The Emergence of Free / Open Courses

The Emergence of Free / Open Courses
Lessons from the Open Source Movement
Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology &

Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University
Andreas Meiszner
European Degree in International Management (DEMI)/EU
Diplom Kaufmann (FH)/G
Degree in Business Administration (BA)/NL
November 24th, 2010
Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology
Creative Commons License

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Abstract
This work has a potentially wide impact as it can apply across disciplines, and at all levels
of education, as evidenced by the case studies and the application trials presented
throughout the work. Free/Open Education is an emerging field, which is interdisciplinary
in nature, drawing on educational sciences, on computer science and technology, and on
‘open’ principles in particular.
The work investigates the nature of Free/Open Education with a particular focus at a
course level. The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement has been largely
strategically driven at institutional levels. More recently one can observe however a further
development within the educational domain that might be broadly characterized as ‘Open
Courses’. These attempts, unlike the OER case, seem to be mainly driven at the individual
educators’ level, but are not strategically addressed at the institutional level. Such ‘Open
Courses’ seem to experiment with a range of different educational approaches, to promote
different levels of openness, incorporate different sets of free and open tools and learning
resources, and – to a varying degree – mix formal with informal learning, bringing together
different stakeholders to be found on the web.
The first part of this work develops an initial understanding of the nature of Open Courses
and identifies different types of Open Course scenarios through means of desktop and case
study research by looking at established practices of courses within formal education that
operate to a certain degree ‘in the open’ and by means of desktop research targeted at
examining related ‘Open’ approaches, such as the Free/Libre Open Source Software
(FLOSS) Learning Ecosystem.
The second part of the work identifies requirements for Open Course design and delivery
and develops and tests a supportive organizational framework that builds on the Meta-
design framework and Courses as Seeds process model. This second part of the work
applied participatory action research and the use of focus groups to stimulate reaction to
ideas, to ask participants for solutions and to allow ideas to be built cumulatively. In the
final part of this work a hybrid organizational framework for open course design is
presented aimed at guiding educators in their course design and delivery process.
The Emergence of Free / Open Courses - Lessons from the Open Source
Movement
Institute of Educational Technology

The Open University
Andreas Meiszner
European Degree in International Management (DEMI) – University of Valenciennes et du Hainaut-
Cambrésis, France
Dipl.Kfm.(FH) – University of Applied Science Bielefeld, Germany
Degree in Business Administration (BA) – International School of Economics Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology
Supervisors:
Prof. Dr. M. J. Weller
Dr. P. McAndrew
Dr. Doug J. Clow
November 24th, 2010
Creative Commons License

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any
way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only
under the same or similar license to this one.
Table of Content

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................................. 1
OVERVIEW ..................................................................................................................................................... 3
1 RESEARCH RATIONALE AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ............................................................. 9
2 FLOSS COMMUNITIES AS AN EXAMPLE OF MATURE LEARNING ECOSYSTEMS .......... 21
3 LEARNING IN FLOSS AND ASSOCIATED PEDAGOGIES........................................................... 55
4 METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................................................. 89
5 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: META-DESIGN & COURSES AS SEEDS (SER) ................... 111
6 OPEN COURSE CASE STUDIES: AN ‘INSIDE’ OR ‘OUTSIDE’ PERSPECTIVE .................... 130
7 THE FLOSSCOM SUMMER UNIVERSITY (FSU) – AN INITIAL FLOSS TYPE
APPLICATION TRIAL .............................................................................................................................. 171
8 OPEN COURSE SCENARIOS: ‘INSIDE’, ‘OUTSIDE’ OR ‘HYBRID’ APPROACH ................. 182
9 OPEN COURSE CASE STUDIES: A HYBRID PERSPECTIVE .................................................... 200
10 THE NETGENERS.NET TRIALS: A HYBRID PERSPECTIVE – EXPERIENCES & LESSONS
LEARNT ....................................................................................................................................................... 227
11 AN ORGANIZATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR HYBRID OPEN COURSE DESIGN &
DELIVERY................................................................................................................................................... 290
12 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................... 328
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................................. 351
PUBLISHED WORK DERIVED FROM THIS RESEARCH ................................................................. 372
ANNEX ......................................................................................................................................................... 376
Detailed Table of Content
LIST OF TABLES & FIGURES .................................................................................................................... I
LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................................... I
LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................................................... I
LIST OF TERMINOLOGY & ABBREVIATIONS .................................................................................. IV
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................................. 1
OVERVIEW ..................................................................................................................................................... 3
1 RESEARCH RATIONALE AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ............................................................. 9
1.1 Introduction 9
1.2 Recent Trends: Open Educational Resources & Open Courses 10
1.2.1 The Open Educational Resource (OER) Movement 11
1.2.2 The recent Emergence of Open Courses 11
1.3 Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Communities as an Example for Mature Learning
Ecosystems 12
1.4 Objectives of this Work 14
1.4.1 Specific Objectives; Six-Step Process 14
1.5 Research Questions 17
1.6 Contribution of the Work 18
1.7 Research Pathway 19
2 FLOSS COMMUNITIES AS AN EXAMPLE OF MATURE LEARNING ECOSYSTEMS .......... 21
2.1 Introduction 21
2.2 FLOSS Communities and their Tools 21
2.3 Roles and Responsibilities of FLOSS Community Members 24
2.4 FLOSS Communities from an Educational Perspective 27
2.4.1 Learning and Knowledge Creation in FLOSS 30
2.4.2 Re-experience and Re-use 31
2.5 Learning Resources and Content in FLOSS 34
2.6 The FLOSS Support System 39
2.7 Motivations of FLOSS Community Members 43
2.7.1 Meritocracy 47
2.8 The Role of Knowledge Broker 48
2.9 Modularity as a Way to reduce Complexity 50
2.10 Summary of Key Characteristics of FLOSS Communities 51
3 LEARNING IN FLOSS AND ASSOCIATED PEDAGOGIES........................................................... 55
3.1 Introduction 55
3.2 Self-directed Learning & fundamental Assumptions to Learning 57
3.3 Cooperative Learning in a Networked Environment 64
3.4 Problem, Case, Project and Inquiry Based Learning 67
3.4.1 Problem Based Learning 67
3.4.2 Case Based Learning 68
3.4.3 Project-Based Learning 69
3.4.4 Inquiry Based Learning 70
3.4.5 Summary 73
3.5 Reflective Practice 75
3.6 Learning Materials in FLOSS vs. Higher Education 75
3.6.1 Interaction with Learning Materials 76
3.6.2 Pre-definition of Learning Materials 76
3.6.3 Fragmentation and Self-Selection of Learning Materials 77
3.6.4 Validity of Learning Resources 77
3.6.5 Personally meaningful Activities 78
3.6.6 Solutions to ill-structured Problems 78
3.6.7 Shared external Representations 79
3.6.8 Collaborative Technologies 79
3.6.9 Continuous integration of Contributions 79
3.6.10 Summary 80
3.7 Summary 80
4 METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................................................. 89
4.1 Introduction 89
4.2 Steps of Work & Methodologies 89
4.2.1 Sources of Evidences and Stakeholder Involvement 92
4.3 Common Methodologies applied for Research in FLOSS 93
4.3.1 Quantitative Research Methods 94
4.3.2 Qualitative Research Methods 95
4.4 Reflective Practice & (Participatory) Action Research 95
4.4.1 Reflective Practice 96
4.4.2 Action Research 97
4.4.3 Participatory Action Research 99
4.5 Case Studies 101
4.5.1 Case Study Research 101
4.5.2 Case Study Indicators of this Work 103
4.6 Desktop Research 107
4.7 Focus Groups 108
4.8 Surveys 110
5 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: META-DESIGN & COURSES AS SEEDS (SER) ...................111
5.1 Introduction 111
5.2 Community Based vs. Traditional Course Design 112
5.3 Meta-design 117
5.4 Courses as Seeds 122
5.5 Lessons Learnt from initial Pilots at University of Colorado, Boulder – US 126
5.6 Summary 128
6 OPEN COURSE CASE STUDIES: AN ‘INSIDE’ OR ‘OUTSIDE’ PERSPECTIVE ....................130
6.2 Case Study St. Cloud State University Minnesota, US 131
6.2.1 Course Facts 131
6.2.2 Course Description: 131
6.2.3 Course Particularities 132
6.2.4 Comparison against the FLOSS Case 136
6.2.5 Comparison against Meta-design & SER 137
6.2.6 Summary 138
6.3 Case Study Utopia Discovery / ADM - Douglas County School District, US 138
6.3.2 Course Description 138
6.3.6 Summary 148
6.4 Case Study University of Washington Bothell, US 149
6.4.6 Summary 159
6.5 Case Study Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University, Greece 160
6.5.6 Summary 169
6.6 Summary 170
7 THE FLOSSCOM SUMMER UNIVERSITY (FSU) – AN INITIAL FLOSS TYPE
APPLICATION TRIAL ..............................................................................................................................171
7.2 Design Outline 171
7.3 FSU Execution Summary 174
7.4 Lessons Learnt for Open Course Design 176
7.4.1 FSU practical Findings 176
7.4.2 Educators’ Responses on the FSU 178
8 OPEN COURSE SCENARIOS: ‘INSIDE’, ‘OUTSIDE’ OR ‘HYBRID’ APPROACH .................182
8.2 Inside Approach 182
8.3 Outside Approach 184
8.4 Hybrid Approach 186
8.5 Comparative Overview: Inside, Outside and Hybrid Approach 187
8.6 Stakeholders in Open Education: Educators, Students, Free Learners & Practitioners193
8.7 Reflections 195
9 OPEN COURSE CASE STUDIES: A HYBRID PERSPECTIVE .................................................... 200
9.2 Case study OpenEd Syllabus, Utah State University, US 200
9.2.6 Summary 208
9.3 Case study CCK08 – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, University of Manitoba, CA
209
9.3.6 Summary 222
9.4 Summary 223
10 THE NETGENERS.NET TRIALS: A HYBRID PERSPECTIVE – EXPERIENCES & LESSONS
LEARNT ....................................................................................................................................................... 227
10.2 Course Environment: General Design Approach 228
10.3 Organizational Aspects and possible Limitations 231
10.4 The NetGeners.Net Case 232
10.4.1 Introduction 232
10.4.2 Specific Design Outline 233
10.4.3 Course Summary 235
10.4.4 Course Findings 246
10.5 The Case of Software Engineering at Aristotle University 263
10.5.1 Introduction 263
10.5.2 Specific Design Outline 264
10.5.3 Course Summary 267
10.5.4 Course Findings 272
10.5.5 Educators’ & Practitioners’ Point of View 281
10.6 Conclusion 285
11 AN ORGANIZATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR HYBRID OPEN COURSE DESIGN &
DELIVERY................................................................................................................................................... 290
11.2 Fundamentals of hybrid Open Course Design 292
11.2.1 The Role of traditional Course Design and the ‘Core’ 292
11.2.2 Commitment to Openness & Inclusivity 292
11.2.3 Accept an extended Group of Stakeholder to be involved 293
11.2.4 Prepare for less Control and constant Change 294
11.2.5 Co-operation & Collaboration Considerations 294
11.2.6 Legal Aspects 295
11.3 Layers of hybrid Open Course Design 295
11.3.1 Content Layer 296
11.3.2 Teaching / Lecturing Layer 297
11.3.3 Learning Layer 298
11.3.4 Assessment Layer 299
11.3.5 Social Layer 300
11.3.6 Technological Layer 300
11.3.7 Economic Layer 300
11.3.8 Courses as Seeds / SER Layer 301
11.4 An organizational Guide to hybrid Open Course Design 301
11.5 Summary 327
12 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................... 328
12.1 The Nature of Open Courses 328
12.1.1 Inside, Outside and Hybrid Perspectives 328
12.1.2 Potential Stakeholders in Open Education 332
12.1.3 Motivations & Gains to engage at Open Courses 333
12.1.4 Semester based Concepts vs. the learning Community Idea 336
12.1.5 A financial Perspective 336
12.2 A Framework for Open Course Design & Delivery 337
12.2.1 Meta-design & Courses as Seeds / SER 338
12.2.2 Modularity as a Mean to foster Seeding, Evolutionary Growth & Re-seeding339
12.3 Limitations of the Study 343
12.4 Suggestions for further Research & Steps forward 344
12.5 Contributions of this Work 347
12.5.1 The theoretical-methodological Level 347
12.5.2 The descriptive-analytical Level 348
12.5.3 The applied Level 349
12.6 Closing Note 350
REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................................351
PUBLISHED WORK DERIVED FROM THIS RESEARCH .................................................................372
ANNEX..........................................................................................................................................................376
Annex 1. NetGeners.Net Questionnaires 376
Annex 1.1 Qualitative Questionnaire Questions of 1st NetGeners.Net application Trial376
Annex 1.2 Quantitative Questionnaire Questions of 2nd NetGeners.Net application Trial378
Annex 2. Future Research Projects resulting from this Work 379
Annex 2.1 The openEd 2.0 Project 379
Annex 2.2 The openSE Project 381
List of Tables & Figures
List of Tables
Table 2-1: Learning processes initiated and displayed through technological tools (Hemetsberger and
Reinhard, 2006 p.207). ..................................................................................................................................... 33
Table 2-2: Information providers – a basic review (Meiszner, 2007b) ............................................................ 43
Table 2-3: Initial and continuing motivational groups within the FLOSS community (Glott et al., 2007 p.20)
.......................................................................................................................................................................... 47
Table 3-1: Technology affordances mapped to different learning theories (Conole’s, 2008 vs. the FLOSS
case) ................................................................................................................................................................. 56
Table 4-1: Steps of work & methodologies...................................................................................................... 90
Table 5-1: Traditional design vs. Meta-design (Fischer & Giaccardi, E 2006) .............................................. 117
Table 5-2: Overview of the design space for Meta-design (Fischer & Giaccardi, 2006 p.20) ....................... 122
Table 5-3: Courses as finished products vs. Courses as Seeds (de Paula et al., 2001 p.3) ............................. 125
Table 6-1: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study St. Cloud .................................................................... 137
Table 6-2: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study ADM .......................................................................... 148
Table 6-3: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study Washington Bothell ................................................... 159
Table 6-4: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study Aristotle University.................................................... 168
Table 7-1: FLOSS / Open Source like learning checklist (FLOSSCom Project, 2007) ................................. 173
Table 8-1: Application scenarios of open educational approaches ................................................................ 193
Table 9-1: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study openEd Syllabus ........................................................ 207
Table 9-2: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study CCK08 ....................................................................... 221
Table 10-1: Selected students’ responses ....................................................................................................... 272
List of Figures
Figure 1-1: Research pathway & stakeholders ................................................................................................. 20
Figure 2-1: An organizational structure of a typical FLOSS community (left model: Aberdour, 2007 p.59;
right model: Crowston & Howison, 2005) ....................................................................................................... 24
Figure 2-2: Role transition in FLOSS communities (Sowe, 2007 p.51)........................................................... 27
Figure 2-3: Example ignorance entry (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2009) ...................................................... 41
Figure 2-4: Example informed entry (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003) ............................................................ 42
Figure 2-5: Motivations for joining and staying within the FLOSS community (Glott et al., 2007 p.19) ....... 45
Figure 2-6: Knowledge brokers in mailing lists network (Sowe et al., 2006 p.1031) ...................................... 49
Figure 3-1: Learning theories (VCCS Litonline, 1998) ................................................................................... 57
Figure 3-2: Inquiry based activities (The Inquiry Page, n.d.) ........................................................................... 71
Figure 3-3: Inquiry based activities (Hooked on Thinking Inquiry Model, 2009) ........................................... 71
Figure 3-4: Basic structure of the Progressive Inquiry (PI) Model (The Progressive Inquiry Model, n.d.) ..... 72
Figure 3-5: Key Characteristics of Learning in FLOSS ................................................................................... 83
Figure 3-6: Key Characteristics of Learning Resources in FLOSS .................................................................. 86
Figure 4-1: Action Research Cycle (Wright, 2008) ......................................................................................... 97
Figure 4-2: Strategies for the selection of samples and cases (Flyvbjerg, 2006) ........................................... 103
Figure 5-1: FLOSS community places – example Ubuntu project (Meiszner et al., 2008b p.2) .................... 113
Figure 5-2: Learning resources in traditional education – Expert Production Model (Diagram: Workflow for
metadata creation for Learning materials, 2006) ............................................................................................ 115
Figure 5-3: Learning resources in FLOSS (Meiszner et al., 2008b p.4)......................................................... 116
i
Figure 5-4: Design time and use time (Fischer, 2007 p.4) .............................................................................118
Figure 5-5: The consumer / designer spectrum (Fischer & Giaccardi, 2006 p.8)...........................................119
Figure 5-6: An organizational structure of a typical FLOSS community (left model: Aberdour, 2007 p.59;
right model: Crowston & Howison, 2005) .....................................................................................................120
Figure 6-1: Students’ grading approach I .......................................................................................................135
Figure 6-2: Students’ grading approach II......................................................................................................135
Figure 6-3: Example of good quality feedback ..............................................................................................153
Figure 6-4: Example of insufficient quality feedback ....................................................................................153
Figure 6-5: Example for students as a researcher ...........................................................................................154
Figure 6-6: Example for students as an editor ................................................................................................154
Figure 6-7: Example for students acting as peers ...........................................................................................154
Figure 6-8: Revision history of students’ contribution ...................................................................................155
Figure 6-9: Assessment grid (Groom & Brockhaus, 2007) ............................................................................156
