons should be covered by an “educational” Creative Commons
license and that an institution will have people interacting with the workflow
model to ensure this is the case. As yet, there are no tools provided to help
those responsible know whether included material is copyright free. The Utah
State group needs to be cautious about statements they have made along the
lines that “everything coming out of eduCommons would be scrubbed IP
clean.” That would be the case if only people, using the workflow model, made
sure this was the case—the system alone will not do the “scrubbing.”
This philosophy suggests that two different digital course resource systems
would emerge within a university: one built entirely of creative commons
material, and another built within the IP environment of the institution’s digital
library/repository allowing access to copyright material only to authenticated
members of community.
The Utah State Open Learning Support14 (OLS) is a website where individuals
can connect to share, discuss, ask, answer, debate, collaborate, teach, and learn.
These meetings are consistent with move toward using social software to form
communities of learners around open content, but this site has not yet really
taken off as has the total access to OCW materials.
Utah State’s direct provision of open courseware provides an example of why
there is room for many in this activity—why elite MIT having all of its courses
online does not corner the market. Network-based OER can provide access to
“long tail” distributions of very specialized and diverse content. For example,
Utah State has a very strong program in applied water management and
irrigation and open courses in this area have been eagerly adopted in developing
countries, especially in arid regions. Indeed in the learning ecosystem models
we will discuss later, one would like to see the truly distinctive specializations in
any given school be brought forward. Eventually it might be the specializations
that together that form the fabric of a “meta-university.”
2.2.4 Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
The Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative15 (OLI) adds a focus to the
OER portfolio on instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative
evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on
empirical evidence. OLI courses include a number of innovative online
instructional components such as cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group
experiments, and simulations. We include a summary of the project, largely
taken from the project website, because the approach of this project is
complementary to the MIT OCW and Rice Connexions Project and

14 http://mit.ols.usu.edu/index_html
15 http://www.cmu.edu/oli/index.html

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Creative Commons is a companion to the OER initiative and was founded in
2001 to help revive the shrinking public domain as copyright durations were
repeatedly extended in large part due to the pressures from the media industry.
They use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for
certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, their ends are
cooperative and community-minded, but the means are voluntary and
libertarian.
Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate
their creative works to the public domain or retain their copyright while
licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU
General Public License,17 Creative Commons licenses are not designed for
software but for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music,
film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. The aim is not only to increase
the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to the material
cheaper and easier. To this end, they have also developed metadata that can be
used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a
machine-readable way. A goal is to enable people to use search and other
online applications to find, for example, photographs that are free provided the
original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or
sampled with no restrictions whatsoever.
As of June 2006 about 140 million web pages link to a CC license, according to
Google, and there are over 25 million CC-licensed photographs on Flickr as of
December 2006. Creative Commons licenses are the basis for numerous open
resource repositories such as Science Commons and Public Library of Science.
The MIT OCW has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution,
Noncommercial, ShareAlike (By-NC-SA) license. All of this is fundamental
infrastructure for the OER movement and thus Hewlett has quite wisely lent
sustaining financial support to Creative Commons.
Similarly Hewlett has helped support the Internet Archives.18 It is another
critical component of infrastructure for the OER movement, as it offers
researchers, historians, and scholars permanent access to historical collections
that exist in digital format. Fortunately, such institutions are growing in
number and sophistication, but Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archives has been a
pioneer in this area. The Internet Archives is now creating a digital library of
Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. It provides free access
to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

17 GNU is the name of an operating system project circa 1984 headed by Richard Stallman
who pioneered the free software movement.
18 http://www.archive.org/index.php

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o. Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado33 is
developing interactive simulations and guided activities for
teaching chemistry and physics.
p. The Notre Dame OpenCourseWare34 project at the University
of Notre Dame is developing thirty courses in ethics,
philosophy, theology, anthropology, and peace and international
studies.
q. University of Washington is preparing two educational
computer simulations, LEGSIM35 and Election Day,36 on the
legislative process and of elections, for widespread, open use.
r. WGBH is developing new science teaching resources in
WGBH’s Teachers’ Domain37 and making them openly available
online.
s. Yale University is creating digitized audio-visual content for
undergraduate liberal arts instruction. It will be offered freely
through the Internet and managed by its Center for Media
Initiatives.38
t. Yale University is making published scientific research on the
environment available through Online Access to Research in the
Environment (OARE39) open to public and nongovernmental
organizations in developing countries.
u. Alexandra Archive Institute40 is compiling archaeological data.
2. Capacity Building in Developing Countries for Effective Use of
OER
a. Academy for Educational Development for the Global Learning
Portal41 project is designing a website supporting educators in
developing countries.

33 http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phet
34 http://ocw.nd.edu/
35 http://www.legsim.org/
36 http://www.election-day.info/
37 http://www.teachersdomain.org/
38 http://cmi2.yale.edu/cgi-bin/cmi2/news.cgi?group=&year=2006&story=1
39 http://www.oaresciences.org/en
40 http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/
41 http://www.glp.net

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b. Commonwealth of Learning57 is supporting Open Educational
Resources activities to infuse the principles of Open
Educational Resources into the Commonwealth of Learning’s
wide array of activities.
c. European Association of Distance Teaching Universities58 is in
the first stage of an effort to explore using free web-based
courses to stimulate learning among all people.
d. Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in
Education59 is building a website to increase awareness and
understanding about open educational resources (OER) and to
provide support for needed OER field-building activities.
e. New America Foundation60 is accelerating the constructive
dialogue between commercial and noncommercial stakeholders
active in the digitization and publication, broadly defined, of
educational and cultural heritage materials.
f. One Economy61 is improving content on an online education
website and supporting a youth technology program benefiting
the residents of affordable housing developments in San
Francisco and San Jose.
5. General software and middleware services infrastructure for
creating, federating, and finding OER resources—Besides the
software developed within the context of specific OCW projects, there
have been some activities related to creating generic software and
services and/or linking with existing open source middleware projects.
The Open University UK under LabSpace62 and the Rice Connexions
Project have also created open tools.
a. Foothill–De Anza Community College District (with the
University of Michigan) is implementing the next generation of
the Easy to Use Distance Education System63 (ETUDES-NG)
open source software across California community colleges, and
is contributing to the development and enhancement of tools to
support online learning

56 http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/web/
57 http://www.col.org/colweb/site
58 http://www.eadtu.nl/
59 http://www.oercommons.org/
60 http://www.conference.archival.tv/index.php?title=Program
61 http://www.thebeehive.org/
62 http://labspace.open.ac.uk/
63 http://etudesproject.org/

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We recommend a visit to the Consortium website69 for a glimpse into this
exploding world. The Use section lets you browse individual OpenCourseWare
sites or search across all courses. The Share section discusses global,
institutional, and faculty benefits for participation in OCW. The Support
section describes how a variety of stakeholder types can participate. There are
also tabs to a list of consortium members as well as recent news stories about
OCW activities from around the world, many from major publications. The
Consortium site, including for example access to the OCW How To Web site,70
seems particularly useful to others who wish to learn how to join the OCW
movement.
The most recent meeting of the Consortium covered topics such as a collective
research agenda, sustainability, intellectual property best practices, OCW and
national education policy, leveraging other OER resources for OCW, as well as
the OCW portal structure and use. The next face-to-face meeting is scheduled
for Spain in spring 2007.
We believe that a broad, grassroots-driven consortium of institutions in a
variety of OER roles is important for enhancing the reach of OER in the
direction we propose in Section 4. Although the OCW Consortium may be
emerging as this asset, it is missing the participation of many of the major
institutions now being supported by Hewlett under the OER program. These
include Carnegie Mellon, Foothill–De Anza Community College District, Rice
University, Stanford University, the Internet Archives, UC Berkeley and Yale.
There are also other institutions in more specific roles that might be included.
This raises the questions of what needs to be done to create a broader
consortium attractive to a broader set of stakeholders and performers. How is
the community being built by the OER investments going to be sustained and
strengthened so it can seize an even larger opportunity for the collective good?
We caution, however, that more institutions and even more examples of any
one course aren’t necessarily better. How would we handle a “success disaster”
in which, for example, a teacher now has access to 100 elementary calculus
courses? We need incentives and mechanisms to promote creation and access
to fewer instances of the same course but with more support material, more
commentary, more examples, etc.


