The Real Digital Change Agent - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-03-04

Summary:

"Over the past few years, many of the most prominent American universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Duke, have joined to embrace a game-changing approach in opening up their previously closed academic resources. Leveraging the revolutionary potential of digital technology to provide access to the world's best faculty members, this new method of dissemination takes what were once exclusive, limited-access, high-priced resources and puts them online for anyone to learn from, freely. Despite its somewhat goofy acronym, this new model has been embraced, sometimes in the face of faculty objections, because of its democratizing, globalizing potential, as well as its effectiveness in improving an institution's reputation for innovation and excellence. I am, of course, talking about Coapi. If you haven't heard of it, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, which now comprises more than 40, began in 2011 as a way for colleges to coordinate and advocate for open-access policies, which typically require that all faculty journal publications be made available freely online, whether on a personal Web site, institutional repository, or discipline-specific public archive. Such reforms tend to be driven by a few faculty and staff members (usually librarians and technologists), with a ground-level commitment to open access, who manage to persuade their administrations and colleagues—and by the federal government, which just required that publications from federally supported research be made available freely online. Odds are that you haven't read much about Coapi as a revolutionary, democratizing force within higher education, especially compared with its high-profile contemporary, MOOCs (massive open online courses). While it's quite rare to read about open-access policies in the popular news media, celebrations of MOOCs as the Great Revolution About to Overturn Higher Education As We Know It litter newspapers' opinion pages—for instance, Thomas Friedman's recent celebratory gloss in The New York Times. I am wary of such boosterism, and I view MOOCs with the measured skepticism expressed well by the University of Virginia's Siva Vaidhyanathan, who has written that MOOCs are 'like fancy textbooks. They are all about the mass market and not the rich connectivity that established online courses offer their limited collection of students.' But I am fascinated by the contrasting rhetoric between the rapid-boil fervor over MOOCs and the barely simmering apathy for open-access policies, especially at the institutional level. MOOCs are often touted in university news releases as being motivated by the desire to increase access to work of faculty freely across the globe. The MOOC leader Coursera's own mission is to 'empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.' But fewer than 20 percent of the American institutions that have formed partnerships with Coursera are also members of Coapi. That seems downright hypocritical to me, as opening access to faculty research would help level hierarchies and tear down boundaries between academics and the public, between major research universities and less-wealthy institutions, and between the developed and developing worlds. Access to the average journal article might do little to change the world. But making the bulk of scholarly research freely available could transform the possibilities of educational uplift, scientific discovery, and public engagement with academic work. Why this disconnect between the rhetoric of MOOCs and open-access policies? ..."

Link:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Real-Digital-Change-Agent/137589/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.mandates oa.universities oa.libraries oa.oer oa.librarians oa.coapi oa.colleges oa.economics_of oa.moocs oa.hei oa.policies oa.courseware

Date tagged:

03/04/2013, 11:47

Date published:

03/04/2013, 06:47