Figure 6-10: Aristotle ISE course structure (FLOSSCom Project, 2008) ......................................................161
Figure 6-11: Student’s FLOSS project activities (FLOSSCom Project, 2008) ..............................................163
Figure 6-12: Model for involving Students in FLOSS projects (FLOSSCom Project, 2008) ........................165
Figure 6-13: Example student’s contribution / interaction .............................................................................166
Figure 7-1: FSU promotions (FLOSSCom Project, 2007) .............................................................................175
Figure 7-2: FSU entrance problem (FLOSSCom Project, 2007)....................................................................176
Figure 9-1: Week X post (Participant’s Blog, 2007) ......................................................................................202
Figure 9-2: Week X Response David Wiley (David Wiley’s Blog, 2007) .....................................................202
Figure 9-3: Participant’s response to Week X dialogue (David Wiley’s Blog, 2007)....................................203
Figure 10-1: Open Course Scenario: Modular & Forge Style ........................................................................230
Figure 10-2: Chat Minutes DWTDI project ...................................................................................................237
Figure 10-3: DWTDI collaborative development space at Wikidot ...............................................................238
Figure 10-4: Copyleft vs. Copyright PB Works project space .......................................................................240
Figure 10-5: Extract from a weekly chat; session I ........................................................................................241
Figure 10-6: Extract from a weekly chat; session II .......................................................................................241
Figure 10-7: Final project wiki page ..............................................................................................................242
Figure 10-8: Instruction guide on how to participate at project group chats ..................................................243
Figure 10-9: Learning project visibility at Google Search .............................................................................244
Figure 10-10: Forum extract of feedback gathering process on course experience........................................245
Figure 10-11: Wiki extract of feedback gathering process on course experience ..........................................246
Figure 10-12: Participant quote: Perceived lack vs. de-facto lack on guidance .............................................248
Figure 10-13: Participant quote: Desired to see what others do .....................................................................249
Figure 10-14: Participant quote: Community identity ....................................................................................250
Figure 10-15: Participant quote: Freedom of choice ......................................................................................251
Figure 10-16: Participant quote: No fear of degrees ......................................................................................251
Figure 10-17: Participant quote: Finding your way around............................................................................251
Figure 10-18: Participant quote: Not about what, but how I learned .............................................................252
Figure 10-19: Participant quote: What we learned .........................................................................................253
Figure 10-20: Participant quote: Static vs. dynamic learning materials .........................................................254
Figure 10-21: Participant quote: Flexible schedule ........................................................................................255
ii
Figure 10-22: Participant quote: Learning is done not received..................................................................... 255
Figure 10-23: Participant quote: Rendering knowledge useless in Higher Education ................................... 256
Figure 10-24: Participant quote: Take the responsibility of ones own learning ............................................. 257
Figure 10-25: Participant quote: Wider scope of learning ............................................................................. 257
Figure 10-26: Participant quote: Sharing, reflection, discussion & re-use ..................................................... 258
Figure 10-27: Participant quote: Find out about everything........................................................................... 259
Figure 10-28: Participant quote: Roles are dynamic ...................................................................................... 259
Figure 10-29: Participant quote: Freedom of choice, structuredness and guidance ....................................... 260
Figure 10-30: Participant quote: Creation of content by learners................................................................... 261
Figure 10-31: Participant quote: Need to gain something out of learning...................................................... 262
Figure 10-32: Participant quote: Motivational factors of learning ................................................................. 262
Figure 10-33: Participant quote: Advantages to participate in Open Education ............................................ 263
Figure 10-34: ISE course space ...................................................................................................................... 266
Figure 10-35: ISE guide for requirement analysis projects ............................................................................ 266
Figure 10-36: ISE course, expected outcomes of students’ project works ..................................................... 269
Figure 10-37: ISE course, criteria on learning projects allowing practitioners to offer mentoring ................ 271
Figure 10-38: ISE participant quote: It didn’t bother me ............................................................................... 273
Figure 10-39: ISE participant quote: Get in contact with more experienced colleagues................................ 273
Figure 10-40: ISE participant quote: Assumed usefulness ............................................................................. 273
Figure 10-41: ISE participant quote: Problem of time ................................................................................... 274
Figure 10-42: ISE participant quote: Did not need any help .......................................................................... 274
Figure 10-43: Sourceforge tree type structure ................................................................................................ 278
Figure 10-44: Sourceforge SVN structure 1 ................................................................................................... 279
iii
List of Terminology & Abbreviations
ADM
Academy of Discovery Model of the Douglas County School
Cases
Used frequently throughout the work to describe the Floss case, the Open Course case studies or the
FSU and NetGeners.Net application trials. It is however made clear to what the term case refers in
the respective circumstance
CoP
Community of Practice
CSCL
Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
CVS
Concurrent Versioning System (see also ‘Versioning Systems’) – referred to throughout this work
mainly as ‘source code control system’
Educational settings
This refers to any type of education that is offered in a structured way and - using the traditional
classifications – includes school education (K12), Vocational Education and Training (VET),
Higher Education (HE), Further Education and Training (FET), and LifeLong Learning (LLL)
Educator
Person or team providing education, such as teachers, lecturers or also course designer
FLOSS, Free Software, Open Source Software, Open Software, FOSS, FOSSD, OSS
This refers to software that is produced in an open source approach and might stand for: Free / Libre
Open Source Software (FLOSS), Free Open Source Software (FOSS), Free Open Source Software
Development (FOSSD), or Open Source Software (OSS)
FLOSSCom
FLOSSCom is an EU funded research project aimed at understanding innovation related to
technology enhanced education and learning. The PhD research work is associated with this project
FLOSS principles
The principles relevant to education, FLOSS principles include FLOSS type learning
FLOSS type / like learning (environment)
The way people learn in FLOSS, sub-group of FLOSS principles, including the spaces and tools
frequented by those communities
FORGE
A collaboration platform allowing collaborative software development over the Internet. A forge
platform aggregates a set of applications with integrated Web interfaces, and generally hosts
multiple independent projects. See also SVN. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)
FREE LEARNER
Someone not enrolled at formal education, but still participating at an educational offer
FSU
FLOSSCom Summer University
ICT
Information and Communication Technology (see also ‘TEL’)
IMS Learning Design
Is a specification that supports the use of a wide range of pedagogies in online learning aimed at
providing an industrial standard that supports interoperability.
IRC
Internet Relay Chat
ISE
Introduction to Software Engineering course at the Aristotle University, Greece
K-12 Education
Refers to the first 12 years of school education that commonly covers the primary and secondary
education cycles
Launchpad
Launchpad is a FLOSS developing environment taking a new approach to free software project
management and hosting. It aims at helping people to work more effectively with other communities
to solve common problems, such as shared bugs.
Learner
The person who learns – within the FLOSS context this might be also referred to as ‘user’ or
‘member’ (See also: ‘User’)
iv
Lurker
In Internet culture, a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup,
chatroom, file sharing or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker
Member, (FLOSS), (Community)
Person that regularly visits a (FLOSS) community meeting point (website, mailing list, forum, etc.)
and that has subscribed to an account (See also: ‘User’)
ONA
Organizational Network Analysis (see also SNA)
OER
Open Educational Resources
OPLE
Open Participatory Learning Ecosystem
Participant
Equivalent to ‘learner’, ‘student’ or ‘user’. Used for example to refer to those ones that participated
at the FLOSSCom Summer University or the NetGener.Net trials
Requirement Specification Document
This phrase is frequently used within the business sector and comes along with a counter term of
‘design specifications’. The requirement specifications list the group of requirements which the
product must meet, while the design specifications list the group of requirements which must be met
by the company designing/making the product, so that it will in fact meet the customer's product
requirements specification. For example, company A issues a (very) detailed spec about what they
want to one or more potential suppliers (the requirement specifications). Potential supplier(s) B
provide a (very) detailed spec about what they can - or cannot – supply (design specification). See
also: http://www.proz.com/kudoz/683109#1725974
SER
Refers to the Courses as Seeds process model that consist of the three phases: Seeding, Evolutionary
growth and Re-seeding
SNA
Social Network Analysis (see also ONA)
SOURCEFORGE
SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software
developers to control and manage open source software development. See also:
http://sourceforge.net
SVN
In software development, Subversion (SVN) is a version-control system. Developers use Subversion
to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and
documentation. See also Forge. See also: http://subversion.tigris.org
TEL
Technology Enhance Learning
Ubuntu
A Linux distribution predominantly targeted at personal computers. Based on Debian GNU/Linux.
User, (Community) Member, Learner, Participant, Student
This in general refers to the individual that uses a service or product, the individual(s) most
benefiting from a provided service. For the purpose of this work user and member are also seen to be
the learner.
Versioning Systems
Versioning systems, like the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) help to track changes that occur
within the code (see also SVN). It might be mentioned that also wikis provide a system to track
changes. A list of versioning systems can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software
v
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank my partner in life and wife Ana for supporting me
throughout the years, from the very beginnings in early 2003 until today. Within this I also
wish her good luck on her very own PhD endeavour at the Open University and hope to
provide her with as much support as I received.
My personal PhD endeavour started back in 2003 at the University of Aveiro, Portugal,
and I would like to thank my former supervisors Prof. Jose Tavares and Prof. Fernando
Ramos of accepting me as their PhD student and for the training and opportunities
provided to me during this time.
I’d also like to thank Prof. Augusto Medina, at the Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação
(SPI), Portugal, who took me in as a project manager and researcher in 2005, who brought
me in contact with the Open University (UK) and who granted me the right and flexibility
to carry out my PhD work within a joint enterprise / academic partnership in between SPI
and the Open University (UK).
Back in 2006 it was James Aczel and Pascal Hardy at the Institute of Educational
Technology (IET) who encouraged me to continue my research with the Open University
(UK) and to join the IET – and albeit this meant investing another 3+ years I haven’t
regretted it for a moment! Thank you for this encouragement and all of your initial
support!
With regards to the actual body of this work I’d like to express my gratitude to the
European Commission for selecting the FLOSSCom project for funding, which supported
my research during the time October 2006 until September 2008. It was within the scope of
this project that I had the pleasure to work together with a highly skilled and motivated
team and to learn how to become a researcher through practice. This collaboration brought
up a number of opportunities that would have been difficult to realize otherwise. The
FLOSSCom project provided me with the opportunity to work closely together with one of
1
my supervisors, Prof. Martin Weller, in a more collaborative nature. The project also
allowed me to organize and participate at a number of workshops, conferences or to
conduct focus group works. This project further brought me in close contact with the team
at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, most notably Prof. Ioannis Stamelos, and
with the Collaborative Creativity Group at UNU-MERIT, namely Rüdiger Glott and
Rishab Ghosh – and I’d like to thank them for all of the fruitful discussions and joint
events or writings carried out during this time. I’d also like to express my gratitude to Eleni
Constantinou and Aikaterini Moustaka from the team at Aristotle University for their support
on their ISE course, as well as Eleni Maria Stea, Judith Jacovkis, Georgios Vorgianitis, Juan
Luis Prieto Martinez, Nikolaos-Ioannis Galanis, Pavlos Paraskevopoulos and Xabier Araujo
Elena for their active participations and contributions during the first NetGeners.Net
application trial.
I would, again, like to thank Rüdiger Glott for his special support and for bringing me to
UNU-MERIT so that I could continue my research path there.
Finally I would like to thank my supervisors, Prof. Martin J. Weller, Patrick McAndrew
and Doug J. Clow, as well as the wider CREET and IET team for the support and guidance
provided to me.
2
Overview
This work investigates the nature of Open Courses and the different types of Open Course
scenarios that exist through means of desktop and case study research by looking at
established practices of courses within formal education that operate to a certain degree ‘in
the open’ and by means of desktop research targeted at identifying related ‘Open’
approaches, such as the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Learning Ecosystem.
The work further identifies requirements for Open Course design and delivery and
develops and tests a supportive organizational framework that builds on the Meta-design
framework and Courses as Seeds / SER process model. Throughout the second part of the
work participatory action research and the use of focus groups are applied to stimulate
reaction to ideas, to ask participants for solutions and to allow ideas to be built
cumulatively.
The first chapter provides an introduction to the background of the study, an overview
about the area as well as the research questions and the overall research pathway. It puts
forward four research questions to be looked at throughout the following work, namely:
Research Question 1: What are the key characteristics and organizational frameworks of
informal and well-established online learning ecosystems, such as the FLOSS case?
a) Which are the key characteristics of FLOSS communities as a learning environment
and learning ecosystem?
b) Who are the stakeholders?
c) What are the respective roles, motivations and gains of the different stakeholders
involved?
d) What are the lessons learnt from the FLOSS case that could support the design,
implementation and delivery of Open Courses?
3
Research Questions 2: What is the nature of Open Courses and what are the different types
of Open Course scenarios?
a) What are the characteristics of Open Courses and what are the possible application
scenarios?
b) Who are the potential stakeholders within Open Course scenarios?
c) What are the respective roles, motivations and gains of the different stakeholders
involved?
d) What are the elements of traditional formal education that might be preserved?
Research Question 3: Are there any shortcomings of established practices of courses
within formal education and Meta-design in comparison to the FLOSS case?
a) What are key characteristics deemed to be desirable of well-established online
learning ecosystems such as the FLOSS case that are absent within established
practices of courses within formal education that operate to a certain degree ‘in the
open’?
Research Question 4: How could the concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’ be translated to
Open Course design? Which type of overall organizational framework would be required
to allow for this?
a) How to allow for continuity and evolutionary growth of learning resources, spaces
and tools, communities involved (internal and / or external ones) over time and to
establish a transactive group memory?
b) How to keep learning resources (initial ones as well as those leveraged into the
course by the students), artifacts created by students and underlying discourse
within a context and structure that would allow future cohorts of students to re-
experience, build on them and to improve what others did?
c) How to easily organize, formalize and generalize the created knowledge, including
structures and processes within the ‘re-seeding’ phase?
4
Chapter two, and partly also chapter three focus on the ‘Research Question 1’ and aim to
identify key characteristics of Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities as
an informal online learning ecosystem, its organizational structures, the type of learning
resources featured, associated learning technologies, the learning opportunities and
activities provided, the communities and stakeholders participating in it, or individual
motivations to participate and the different roles assumed by participants. The chapter
identifies some of the underlying key characteristics of FLOSS as a learning ecosystem
such as ‘openness’ or ‘inclusivity’, volunteering and volatility, the use of large-scale
networks, content-richness and specialisation, or modularity.
Chapter three focuses on learning in FLOSS and associated pedagogies, including a brief
comparison to their counterparts in traditional higher education. The chapter looks at the
characteristics on learning in FLOSS communities and contrasts it to the way learning
usually takes place in higher education.
The fourth chapter details the research methodology applied within this work as well as
those methodologies frequently applied at research within the FLOSS ecosystem.
Chapter five provides a framework for the further course of this work, the Meta-design
conceptual framework and its underlying Courses as Seeds / SER process model. Both, the
Meta-design conceptual framework and its underlying Courses as Seeds / SER process
model, are aimed to support the design and the growing of courses and are based on the
notion of the collaborative power of the internet (technical component) and a general
increasing digital literacy of learners and their potential to act as co-designer in a
collaborate manner together with their peers by engaging in personal meaningful tasks
(social component).
Chapter six focuses on ‘Research Question 2’ aimed to explore the nature of Open
Courses. This chapter, like chapter nine, identifies some of the characteristics of Open
Courses, possible application scenarios, potential stakeholders within such Open Course
5
scenarios, the respective roles, or motivations and gains of the different stakeholders
involved. Together with chapter nine and the FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU)
application trial presented in chapter seven this sixth chapter further provides information
on the elements of traditional formal education that might be preserved.