69 http://ocwconsortium.org/index.html
70 http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/HowTo/index.htm

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2.2.8 International Impact
The OER program aspires to provide open access to (and eventually open
contribution to) high-quality education resources on a global scale in many
languages. The portfolio has supported a mix of provisioning high-quality
OER, particularly in the United States, and its use worldwide, especially in
developing countries. The impact is very impressive as measured by the
international participation. The OpenCourseWare Consortium membership
lists the huge consortium of Chinese institutions in CORE71 together with
cadres of volunteers translating course material from English to Chinese.
CORE now has over 100 university members with five million students. The
ten lead universities use several hundred MIT OCW in their teaching programs.
This has had a major impact on Chinese education. CORE also has about 150
Chinese courses on its website that can be shared globally.
International impact has been led by the OCW activities, but there has also
been significant impact in the broader agenda of OER and ICT-supported
learning beyond OCW. This impact has occurred through international
projects such as Teachers Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA),72 Open
University UK, Open University Netherlands, European Association of
Distance and Teaching Universities,73 India National Knowledge Commission74
(through a grant to MIT), OECD,75 and UNESCO International Institute for
Educational Planning76 (IIEP).
In France, we find the Paris Technology77 “Graduate School,” a coalition of a
dozen technical schools. The Japan OCW Consortium78 includes ten
universities. Universities in Spain and Portugal have rallied around Universia
OCW79 based largely upon MIT OCW material translated into Spanish.
Effectively involving Africa in OCW is a complex process. Hewlett has worked
primarily through the African Virtual University, and MIT has worked directly
with some additional schools in South Africa. The recent investment by
Hewlett in the Open University80 UK to enhance its participation in the OER
movement, including access in Africa, is a good strategic move and may well
leverage the excellent track record of the Open University in international
engagement.

71 http://www.core.org.cn/en/news/2005/news_1202.htm
72 http://www.tessaprogramme.org/
73 http://www.eadtu.nl/
74 http://knowledgecommission.gov.in/
75 http://www.oecd.org/
76 http://www.unesco.org/iiep/
77 http://graduateschool.paristech.org/
78 http://www.jocw.jp/
79 http://mit.ocw.universia.net/
80 http://www.open.ac.uk/

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4. Explore roles for students in creating, enhancing, and adopting
OER. Consider an “OER Corps” in which students receive
training, small stipends, and prestige to assist in material
preparation, enhancement, and use (especially in historically
disadvantaged domestic communities and developing countries).
5. Consider a voluntary (or mix of voluntary and paid) wiki-like model,
in which OER is the object of micro-contributions from many.
This approach raises complex issues of quality, but much work on
collective “converging to better” is under way.
6. Examine ways that social software can be used to capture and
structure user commentaries on the material. More generally, find
ways to instrument the use of the material with special attention to
capturing problems encountered by diverse student communities.
Do the same for teachers using, remixing or repurposing the
material.
Sustainability of OER is becoming a subject of academic study. Dholakia,
King, and Baraniuk,81 for example, argue that current thinking on the topic is
often solely tactical with too much attention on the “product” and not enough
attention on understanding what its user community wants or on improving the
OER’s value for various user communities. Their proposal is that “prior to
considering different revenue models for a particular OER and choosing one or
a combination of them, the OER providers should focus on the issue of
increasing the aggregate value of the site to its constituents to the greatest
extent possible. In other words, unless the OER site is able to first gain and
maintain a critical mass of active, engaged users, and provide substantial and
differentiated value to them in its start-up and growth phases, then none of the
available and/or chosen revenue models will be likely to work for the OER in
the long run.”
2.3.3 Curation and Preservation of Access
As digital OER content grows, so will the need for systematic reliable
infrastructure for curating and preserving access. The Internet Archives has
made pioneering contributions in this area. Fortunately, academic libraries and
major and cultural heritage institutions, including the National Archives82 and
the Library of Congress,83 84 are now giving more attention to preserving digital
objects. As part of their mission, academic libraries85 86are creating large digital
repositories intended to be persistent. Similar activities are under way in the

81 What Makes an Open Education Program Sustainable? The Case of Connexion
82 http://www.archives.gov/era/
83 http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/about/planning.html
84 http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/index.html
85 http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home
86 http://dspace.org/federation/index.html

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OER collections overall should migrate to richer document formats, preferably
XML as the reference copy with automatic conversion to html, .pdf, and most
any format handled by the http protocol; support embedded multimedia
objects; and enhance access to sub-objects in documents. This will be
increasingly important for translation into other languages and use on a variety
of technology platforms.
2.3.5 Intellectual Property Issues
Intellectual property issues are at the heart of OER. The majority of existing
educational content is protected under traditional copyright with terms and
conditions that must be honored within the “open” paradigm. The formally
defined faculty, staff, and student community of a university generally have
access to site licensed digital materials through their library and have access to
most of the literature that would be cited in course material. Students purchase
access to other materials in textbooks and course packs. But in opening up
course material to the world, institutions must invest the time and expense to
scrub the material to be sure that materials licensed for use in their formal
community are not available to world. The citation or link can be there, but the
target cannot. Outsiders generally have access to abridged versions of the
material although they may find the material elsewhere. As earlier described in
Section 2.2.5, the Hewlett Foundation has wisely supported Creative Commons
to help mitigate the constraints of “all rights reserved” copyright.
All of this is modulated by concepts of “fair use” and by an emerging spectrum
of interpretation of copyright in the digital realm. The Google Book Search92
project, for example, is raising questions such as whether displaying excerpts of
text around a hit from a key word search constitutes copyright violation, or
indeed whether the initial digitization and indexing violate copyright. There are
similar ambiguities occurring around the access to orphaned works, those under
copyright for which an owner cannot be found at reasonable cost. The
Copyright Office has recently completed a study of this topic and described
several proposed “solutions.”93
The legality of using traditionally copyrighted materials will evolve, hopefully in
the direction of more openness, but the impact of OER will hinge on how
widely the suite of licenses supported by Creative Commons are adopted.
Present copyright law defaults to full copyright protection of a work; Creative
Commons provides means of overriding that default. It is important that the
OER-inclined education community continue to increase awareness and
adoption of the Creative Commons culture to produce resources intended for
use in open participatory learning ecosystems.

92 http://books.google.com/
93 http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/

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the numerous learnings from remixes, etc.). Although some good work in this
area has begun, it has barely scratched the surface, and we need to architect the
next generation platforms to close the loop and accelerate the improvement of
the material through reflected use.
A part of the solution is to replace traditional pre-publication review, often
accept/reject and exclusive, with a post-publication review based on a more
open community of third-party reviewers experienced in using the materials. In
this model pre-publication credentialed materials are not merely distributed
through the network; post-publication materials are credentialed through use in
the network. We use material from a recent Connexions report, “Sharing
Knowledge and Building Communities”97to make the point more vivid.
In Connexions, digital learning objects at different levels of granularity are
contributed by many people into a “content commons.” Since the Content
Commons is open to all, it will contain modules and courses in various stages of
development and, hence, of various quality levels. How do we ensure that high-
quality Connexions content is easily accessible to users? This requires both a
means to evaluate and credential modules and a means to direct users to
modules deemed of high quality.