Chapter seven presents the findings of the FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU), an
initial application trial aimed at applying some of the FLOSS characteristics identified
throughout chapter two and three within an educational context. Meanwhile the cases
presented throughout chapter six mostly have shown how characteristics of FLOSS
communities were also successfully applied within formal educational settings, the FSU
has shown the importance that some of the principles from traditional formal education
might be preserved.
Chapter eight follows up on ‘Research Question 2’ and the nature of Open Courses
focusing on possible application scenarios and potential stakeholders to be considered for
Open Courses. This chapter draws on the theoretical findings of chapter two, three and five
and the cases reviewed throughout chapter six, and to a lesser extent also on chapter seven
by drawing on the lessons learnt from the FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU). The
chapter shows two distinct approaches that might be adopted for Open Course design: the
inside one and the outside one. It also suggests that the potentially highest gain perhaps
would be achieved with a hybrid approach, though no evidence could be provided at this
point, but will be the focus of chapter nine.
The cases reviewed at chapter nine, openEd Syllabus and CCK08, provide an overview of
the nature of hybrid Open Courses (Research Question 2), their course design and delivery
aspects and the type of stakeholders involved, their respective roles, or motivations and
gains. As shown throughout this chapter the Meta-design concept appeared to be indeed a
reasonable framework, that might be used to explain Open Course design and delivery, in
particular for the case of CCK08. The case of CCK08 further shows how networks might
6
be created by bringing together formally enrolled students and free learners outside of
formal education and how those different groups might interact in a semi-structured and
partly self-organized way, which has been one of the shortcomings (Research Question 3)
of the cases reviewed in chapter six and as detailed in chapter eight. Chapter nine also
provides some insights on how the Courses as Seeds / SER concept (Research Question 4)
might be applied in practice. Chapter nine leaves however some unanswered points that
will be looked at during the application trials presented in chapter ten.
Chapter ten presents the results of two application trials focusing on two distinct questions,
the Research Question 4 on how the concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’ could be
translated to Open Course design, as well as motivational aspects. With this it draws on
FLOSS concepts, such as modularity, the use of forges or a task focus. Chapter ten further
looks at motivational aspects of the various stakeholders’ involved on why to actively
engage within an Open Course setting, in particular for formally enrolled students and free
learners outside of formal education.
Based on the findings of chapters two, three and five to ten of this work, the eleventh
chapter provides a hybrid organizational framework for Open Course Design, including
fundamentals, the different layers of such a framework and a brief guide. This chapter
focuses on the ‘hybrid’ perspective to Open Course design and delivery as introduced at
chapter eight, as further detailed at chapter nine and as has been subject to experimental
application trials at chapter ten. As detailed at section 8.4, the hybrid approach has been
introduced as residing in the middle of the outside and the inside approach and combining
both ends. Consequently the fundamentals, the different layers of such a framework, as
well as the brief guide that are all presented at chapter eleven are of equal importance for
educators wanting to implement an inside or outside approach.
7
8
1 Research Rationale and Research Questions
1.1 Introduction
Terms such as ‘Web 2.0’ (O'Reilly, 2005), ‘Open Educational Resources’, ‘the
participatory web’, ‘prosumers’, ‘peer production’, or ‘social learning’ are today often used
when talking about new forms of learning and educational provision that have been
enabled through information and communication technologies. And indeed it appears as if
Web 2.0 tools and techniques have developed a dynamic of their own, creating many good
examples of how to support individual and collective learning, provide learners with a
richer learning experience, foster collaborative learning and knowledge production, or
allow for the establishment of continuous and evolutionary growing educational
communities (Bacon & Dillon, 2006; Schmidt, 2007; Schmidt & Surman, 2007; Staring,
2005). The Web 2.0 approach provides the potential of combining all kinds of channels
through which knowledge can be changed and shared, from pure text to interactive
multimedia applications, allowing participants’ to develop critical thinking and analytical
skills on how to engage within those environments and how to take advantage of the web
for their personal learning needs (Brown & Adler, 2008; Weller & Meiszner, 2008).
But despite all of those potentials it has also been argued that higher education still has
adapted very little in response to them with graduate education often not employing the
power of new media in visionary or effective ways (Derry & Fischer, 2007). It has also
been argued that higher education is still largely ‘analogue’, ‘closed’, ‘tethered’, ‘isolated’,
‘generic’ and ‘made for consumption’ (Wiley, 2006), though a vast and constant move
towards online courses fosters a change from ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ and from ‘tethered’ to
‘mobile’ (Wiley, 2006).
“Students are inside a classroom (tethered to a place), using textbooks and handouts (printed
materials), they must pay tuition and register to attend (the experience is closed), talking during
class or working with others outside of class is generally discouraged (each student is isolated
though surrounded by peers), each student receives exactly the same instruction as each of her
9
classmates (the information presented is generic), and students are students and do not participate in
the teaching process (they are consumers).” (Wiley, 2006 p.1)
As this work will show however formal educational offers have adapted beyond being
‘digital’ or ‘mobile’, and as will also been shown such adaptations do not depend only on
regional, local or institutional initiatives and the availability of funding provided through
those initiatives, but can also emerge at a course level as a result of educators who start to
experiment with the different sets of free and open tools and learning resources that today
are commonly available to them.
1.2 Recent Trends: Open Educational Resources & Open Courses
Initiatives such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare1 marked the start of the Open Educational
Resource movement, a movement largely strategically driven at institutional levels. With
this movement good quality tools and educational materials were made freely available to
educators and learners throughout the globe. During the past years many institutions
followed this move indicating that there is a growing trend within traditional education to
‘open up’.
More recently one can observe a further type of openness within the educational domain,
an openness where formally enrolled students engage with their peers using Web 2.0 and
social media, resulting in an ever blurring border between the formal and the informal and
providing the potential of taking further advantage of the opportunities the participatory
Web 2.0 provides. Those attempts, unlike the OER case, seem to be more driven by
educators at a course level, but are not strategically addressed at the institutional level.
1
http://ocw.mit.edu
10
1.2.1 The Open Educational Resource (OER) Movement
The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement has emerged as what might be seen as
an alternative to traditional educational environments, aiming at opening the door to the
next generation of higher education provision.
The current OER movement is tackling maybe one of the most crucial aspects for
education: the free and open access to educational resources being released under a
commons license and thus the possibility to re-use those resources and to adapt them
(Schmidt & Surman, 2007).
However, the OER movement appears to largely follow traditional educational paradigms
using experts’ production and development models, and seeing the learner as a passive
consumer, or at least leaving them with this role. This can be seen for example by the
traditional expert production model it applies that results in the fact that content and
learning activities / processes (discourse) remain disconnected and therefore not personal
(Meiszner, Glott & Sowe, 2008b).
Drawing on Wiley’s (2006) six characteristics, the OER movement addresses one further
point of those that Wiley considers to be relevant towards a changing educational
landscape: it is not only ‘digital’ and ‘mobile’, but also ‘Open’. The OER movement does
however not address the remaining 3 characteristics laid out by Wiley, namely ‘connected’,
‘personal’ and ‘driven by participation’.
1.2.2 The recent Emergence of Open Courses
Another development with regards to ‘openness’ that can be observed within the
educational domain is the emergence of ‘Open Courses’ that, unlike the OER case, seem to
be mainly driven at an individual educators’ level, but not be strategically addressed at the
institutional level.
11
Despite the lack of thorough research in this domain and the early stage of what might
become an ‘Open Course Movement’, those Open Courses seem to experiment with a
range of different educational approaches, tend to promote different levels of openness,
incorporate different sets of free and open tools and learning resources, and – to a varying
degree – mix the formal with the informal, bringing together the different stakeholders to
be found at the Web.
What all of those Open Course attempts seem to have in common is a willingness to
experiment in a more unconventional way and with less traditional educational restrictions
with the opportunities the participatory Web 2.0 provides. These Open Courses seem to
apply, unintentionally or on purpose, a number of principles that are inherent to Web 2.0
therefore addressing the remaining three points of Wiley’s (2006) 6 characteristics:
‘connected’, ‘personal’ and ‘driven by participation’.
With these Open Courses being still at an initial and early stage this work aims to take a
closer look at a number of Open Course cases and to compare them against similar and
well established mature but informal learning ecosystems that can be found on the Web to
identify similarities, variances, shortcomings or strength, to understand how they work, or
which of the principles of the informal counterparts might be taken forward to open
educational settings, and what the application scenarios are.
1.3 Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Communities as an Example
for Mature Learning Ecosystems
Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities appear to be relative mature
learning ecosystems that foster in example collaborative content creation, re-use and peer
review and community based support systems. The FLOSS case therefore potentially
provides us with insights about how to make use of ICT and the Web 2.0, on the way
members create the content, the motivation why they do this, the way they engage with
12
each other on content development and support, and the different roles they assume.
Research in FLOSS has been carried out from a number of different perspectives, such as
the community of practice / community of learner perspective (Wenger, 1998; Pór, 2004;
Stürmer, 2005), from the software development perspective, (Scacchi, 2001, 2002, 2005,
2006a, 2006b), from the knowledge building perspective (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt,
2004, 2006; Hemetsberger 2006), a technological community perspective (Pór, 2004;
Meiszner, 2007), or from a conceptual and educational perspective (de Paula et al., 2001;
Fischer & Sugimoto, 2006; Fischer, 2007; Scharff, 2002; Staring, 2005; Bacon & Dillon,
2006).
The FLOSS model shows how users can become active ‘resource’ creators, how learning
processes can be made visible and can benefit other learners, how to successfully establish
and maintain user support systems, and ultimately how all of this can be re-used and freely
maintained (Glott et al., 2007; Weller & Meiszner 2008). From a pedagogical perspective
learning in FLOSS might be characterized by self-studying, project-based learning,
problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, collaborative learning, reflective practice
or also by social learning (Glott et al., 2007; Weller & Meiszner 2008).
It is not assumed however that these pedagogies were deliberately implemented, but rather
that due to the structure, approach and governance of FLOSS communities certain
pedagogies have emerged over time (Glott et al., 2007; Weller & Meiszner, 2008). FLOSS
projects, their communities and the way learning takes place in these ecosystems therefore
appears not as a contradiction to such pedagogies; but in many respects might be seen as a
best practice case of the implementation of the principles and goals of such pedagogies
(Glott et al., 2007; Weller & Meiszner 2008).
For these reasons it is assumed that the FLOSS case might provides support the
development of a better understanding on and the suitable of organizational frameworks
for the design and delivery of Open Courses.
13
1.4 Objectives of this Work
This work is targeted at educators, researcher, curriculum developer, practitioner from the
educational field, as well as it is aimed to support policy maker. The work has a potentially
wide impact as it can apply across disciplines, and at all levels of education, as evidenced
by the case studies and the application trials presented throughout the work. Free/Open
Education is an emerging field, which is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on educational
sciences, on computer science and technology, and on ‘open’ principles in particular.
The overall objectives of this work are to:
(1) Develop an initial understanding of the nature of Open Courses and to identify the
different types of potential Open Course scenarios. This will be achieved through the
means of case study research and by looking at established practices of courses within
formal education that operate to a certain degree ‘in the open’. Related ‘Open’ approaches
will be identified through desktop research.
(2) Identify requirements for, and to provide, organizational frameworks that would
support such Open Course design and delivery. To achieve this second objective the work
will make use of participatory action research and the use of focus groups to stimulate
reaction to ideas, to ask participants for solutions and to allow ideas to be built
cumulatively.
1.4.1 Specific Objectives; Six-Step Process
The process of this research might be broadly structured into six steps with the following
specific objectives:
Step 1: To examine key characteristics and to gain an understanding of the organizational
framework of ‘Open’ approaches of informal and well-established online learning
ecosystems, more precisely the Free / Libre Open Source Software communities (FLOSS).
14
This step includes the identification of characteristics deemed to be desirable within
educational settings.
Step 2: To identify existing educational organizational frameworks which draw on key
characteristics inherent in well-established online learning ecosystems and therefore
potentially support Open Course design. The Meta-design conceptual framework (Fischer,
2007) and its underlying Courses as Seeds process model (de Paula et al., 2001) have been
identified within this step and will serve as a ‘grounding’ for the further parts of this work.
Step 3: To identify and review, by the means of six case studies, established practices of
courses within formal education that operate to a certain degree ‘in the open’. This step has
the objective to identify analogies to and deviations from the FLOSS case and Meta-design
and to develop an initial understanding on the nature of Open Course and to derive
application scenarios. As will be shown, there appear to be three general Open Course
scenarios: the inside, the outside, and the hybrid approach.
Step 4: To identify key characteristics from the FLOSS case and / or Meta-design that (1)
are also inherent within the reviewed cases and that apparently work out well, as well as
(2) those ones deemed to be desirable but absent within current Open Course design
practices, and (3) principles of traditional course design and delivery that might be
retained. The objectives of this fourth step will be achieved through a comparative analysis
between the FLOSS case, Meta-design and the six case studies presented at step three. The
results obtained during step four will then be compared against the practical findings
obtained throughout step five.
Step 5: To develop a hybrid Open Course organizational framework upon the results of the
earlier four steps, upon the lessons learnt from one early and rather unstructured
application trial and upon the feedback gathered through focus groups targeted at educators
and practitioners that are experienced in the field of open education or open source. This
initial hybrid Open Course organizational framework will then be subject to two
15
application trials to evaluate the initial assumptions presented at step four against the
practical experiences of participating learners and educators. Based on the results of the
two application trials the initially developed hybrid Open Course organizational framework
will then be critically reviewed. This critical review will be supported through the
involvement of experienced educators and practitioners in this field. The hybrid
organizational framework also aims to address, implement and test key characteristics from
the FLOSS case that were deemed to be desirable, but for which the Meta-design and
Courses as Seeds concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’ did not provide any clear guidance
on how to achieve these in practice; namely how to allow within Open Course settings for:
• Continuity and evolutionary growth of learning resources, spaces and tools,
communities involved (internal and / or external ones) over time and how to
establish a transactive group memory.
• Keeping learning resources (initial ones as well as those leveraged into the course
by the students), artifacts created by students and underlying discourse within a
context and structure that would allow future cohorts of students to re-experience,
build on them and to improve what others did.
• Easily organizing, formalizing and generalizing the created knowledge, including
structures and processes within the ‘re-seeding’ phase.
Step 6: At this final step a revised hybrid organizational framework for Open Course
design will be provided; including a guide for Open Course design and detailing aspects
that educators might need to ‘Keep’, ‘Change’, ‘Integrate’, or to ‘Consider’ within Open
Course settings.
16
1.5 Research Questions
The following research questions were derived from the overall objective of this work:
Question 1: What are the key characteristics and organizational frameworks of informal
and well-established online learning ecosystems, such as the FLOSS case?
a. Which are the key characteristics of FLOSS communities as a learning environment
and as a learning ecosystem?
b. Who are the stakeholders?
c. What are the respective roles, motivations and gains of the different stakeholders
involved?
d. What are the lessons learnt from the FLOSS case that could support the design,
implementation and delivery of Open Courses?
Questions 2: What is the nature of Open Courses and what are the different types of Open
Course scenarios?
a. What are the characteristics of Open Courses and what are the possible application
scenarios?
b. Who are the potential stakeholders within Open Course scenarios?
c. What are the respective roles, motivations and gains of the different stakeholders
involved?
d. What are the elements of traditional formal education that might be preserved?
Question 3: Are there any shortcomings of established practices of courses within formal
education and Meta-design in comparison to the FLOSS case?
a. What are key characteristics deemed to be desirable of well-established online
learning ecosystems such as the FLOSS case that are absent within established
practices of courses within formal education that operate to a certain degree ‘in the
open’?
17
Question 4: How could the concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’ be translated to Open
Course design? Which type of overall organizational framework would be required to
allow for this?
a. How to allow for continuity and evolutionary growth of learning resources, spaces
and tools, communities involved (internal and / or external ones) over time and to
establish a transactive group memory?
b. How to keep learning resources (initial ones as well as those leveraged into the
experience, build on them and to improve what others did?
c. How to easily organize, formalize and generalize the created knowledge, including
structures and processes within the ‘re-seeding’ phase?
1.6 Contribution of the Work
The results of this work will provide contributions at three levels: the theoretical-
methodological, the descriptive-analytical and the applied level.
A. At the theoretical-methodological level; by providing application scenarios and
guidance for Open Course design to allow for a better understanding about the suitability
of Meta-design and its underlying Courses as Seeds process model as a tool for the design,
implementation and delivery of Open Courses.
B. At the descriptive-analytical level; by analyzing and describing how FLOSS
communities work as learning environments and ecosystems and what the underlying
principles, structures and processes are. This would be complemented by a review of
similar cases within educational settings to illustrate common elements and approaches and
to compare how they worked out within such open educational settings.
18
C. At the applied level; by furthering the understanding on what are the key aspects to be
considered for Open Course design and delivery, including the lessons learnt of the
application trials carried out as part of this work.
1.7 Research Pathway
As shown in Figure 1-1 there have been several action paths that were running in parallel
throughout this work, notably the compilation of the Open Course case studies and the
three application trials. A number of physical and virtual events have been organized
throughout this work to assure a close involvement of the different stakeholders that can be
found in Open Course settings and to allow for their critical constructive feedback, and to
draw on these. The main events that have been carried out were:
• One workshop at the Aristotle University, September 2007 – Greece (target group:
educators)
• One workshop at the OpenLearn conference, October 2007 – United Kingdom
(target group: educators & practitioners active in OER)
• A virtual discussion, March to September 2008 (target group: participating students
of the first NetGeners.Net application trial)
• One round table discussions, a panel discussion & presentations at the FKFT
conference, July 2008 – Spain (target group: participating students of the first
NetGeners.Net application trial; educators & practitioners active in FLOSS, OER,
Open Access & related)
• One round table discussion in Greece, September 2008 (target group: participating
students of the first NetGeners.Net application trial)
• A virtual discussion with EDUCOO (Open Office Education project), January 2009
(target group: educators & practitioners active in FLOSS)
19
• Participation at the Mozilla Educamp, February 2009 – Belgium (target group:
educators & practitioners active in FLOSS)
• One workshop at the OSS09 conference, June 2009 – Sweden (target group:
educators & practitioners active in FLOSS)
• One session carried out by the Aristotle Course team of their ‘ISE – Introduction to
Software Engineering’ course at which students presented their works and
experiences and at which a round table discussion took place, June 2009 – Greece
(target group: students)
Figure 1-1: Research pathway & stakeholders
20
2 FLOSS Communities as an Example of Mature Learning Ecosystems
2.1 Introduction
Chapter two, and partly also chapter three, will focus on ‘Research Question 1’ and is
aimed to identify key characteristics of Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)
communities as an informal online learning ecosystem. The chapter will look at key
characteristics of FLOSS communities as a learning environment and learning ecosystem,
the type of stakeholders inherent to it and their different roles assumed, the motivations
and gains of those stakeholders groups, and the lessons learnt from the FLOSS case that
could support the design, implementation and delivery of Open Courses. This chapter will
provide an insight into the way FLOSS communities function in terms of communication,
collaboration, content production, user support and the underlying technological
framework used.
2.2 FLOSS Communities and their Tools
FLOSS projects are almost exclusively administered online and one of the most important
prerequisites for their coordination and cooperation is provided by the functionality of
various communication and groupware tools that provide a meeting place for online
interaction without regard to time or physical location (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006).
This section is aimed at providing some information on the type of tools that are available
and used within the FLOSS communities. FLOSS communities seem to rely on two
important organizational aspects: modular design and the use of Internet, whereas the
Internet (such as email, newsgroups, forums, etc.) reduces transaction and communication
costs among developers and therefore provides a fundamental infrastructure for distributed
development across space and over time (Giuri et al., 2004).
The underlying technological infrastructure that can be found in FLOSS communities is
both simple and mature. Code is usually stored in ‘source code control systems’ (for
21
example in SVN / CVS), documents and manuals in knowledge bases or wikis, and
additional information are published through the project’s website, newsletters, or blogs
(Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004). Communication occurs mainly asynchronously
through mailing lists or forums and is therefore preserved and available for the entire
community. The availability and integral application of this diverse range of tools is one of
the most important preconditions for collaboration and enables mass participation in
collective activities as they can be found at FLOSS communities (Hemetsberger &
Reinhardt, 2006). FLOSS projects might be either hosted on their own platforms and
systems, or they are hosted at freely available services such as Sourceforge2, or a mixture
of both. Systems like Sourceforge provide FLOSS projects with a number of tools from the
day of start – even without having an own platform or system. Sourceforge, for example,
provides projects with a project website, a subversion system / source code control system
(SVN / CVS), mailing lists, forums, repositories, or a documentation space. In a review of
FLOSS projects that are listed at the www.opensourcecms.com website Meiszner (2007)
found that 80 out of 113 reviewed FLOSS projects possessed their own platform or system
(71%), meanwhile the remaining 33 (29%) were hosted at a service like sourceforge.net.
Though all of those 113 reviewed projects developed themselves software that provides a
broad range of communication and information tools, the tools that were actually used
within these communities appeared to be rather narrow. Almost 94% (n=75) of all
communities had a forum and documentation / knowledgebase available and in 51%
(n=41) of the cases a wiki was used for documentation / knowledge base purposes. Further,
more than half of the projects provided some type of news services with 85% of the
communities offering a project related news section, and another 50% offering additional
news such as ‘latest forum posts’, ‘latest blog entries’, or ‘RSS news feeds’. Tags were
used in only 5 (6%) and video / podcasts in only 4 (5%) communities.
2
http://sourceforge.net
22
The KDE community, a case studied by Hemetsberger and Reinhardt (2004), provides an
overview of how a technological community infrastructure might be realised. In order to be
able to digest the huge amount of knowledge and information and to build up a group
memory, the KDE community implemented knowledge technologies and task-related
features to decrease complexity. The modular structure of tasks, keeping track of code in a
CVS repository, and shifting the locus of knowledge from individuals to a transactive
group memory where members know where to find information facilitates the digestion
and allows to find relevant information (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004). To foster
comprehension developers also add comments to their source code (reflection-on-action)
therefore allowing for a re-thinking and re-experiencing process among the other
community members (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004). But perhaps the most important
building block of the KDE community’s knowledge system consists of 81 mailing lists for
discourse and open reflection and as an archive for transactive memory of the learning
community (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004).
Mailing lists and forums are important tools for asynchronous communication. These
asynchronous communication technologies are not only valuable for knowledge creation
purposes, but also in order to make community members think before they act and respond
(Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006). While mailing lists are targeting the developer
community; forums seem to target the community at large (for example the user). Though
still not answered in detail there are indications for different preferences for the different
community groups. This is demonstrated by two case studies carried out in this domain,
one on the Freenet community (Krogh et al., 2003) and another in the Apache community
(von Hippel, 2002). The first study focuses on the core team and suggests that mailing lists
are the main way of communication within the community; meanwhile the latter one
examines the support environment and providing the impression that the main method of
communication is based in forum posts.
23
2.3 Roles and Responsibilities of FLOSS Community Members
There are different types of memberships and roles to be found in FLOSS communities. At
the very heart of each community are the project initiators and the core development team.
A review of the top 100 FLOSS communities at Sourceforge (Krishnamurthy, 2002)
concludes that the core development team consists of a very small number of people,
meanwhile the bigger part of the core team, the enhanced team, is involved in other tasks
like for example providing feature suggestions, trying products out as lead users,
answering questions etc. (Ghosh & Glott, 2005; Krishnamurthy, 2002). Crowston and
Howison (2005) suggest a hierarchical or onion-like structure for FLOSS communities
(Figure 2-1 - left), consisting of the following layers: At the centre of the community are
the core developers, who contribute most of the code and oversee the design and evolution
of the project. In the next ring out are the co-developers who submit patches (for example
bug fixes), which are reviewed and checked in by core developers. Further out are the
active users who do not contribute code but provide use-cases and bug-reports as well as
testing new releases. Finally, and even further out still and with a virtually unknowable
boundary, are the passive users of the software who do not speak on the project’s lists or
forums.
a.) Onion Model b.) Onion-Pyramid Model

Figure 2-1: An organizational structure of a typical FLOSS community (left model: Aberdour, 2007
p.59; right model: Crowston & Howison, 2005)
The onion model is the most referenced model of a sustainable FLOSS community. The
term ‘Onion’, according to Aberdour (2007) refers to the successive layers of member
24
types and might be described as follows. In FLOSS individuals create a sustainable
community, with the hierarchical move upwards being supported through promotions
based upon an individual’s meritocracy. An individual might move towards the core by
starting as a bug reporter and then over time becomes a contributing developer. A small
number of those contributing developers will then eventually join the core development
team. Each type of member has certain responsibilities in the system’s evolution, which all
relate to the system’s overall quality (Aberdour, 2007). In their study of role migration and
advancement processes in the Mozilla, Apache, and NetBeans projects, Jensen and Scacchi
(2007) criticized the onion model view of FLOSS communities. They argued that in its
present form the onion model fails to draw out the presence of multiple tracks of project
career advancement through different role-sets. They suggested an onion-pyramid view of
the organizational structure of FLOSS communities as shown in Figure 2-1 – right side.
The enhanced team is engaged in other multiple forms of leadership like thought leaders,
networkers, people who document the practice, pioneers, etc. (Wenger, 2000). But, the
largest part of the community, and valid for both of the models presented in Figure 2-1, is
the user group that rather ‘consumes’ than to ‘contribute’. This group has been classified
by Giuri et al. (2004) as the ‘external contributor’; in opposite to the remaining parts that
are seen to be the ‘internal member’.
The Apache case study provides an overview about the possible distribution of high active
core member, less active member, and the wider active community. In the case of Apache
15 core members contribute 83% of the code, another 250 member can be considered to be
‘regular member’ that engage in a number of different functions, with another 3000
member belonging to the wider Apache community that mainly reports bugs (Giuri et al.,
2004). Besides the contribution of code or content (programs, artifacts, execution scripts,
code reviews, comments, etc.) members also actively engage in online discussion forums
or threaded email messages as a regular way to both observe and contribute to discussions
25
of topics of interest to community participants (Scacchi, 2001). It could further be
observed that community members chose on occasion to author and publish technical
reports or scholarly research papers about their software development efforts, which are
publicly available for subsequent examination and review. Each of these highlighted items
point to the public availability of data that can be collected, analyzed, and represented
(Scacchi, 2001).
FLOSS communities are very flexible communities where roles are not stagnant. Rather
than having the stringent structures present in traditional software development
organizations, most advancement or promotion in FLOSS communities is through
meritocracy. A handful of people have earned the right to make decisions based on merit or
because of their past contributions. In some projects (for example Debian, FreeBSD,
Apache) positions are filled through a democratic voting process. The success of a project
is best measured by the success of its community. Individuals create a sustainable
community by increasing their involvement through a process of role meritocracy (Sowe,
2007; Jensen & Scacchi, 2007), which varies from one project to another. Through
sustained contribution, users are recognized and gradually move from one role to another.
Passive users may become active users and might, in due course, become developers or co-
developers. A few contributing co-developers will eventually join the small team of core
developers. These role transitions are depicted in Figure 2-2.
26
Figure 2-2: Role transition in FLOSS communities (Sowe, 2007 p.51)
The dotted boxes in Figure 2-2 show some of the project activities at which members in
each role might be involved (Sowe, 2007). Active project participants are mostly involved
in mundane project activities with the essential project activities, such as reviewing,
approving, and committing code to the project's source tree, being mostly done by the
trusted core and co-developers. Developers who have earned sufficient credits with the
core team may also contribute to essential project activities. In projects like Debian, where
some developers are maintainers of packages, they might also take on the complete
responsibility of their packages by coordinating and managing activities associated with
the package (Sowe, 2007).
2.4 FLOSS Communities from an Educational Perspective
In a recent study Bacon and Dillon (2006) mapped existing educational FLOSS studies and
provided a historical overview and the key contemporary debates in the area. They
suggested that FLOSS, from a production as well as from a community perspective, might
serve as an example for future educational structures and processes like:
1. New approaches to teaching and learning.
27
2. Development of the teaching workforce - the degree to which ongoing collaborative
knowledge sharing is likely to be important in the future.
3. Specifically enabling personalised learning and enhanced learner voice.
Personalisation of education and the degree to which learners are able to shape
educational experiences to meet their own needs.
4. Enabling knowledge sharing and collaboration between teachers and teachers,
learners and educators; including peer-production that is driven by collaborative,
social modes of interaction and knowledge exchange.
5. Overcoming structural divides between developers of educational software and its
users.
6. Design of digital resources for learning - the degree to which learners, teachers and
educators are able to work alongside programmers to create resources tailored more
specifically to their educational needs.
7. New organisational models and structures for education.
Bacon and Dillon (2006) suggest that there are two general factors from which educational
settings might benefit from FLOSS approaches: the common based peer-production and
the way of teaching and learning. With this they, like Staring (2005), aimed to directly
translate the FLOSS learning ecosystem into current educational systems, for example by
looking at how FLOSS benefits from its community and translating it to education where
teachers would be supported by Communities of Practice (CoPs) and where students would
become actively engaged knowledge creators. Bacon and Dillon (2006) aimed to link
FLOSS approaches to their counterparts in educational settings introducing educational
terminologies like: constructivism, learner centred, cooperative learning, collaborative
learning, or practice (problem/inquiry) based learning. Bacon and Dillon (2006) did not
claim that there is, or is not, a totally new pedagogical approach of learning within the
FLOSS communities – but in the way that FLOSS communities make it work in practice.
28
Although Bacon and Dillon (2006) referred to the learner as a knowledge builder, they
might have fallen short on following up on the entire knowledge building process in
FLOSS, where knowledge building leads at the same time to content creation, content re-
use and continuous improvement involving all type of actors, from novice to seniors. In
FLOSS, the knowledge learners create within their problem solving process, or their
discussion with peers, then becomes learning material for others as soon as it is made
available in forums, or mailing lists and subsequently might be integrated into the code,
wikis, manuals, or FAQs (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006).
Bacon and Dillon (2006) provide some information on FLOSS communities as
communities of practice (CoPs) starting with a brief explanation of CoPs in general
(referencing the work of Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), highlighting that many
researchers see FLOSS as a prime example of what might be considered as an active
community of practice (Tuomi, 2001; Krishnamurthy, 2002; Mockus et. al., 2002; Stürmer,
2005; Tuomi, 2001, 2004).
“The new developers can learn their skills and work practice by developing code that extends the
system’s functionality but does not interfere with its core functionality. Gradually, the novices can
then earn a reputation as reliable developers, and become masters and gurus in the project
communities. This process of social integration and skills development is closely related to the
architecture of the technical system that is being developed.” (Tuomi 2005 p.437)
The collaborative knowledge creation and sharing process within FLOSS communities
therefore could potentially extend the teachers’ practice regarding content development
and knowledge sharing. Though Bacon and Dillon (2006) acknowledge the success of
Wikipedia, and talk about user generated content, it seems that they rather consider
teachers, researchers or other type of experts to be the content creator – but not the learner.
Looking at FLOSS however, and as pointed out by Tuomi (2005), shows that also learners
might become valuable content and knowledge creators in a formal educational setting if
29
provided with similar conditions to FLOSS at which they could extend the system’s
functionality, but where they would not interfere with its core functionality (Tuomi, 2005).
2.4.1 Learning and Knowledge Creation in FLOSS
Learning in FLOSS communities might be described as experiential learning, where
learning is a process that creates new knowledge through the transformation of experiences
that are developed within this process (Kolb, 1984 in Hemetsberger, 2006; Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt, 2006). In conceptualizing ways how to enable sharing and creating
knowledge online Hemetsberger and Reinhardt (2006), like Bacon and Dillon (2006), drew
on the communities of practice literature (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Brown & Duguid, 1991;
Wenger, 1998, 2000) and on Schön’s notion of ‘the reflective practitioner’ (Schön 1999).
Hemetsberger and Reinhardt (2006) were carrying out their work alongside the following
three questions:
1. How do community members organize content with regard to their daily routines
that potentially transforms into knowledge for other members?
2. As open-source communities depend on attracting and socializing new members:
how are new members enabled to accumulate the knowledge necessary for
becoming a valued member?
3. How do members co-create and conceptualize new ideas – create new knowledge –
in absence of physical proximity?
One of their key findings and a valid answer to all of these three questions was ‘enabling
re-experience’: Enabling re-experience seemed to be a crucial requirement for online
learning and knowledge building and a principle that FLOSS communities are following.