97 The Connexions working paper is available from Richard Baraniuk (richb@rice.edu).
Also see http://www.cni.org/tfms/2001b.fall/handout/Connexions.RReedstrom2001Ftf.pdf

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apart these possibilities, but our bias (in agreement with the author of this blog
item103) is to favor (3) and perhaps (2), rather than (1).
2.3.7 Computing and Communication Infrastructure
Everything we have been describing is based on a platform of distributed
computing and communication technology, a.k.a. e-infrastructure104 or
cyberinfrastructure.105 We assume continued advances in this area are driven in
part by continuing exponential gains in computation and communication rates
and storage capacity. “Hundred dollar laptops”106 and “one laptop per child”107
activities are growing. The capacity of international networks for education and
research is growing and reach through the leadership of the U.S. National
Science Foundation and their international counterparts.108 (Significant
progress has been made recently in Latin America, and there is some reason for
optimism in better networking to sub-Saharan Africa although much remains to
be done, especially within countries.) But access to the supporting technology,
especially, but not exclusively, in the developing world cannot be taken for
granted.
One of us, Hammond, has extensive on-the-ground experience with
information and communication technologies (ICT) in developing regions and
with new technologies and trends that could be important within five years.
These may be ripe for testing and for exploratory investments by Hewlett in
support of OER and the next phase we are calling OPLI. There is more on this
topic in section 3.2.3. In the Appendix to this report is a paper by Hammond,
“The Realities of Information and Communication Technology in Developing
Region and Implications for OER Initiatives.” It makes a strong case for
mobile phone technology.
The experience with basic connectivity in the developing world is that the first
step is far more transformative than the same (incremental) step in our
developed world, and education in emerging economies is in the mainframe era,
not even the PC era, so mobiles (situation-aware, portable, always-on devices)
have the potential to be equally transformative in the developing world.
2.3.8 Scale-up and Deepening Impact in Developing
Countries
A primary goal of the Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources
Initiative is to use information technology to help equalize access to knowledge

103 http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2006/12/nature_open_peerreview_trial_c.html
104 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_einfrastructure.aspx
105 http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=cise051203
106 http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
107 http://www.laptop.org/
108 http://www.irnclinks.net/

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and educational opportunities across the world. The initiative targets educators,
students, and self-learners worldwide. The impact on the developing world has
been solid but modest with respect to the need. The scale of resources invested
by Hewlett and others and the scale of pilot deployments, experimentation, and
development of indigenous institutional participation in the OER movement,
does not begin to match the scale of the unmet needs in the developing world
for digital access, availability of high-quality educational content, or interactive
(as opposed to rote learning) educational processes. The challenge here is
immense, but so is the potential impact.
There are interesting questions as to the definition of “developing country” that
may affect Hewlett’s future priorities. The real division is not country by
country, but modern urban versus rural. Parts of China, India, South Africa,
Brazil, Mexico, and usually at least the capital city in most other developing
countries have a modern urban core, where broadband and other business
services are available, at a price, and where the small middle class and the
technical elite can be found, at least during working hours. The rural areas of
all these countries are still very poor, unconnected in any systematic way, and
unprepared for being pushed into a cash-based global economy (although it’s
happening anyway). Since substantially more than 50 percent of both China
and India’s populations are rural and have incomes below $3 U.S. a day, they
could be called developing countries—even if at the national governance level,
these nations are quite powerful modern states. South Africa is similar.
Brazil and Mexico and Russia are tougher calls, because they are 70 percent or
more urban and have higher average incomes, but the rural areas (and the urban
slums) are still “developing.” Most of the development literature treats all of
these countries as developing, even while acknowledging a growing modern
urban core. It is the modern urban–rural disparity, in fact, that is the greatest
source of potential social instability—and the governments know it.
There is hunger among ordinary people to learn English better, to improve their
business skills, to learn how to do specific technical tasks that improve their
employability—whether you call it an unmet need or an untapped market, it is
substantial. An educational approach that is informal (outside of schools), self-
paced, interactive, voluntary, group-based, and visual can fit into a long bus ride
or standing in line or a slow day at the market stall—the real circumstances of
people in developing markets.
We leave this topic with a startling set of observations by Sir John Daniels,109
currently President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning in Canada,
and formerly Vice-chancellor of the Open University, UK.

109 http://www.col.org/colweb/site/pid/2833

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3 The Brewing Perfect Storm
3.1 Introduction
The Hewlett Foundation has been a major force in creating an OER movement
that will yield benefit into the future even if Hewlett now exits the field. But
doing so would forfeit an extraordinary opportunity and responsibility to
leverage its investments to both deepen and broaden the impact of the OER
initiative.
We are advocating investments to achieve more pervasive access to OER and
are advocating an initiative aimed at deeper impact on learning. We advocate an
initiative, building on OER, to create a global culture of learning. A culture of
learning, or what some might call a learning ecosystem,110 is targeted at preparing
people for thriving in a rapidly evolving, knowledge-based world. This world
demands creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism from all of us. This
approach is very much in the spirit of what Marshall Smith and Catherine
Casserly are saying in the context of their talks with titles like “The Old and the
New: A Learning Revolution,”111 in which they focus not on marginal change
in the educational system and school, but rather on ways to use technology to
create powerful improvements in learning. For example, wireless and mobile
phone technologies offer new opportunities for OER access, especially in the
developing world.
The OER initiative has been a vehicle for building a culture of sharing. We
now propose that OER be leveraged within a broader initiative—an
international Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) initiative
(to be described in Section 4) for building a culture of learning.
This is a risky undertaking, but we believe that conditions now exist to make it
compelling. In this section we survey threads of activities that, like OER, are
individually significant but if combined together would be far more powerful.
Figure 4 illustrates a framework of enablers, transformative initiatives under
way and proposed, and grand challenges that are elements of a possible perfect
storm of innovation in discovery and learning.

110 Further consideration in the future of the analogs between a learning ecosystem and a
natural ecosystem may be productive. Ecosystems are characterized by interdependency,
diversity, complex composition, variation in granularity and scale, adaptive (plastic), and
evolving. Other important concepts in ecosystems are key species, energy cycles, key
elements, and food webs.
111 http://www.ced.org/docs/report/report_ecom_openstandards.pdf

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The key enablers we focus on are
ƒ open source code, open multimedia content and the community
or institutional structures that produce or enable them;
ƒ the growth of what we are calling participatory systems
architecture;112
ƒ the continuing improvement in performance and access to the
underlying information and communication technology (ICT);
ƒ increasing availability and use of rich media, virtual
environments, and gaming; and
ƒ the emerging deeper basic insights into human learning (both
individual and community) that can informed and validated by
pilot projects and action-based research.

Figure 4—Enablers and collateral initiative context for the OPLI Initiative
These enablers are already empowering major domestic and international
transformative initiatives in science and engineering research and education (e-
science, a.k.a. cyberinfrastructure-enhanced science) and salients of innovation

112 Our notion of architecture includes both technical and social dimensions.

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in the humanities. The e-science activities are directed at meeting grand global
challenges through more effective science and engineering, at enhanced
innovation, and at maintaining leadership in a global knowledge-based
economy. A spin-off of the science-focused cyberinfrastructure activities has
been a growing focus on the role of technology in enhanced scholarship and
learning in the humanities and social sciences. All of this is fueling reflection
about augmented models of the university of the future, including the concepts
“engaged universities in and of the world” and “meta-universities113.” And we
are proposing that Hewlett lead a complementary “open participatory learning
infrastructure” initiative. In Figure 4, we also suggest that Hewlett will be able
to identify and leverage other initiatives in the world yet to be discovered.
There is huge potential synergy between these initiatives and the challenges they
are targeting to meet.
So we are situating the proposed OPLI with other transformative initiatives,
empowered by common enablers, that like the OER, are well under way and
potentially highly synergistic, namely
ƒ the worldwide e-science movement, or what is called in the
United States cyberinfrastructure (CI)-enabled science;
ƒ the less developed and funded, but potentially high-impact
movement concerning CI-enhanced humanities.
These initiatives are all in service of meeting international, strategic societal
grand challenges, namely
ƒ to significantly transform effectiveness of and participation in
scientific discovery and learning;
ƒ to enable engaged world universities, meta universities, and a
huge global increase in access to high-quality education; and
ƒ to create cultures of learning for supporting people to thrive in a
rapidly evolving knowledge-based world.
We believe that the Hewlett Foundation in concert with other investors and
stakeholders could make a major contribution by defining and leading the OPLI
initiative and linking with the other two initiative areas in ways that contribute
to meeting all three of the grand challenges. In the remainder of this section we
elaborate on the elements of the framework in Figure 4.

113 Charles M. Vest, “Open Content and the Emerging Global Meta-University,”
EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2006,
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0630.asp?bhcp=1

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phenomenon is converting consumers to producers and supporting a huge
outpouring of creativity in user-generated content. “Collective intelligence” is
helping us organize huge masses of information through, for example,
“folksonomies.” Amateurs are doing the work of professionals, or amateurs
and professionals are working together through “crowdsourcing.” The “long
tail” is providing consumers much wider distributions of choices, be they
books, rare ceramics, or courseware on obscure topics. How can all of this and
more be applied to learning in an OER world as participatory architectures
become more pervasive and powerful?
Open code and content are part of a larger openness movement that may be
relevant to the future of OER and beyond. “Openness” has become a subject
of substantial interdisciplinary academic study with growing expertise that could
be called upon by the Hewlett Foundation. Openness includes development
and adoption of open standards and open innovation119 in the world of the firm.
Open innovation involves limited open sharing between firms for some
collective good (cooperate to compete) but not necessarily for the public good.
We also note that openness of product and/or process leads to enhanced
opportunities for openness in monitoring evolution and impact as well as more
openness in understanding impact. This is a very important attribute of
openness to which we will return in Section 4.
3.2.2 Participatory Systems Architecture
The rapid emergence of the World Wide Web, layered on the Internet and
distributed computing architecture, is the mainstay for provisioning and using
open educational resources. In its first phase, the web has been used largely to
distribute information. It has now emerged as a platform for collaboration and
participation in a wide variety of collective activities. It has been used as a
platform for what is often generically call social software.120 It has entered the
“web 2.0” phase—a shift from information to participation. This creates a
platform for the OPLI Initiative we are advocating.
What we are calling participatory systems architecture underlies the TIME Person of
the Year being You. Quoting from the TIME story,121

119 Concept pioneered by Henry Chesbrough. See http://www.openinnovation.net/
120 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software
121 TIME magazine, December 25, 2006. See cover story at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html?aid=434&from=o&to
=http percent3A//www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0 percent2C9171 percent2C1569514
percent2C00.html

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There are other threads of activity that will empower the OPLI initiative
including:
ƒ The three-decades-old research and development knowledge
base of the computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW)
community.125
ƒ The increasing prevalence of “service-oriented architecture” that
among other things is a paradigm for discovery and re-use of
software objects and for organizing and using distributed
capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership
domains.126
ƒ Initiatives of the Mellon Foundation,127 Moore Foundation,128
Getty Foundation, and others to create open source software
services and middleware for academic enterprise, including
international virtual communities. They are now considering
scholarly middleware, workflow engines, user interfaces
(especially for accessibility in the FLUID project), and software
bus initiative for academia that may directly support OPLI.
ƒ The Second Life129 phenomenon—an open-ended virtual world
created by San Francisco–based Linden Lab. Second Life gives
its users (referred to as residents) tools to shape its world.
Second Life combines features from social networks, multiplayer
online games, and e-tailers; it lets people adopt new personas
called avatars in its 3D world, where they can interact with others
for entertainment and business purposes. Millions of dollars
exchange hands every week in member-to-member commerce in
Second Life. Companies including IBM, Dell, Starwood Hotels
& Resorts Worldwide, and American Apparel are setting up shop
in Second Life to sell and promote their services.
ƒ Research, development, and deployment of numerous virtual
organizations in international e-science/cyberinfrastructure
initiatives, including those supported by the U.S. National
Science Foundation (NSF). Figure 6 illustrates the virtual
organization framework for the NSF activities and some of the
various names for such organizations in use by international
distributed research communities.

125 http://www.cscw2006.org/index.html
126 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture#SOA_definitions
127 http://rit.mellon.org/
128 http://www.plos.org/about/index.html
129 http://secondlife.com/

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Figure 6—Framework for virtual organizations for distributed participation in science.
3.2.3 Improvement in Performance and Access to the
Underlying ICT
The exponential improvement in computation rates, information transfer rates,
and storage capacity continues. This is manifest in both increased capacity for
fixed dollars and decreased cost for fixed performance. Increased capacity, now
approaching the “petascale130 regime,” is critical to e-science. Reduced cost and
thus ubiquity of access is critical for an international OPLI initiative.
Eventually, however, the increased power of computing that is opening new
frontiers for simulation, modeling, and virtual/augmented reality will be highly
significant for open participatory learning. Of all these improvements in
computation, storage, and networking, the most important is networking—the
ability to connect.
Cell phones, particularly as they become “smarter,” offer a promising platform
for massification of education participation in developing countries. We are
recommending that Hewlett place a large emphasis on exploring access to OER
and participatory learning through mobile devices. In developing countries,
adoption of mobile phones far exceeds adoption of PCs, and the trend is, if
anything, accelerating. The reasons are partly economic: phones are less

130 Petascale means computations rates greater than or equal to 1015 operations per second.

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from standard sources of authority. They are inherently collaborative learners
who want to learn by doing. This process of doing plays out across nearly all
the disciplines. They build, they remix, they mod, they blog, they converse, they
share hints, stories, writings—all facilitated by digital communication in both
physical and virtual worlds.
It is easy to dismiss the more subtle aspects of their activities. Take games,
especially massively multiplayer games. What is being learned here? First of all,
notice that playing a game such as the popular World of Warcraft (WoW)
requires a player to find, join, or form a guild of like-minded players. The social
skills to build and maintain guilds are non-trivial, and success depends on
developing this skill. Players also develop dispositions that increase their
situational awareness to make sense out of what is happening around them.
Most learning here happens experientially, often from their making decisions
and having to live with and reflect on the consequences.
Let’s briefly consider two games that aim at getting kids more engaged in civic
affairs. The first is the PeaceMaker131 at CMU that presents a crisis between
Israel and Palestine and gets teams to play both sides in terms of what Israel
and Palestine should do. Depending on the move, each team gets to experience
the likely reactions by the various constituents they represent, letting one
experience how fast a situation can become critical. What emerges from playing
this game is a skill in understanding opposing positions.
Another game of this genre is under development at the University of Southern
California by Doug Thomas and Chris Swain: the Redistricting Game.132 As
Thomas describes it, “The purpose of the game is to provoke engagement
around issues of political redistricting, reapportionment, and gerrymandering.
The potential of this game is not in educating people about the ways in which
redistricting works, though it does do that. The true potential is in what
happens around the table when people play it. When players engage with the
game and each other, they enter into a grounded discussion that forces them to
think critically about the choices they make and well as engage in critical
reflection about the processes in which they are engaged.”
The NSF is now investing in projects to explore online multiplayer, role-playing
games in an immersive 3-D environments. One example is WolfQuest 133in
which players join a wild wolf pack and venture into the wilderness. Playing
alone or in teams in multiplayer missions, they join a wolf pack and hunt, fight,
and socialize, all while doing their best to survive. The WolfQuest experience
goes beyond the game with an active online community where you can discuss

131 http://www.peacemakergame.com/
132 http://redistrictinggame.org/
133 http://www.wolfquest.org/

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facilities). It empowers great emphasis on authentic, practice-based learning—
on learning to be.
We emphasize an important fact: this is a grassroots, bottom-up, movement
coming from the research communities. It is not a top-down, blue-sky initiative
thought up in Washington. The community-driven nature of this movement is
evidence of readiness for transformation toward a new culture of learning and
discovery, at least in the sciences and engineering.