“Our findings make one key assertion. They reveal that enabling re-experience constitutes the
fundamental mechanism for learning and knowledge-building to occur online. From an individual
perspective, learning is initiated by displaying information-rich content, both; in a structural and in a
30
sequential order, as well as by instructive content and discourse. At the collective level, we found
participative practice, collective reflection and virtual experimentation processes to be explanatory
with respect to knowledge building. Knowledge manifests itself online through a variety of contents
displayed, as well as through online discourse. Our analysis further documents how those
manifestations of knowledge initiate individual and collective processes of learning and knowledge
building. In the following those processes are described in detail.” (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006
p.195)
2.4.2 Re-experience and Re-use
Re-experience is assured at various levels in FLOSS and by the use of different tools, such
as ‘source code control systems’ (for example CVS, SVN), mailing lists, forums, wikis or
live demos of the product. Hemetsberger and Reinhardt (2006) reviewed FLOSS
communities from two perspectives: the Learning Community and the Knowledge building
community, describing for each perspective where and how re-experience is assured.
The Learning Community
From this perspective re-experience is enabled by ‘displaying the source code and the
transactive group memory’. This means that past experiences and the problem solving
processes are preserved and made available for others at the source code in the format of
comments, within the ‘source code control system’ repository and change log, at the
archives of the mailing list and forums, or within the documentary and / or wiki.
As an illustration Hemetsberger and Reinhardt (2006) refer to the KDE project’s website
that has a clear and transparent structure providing information-rich content in combination
with hypertext technology and the implementation of search functions. This is seen as
being of key importance to initiate a productive inquiry process and for reflective
observation. To allow this, a pre-requisite is the open access to content and communication
channels.
31
Re-experience is also enabled through ‘instructive content and discourse’ where learners
are provided with training facilities. It might come as a surprise that the technological tools
used within the KDE community are relatively simple. Still those tools allow learning to
take place without person-to-person interaction, though in the case required help is
available through tools like for example chats or forums (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt,
2006). The existence of such training facilities is however not a replacement to individual
mentorship and / or face-to-face contacts for learners at the very beginning stage. At this
stage mentorship and/or face-to-face contact still seem to outperform Internet technology
and computer-mediated communication (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006).
The Knowledge-building Community
From this perspective re-experience is enabled through ‘participative practice’ through
systems such as the ‘source code control system’ and log file that keeps members
automatically updated on changes and allows for quick scans through changes. This also
includes information on the type of changes and the reasons behind them (Hemetsberger &
Reinhardt, 2006).
Re-experience is further enabled by ‘collective reflection and virtual experimentation’
through mailing lists or forums as platforms for members to engage in communication and
reflective discourse. The virtual environment, the different (technological) components, the
design of processes and structures play a crucial role for the coordination of activities and
to create and maintain a shared framework (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006).
The different levels of learning and knowledge creation in relation to each of the used tools
are illustrated at Table 2-1 (as provided by Hemetsberger & Reinhard, 2006).
32
Displays and Technological tools Initiated processes of learning
manifestations and knowledge-building
of knowledge
Code • ‘Source code control system’ • Full cycle of re-experiencing:
repository • Concrete experience
• Reflective observation
• Abstract conceptualization
• Active experimentation
Transactive • Website content and hyperlinks • Productive inquiry
Group Memory (for example FAQs, content) • Reflective observation
Instructive • Online tutorials and screenshots • Active experimentation
Content • Bug reporting system, ‘source • Reflective observation
code control system’ change log • Participative practice
and diff application
Instructive • IRC (Internet relay chat) • Reflective observation
Discourse • Collective reflection
Reflective • Asynchronous communication • Collective reflection
Discourse (for example mailing lists, • Collective conceptualization
newsgroups) • Virtual experimentation*
Note: * Here virtual experimentation is used as synonym for experimentation with things
the programmers have in mind, but that do not exist as yet.
Table 2-1: Learning processes initiated and displayed through technological tools (Hemetsberger and
Reinhard, 2006 p.207).
33
2.5 Learning Resources and Content in FLOSS
FLOSS communities provide users with various types of learning resources, the ‘common’
ones like manuals, tutorials, or wikis, but also resources that might not be recognized at
first as learning resources or content like for example the information provided through
mailing lists, forums or blogs. One common aspect of all different types of content is that
they are usually jointly generated by user and developer and often continuously updated
and improved afterwards. Scacchi (2002) identified eight types of what he defined as
‘software informalisms’ with each having sub-types. This eight-type classification provides
a relative structured overview of the different available types of content, which Scacchi
refers to as ‘information systems’. He also provides an overview of the purpose these
information systems / software informalisms are used for: (software) product requirement
definition, sense making, continuous discourse, and accountability. The requirements for a
FLOSS product are, unlike those for traditional software products, not pre-defined, but
specified through developer and user discourse that reference or link in accordance to
Scacchi (2002):
• Email or bboard (forum) discussion threads
• System vision statements
• Ideas about system functionality and the non-functional need for volunteer
developers to implement the functionality
• Promotional encouragement to specify and develop whatever functionality one
needs, which might also help to get a new job
• Scholarly scientific research publications that underscore how the requirements of
domain-specific software (for example for astronomical imaging) are understood
without elaboration, since they rely on prior scientific/domain knowledge and
tradition of open scientific research
34
From the learning point of view Scacchi’s ‘eight informalisms’ classification, as presented
below, might help to better understand the type of ‘learning resources’ or ‘content’ that
users in FLOSS in general utilise. The software programme itself might be seen as
analogous to the content of a course in formal education. But unlike in education, or even
in formal software development, there is no such thing as a ‘course syllabus’ or
‘requirement specification document’. Instead users and developer are in a constant re-
negotiation of the software’s features, functions or design (Scacchi, 2002).
“…it appears that the requirements for open software are co-mingled with Design, implementation,
and testing descriptions and software artifacts, as well as with user manuals and usage artifacts (for
example input data, program invocation scripts). Similarly, the requirements are spread across
different kinds of electronic documents including Web pages, sites, hypertext links, source code
directories, threaded email transcripts, and more. In each community, requirements are described,
asserted, or implied informally. Yet it is possible to observe in threaded email/bboard discussions that
community participants are able to comprehend and condense wide-ranging software requirements
into succinct descriptions using lean media that pushes the context for their creation into the
background.” (Scacchi, 2002 p.18)
Following each of the eight informalisms (Scacchi, 2002) will be briefly outlined, to
explore them from a ‘Learning Resource’ point of view.
1 Community communications
Mailing lists and forums are the common place for community communications to discuss
the requirements of the software or known bugs, but also other organizational aspects such
as marketing, community spaces, etc. and they are also the main place to provide support
to users. Chats, instant messaging or VOIP (Voice over IP) are also used but more for ad-
hoc discussions. The advantage of communications in mailing lists and forums is that other
users can later on read through these (Hemetsberger, 2006; Hemetsberger & Reinhardt,
2006) and it therefore helps to avoid answering the same questions repeatedly (see also
Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003).
35
In FLOSS communities messages often do not consist of questions and answers only, but
also include the ‘path’ (process) leading to the answers. This might include parts of the
code discussed together with references, or links to other messages or software websites
and thus provides some sense of the context that is surrounding the messages, or where and
how to act on them (Scacchi, 2002).
FLOSS communities learn and build collective knowledge through the use of
‘technologies’ and the establishment of discursive practices that enable virtual re-
experience. The problem solving processes, or other type of argumentation lines, are
important learning resources of FLOSS communities that enable other users’ re-experience
(Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2009). With this users get access to knowledge that is often
tacit in nature but by the same time being visible and observable in the common practice of
and interactions among the practitioners (Brown & Duguid, 1991). This knowledge is also
highly contextual and, in accordance to Brown & Duguid (1991), cannot be externalized
and taught independently from its context. Experienced FLOSS community members are
well aware of the role of mailing lists and forums and consequently expect that these
resources are used first, before individual support might be provided (Hemetsberger &
Reinhardt, 2006)
2 Scenarios of usage as linked Web pages (also known as live demos)
To explain the functioning of the software “community participants create artifacts like
screenshots, guided tours, or navigational click-through sequences (for example ‘back’,
‘next’ Web page links) with supplementary narrative descriptions in attempting to convey
their intent or understanding of how the system operates, or how it appears to a user when
used [...] participants may publish operational program execution scripts or recipes for how
to develop or extend designated types of open software artifacts.” (Scacchi, 2002 p.19). As
a use case live demo versions are also commonly available where users can log in at the
front and back-ends to experience the software in practice.
36
3 How to Guides
‘How to’ guides are also provided that explain how the software functions. Additionally
communities might set out FAQs, knowledge bases or wikis (Meiszner, 2007). Further
valuable ‘How to Guides’ are also provided at the community forums.
4 External Publications
All of the four cases that were examined by Scacchi (2002), and 50% out of the 80
communities that were reviewed by Meiszner (2007) provided also links to external
publications. These publications might consist of technical articles, books, news feeds,
blog postings, or professional and academic articles.
“Academic articles that are refereed and appear in conference proceedings or scholarly journals…serve a
similar purpose as professional articles, though usually with more technical depth, theoretical
recapitulation, analytical detail, and extensive bibliography of related efforts. However, it may be the
case that readers of academic research papers bring to their reading a substantial amount of prior domain
knowledge. This expertise may enable them to determine what open software requirements being
referenced may be obvious from received wisdom, versus those requirements that are new, innovative, or
otherwise noteworthy.” (Scacchi, 2002 p.20)
5 Open Software Web Sites and Source Webs
Community websites have the advantage of providing the community with an information
infrastructure for “publishing and sharing open descriptions of software in the form of Web
pages, Web links, and software artefact content indexes or directories. These pages,
hypertext links, and directories are community information structures that serve as a kind
of organizational memory and community information system. Such a memory and
information system records, stores, and retrieves how open software systems and artefacts
are being articulated, negotiated, employed, refined, and coordinated within a community
of collaborating developer-users” (Scacchi, 2002 p.20) and it might “include content that
incorporates text, tables or presentation frames, diagrams, or navigational images (image
maps) to describe their associated open software systems. This content may describe vision
37
statements, assert system features, or otherwise characterize through a narrative, the
functional and non-functional capabilities of an open software system…Web content that
describes an open software system often comes with many embedded Web links. These
links associate content across Web pages, sites, or applications.”(Scacchi, 2002 p.20)
A further characteristic of FLOSS is the access to its source code. The source code can be
accessed at the project’s website or at repositories like for example sourceforge.net.
6 Software bug reports and issue tracking
The collaborative activity of fixing bugs is a common characteristic of FLOSS, including
activities like identifying bugs, to track them, and to have the community testing if a bug
was successfully fixed. “Bugs and other issues (missing functionality, incorrect
calculation, incorrect rendering of application domain constructs, etc.) are common to open
software, much like they are with all other software. However, in an open software
development situation, community participants rely on lean communication media like
email, bug report bboards, and related issue tracking mechanisms to capture, rearticulate,
and refine implicit, misstated, or unstated system requirements”(Scacchi, 2002 p.21)
7 Traditional software system documentation
Like traditional software, open source software in general comes along with some type of
documentation to support end-users or developers and similar to traditional software, the
documentation provided for open source software is frequently out of date. But the
advantage of open source software documentation is that, unlike the documentation of
traditional software, it benefits from the fact that the documentation can be updated by the
community (Scacchi, 2002). From an educational perspective it thus might be translated as
user / learner generated content for learning and instructional materials or educational
content.
Problems in keeping these materials updated might explain why many FLOSS
communities introduced wikis for documentation purposes (Meiszner, 2007) since these
38
are more convenient for users to get engaged with and therefore facilitate constant changes
and updates in comparison to previous systems.
8 Software extension mechanisms and architectures
Developers of open source software systems of the four communities that were observed
by Scacchi (2002) seemed to seek keeping their systems open through the provision of a
variety of extension mechanisms and architectures. Though not analysed in detail Scacchi
(2002) suggested that these observed extension mechanisms and architectures are more
than just open application program interfaces (APIs) and that they generally would
represent operational mechanisms or capabilities.
2.6 The FLOSS Support System
The support system of FLOSS communities is as perfect as it is erroneous. On the one
hand it offers a 24hours, 7 days a week, 365 days per year support with up to date content
(learning materials), and all of this provided by volunteers at no charge. On the other hand
it is erroneous since none of these services are granted and consequently there might be
less support at the individual level and some learner might end up without help.
Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) analysed the support system of the Apache community and
found that their field support systems functions effectively and that 98% of the support
services return direct learning benefits for the support provider. They confirmed that
‘giving as a natural thing’ as also described by Demaziere et al. (2006), or ‘gaining
reputation’ and ‘personal enjoyment’ are important motivational factors, but so are the
‘learning benefits’ for the support provider.
The information provider learns himself by providing support. One might learn about
processes that could be improved, features that might be re-designed or newly introduced,
where the support needs to be improved, or just on a personal level on how he could
39
improve doing things. Thus the situation between the information provider and receiver
could be described as a win / win situation. The fact that a great part of motivation to
provide volunteering support resides in learning benefits for the support provider leads also
to the conclusion that there need to be problems in order to keep the support system alive –
or as Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) expressed it with a quote of Raymond:
“Actually . . . the list [of fetchmail beta-testers] is beginning to lose members from its high of close to
300 for an interesting reason. Several people have asked me to unsubscribe them because fetchmail is
working so well for them that they no longer need to see the list traffic! Perhaps this is part of the
normal life-cycle of a mature, bazaar-style project.” (Raymond, 1999 p.46).
Support in FLOSS is characterized by information seekers posting their questions on a
public website, which might be a forum or mailing list. Following the potential information
providers read those questions and might choose to post answers to it (Lakhani & von
Hippel, 2003). In FLOSS it is expected that the information seeker first try to solve their
problem themselves by the means of available materials and if required by surfing the
Web.
For the case of Apache it might be interesting to note that the core development team made
clear that they are not interested in providing any support and therefore the support system
has evolved separately, operated by and for users themselves.
The intake of new members (newcomers) is extremely important for FLOSS projects in
order to maintain their sustainability (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003). However, such an
intake increases complexity, since these newcomers have to be (culturally) integrated and
taught in order to help them to become competent members, by avoiding the possible
limits of the FLOSS support model (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003).
The FLOSS support model could not be sustained if it would solely rest on the hands of
experts or developers, as they constitute the community’s most valuable source of
innovation and new software development. Furthermore, experts may have less patience to
40
guide a novice, meanwhile from the novice’s viewpoint, someone more proximate in
experience, like another novice user at a slightly higher knowledge stage, might be a better
teacher than the expert given that the knowledge gap is not as great (Swap et al., 2001).
Therefore, other community members who are already advanced learners are also
contributing to the support, for example by answering forum posts.
For the newcomer, the first learning steps are the most difficult, as they do not know what
questions to ask or where to start. As already stated the community usually doesn’t provide
support for things that could be easily solved through self-study, reading the frequently
asked questions (FAQ) and other provided materials, or by searching the Web. By ignoring
those rules newcomers are likely to be confronted with the probably most used
abbreviations in FLOSS, the RTFM (‘Read The Friendly Manual’) and the STFW (‘Search
The Friendly Web’, also known as ‘Google is your friend’). An illustration of an
‘ignorance newbie entry’ (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2009), is provided in Figure 2-3.
Figure 2-3: Example ignorance entry (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2009)
However, when a newcomer shows some degree of knowledge on the subject and of
having tried to solve a question himself than the community is receptive to provide
support. The excerpt provided in Figure 2-4, taken from the Apache Usenet (Lakhani and
von Hippel, 2003), presents an example of this.
41
Figure 2-4: Example informed entry (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003)
Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) also address the limits of FLOSS type support system
regarding the number of support seekers in comparison to support providers, and also the
type of information requested. They found that about 2% of the knowledge providers were
responsible for about 50% of the answers to questions posted on the help system and 50%
of the questions were provided by 24% of the knowledge providers. The 100 most active
information seekers posted an average of 10.43 questions and the 100 most active
information providers posted an average of 83.63 answers during the 4-year period of their
study. This suggests that only a few individuals are active in providing answers to
questions asked in the Apache system.
42
phpBB Forum Community (14.02.07) osCommerce e-Shop Community (12.12.06)
Number % Posts % Number % Posts %
Most active 50 member 50 0,02% 515.743 21,26% Most active 50 member 50 0,06% 134.071 19,03%
Other member 299.677 99,98% 1.910.409 78,74% Other member 83.773 99,94% 570.413 80,97%
Total 299.727 100,00% 2.426.152 100,00% Total 83.823 100,00% 704.484 100,00%
Most active 500 member 500 0,17% 1.001.812 41,29% Most active 500 member 500 0,60% 282.310 40,07%
Other member 299.227 99,83% 1.424.340 58,71% Other member 83.323 99,40% 422.174 59,93%
Total 299.727 100,00% 2.426.152 100,00% Total 83.823 100,00% 704.484 100,00%
Forum-hilfe.de (12.09.07) http://www.uni-protokolle.de (12.09.07)

Other member 8.455 99,41% 117.452 51,57% Other member 104.772 99,95% 800.910 84,32%
Total 8.505 100,00% 227.762 100,00% Total 104.822 100,00% 949.886 100,00%
Other member 8.005 94,12% 68.081 29,89% Other member 104.322 99,52% 571.376 60,15%
Total 8.505 100,00% 227.762 100,00% Total 104.822 100,00% 949.886 100,00%
Table 2-2: Information providers – a basic review (Meiszner, 2007b)
Table 2-2 provides a brief review of the phpBB and osCommerce forums and of two
informal learning communities that have been conducted by the author of this work, which
both support the above stated observations of the Apache case. At those 4 reviewed
communities less than 1% of the members were providing nearly 40% of all posts.