Figure 7—NSF CI vision and activities based on broad and diverse community engagement.
As illustrated in Figure 7, this movement was catalyzed by a landmark 2003
report from an NSF-appointed Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel, “Revolutionizing
Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure.”143 This report includes
the following assertion:
“a new age has dawned in scientific and engineering research, pushed by
continuing progress in computing, information, and communication
technology, and pulled by the expanding complexity, scope, and scale of
today’s challenges. The capacity of this technology has crossed thresholds
that now make possible a comprehensive “cyberinfrastructure” on which to
build new types of scientific and engineering knowledge environments and
organizations and to pursue research in new ways and with increased
efficacy.”

143 http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/toc.jsp

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Since this report was issued, there have been several dozen national and
international workshops and reports from all branches of science and
engineering, research, and education exploring the implications of
cyberinfrastructure for their future. Many of these reports are available through
the NSF OCI website.144 There is now wide agreement in most fields that we
are at a very exciting time in the history of science as cyberinfrastructure
converges with the increased demand for meeting grand challenges through
multiscale, multimodal, multisite science.
Of particular relevance to the OER movement are major disciplinary
“collaboratories” (instances of a virtual organization) which are becoming
functionally complete: through web portals, members of the collaboratory can
reach all the colleagues, computational models, data and literature, and
instrumentation they need to do their work. As illustrated in Figure 8, the
cyberinfrastructure platform relaxes constraints of time and distance
(geographic, disciplinary, and institutional distance) enabling people,
information, and facilities to be linked and used in all four quadrants of same
and different time and place. It can dramatically scale up access and
participation. Physical proximity (same time and same place) continues to be
important, but is now richly augmented by collaborative work flowing through
all four variants of time and place. Similar shared knowledge environments by
different names are being created as part of the NSF TeraGrid Project.145 In
this case the collaboratories are called “science gateways” (the gateways into
collaboratories). Many of these science gateways are being designed to support
both research as well as authentic, participation-based learning at K–12,
undergraduate, and graduate levels. The TeraGrid website provides
descriptions of about 25 such science gateways.146 The Nanohub147 science
gateway is a particularly strong example of a site designed to support both
frontier research and complementary authentic learning—a dual-use
collaboratory. The science gateways provide access not only to open content
but also to open scientific instruments and mentored, authentic experience in a
community of practice.
Perhaps even more in the spirit of the OER culture is the Open Science Grid148
(OSG), a globally distributed computing infrastructure for large-scale scientific
research, built and operated by a consortium of universities, national
laboratories, scientific collaborations, and software developers. There is also a
growing participatory learning component to the OSG. For example, OSG is
collaborating with the NSF’s Interactions in Understanding the Universe

144 http://www.nsf.gov/oci/
145 http://www.teragrid.org/
146 http://www.teragrid.org/programs/sci_gateways/
147 http://www.nanohub.org/
148 http://www.opensciencegrid.org/

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advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and
the social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of relations among
the national societies devoted to such studies.” In December of 2006, the
ACLS released a report on a two-year study by the Commission on
Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences, supported by the
Mellon Foundation. The Commission carried out research, hearings, and
consultations to gather information and develop perspective in 2004. A draft
report was issued in 2005 for public comment, the intended audience including
the scholarly community and the societies that represent it, university provosts,
federal funding agencies (including but not limited to the NSF), and private
foundations.
The final report, Our Cultural Commonwealth,
is now available from the ACLS website.152
This report should be required reading for
those going forward with investments in the
OER movement and we cannot do it justice
in this brief summary. We will, however, list
the primary recommendations, which
include subtext addressed to different
constituencies: funders, universities,
technology providers, cultural institutions,
etc. We assume that the connection
between these recommendations and the
future of the OER movement is fairly
obvious. The top-level recommendations
are as follows:
1. Invest in cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences as a
matter of strategic priority.
2. Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and
access.153
3. Promote cooperation between the public and private sectors.
4. Cultivate leadership in support of cyberinfrastructure from within the
humanities and social sciences.
5. Encourage digital scholarship.
6. Establish national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and
exploits cyberinfrastructure.

152 http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm
153 Emphasis by the writers of this report.

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7. Develop and maintain open standards and robust tools.
8. Create extensive and reusable digital collections.
Finally, the Commission calls for specific investments, not just of money but
also of leadership, from scholars and scholarly societies; librarians, archivists,
and curators; university provosts and university presses; the commercial sector;
government; and private foundations.
The U.S.-based group we know of that is the most active on some of these
recommendations is HASTAC (pronounced “haystack”), which stands for the
seldom-used Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced
Collaboratory. 154 It is a growing consortium of humanists, artists, scientists,
social scientists, and engineers from universities and other civic institutions
across the United States, and increasingly internationally, who are committed to
new forms of collaboration through the creative use of technology. Since 2003
the HASTAC community has been developing tools for multimedia archiving
and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative
educational programs in information science, virtual museums, and other digital
projects. Its stated state aim is “to promote expansive models for thinking,
teaching, and research.” During the 2006–2007 academic year HASTAC is
organizing impressive public lectures on various campuses. This
“InFormation” activity will conclude with the first HASTAC International155
Conference in April 2007.156
There are many other activities, likely already on the Hewlett radar, focused on
building high-quality open content for the humanities and popular culture.
These include, of course, the Library of Congress American Memory157 and
multilingual Global Gateway158 projects and more recently the National
Archives.159 The pilot project at the Archives goes well beyond scans of
historical documents, including, for example 3-D renderings of historic
government ships reconstructed from the official blueprint drawings. Surely
many similar activities are under way outside the United States that can be
founded and pursued as resources to serve the international, cross-cultural
objectives of OER.

154 http://www.hastac.org/
155 Including we understand, some developing countries.
156 http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1134833.html
157 http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
158 http://international.loc.gov/intldl/intldlhome.html
159 http://www.archives.gov/era/index.html

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4 The Next Phase: Open Participatory Learning
Infrastructure (OPLI) Initiative
4.1 Introduction
We are recommending that the Hewlett Foundation continue to nurture global
open educational resources, but to do so on a larger and more diverse scale and
in the context of an even bolder goal—to shape a new culture of learning that is
now possible in the digital world. We believe that the Hewlett Foundation can
play a leadership role in weaving the threads of an expanded OER movement;
the e-science movement; the e-humanities movement; new forms of
participation around Web 2.0; social software; virtualization; and multimode,
multimedia documents into a transformative open participatory learning
infrastructure—the platform for a culture of learning.
We are not recommending a direct assault on institutionalized higher education
but rather establishing new alternatives to learning for more people in the
world. Bold change at the edges of the formal education system, at all levels,
will eventually propagate into and change the core.
Hewlett will have the greatest impact on education by catalyzing160 an
infrastructure that will be supported and used by many for open participatory
learning. Infrastructure and creating infrastructure are often taken for granted,
but understanding infrastructure—the dynamics, the tensions and the design—
is a rich and interesting topic, and infrastructure is often the most complex and
expensive undertaking of a society.
4.2 Understanding Infrastructure
A recent report from a workshop, Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics,
Tensions, and Design,161 along with the community producing it, are relevant to
the OPLI Initiative. We will touch on the highlights most relevant to
understanding the what and how of the OPLI initiative. We encourage, however,
careful study of the full report and possible consultation with some of the
authors. Relevant work from economists162 on concepts such as the case for
commons and pooling arrangements can be used to inform the OPLI initiative as can
typologies of infrastructure organized on commercial, government, and social

160 Although it has not been characterized as an infrastructure initiative, much of the OER
initiative is about evolving infrastructure for enhanced creation and use of infrastructure for
accessing digital content.
161 http://www.si.umich.edu/InfrastructureWorkshop/
162 For example, Role of intellectual property in constructing/designing open environments
through pooling arrangements, Brett Frischmann,
http://numenor.lib.uic.edu/fmconference/viewabstract.php?id=12

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stakeholders. This community might help assure that the OER and OPLI
initiatives produce positive externalities and large social surplus.
Since the 1980s, historians, sociologists, economists, and information scientists
have been studying how and why infrastructures form and evolve; how they
work; and how they sometimes disintegrate or fail. This work reveals some
base-level tensions that complicate infrastructural development and challenge
simple notions of building infrastructure as a planned, orderly, and mechanical
act. These tensions and examples of them include
ƒ Time—short-term funding decisions vs. the longer time scales
over which infrastructures typically grow and take hold;
ƒ Scale—disconnects between global interoperability and local
optimization; and
ƒ Agency—navigating processes of planned vs. emergent change in
complex and multiple-determined systems.
Important concepts and points made by this workshop, and adopted
extensively from their report, include the following:
4.2.1 Fostered, Not Built
Infrastructure is not built from a blueprint, nor necessarily a centralized
government-dominated activity. Cyberinfrastructure, especially, emerges from
highly distributed, complex, multi-actor processes informed by heuristics for
linking isolated and local systems. Although “systems” are technically recursive
(a system is a system of systems), it is useful to distinguish infrastructure as
resulting from establishing interoperability between otherwise heterogeneous
local and specialized systems.
(For example transformers,
inverters, and mechanical plug-
adapters enable a global
electricity infrastructure.)
The complications of time,
scale, and agency challenge
simple notions of infrastructure
building as a planned, orderly,
and mechanical act. They also
suggest that boundaries between technical and social solutions are mobile, in
both directions: the path between the technological and the social is not static
and there is no one correct mapping. Robust cyberinfrastructure will develop
only when social, organizational, and cultural issues are resolved in tandem with
creating technology-based services. Attention to these concerns will be critical
to long-term success.

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4.2.2 Dynamics
Historical infrastructures—the automobile, gasoline, and roadway system;
electrical grids; railways; telephony; and most recently the Internet—become
ubiquitous, accessible, reliable, and transparent as they mature. The initial stage
in infrastructure formation is system-building, characterized by the deliberate
design of technology-based services. Next, technology transfer across domains
and locations results in variations on the original design, as well as the
emergence of competing systems.
Infrastructures typically form only when these various systems merge, in a
process of consolidation characterized by gateways that allow dissimilar systems
to be linked into networks. In this phase, standardization and inter-
organizational communication techniques are critical. As multiple systems
assemble into networks, and networks into webs or “internetworks,” early
choices constrain the options available, creating what historical economists call
“path dependence.”
4.2.3 Tensions
Transparent, reliable infrastructural services create vast benefits, but there are
always losers and winners in infrastructure formation. Questions of ownership,
management, control, and access are always present. For example:
ƒ Who decides on rules and conventions for sharing, storing, and
preserving resources?
ƒ Local variation vs. global standards: how do we resolve frictions
between localized routines and cultures that stand in the way of
effective interoperability and collaboration?
ƒ How can national cyberinfrastructure development move
forward without compromising possibilities for international or
even global infrastructure formation?
4.2.4 Design
These and other tensions inherent to infrastructure growth present imperatives
to develop navigation strategies that recognize the likelihood of unforeseen (and
potentially negative) path dependence and/or institutional or cultural barriers.
The proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralized learning environment that:
(1) permits distributed participatory learning; (2) provides incentives for
participation (provisioning of open resources, creating specific learning
environments, evaluation) at all levels; and (3) encourages cross-boundary and
cross cultural learning.
Because all three of these goals are simultaneously social and organizational in
nature and central to the technical base, designing effective navigation strategies

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4.3.1 Peer Learning and Labs on the Wire
Toward creating a culture of activity-based, participatory learning (including
significant peer learning) we might start by considering the role of the Faulkes
Telescope Project167 in Australia or the Bugscope project168 in the United States.
The Faulkes Telescope Project provides access to a global network of robotic,
online telescopes for research-based science education. The Bugscope project
is an educational outreach program for K–12 classrooms. The project provides
a resource to classrooms so that they may remotely operate a scanning electron
microscope to image “bugs” at high magnification. The microscope is remotely
controlled in real time from a classroom computer over the Internet using a
Web browser. Students also have access to faculty expertise to answer
questions as they arise in the observations.
Given today’s cyberinfrastructure, why haven’t we blown open the ability to
give students anywhere access to serious scientific instruments—instruments to
explore nature’s secrets as an adventure? Imagine the MIT iLabs Project169
done large scale and complemented by access to capabilities like the MOSIS170
integrated circuit fabrication server. This could provide open access to both
building and evaluating complex circuits. Now consider the Fab Labs171
project at MIT. MIT’s Fab Labs project aims to give ordinary people around
the world the technology to design and make their own stuff. Is this the dawn
of the age of personal fabrication? It is used by humanists, architects, and
engineers to learn how to build almost anything and learn how to use
sophisticated equipment to assist in building.
Along the same lines, particularly if more focused toward participatory learning,
is the Fab@Home172 Project. Here is an overview from the Web:

167 http://faulkes-telescope.com/
168 http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/
169 http://icampus.mit.edu/ilabs/
170 http://www.mosis.org/
171http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/01/30/how_to_make_almost_anyt
hing/
172 http://www.fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Fab percent40Home:Overview

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Universal manufacturing embodied as today’s freeform fabrication systems
has – like universal computers – the potential to transform human society to
a degree that few creations ever have. The ability to directly fabricate
functional custom objects could transform the way we design, make, deliver
and consume products. But not less importantly, rapid prototyping
technology has the potential to redefine the designer. By eliminating many of
the barriers of resource and skill that currently prevent ordinary inventors
from realizing their own ideas, fabbers can “democratize innovation.” 173 174
175
Ubiquitous automated manufacturing can thus open the door to a new class
of independent designers, a marketplace of printable blueprints, and a new
economy of custom products.
Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively
new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefully depositing
materials drop by drop, layer by layer. Slowly but surely, with the right set of
materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that
would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using
conventional manufacturing techniques. A fabber can allow you explore new
designs, email physical objects to other fabber owners, and most importantly
- set your ideas free. Just like MP3s, iPods and the Internet have freed
musical talent, we hope that blueprints and fabbers will democratize
innovation.
Creating a culture of learning will end up redefining how we think about work,
leisure, and entertainment.
4.3.2 Exploiting Specialized Resources
Such participatory learning environments return us to a land of passionate
building and tinkering—getting a feel by doing. OPLI can be a platform for
extending to developing countries some of the learning innovation in
engineering education at Olin College,176 a new school with little institutional