2.7 Motivations of FLOSS Community Members
In the course of the success of FLOSS programs like Linux and the Apache Web server the
question why people spend effort and time gratis for FLOSS increasingly triggered
research on the FLOSS phenomenon. According to Lerner and Tirole (2002), all
contributions to FLOSS, though free of charge, can be explained by economic motivations
because behind all these contributions they assume the wish of the contributors to signal
their skills and experience to the wider community and to thus enhance their chances on
the labour market. This view is however based on theoretical considerations of why people
might contribute freely to FLOSS and narrows the whole phenomenon down on reputation
issues. It does not include other values of the FLOSS community that are also important
for its understanding and that contradict the idea of a primary economic motivation as
driver of all contributions to FLOSS, as they are expressed in Raymond’s (1999) ‘bazaar’
model. Such values are, for instance, a deep interest in and need for software and the
conviction that software should be freely available and provide the users the opportunity to
43
check and modify the code. As Demaziere et al. (2006) point out: “We have mostly met
computer programmers for whom the commitment to free software had neutral, even
negative consequences, from a material point of view. Above all the validity of the
hypothesis of motivation through financial incentives is founded on the premise of a
contribution based on a calculated choice, anticipating the long term effects on a career.
Yet, what our interviews show is that it is a more progressive commitment, sustained by a
growing familiarity with programming activity and the ‘social world’ of developers
(Strauss, 1978) and accentuated by memorable experiences through which computer
programmers build a sense of participation and interaction with other free software
developers.” (Demaziere et al., 2006 p.8)
Referring to Raymond’s (1999) ‘bazaar’ model and focusing on basic tasks that must be
performed in FLOSS projects, Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) identify the following main
motives why users voluntarily work on these basic tasks: There is a direct need for the
software and software improvements worked upon; Enjoyment of the work itself; and to
enhance their reputation that may flow from making high-quality contributions to an open
source project. However, Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) point out that these three
motivations do not suffice to explain the motivation to perform “mundane but necessary”
tasks in FLOSS projects, such as providing ‘field support’, which is provision of help to
people having problems with a FLOSS product. Kollock (1999), as referred to in Lakhani
and von Hippel (2003) also points out that reputation enhancement may drive people to
contribute to FLOSS, but he also stresses other factors that may motivate FLOSS
community members: expectations of reciprocity that can reward providing something of
value to another; the act of contributing that can have a positive effect on contributors’
sense of efficacy (i.e. a sense that they have some effect on the environment); and
contributors’ attachment or commitment to a particular open source project or group.
44
Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) developed an approach towards motivations of FLOSS
community members that goes beyond theoretical considerations and anecdotal evidence
by directly addressing the activities carried out by community members and asking them
for their reasons to carry them out. Their approach is however limited in the sense that it
focuses only on one major activity, the provision of help to others, and one FLOSS project
– the Apache webserver. The range of activities carried out within the FLOSS community
is however very broad - whereby providing help to others is not among the most important
of these activities – and that many of these activities are not bound to participating in a
specific project. The FLOSS Developer Survey (Ghosh et al., 2002) on the other hand
aimed at examining motivations related to the FLOSS community as a whole. The survey
that involved 2783 community members acknowledged that members of the FLOSS
community have different degrees of knowledge and expertise in FLOSS-related issued
and that therefore knowledge creation and sharing might also play a role as motivators for
contributing to the community. Finally, the FLOSS Developer Survey targeted the motives
to participate in the FLOSS community from two different perspectives, the reasons for
joining the community and the reasons for staying in the community.
Figure 2-5: Motivations for joining and staying within the FLOSS community (Glott et al., 2007 p.19)
45
Figure 2-5 illustrates the answers to these two questions, whereby the respondents have
been asked to limit themselves to a maximum of four answers. The answers are ordered by
the size of the shares allocated to the ‘reasons to stay in the community’, since these
reasons help explaining how the community manages to become sustainable. Evidently,
improving skills and sharing knowledge are the most important motivators for people to
engage in FLOSS. The second important group of motivators relates to software-related
aspects (‘wish to improve software products’), political aspects (‘software should not be a
proprietary product’) and aspects of socialising within the community (‘participation,
collaboration’). Except for ‘learning and developing new skills’, which stagnates on
importance with growing expertise, all other reasons gain importance after the community
member got some experience, which particularly applies to the product-related and the
political item.
Motives such as ‘to solve a problem that could not be solved by proprietary software’ or
‘to get help in realising a good idea for a software product’, but also a material motive (‘to
improve my job opportunities’) reach shares between 20% and 30% of respondents. While
the motive to get help in realizing an idea for a software product shows no change in its
importance, the other two items, especially the motive to improve job opportunities by
contributing to FLOSS, gain considerable importance. To get a reputation and to help
realising ideas for software products are the two least important motivators for joining as
well as for staying in the community. A factor analysis with a subsequent cluster analysis
identified six diverging groups of developers with regard to the initial motivations to join
the FLOSS community and four diverging groups with regard to continuing motivations to
stay in the community. Table 2-3 shows these motivational groups and how initial
motivational groups and continuing motivational groups are related to each other.
46
Table 2-3: Initial and continuing motivational groups within the FLOSS community (Glott et al., 2007
p.20)
As a conclusion, what motivates people to join FLOSS cannot be explained by ‘simple
economics’ (Lerner & Tirole, 2002), which becomes evident in particular by the low
shares of respondents who say that getting a reputation within the FLOSS community and
making money are motivators. Rather than that, the provision of a learning environment in
which new skills can be developed and knowledge is shared motivates the largest part of
the community to contribute to FLOSS in accordance with Gosh et al (2002).
2.7.1 Meritocracy
The FLOSS system of meritocracy is “a system in which the talented are chosen and
moved ahead on the basis of their achievement” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). In FLOSS
individuals help shaping the community by slowly progressing from novel users, to more
regular participants up towards the core or enhanced core team being awarded with merits
for their achievements and contributions to a FLOSS project. Individuals create a
sustainable community by increasing their involvement through a process of role
meritocracy (Sowe, 2007; Jensen and Scacchi, 2007). All of the FLOSS members, with
their different types of roles, responsibilities and contributions, therefore help to develop
the system leading to its constant evolution and growth (Aberdour, 2007). Meritocracy is
47
therefore based on a type of peer-assessment that helps individuals in the assessment of
their progress.
2.8 The Role of Knowledge Broker
Interactions between FLOSS community members have been examined by the means of
social network analysis (Sowe, 2007). A number of other studies have also employed
social network visualizations to visualize communication flow among individuals by
email logs (Gloor et al., 2003), to study interaction among IRC channels users (Mutton,
2004), and to visualize the relationships among modules in the Apache project (Barahona
et. al., 2004). Some benefits of social network analysis studies in FLOSS include to
understand how FLOSS communities are organized; to understand the interaction
between programmers working in a given software project; or to be able to analyze the
structure and to model the evolution of social interaction in FLOSS communities
(Valverde, 2006; Crowston & Howison, 2005; Weiss & Moroiu, 2007). Social network
analysis further allows for studying how software developers and users relate among
themselves and how they are organized, or how they take decisions and how they
distribute the workload (Barahona et al., 2004). Social network analysis further allows to
understand the knowledge collaboration in FLOSS development (Ohira et al., 2005); to
visualize how individuals interact in FLOSS projects' mailing lists (Sowe, et al. 2006b);
to find a list of candidates who are expert in a specific topic (Chen et al., 2006); or to find
collaborators and the ways that those collaborate with each other (Fisher, 2003).
The FLOSS development process produces massive quantities of data, which software
engineering researchers can use to build and visualize the behaviour and relationships
between individual nodes. Such a large source of data gives researchers an unprecedented
level of detail in social network analysis, along with the potential for new understanding,
and useful predictions. In Xu et al. (2005) and Madey et al. (2002), software developers
48
form nodes on a network (graph) and links or edges exist between such nodes if
developers participate on the same project. In these studies, identification of clusters
exposed connected groups of software developers across FLOSS projects. Such networks
revealed a small group of software developers, also called ‘linchpins'. In a study of
mailing list network, Sowe, et al. 2006 found out that participants in one list are
connected to participants in another list in the Debian project (Figure 2-6).
Figure 2-6: Knowledge brokers in mailing lists network (Sowe et al., 2006 p.1031)
The visualization (Figure 2-6) shows that posters, means the community members who
post in a forum, could be located at more than one node in the network and are capable of
sharing their knowledge with other participants in other nodes. The exchange of email
messages was used to establish ties between the nodes (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005). Each
tie was weighted as the number of email messages contributed by each individual. The
mailing lists network enabled the identification of three groups or structures within the
lists.
1. Group one. These posters posted more information and/or provided more
assistance within the lists they participated. Both knowledge seeking and
knowledge providing are localized in these groups.
49
2. Group two. Posters who participated across lists, externalizing their knowledge
and expertise and helping answer questions knowledge seekers posted.
3. Group three. At the centre of the visualization is a group of 15 posters acting as
knowledge brokers and connecting the different groups (Sowe, et al. 2006) taking
on functions such as community facilitators or hubs (Barabasi & Bonabeau, 2003)
on the network.
In a similar study Chen et al. (2006) could make similar observations than the ones
presented above, suggesting that the findings presented by Sowe et al. (2006) are valid for
a number of different FLOSS communities. Chen et al. (2006) further observed that
experts or knowledge brokers were surrounded by a number of other 'peripheral users'; that
knowledge brokers reply more often to questions that are posted to mailing lists than
peripheral users; or that knowledge brokers seem not to cluster into some densely linked
groups (or cliques) in mailing lists networks.
2.9 Modularity as a Way to reduce Complexity
Modularity in FLOSS helps to reduce systemic interdependencies between different files
of the same product, allowing a higher level of task partitioning and a lower level of
explicit coordination and interaction among programmers. Modularity might be achieved
through a clear division of labour between the core product and more ‘external’ features
such as modules, add-ons or plug-ins (Mockus et al., 2002). In FLOSS modularity
increases flexibility and the comprehensibility of a system, which allows for a reduction in
the development time (Stürmer, 2005). To allow for this it requires well defined interfaces
of the software parts that would ensure a smooth interaction of the contributions of the
various developers, and which by the same time fosters community building (Stürmer,
2005). In FLOSS there are many participants engaged in smaller sub-projects that can be
either integrated into the product (like contributions, modules, plug-ins, extensions), or are
50
of a supportive nature (like manuals, live demos, how-to guides, translations) (Stürmer,
2005). This type of modularity reduces complexity and allows participation at a lower
commitment or participation burden. The aspect of modularity is not limited to the FLOSS
domain, but also can be seen in other major online projects such as for example Wikipedia
(Swartz 2006). Modularity therefore contributes at different level like providing an easy
entrance, offering a large variety of opportunities to participate, or facilitating
collaboration and production.
As pointed out in section 2.4, new developers can learn their skills and work practice by
developing code that extends the system’s functionality but does not interfere with its core
functionality (Tuomi, 2005), this not only fosters their social integration, but also allows
such new developers to contribute and to become content and knowledge creators.
Therefore modular approaches, in which less skilled people are provided with the
opportunity to enhance ‘non-core’ functions, are beneficial in at least three ways: (1) they
allow new and less skilled participants to become knowledgeable practitioners, (2) they
foster social integration and community building and (3) the artifacts created by those new
and less skilled participants still add a value to the FLOSS project itself.
2.10 Summary of Key Characteristics of FLOSS Communities
Chapter two provided an overview of FLOSS as an online learning ecosystem, its
organizational structures, the type of learning resources featured, associated learning
technologies, the learning opportunities and activities provided, the communities and
stakeholders participating in it, individual motivations to participate and the different roles
assumed by participants. In answer to the ‘Research Question 1’ of this work, the key
characteristics of Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities as an informal
online learning ecosystem that could be identified throughout this chapter were:
51
First characteristic: The underlying technology used by most FLOSS projects is relatively
simple, yet mature, usually including versioning systems, mailing lists, chats, forums,
wikis or similar knowledge bases. Additionally free web-based services such as
Sourceforge provide each FLOSS project with an initial working and community
environment therefore facilitating the take off of new projects (Meiszner, 2007). But
perhaps as important as making use of a range of relative simple and mature technologies
is that they are ‘open’ and accessible for anyone who might wishes to participate or just to
use the resources provided. As described by Glott et al. (2007) one of the FLOSS
characteristics is usually known as ‘openness’ or ‘inclusivity’ of the FLOSS community.
FLOSS communities, like any other social formation, have established specific cultural
and social patterns and norms that require from anyone who wants to join a certain degree
of assimilation. Openness and inclusivity does therefore only mean that those who want to
join the community do not have to pass enrolment procedures or have to pass formal
performance assessments. But openness not only allows free access to everyone and
inclusivity, it also fosters transparent structures since the FLOSS ecosystem is openly
accessible, providing access not only to code and documentations, but also
communications, discussions and interactions of any kind, for example through forums,
mailing lists or chats sessions.
A second characteristic relates to volunteering and volatility since FLOSS participants
voluntarily decide which role(s) they want to play or which responsibilities to take on. As a
consequence, roles and responsibilities (or capacities) of community members can change
over time but also at the very same time depending on the different contexts. This results in
a very vivid and volatile internal structure and dynamics of the community at which
participants can contribute to areas of their personal interest or relevance and take on
different roles and responsibilities, which might be of a more durable or fluid nature. The
possibilities to contribute are not limited to the core code only, but consist of a broad
52
spectrum, including non-software development related ones; with all of those contributions
adding a value to the FLOSS project at large.
A third characteristic is the use of large-scale networks and the way they are established
and maintained. It has been shown that a vivid and healthy community could be seen as a
synonym for the success of the FLOSS project itself. On the other hand it has also become
clear that ‘large-scale network’ does not refer to the existence of a large number of core
developers, but rather to a large number of people interested in the project and with some
of those deciding to become active and to contribute. To allow and foster active
participation and contribution one of the key enablers has been described as enabling ‘re-
experience’ as a fundamental mechanism for online learning and knowledge-building
(Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006) and for new member integration. Enabling re-
experience and the availability of large-scale networks are also pre-conditions for the
FLOSS volunteering support model, which is required to allow core developers to focus on
development activities, but yet being able to assure new member integration.
The fourth characteristics relates to content-richness and specialisation. FLOSS
communities, though revolving on software development, offer a range of opportunities
that by far exceed the scope that is closely related to software. Content in FLOSS
communities provides users with various types of learning resources including manuals,
tutorials, or wikis, but also resources that might not be at first recognized as learning
resources such as communications, discussions or interactions at mailing lists, forums or
chats. One common aspect of the different types of content is that they are jointly
generated by users and developers and after generation are overall continuously updated
and improved. This however is not limited to a given FLOSS community, but also includes
the re-use of artifacts that were produced by other FLOSS communities, or artifacts that
are in general freely available on the Web and that are frequently brought into the
53
community by individuals that are acting as information and knowledge brokers (Sowe et
al. 2006).
A fifth characteristic is the aspect of modularity, which for the FLOSS case reduces
systemic interdependencies between different files of the same product, allowing a higher
level of task partitioning and a lower level of explicit coordination and interaction among
programmers. Modularity might be achieved through a clear division of labour between the
core product and more ‘external’ features such as modules, add-ons or plug-ins (Mockus et
al., 2002). Within an educational context modularity might be translated to providing
learners with the opportunity to make contributions that do not interfere with ‘the core’. In
educational terms the core might relate to ‘core course components’ that should not be
fundamentally altered. Modularity might also refer to allowing participation and
contributions at a lower entrance barrier, at lower initial skills, or with less time
commitment or more efficient usage of time available. This is to say that course structures
should allow for studying certain modules alone, without having to go though the entire
course. Equally, opportunities to contribute should be provided at such modular levels, or
perhaps not relate to the course’s learning objective at all. The activity of a learner setting
up a blog, developing a rating system, setting up a Youtube channel, or organizing weekly
IRC chats might all add a value to a course, yet are not directly focusing on contributions
to the course content itself.