173 Burns M., (1995) The Freedom to Create, in Technology Management, Volume 1,
Number 4 http://www.ennex.com/~fabbers/publish/199407-MB-FreedomCreate.asp
174 Gershenfeld N., (2005) FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – From Personal
Computers to Personal Fabrication, Basic Books http://cba.mit.edu/projects/fablab/
175 Lipson H. (2005) “Homemade: The future of Functional Rapid Prototyping”, IEEE
Spectrum, feature article, May 2005, pp. 24-31
http://www.mae.cornell.edu/ccsl/papers/Spectrum05_Lipson.pdf
176 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Engineering

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inertia to overcome when adopting new practices. It attempts to set itself apart
from traditional engineering schools through its focus on project-based and
team-based learning, its interdisciplinary approach, and its unique organizational
structure.
Universities and other centers of knowledge worldwide have been creating
special collections, websites (often associated virtual communities of practice)
around narrow topics, for example Decameron Web,177 The Valley of
Shadow,178 The Perseus Project,179 websites on the Civil War, and on and on.
These become rich sites to explore and even participate in—starting to engage
in learning to be a scholar. There are likely now hundreds of such high-quality
sites with many in the humanities. Consider the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble
and the ability it offers to pull up different (video and movie) performances of
Hamlet and see/feel the wide range of interpretations different directors have
given. Which one seems right and why?
Returning to history, how might one get youth to take some of this material and
build games around them? This is a rich tapestry of history games already, but
how do they get used in history classes, if they do at all? What kinds of
discussions can they foster?
Moving back to engineering and science, recall the critically acclaimed series at
Cal Tech called The Mechanical Universe…and Beyond.180 This is a series of fifty-
two thirty-minute videotape programs covering the basic topics of an
introductory university physics course. It includes hundreds of spectacular
computer animation segments created by the famed graphics guru, Jim Blinn.
The National Science Foundation later funded production of a seven-hour high
school adaptation suitable for high school physics students, and it has been
translated into nine languages. But this just scratches the surface of what could
be done to get people of any age to understand how the mechanical universe
works. How could high-quality resources such as these be remixed and reused
in even more powerful ways? We have already alluded to the vast capabilities of
visual simulations—but there is now little way to know what each other is
doing, what has worked, what can be shared and so on. Could a pervasive
OPLI reduce this lost-opportunity cost?
Consider Andy van Dam’s ambitious proposal to build, in a distributed and
federated way, a clip library of simulations181 (sim clips) that recursively delve
deeper into a topic. His focus initially was the human body, which can be
viewed at multi-scale (both spatial and temporal) levels, but at each level each

177 http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dweb.shtml
178 http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/
179 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
180 http://www.its.caltech.edu/~tmu/
181 http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0521.asp

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Might we build and host in an OPLI a vast video library of master teachers that
could be indexed, commented on and parsed? MIT’s new browser shows
promise for automatic speech recognition; it is trained only by giving the system
some papers written by the lecturer. Once transcripts are created, we are able
to access just that part of a lecture to get a quick refresher or memory jog. Or a
teacher might use it to slip something into his or her own lecture. Universities
focus on both timeless issues and very timely issues. We need to find ways to
capture more of the latter so one starts to think of OPLI-based services as a
place to come or an infrastructure to use to find out about the latest
developments in a particular field. This is in part what we discussed earlier
about increasing the granularity of what can be accessed and reused within a
resource collection.
An emphasis throughout this report is how can we create material that can be
radically repurposed and remixed where appropriate. Key to making the whole
more than the sum of the parts is to create some XML183 schemes with at least a
minimal amount of markup capability. How detailed it should be or how it
evolves is an open question. Currently, one could argue not only is the whole
not more than the sum of the parts; it is more often closer to the difference of the
parts—more does not necessarily mean better; in fact, it often overloads us.
We need new powerful assists from the merger of social filtering, search, and
visual browsing schemes to survive. We also need social software and social
sites for critiquing and sharing experience: sharing material + sharing
experience = closing loops to make resources better. Some of these resources
are very transient, but much of what is done gets repurposed decades later. We
need to solve the archival problem in OPLI (others will) but we must recognize
that archiving of multimedia material is a problem in itself.
4.4 Some Functional Attributes of an OPLI
Having sketched some of the gestalt of learning in the OPLI-enabled work, we
will now list some of the necessary attributes of the underlying OPLS.
ƒ Extensible—we are in a turbulent embryonic stage although
middleware projects like Globus184 are making headway. Google
and YouTube are not solutions or even initial platforms, but they
will evoke and provoke our imaginations.
ƒ Remixable—discussed earlier.
ƒ Repurposable—automatic scaling and transcoding between
wall-size screens and mobile PDAs.

183 extended markup language.
184 http://www.globus.org/

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ƒ Highly and smartly instrumented—learning in OPLI is
computer mediated, especially the distributed part, and we must
instrument what goes on to get some really fine-grain analysis of
what is working and why. More generally, a key opportunity is to
figure out how to make learning experiments more powerful and
relevant to more people. The openness of the systems and the
artifacts and resources in it should contribute to finer-grained,
more nuanced assessment.
4.5 Some Thoughts about How
We doubt that this will be a business-as-usual undertaking for the Education
Program at the Hewlett Foundation. Careful thought will need to go into the
meta question of how to mount this initiative. Here are some of our
suggestions:
1. Identify and engage representatives from the community of OPLI
funders and performers in a series of workshops to build common
vision of the opportunity space and to find specific roles for them. Use
a combination of face-to-face and online meetings. (We can help
identify candidate participants.) This can be supplemented by a series
of private meetings with possible funding partners.
2. Use input from these workshops, this report, and other retrospectives
of the OER to establish a vision document (similar to what NSF did for
the cyberscience activities mentioned in Section 3).
3. Within the general framework of this vision document develop a set of
funding opportunities through: invitation, a venture fund for relatively
small unsolicited proposals, and one or more solicitations for major
funding. The solicitations could be an open invitations (perhaps
worldwide) but multiphase: letter of intent, pre-proposal, full proposal.
Proposers could be eliminated at any of these stages. Hewlett could
consider outsourcing management of the review process to other places.
The NSF, for example, often provides this service to other federal
agencies and may be able to do so for private foundations.
4. Establish a standing external advisory committee and a cadre of on-call
consultants.
5. Ramp up program officer staffing inside Hewlett, select and fund a
project coordination office at a university or other nonprofit institution.,
or do both. The project office would handle much of the day-to-day
coordination of the OPLI grantee community. Consider models such
the relationship between NSF and the National Center for Atmospheric

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Research (NCAR). NCAR is an example of a federally funded research
and development center. The OPLI initiative could be conducted
primarily through a Hewlett (and others?) funder R&D center.
6. Although we have been using the words grant and grantee we suggest that
much of this program would be funded as what NSF calls a
“cooperative agreement.” A cooperative agreement is an arrangement
somewhere between a contract with clear deliverables, and a grant with
no specific expectations nor much oversight from the funder. More
generally, there could be funding models and experience at the NSF that
might be appropriated by Hewlett.
7. As Hewlett has done in OER, build a community that will interact and
increasingly build common ground on the vision, approach, and
opportunities for collaboration. Promote humble listening and
collective action between normally competitive communities.
4.6 Why Hewlett and Why Now?
We have been looking over Hewlett’s shoulder at the OER movement
now for several years and have grown increasingly enthusiastic,
respectful, and excited about what the Foundation’s investments of
money and leadership have accomplished.186 The Hewlett Foundation is
the recognized leader in nurturing the OER movement, and in our
judgment is almost the only place to catalyze, in partnership with other
private and government foundations, the next logical step from open
resources to open participatory learning. Hewlett has the global network
of grantees, the global reach to many others, the momentum, the entry to
most any person or institutions worldwide, the flexibility, the agility, and
the personal commitment of program officers. It has shown that it can
attract the best to work with in this emerging field.
The primary goal of Section 3 was to address the why now question. The
world is fortunate to have several major cyberinfrastructure-based,
revolutionary movements under way that could now be linked for
extraordinarily positive social benefit. The good news is that these are
largely community-driven initiatives with a life of their own. The bad
news is that without some conceptual and financial “force fields” from
enlightened funders, these communities may go their separate ways with
suboptimal or even balkanized outcomes. There is now an open window
of time in which to act.