54
3 Learning in FLOSS and associated Pedagogies
This chapter will follow up on the ‘Research Question 1’ on identifying and understanding
the key characteristics of FLOSS as an informal online learning ecosystem. Unlike the
previous chapter this chapter will focus on learning in FLOSS and associated pedagogies,
including a brief comparison to their counterparts in traditional higher education. The
chapter will build on the previous chapter and look at the characteristics on learning in
FLOSS communities and contrast it to the way learning usually takes place in higher
education.
3.1 Introduction
Gulati (2004) refers to online learning as a social experience and suggests that the
flexibility offered by online technologies helps to support the needs of diverse learners.
Within this context Gulati (2004) further suggests that constructivist learning strategies
might be best suited for such type of learning environments. Constructivism does not stand
for a standard to follow, nor does it represent one distinct theoretical position (Doolitle,
1999). Constructivism combines philosophical, psychological and cybernetics aspects and
aims to describe the way individuals understand their environment (Glasersfeld von, 1989).
The constructivist theory argues that the individual is actively constructing knowledge and
left to make his own discoveries, inferences (based on the individuals current and past
knowledge) and to draw their own conclusions (Mayer, 1992; Hendry, 1996). Conole
(2008) claims that there has never been a closer alignment between the current practices of
Web 2.0 technologies and what is put forward as good pedagogy. She goes on arguing
about the need to rethink the fundamental characteristics of learning and what those
fundamentals consist of and how social networking might be harnessed to maximise these
characteristics to best effect. Conole (2008) argues further that the current complexity of
digital environments requires developing ‘schema’ or ‘approaches’ to thinking about how
55
one could harness best the benefits offered through new technologies. Table 3-1 shows on
the first three columns the ‘Table 1: Technology affordances mapped to different learning
theories’ of Conole’s (2008) work, and compares it against the FLOSS case (4th column).
As can be seen at Table 3-1, the FLOSS case indeed appears to be a suitable example on
how to align technologies to good pedagogies as further explored throughout this chapter.
Theories Main focus Map to technologies The FLOSS example

Behaviourism Trial and error learning Presentation of content, use of multiple Present. E.g. Experimental coding
media to convey information
Learning through association Feedback through e-assessment tools Usually absent

and reinforcement
Peer feedback Present. E.g. Community feedback

Cognitive Focus on the processes by Guided and adaptive instruction through Present, albeit the aspect of
constructivism which learners build interactive materials "interactivity"
their own mental structures is less obtained through technology,
when interacting with an but by participants linking their
environment artifacts one to another (e.g. a post / a
Task-orientated, favour Access to resources and expertise Partly present. Access to all
hands-on, self-directed offers the potential to develop more information and knowledge sources is
activities orientated towardsengaging and student-centred, active guaranteed. Possibility to engage with
design and discovery and authentic learning environments a diverse and global community.
Authentic learning experience by
engaging in real life situations. But:
Not student centered, learners need to
'dig in' and find the information,
knowledge, people themselves.
Social Emphasis on interpersonal Multiple forms of asynchronous and Present. Albeit no formal role
constructivism relationships involving synchronous communication offer the distinction
imitation and modelling and potential for more diverse and richer between e.g. 'teachers' and 'learners'
joint construction of forms of dialogue and interaction
knowledge between students and tutors and
Archive materials and resources provide Present
ample opportunity for vicarious learning
Different online communication tools Present. Albeit the tools used are
and learning environments and social often basic
fora offer the potential for new forms of and mature, but complemented by
communities of practice or facilities to state of the art emerging tools
support and enhance existing
communities
Situated Learning as social Networking capabilities of the Web Present
learning participation enable more diverse access to different
forms of expertise and the potential for
the development of different types of
communities
Shift from a focus on the Online communication tools and Present
individual and learning environments offer the potential
information-focused learning for new forms of communities of
to an emphasis on social practice or can facilitate and enhance
learning and communication/ existing communities
collaboration
Table 3-1: Technology affordances mapped to different learning theories (Conole’s, 2008 vs. the
FLOSS case)
There are a number of different ways in which learning occurs in FLOSS, and it might be
assumed that often it will be a mixture of more than one. The pedagogies inherent to the
56
FLOSS case match well with constructivist learning theories as illustrated in Figure 3-1
and further detailed throughout this section.
Figure 3-1: Learning theories (VCCS Litonline, 1998)
It is not claimed that learning as it occurs in FLOSS is radically new and unrelated to the
solid pedagogic framework that has been established for new types of learning. From a
pedagogical perspective learning in FLOSS, and as detailed in chapter two, is characterized
by self-studying, project-based learning, problem-based learning, case-based learning,
inquiry-based learning, collaborative learning, reflective practice or social learning (Weller
& Meiszner, 2008). It is not assumed that those pedagogies were deliberately set out, but
rather that due to the structure, approach and governance of FLOSS communities certain
pedagogies have emerged (Glott et al., 2007; Weller & Meiszner, 2008). FLOSS appears
not as a contradiction to such pedagogies but in many respects as a good example of the
implementation of their principles and goals.
3.2 Self-directed Learning & fundamental Assumptions to Learning
As highlighted by the FLOSSPOLS Developer Survey (Ghosh et al., 2002; Glott et al.
2007) self-studying, or self-directed learning, is a common form of learning in FLOSS
(mentioned by 58% of the surveyed community members), and the most common
approaches to learning are those that provide the opportunity to either read or work on the
code and that depend on Internet-based technologies. Due to the absence of teachers, self-
57
studying is a pre-requirement in FLOSS. In FLOSS there is no ‘teaching’ or ‘instruction’
in the strict meaning of the term, though there is a kind of mentorship and tutoring, where
more experienced members give advice and guide inexperienced ones, but unlike formal
education none of those are guaranteed and learners might end up without any type of
support (Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003; Swap et al. 2001). Every novice participant in a
project has to read and study documentation, FAQs, manuals, discussion threads and any
other source of information relative to the project (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006).
Self-studying / self-directed learning skills and abilities, in particular within the light of
lifelong learning, are today recognized to be crucial to be possessed and should be an
integrated part of formal education (Fischer & Scharff, 1998). The FLOSS case therefore
could help understanding on how to provide learning opportunities that facilitate self-
directed learning activities by embedding them within an environment that by the same
time allows learning from what others did, or how they did, and additionally providing
opportunities for cooperative and collaborative learning activities that are often related to
project or problem based learning activities.
Fischer and Scharff (1998) describe the need for self-directed learning, the theoretical
grounding, and the type of learning environments required to support and foster self-
directed learning. To support their argumentation they draw on Resnick’s (1989) six
fundamental assumptions to learning and derive from those characteristics that online
learning environments should feature. As will be shown FLOSS as a learning environment
inherits – to a certain degree – all of these six characteristics.
1. “Learning is a process of knowledge construction not of knowledge recording or
absorption (Harel and Papert, 1991) and it requires environments in which learners
can be active designers and contributors rather than passive consumers (Fischer,
1998).” (Fischer and Scharff, 1998 p.2)
58
This characteristic is well presented within FLOSS for all of the members, but the lurkers.
As detailed in chapter two of this work, participants in FLOSS are encouraged to take on
active roles, to become designer, contributor or collaborator. The FLOSS environment
provides a large number of opportunities to engage in and to become an active contributor,
beyond programming tasks (Glott et al., 2007). Shaping the FLOSS ecosystem and
contributing to it is facilitated through a modular design (Mockus et al., 2002; Stürmer,
2005). Though becoming active is encouraged and promoted, passive consumption is
accepted as long as it does not consume resources such as asking questions that has been
already answered. This would consume resources and therefore people are discouraged
from doing so (Weller & Meiszner, 2008). Participants in FLOSS construct new
knowledge as a result of their interaction, either intentionally, for example by editing a
wiki, or accidentally, for example by answering a question.
2. “Learning is highly tuned to the situation in which it takes place (Lave and
Wenger, 1991; Suchman, 1987) requiring environments that are domain-oriented
and support human problem-domain interaction (the connection between people
and the domain specific problems that they face) and not just human-computer
interaction. In a typical activity (such as working or playing), individuals are acting
until they encounter a breakdown and they reflect about the breakdown (Fischer et
al., 1993). These breakdowns (originating from missing knowledge,
misunderstandings about the consequences of actions, and so on) are key to situated
learning. Schön (Schön, 1999) calls this reflection-in-action, Norman (Norman,
1993) calls it experiential and reflective mode. Because self-reflection is difficult, a
human coach, a design critic, or a teacher can help the learner to identify the
breakdown situation and to provide task-relevant information for reflection. ”
(Fischer & Scharff, 1998 p.2)
59
This characteristic is well presented within FLOSS since software development often
requires a very high level of domain knowledge, of experience, and of intensive learning
(von Krogh et al, 2003). Software development is also a highly collaborative construction
and developing process that is targeted at solving complex problems (Scharff, 2002) and
where developer and software user are in a constant re-negotiation of the software’s
features, functions or design (Scacchi, 2002). Members of FLOSS communities learn and
build collective knowledge through the use of ‘technologies’ and the establishment of
discursive practices that enable virtual re-experience, such as the availability of prior
problem solving processes, or other type of argumentation lines, that allow for collective
reflections or individual re-experience (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006). Within a
FLOSS context content and discourse are frequently connected through participants that
are engaging around the content (for example the code), discuss and reflect on it, put it into
context to related situations, develop solutions to it and evaluate how they work out.
3. “Learning is knowledge-dependent, meaning people use their existing knowledge
to construct new knowledge, requiring environments that support user-tailored
information presentations such as differential descriptions of new information. For
example, if someone who knows MS Word wants to learn HTML, the explanations
and examples provided should be different than those given to a learner who knows
Framemaker. The cognitive models of users constructed by Intelligent Tutoring
Systems (Ritter et al., 1998) provide some support for presenting knowledge in a
form targeted to a specific user. Design critics may be used to tailor information so
that it is relevant to the current task.” (Fischer & Scharff, 1998 p.2)
This characteristic is partly present within FLOSS and as described in point 2 above,
participants in FLOSS engage in a variety of activities at which they construct new
knowledge and artifacts by drawing as well on their existing individual as the collective
knowledge (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006). Intelligent tutor systems nonetheless are
60
absent in FLOSS and it is the participants’ individual responsibility to identify suitable
sources and learning opportunities. ‘User-tailored’ from the FLOSS perspective means to
identify how participants in related circumstances have learnt, the resources they used, or
solutions they brought forward (Hemetsberger, 2006). This can be a time consuming
exercise, in particular in the case where human intelligence is absent to point learners to
the right resources that the learners might not have found themselves (Glott et al., 2007;
Meiszner & Weller, 2008).
4. Learning needs to account for distributed cognition (Norman, 1993), by which the
knowledge and effort required to solve a problem is distributed among various
participants. The distribution of knowledge among humans is based on the
"symmetry of ignorance" (Rittel, 1984) or asymmetry of knowledge between
different stakeholders in problem solving. Teaching in classrooms is often
conceptualized very differently: it is often fitted "into a mould in which a single,
presumably omniscient teacher explicitly tells or shows presumably unknowing
learners something they presumably know nothing about" (Bruner, 1996). A critical
challenge is a reformulation and reconceptualization of this impoverished and
misleading conception. Although this model may be more realistic for early school
years (Hirsch, 1996), it is obviously inadequate for self-directed learning processes
as they occur in lifelong learning, where knowledge is distributed among many
stakeholders and "the answer" does not exist or is not known.” (Fischer & Scharff,
1998 p.2)
This characteristic is well presented within FLOSS since FLOSS as a learning ecosystem
provides participants with access to tacit knowledge that is made visible and observable in
the common practice of and interactions among competent practitioners (Hemetsberger,
2006). This tacit knowledge is further highly contextual and might not be externalized and
taught independently from its context (Brown & Duguid, 1991). FLOSS projects depend
61
on distributed cognition and a heterogeneous group of participants to cover the broad
spectrums related to it; ranging from core competencies such as programming to the
feedback provided by users (Scharff, 2002, Turner et al., 2006). This diversity also allows
FLOSS projects to draw up requirement specifications and to derive development
roadmaps (Scacchi, 2002). Perhaps as a result of this diversity FLOSS projects often
provide spaces and / or tools that are tailored for different target groups (for example quick
guides, beginners sections for newbies or developer mailing lists and bug tracker for
developers). Even in the event of a small community size, and therefore absence of
diversity, the required knowledge or expertise might still be obtained by making use of the
knowledge of (larger) related FLOSS projects though the information / knowledge
brokering role taken on by members that leverage knowledge and information from for
example one community to another (Sowe et al., 2006, 2006b).
5. “Learning is affected as much by motivational issues (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) as
by cognitive issues, requiring environments that let people experience and
understand why they should learn and contribute something. For example,
learning-on-demand (Fischer, 1991) lets users access new knowledge in the
context of actual problem situations and delivers information about which they are
unaware in the context of their problem situations. Environments must allow users
to take pride in their contributions and be awarded for them.” (Fischer & Scharff,
1998 p.2)
This characteristic is well presented within FLOSS. Being able to learn from what others
did, and how they did it, constitutes a fundamental element in FLOSS that helps learners to
acquire new skills and knowledge, allowing them to reflect as well on their own actions as
on the ones from others (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004; Hemetsberger, 2006).
Therefore learners not only have access to new knowledge in the context of an actual
problem situation (Fischer & Scharff, 1998), but are also guided to this knowledge. This
62
guidance might be by re-experiencing how others have learnt, or it might be by learners
posting their considered solution and then receiving feedback and further information to it
by other community members. From the motivational perspective FLOSS provides a
number of incentives, such as building up an online repute, to reward individual
contributions and commitment, or to learn oneself once providing support to others (Ghosh
et al., 2002). Motivational issues in FLOSS are manifold and often lead to win / win
situations – for example in the event of support seeker and support provider (Demaziere et
al., 2006)
6. Learning is not limited to any discrete group of individuals. Even though
educational systems deal with "teachers" and "learners" as separate groups, in
reality these labels are not universally applicable. As tasks and responsibilities
change, all individuals must be continuously learning. For example, educators
who are traditionally "teachers" may desire to investigate new technologies to use
in their classrooms. However, when exposed to new technology and methodologies
for creating educational curricula, teachers become learners in order to understand
how to use new opportunities effectively.” (Fischer & Scharff, 1998 p.2)
This characteristic is well presented within FLOSS as participants assume many roles, and
with such roles being a subject to frequent changes depending on context, task or situation
(Ghosh et al., 2002; Hemetsberger & Reinhardt 2006). This is due to the broad range of
participation opportunities provided; the very different tasks involved; the rapid
advancement and development of the software; technology and ultimately knowledge.
Participants in FLOSS might be experts in one area, relatively skilled in a second one, but
rather newbies in a third. As a matter of fact, ‘to learn’ is an important motivation for
subject matter experts once they engage at support provision (Demaziere et al., 2006),
therefore adopting by the very same time as well the role as a service provider as the one of
a learner.
63
The reflection on Resnick’s (1989) six fundamental assumptions to learning provided at
this section indicates that the FLOSS case indeed appears to be a good example on online
learning environments that support self-directed learning. The same reflection also points
out the preconditions that might be established for the design of similar online learning
environments within an educational setting. In line with the findings of chapter two, those
preconditions might include: re-experience must be enabled; it must be possible to build on
what others did; user contributions must be possible and fostered; a modular design to
facilitate contributions; there should be processes at which participants can engage around
the content, to discuss and reflect on it, to put it into a context that is related to a situation,
or to develop solutions to it and evaluate how they work out; there should be structures in
place that stimulate information / knowledge brokering activities; there should be some
type of incentives, gains and win-win solutions for the various activities and roles
participants are encouraged to take on.
3.3 Cooperative Learning in a Networked Environment
Learning in FLOSS features a number of different approaches such as collaborative
learning that builds on prior knowledge, with individual learners having different degrees
of knowledge and expertise, involving real experience, a peer component and the aspects
of inquiry (Glott et al, 2007). Collaborative learning in FLOSS takes place within a virtual
networked environment that consists of a cooperative nature of development and thus
necessitates cooperative learning from peers (Ghosh et al., 2002; Scharff, 2002; Turner, et
al. 2006; Valverde, 2006). Collaborative learning often takes place once the individual is
stuck on a problem and requests help from the community, or as a result of reflecting on or
discussing issues related to problems, projects or improvements (Hemetsberger, 2006).