186 Our enthusiasm is manifest in the fact that we have very willingly worked on this review
and report at a level well beyond what we initially thought we had signed up for.

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Bold initiatives for change such as OER and OPLI are not easy, but this,
as Machiavelli187 reminds us, is nothing new.
It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor
more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a
new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by
the old order and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by
the new order; this lukewarmness arising from the incredulity of mankind
who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have
experience of it.

187 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by Daniel Donno (Bantam Classics: New
York, 1986)

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Fixed and Mobile Subscribers Per 1,000 People, 2000 and 2004
148
315
267
119
31 32
450
730
507
206
87 103
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
East Asia and Pacific Europe and Central
Asia
Latin America and
Caribbean
Middle East and
North Africa
South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa
2004
2000

Internet Users Per 1,000 People, 2000 and 2004
18
29 34
10 5 5
76
117 104
47
21
15
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
East Asia and Pacific Europe and Central
Asia
Latin America and
Caribbean
Middle East and
North Africa
South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa
2004
2000

Source: Adapted from 2006: Information and Communications for Development, Global Trends and
Policies (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006), p.6

Figure 5.1—Mobile telephone and Internet users by region, 2000 and 2004

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and increased attention to this platform. At the moment, attention is focused
on high-end users and high prices, but that is likely to change within five years,
driven in part by the huge volume of potential users in developing countries.
Hence it is important for Hewlett to consider how this platform can serve the
needs of education.
A second major trend is the rapid evolution of fixed wireless broadband
networks, the Wi-Fi family (802.11), and the newer and longer-range Wi-Max
family (802.15). These are spread-spectrum radio technologies very similar to
those used in mobile phones, but they are newer, optimized for data rather than
voice, with much higher throughput capacity and generally less expensive
equipment—in large part because they are based on industry-wide standards
that are attracting many manufacturers. They can operate in both licensed and
unlicensed (free) parts of the radio spectrum. A still evolving mobile Wi-Max
standard may become the 4G technology of choice for mobile carriers. Wireless
Internet Service Providers (WISPs) based on these technologies are
proliferating in the United States and are about to take off in Europe. But the
critical point here is that the low cost of these technologies and their rapid rate
of evolution may provide a route to affordable broadband coverage even in
rural areas of developing countries.
The model system has a number of components, as follows: Wi-Max-fixed
wireless or new generation satellites (designed for IP-based traffic) as backhaul
links to reach rural communities; advanced Wi-Fi mesh networks within such
communities or to link a group of communities; and, initially, Wi-Fi–enabled
phones including multi-mode mobile phones or PC-phone hybrids that provide
Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) voice service.195 New “smart” mesh
networks can be deployed without an engineer, can be remotely monitored,
draw so little power that they can be solar-powered when needed, and can
provide service up to several kilometers from the access point. A significant list
of applications, agricultural information, financial services, health alerts, instant
translations, and educational services can be delivered via such phones and
voice-based systems. This model has already been deployed in rural Mongolia,
where it is rapidly being commercialized, and a larger deployment in Vietnam is
in the planning stages. (See Next Section.) The central features of the model
are: (1) the user interface is a phone, with minimal tech-support or literacy
issues; (2) it provides voice service at radically lower cost than any switched
network. For calls within a local rural network, which accounts typically for
about half the traffic on a local phone system, the cost is essentially zero; for
calls to other Internet phones, the cost, like a Skype call, is minimal. Only calls
into the switched network need incur significant tolls. And (3) it is a broadband
network capable of supporting PCs, advanced mobile phones, or other Internet

195 For more details, see “A New Model for Rural Connectivity,” by Al Hammond and John
Paul, posted at www.nextbillion.net.

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models that reach low-income populations and financial services over mobile
phones, especially the Philippines and South Africa, which may make them
good pilots for educational experiments.199
Vietnam as a Laboratory. The involvement of one of the authors in a rural
connectivity project in Vietnam means that more detailed information is
available for this country, examined here as an in-depth case study. Eighty
percent of the population is rural, and 32 percent is under the age of 15, still a
very youthful population with high education needs. The economy is
accelerating; Vietnam is joining the WTO this year and already has a bilateral
trade agreement with the United States; and the government is ranked highly in
World Bank Doing Business surveys for reforms of its enabling environment.
English has been taught in schools as a second language for twenty years. In
the ICT space, both ISPs and VOIP are legal, there is fully commercial VSAT
service, and tentative Wi-Max frequencies have been assigned. There are two
competing broadband providers, both building national optical fiber loops (in
Vietnamese style, both are nationally owned entities that operate as private
companies), and three mobile phone providers. Mobile coverage reaches 67
percent of the population but is quite spotty in mountainous rural areas. In
practice, many rural communes do not have phone service and virtually none
have Internet access, although they usually have electrical power. Most rural
households could not afford mobile service, typically a minimum of $7 to $10
per month. Vietnam has just signed an agreement with Rice University to make
its open curriculum platform, Connexions, the basis for the country’s effort in
this area. Two new national initiatives could impact rural connectivity: a new
Universal Service Fund can provide zero percent equipment financing for
service to rural communities, and a new rural infrastructure effort designed to
integrate rural areas into the economy that is heavily financed by a group of
donors, Program 135, is looking for province-scale models to implement
nationwide.
In this context, a pilot connectivity pilot is taking shape in Quang Ngai
province, a poor and largely rural area of one million people in the middle of
the country. The pilot, to be managed jointly by the provincial government and
World Resources Institute, will implement the VSAT/Wi-Fi/VOIP model
described above in three rural communes (each of which includes three to five
villages of varying size) chosen to span different topographies and ethnic
groups, with support from AusAID and USAID. The provincial government
has made clear its intent, if the pilot is successful, to use national funds from
one of the programs described above (Universal Service Fund or Program 135)
to build out the entire province (156 rural communes, or about 160,000 rural
households). Preliminary estimates are that the VSAT/mesh Wi-Fi

199 See case studies on Smart Communications (Philippines) and Vodacom (South Africa)
and other posting on Celtel (Zambia) and Whizit (South Africa) at www.nextbillion.net.

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infrastructure could be installed across the entire province for a capital cost of
about $2.5 million. VSAT broadband leases (one per commune) cost $900 per
year for 2Mbps down and 0.5 Mbps up, amounting to less than $1 per
household per year.200 AusAID is supporting the project because it sees a
potential provincial infrastructure model for national scaling. In addition, the
Connexions project has expressed interest, since its partnership with the
Vietnam Education Ministry is already in place and province-scale rural
broadband access that could be applied to educational purposes does not
otherwise exist in the country. There is also a nascent local software industry,
and Intel is building a chip factory in Vietnam. The combination of these
features may make Vietnam, still a relatively poor country, an interesting and
fruitful laboratory for new, IT-based educational approaches.
For reasons advanced earlier, a number of other countries may also provide
useful venues—the Philippines, South Africa, and any of several countries in
Latin America.

200 The VOIP traffic will be managed with a “soft” switch residing on a PC that requires
less than a second to establish a connection; for local calls, the traffic then stays within the
local WiFi network and does not transit the VSAT link. The result is that approximately
1,000 households, a commune average, can share the VSAT bandwidth with little difficulty
as long as VOIP is the main application and call volume remains modest (likely, these are
agricultural communities). Additional VSAT links could be added when demand warrants.