Learning in FLOSS can be seen as collaborative learning that builds on prior knowledge,
with individual learners having different degrees of knowledge and expertise. Learners in
64
FLOSS create their own education due to the absence of a formal curriculum; with the
learning being based on ones own prior knowledge or the one of others. A strong
motivational aspect to provide support to others is the circumstance that support providers
learn their selves by doing so (Ghosh et al., 2002; Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003), which is
similar to observations within formal education at which strong students benefit once
supporting weak students (Felder & Brent, 2007).
Cooperative or collaborative learning approaches that rely on a cognitive and constructive
assumption also gained more and more on popularity within the educational landscape in
recent years (Karagiorgy & Symeou, 2005), which might results from the increasing
opportunities and uptake provided by information communication technologies. Some
literature that covers ICT and technology enhanced learning (TEL) approaches describes
learning as a social experience, using constructivist learning strategies, and agrees that the
use of technology helps to support the needs of diverse learners (Gulati, 2004). From the
cooperative / collaborative learning theory perspective learners are supposed to work
together in groups towards a common goal, being responsible for one another's learning as
well as their own. One benefit is seen within the active exchange of ideas within these
groups that not only increases the interest among the participants but also promotes critical
thinking (Gokhale, 1995). One of the underlying ideas is that students learn more once
being engaged in activities instead of just watching and listening; and also that cooperative
/ collaborative learning is of mutual benefit for both weak and strong students (Felder &
Brent, 2007). Weak students that are working individually are likely to give up when they
get stuck, but if working cooperatively do not so, meanwhile strong students learn more by
supporting weak students and likely also find gaps in their own understanding that they
would not have done otherwise (Felder & Brent, 2007). Research further indicates that
students, who are engaged in a collaborative learning project, frequently gain an increased
level of tolerance and acceptance of other people's viewpoints, a skill which can be
beneficial in real-life situations where compromises are often required (Andres, 2002).
65
Challenges of cooperative / collaborative learning might be the requirement for
coordinated scheduling, availability of common communication tools, no mutually
accepted goals and objectives, lack of basic skills and for formal education the individual
assessment of the student’s achievement (Andres, 2002). Gulati (2004) argues that
constructivist learning strategies often do not work out in educational settings due to the
lack of informal learning spaces and opportunities that provide freedom to ‘try things out’,
to adopt multiple roles, to make use of prior knowledge, or to take risks and make
mistakes. As highlighted at chapter two of this work, within the FLOSS case trial and error
approaches constitute a vital element of learning, with the results often being shared within
the community.
Applied within virtual networked environments cooperative / collaborative learning is also
referred to as Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). The opportunities
CSCL offers are seen in enabling collaboration, interactive learning, and new pedagogical
approaches that can lead to changes in the way students and faculty interact (Kim, 2000).
CSCL practices are more and more implemented at K-12 educational level throughout
Europe being described as a promising pedagogical paradigm (Dean & Leinonen, 2004).
The ITCOLE project analyzed the impact of CSCL on students’ learning, involving 80
schools at K-12 level in 4 different countries. Teachers involved at this project agreed that
the use of the electronic learning environments supported collaboration among students,
but also concluded that knowledge building with students is a complex process, (especially
when not explicitly guided by teachers) and that in addition to virtual meetings, face-to-
face meetings were necessary to support students within their learning process (Dean &
Leinonen, 2004).
Since cooperative / collaborative learning is seen to be desirable within a formal
educational setting, and a common way of learning within the FLOSS context, it appears to
be equally desirable to identify and transfer the underlying FLOSS principles that foster
66
such type of learning in the FLOSS case. Drawing on the earlier chapter two, preconditions
that might be established for the design of online learning environments within an
educational settings that are similar to the FLOSS case, are to create situations that allow
for and foster real experience; a cooperative development; cooperative learning from peers;
to be responsible for one another's learning as well as the own; an active exchange of ideas
within groups; informal learning spaces and opportunities that provide freedom to ‘try
things out’, to adopt multiple roles, to make use of prior knowledge, or to take risks and
make mistakes.
3.4 Problem, Case, Project and Inquiry Based Learning
Learning in FLOSS is problem based as people often come together to collaboratively
‘scratch an itch’ (Bolstad, 2006) and to solve ill-structured problems (Scharff, 2002). In the
FLOSS context, all pre-described models apply simultaneously. In other words, working in
a FLOSS context can be problem, project, case based, or inquiry based, depending on the
point of view, on the objective or on the moment. As an example, ‘project based’ work is
often aimed at solving a ‘problem’, with the ‘problem solving process’ involving some
type of ‘inquiry’ and the result of all of this potentially becoming a ‘case’ for others.
Therefore, and within a FLOSS context, the terms ‘project’ is often interchangeable with
the terms ‘problem’, ‘case’ or ‘inquiry’.
3.4.1 Problem Based Learning
According to Savery (2006), problem based learning is an instructional and learner centred
approach that empowers the learners to conduct research, to integrate theory and practice,
and to apply knowledge and skills in order to develop a solution to an identified problem.
A critical aspect for the success of such an approach is to articulate ill-structured problems,
to guide students within their learning process and to conduct a thorough debriefing at the
67
conclusion of the learning experience (Savery, 2006). Jonassen (1999) emphasizes that the
problem should not be overly prescribed. Rather, it should be ill-defined or ill-structured,
so that some aspects of the problem are emergent and definable by the learners. Ill-
structured problems have unstated goals and constraints and have multiple solutions,
solution paths, or no solutions at all. Problem based learning is seen to help developing the
ability to think critically, analyze and solve complex, real-world problems, to find,
evaluate, and use appropriate learning resources; to work cooperatively, to demonstrate
effective communication skills, and to use content knowledge and intellectual skills to
become continual learners (Duch, Groh & Allen, 2001)
Although problems in FLOSS are often ill-structured, learners can not rely on being
provided with guidance, nor with a debriefing at the end. Contrary to this, learners in
FLOSS are expected to first check if a similar learning process has been documented and
to learn from those through re-experience. If this is not the case, or if the documentation is
not comprehensive enough, learners might request additional help and guidance (for
example through posting to the forums).
3.4.2 Case Based Learning
A case might be a story, a written narrative of a real-world event, a particular situation, or
an experience connection those situations to more general principals, theories, methods, or
standards (Hachen, 1996; Shulman, 2000). A case might be used as a case study for a
partial simulation of a real world problem in a controlled environment (Ward, 1998). Cases
or case studies are often used by professionals to make sense of their practice and provide
alternative ways for the mind to organize and store information, elaborate existing
understandings, and potentially transform one’s professional view (Morison, 2001).
Benham (1996) suggests the following steps to apply case based approaches:
1. Clarify the facts of the case and identify the issues involved.
68
2. Explore the case from multiple perspectives and learn how to ‘frame’ the
situation within its particular context.
3. Use professional knowledge (from research and/or personal experience) to
discuss the case.
4. Propose possible decisions and action plans to solve the dilemma or identify
and explain examples of best practice in the domain.
5. Determine the consequences of alternative courses of action.
6. Choose and justify a solution, and create a plan to evaluate its effectiveness.
Within the FLOSS context cases could emerge as a result of for example a ‘project based’
work that is often addressed at solving a ‘problem’ under involvement of some type of
‘inquiry’. It is therefore rather the result of a chain of actions, than a planned activity of
compiling a case.
3.4.3 Project-Based Learning
Within project based learning learners focus on complex projects, which might consist of a
number of cases, debating ideas, plan and conduct their own experiments, and
communicate their findings (Krajcik et al., 1994). Within a project based approach learners
are usually provided with specifications for a desired end product (build a rocket, design a
website, etc.) with the learning process being more oriented to following correct
procedures. While working on a project, learners are likely to encounter several ‘problems’
that generate ‘teachable moments’ (Lehman et al., 2006). Problem and project based
learning appear to be relatively similar. Esch (1998), however, offers two helpful continua
for distinguishing between the first and the later:
69
The extent to which the end product is the organizing centre of the project.
Within project based learning the end product drives the planning, production, and
evaluation process, meanwhile for problem based learning the inquiry and research is the
primary focus of the learning process.
The extent to which a problem is the organizing centre of the project.
Within project based learning it is implicitly assumed that any number of problems will
arise and students will require problem solving skills to overcome them, meanwhile
problem based learning begins with a clearly articulated problem and require a set of
conclusions and / or solution.
Within the FLOSS context Esch’s distinction appears to apply too: The overall objective of
each FLOSS project is to produce a “software product”, hence it is project based.
However, as part of this development process very likely a number of problems will
emerge that need to be resolved, in which case the focus would shift to a problem solving
one.
3.4.4 Inquiry Based Learning
Inquiry is the process used by scientists to build up evidence-based understanding of the
natural world in which learners learn about the world by using inquiry. Albeit learners
rarely discover truly new knowledge research indicates that when engaged in inquiry
learners at least tend to build knowledge that is new to them (NLIST, 2001). Inquiry
Instruction is a learner centred method of teaching and learning (Pellegrino, 2002) with
inquiry based teaching being the art of creating situations in which students take on the
role of scientists (Wainwright, nd). Inquiry instruction is based on the premise of learning
through investigation where students are investigating problems through the analysis,
synthesis, and generalization of data that they have collected through questioning,
70
observing, or experimenting (Doolittle, 2002). Inquiry based learning follows a number of
activities, as illustrated in Figures 3-2 and 3.3.
Figure 3-2: Inquiry based activities (The Inquiry Page, n.d.)
Figure 3-3: Inquiry based activities (Hooked on Thinking Inquiry Model, 2009)
Following Doolittle (2002), inquiry based approaches are suitable to foster critical thinking
skills, for inductive reasoning, to support problem solving or the student’s self-regulation
of learning. Bodzin (2004) notes that inquiry based approaches are promising to allow
students become scientifically literate, which he sees to be one of the required key skills of
modern knowledge societies. Inquiry based approaches are also seen to be particularly
suitable for online learning activities, since the Web facilitates learning experiences that
71
are open, flexible, and distributed and further provides plenty of opportunities to engage,
interact, and allows efficient instruction (Kahn, 2001).
The ‘Progressive Inquiry Model’ as for example suggested by the ‘Centre for Research on
Networked Learning and Knowledge Building’3 of the University of Helsinki, Finland,
promotes the idea of introducing a continuous inquiry cycle to support computer supported
collaborative learning (CSCL) as illustrated in Figure 3-4. The progressive inquiry model,
PI-Model, aims to establish a sustainable process of advancing and building knowledge,
entailing that new knowledge is not simply assimilated but constructed through solving
problems of understanding. Characteristic of this kind of inquiry, compared to direct
assimilation, is that the student treats new information as something problematic that needs
to be explained (Dean & Leinonen, 2004).
Figure 3-4: Basic structure of the Progressive Inquiry (PI) Model (The Progressive Inquiry Model,
n.d.)
The PI model is grounded in the idea of facilitating the same kind of good and productive
practices that characterize scientific research communities in education, to imitate those
3
URL: http://www.helsinki.fi/science/networkedlearning/eng/index.html
72
characteristics within the classroom and therefore encouraging students to engage in an
extended process of question and explanation driven inquiry (Dean & Leinonen, 2004).
The PI model further suggests that students should be guided in setting up their own
research questions and working theories that are made publicly available to foster
collaboration (CSCL) and therefore allowing for improving shared ideas and explanations
or the search for new information to support ideas and theories (Dean & Leinonen, 2004).
Students should also be encouraged to publish the results of their work, not only to allow
reflecting on those results, but also for them (the results / published work) to become a
learning resource for future students. Therefore progressive inquiry promotes a project’s
based approach, where the results of those projects (for example slideshows, project
reports, posters, artifacts, etc.) help students to externalize and clarify their ideas and to
share them with others. To allow this type of progressive inquiry it is important to provide
students with virtual learning environments that provide tools for supporting the inquiry
process, the sharing of knowledge, or expertise (Dean & Leinonen, 2004). The PI model is
closely aligned to learning as it takes place in FLOSS and the underlying learning
environment. As noted by Dean & Leinonen (2004) the PI model does not depend on
learning management systems (LMS), but might be used with common ICT tools, such as
Internet, e-mail, chat, or forums, which - again – is supported by taking FLOSS
communities as an example.
3.4.5 Summary
From a problem, case, project or inquiry based perspective the literature review presented
in this section 3.4, suggests that there are a number of preconditions that must be
established for the design of online learning environments within an educational settings
that are similar to the FLOSS case, namely to:
73
• Provide project or case based learning activities at which learners can explore the
subject from multiple perspectives, learn how to ‘frame’ the situation within its
particular context, make use their own professional knowledge or the knowledge of
others, determine the consequences of alternative courses of their actions, choose
and justify a solution, and create a plan to evaluate its effectiveness.
• Articulate ill-structured problems with unstated goals and constraints, multiple
solutions, solution paths, or no solutions at all.
• Create situations in which learners can take on the role of scientists and to tinker,
experiment, try things out, develop own research questions or working theories,
explain their own findings and ideas to others, and encourage learners to engage in
an extended process of question and explanation driven inquiry.
• Encourage learner to first check if a similar learning process has been documented
before asking for help. If this is not the case, or if the documentation is not
comprehensive enough, learners might request for additional help and guidance (for
• Encourage learner to publish the results of their work, not only to allow reflecting
on those results, but also for them (the results / published work) to become a
learning resource for future students.
• Provide guidance through the provision of: possible decisions and action plans to
solve the dilemma, or identify and explain examples of best practice in the domain;
specifications for a desired end product (build a rocket, design a website, etc.); or a
thorough debriefing at the conclusion of the learning experience.
74
3.5 Reflective Practice
Reflective practice is both a learning theory as well as an applied research method (see also
chapter four). Following Schön (1987) professional practice might be developed through a
continuous cycle of action and reflection, new action, and re-reflection, which – as a matter
of fact – provides some similarities with the inquiry cycle (section 3.4). Such reflections
might not always result in solving a problem, but on the contrary may even cause further
reflections, with all of those reflections still providing a fundament to encounter solutions
to a problem (Schön, 1987). Reflective practice appears to be an integral part to learning in
FLOSS, often going hand in hand with inquiry based learning, or as expressed within
Hemetsberger & Reinhardt’s (2006) work a ‘reflective inquiry processes’. Hemetsberger
(2006) notes that the collaborative nature of FLOSS communities causes many
practitioners to develop reflective practice, since they will have their contributions and
assumptions challenged, and may need to reflect upon the best solution to a problem, their
own communications, and when moving to another project lessons learnt from previous
ones. One characteristic of FLOSS, and a sharp contrast to collaboration in the physical
world, is the global access to a large pool of interested peers (Hemetsberger 2006).
Preconditions, from a reflective practice perspective, that must be established for the
design of online learning environments within an educational settings that are similar to the
FLOSS case, are those ones listed within the sections 3.2 and 3.4.
3.6 Learning Materials in FLOSS vs. Higher Education
The term ‘learning material’ could be defined as any entity containing a chunk of
information useful for somebody to develop knowledge in a certain context. It could be a
book, a URL, an instructor, an observation, a peer, etc. This definition is suitable for
formal education and FLOSS, as it is broadly expressed.
75
3.6.1 Interaction with Learning Materials
Interaction with learning materials is very different in FLOSS and in marked contrast to
traditional formal higher education. In FLOSS for example the interaction with learning
materials often is not with materials selected by an educator but rather those selected, and
as importantly, generated by the community itself. This includes as well materials as
commonly featured in traditional education, such as manuals or guides, but also access to
code, or the dialogue between contributors (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006; Scacchi,
2002; Stürmer, 2005). Unlike in traditional education where every cohort of students acts
in isolation from previous ones, in FLOSS communities the history of other learners and
contributors forms a vital element of the learning materials. In FLOSS such a linkage
between ‘different cohorts of students’ is a pre-requirement since knowledge is often tacit
and highly contextual and cannot be externalized and taught independently from its context
(Brown & Duguid, 1991).
In formal educational settings on the other hand educators usually take on the role that in
the FLOSS case is provided by the overall community.
3.6.2 Pre-definition of Learning Materials
Learning materials are loosely coupled in FLOSS, with almost all resources being
generated by the community: documentation, discussion, FAQs, and even the software
code itself are generated and continuously developed further and enhanced (Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt, 2006; Scharff, 2002). Despite the existence and provision of tutorials and
guides there is no such thing in FLOSS as a pre-defined curriculum and pre-defined
learning materials.
In formal education settings on the other hand ‘content’ is usually pre-defined at the
beginning of the course and will remain the same to the end of the course and over years.
76
3.6.3 Fragmentation and Self-Selection of Learning Materials
Learning materials in FLOSS are often widely dispersed and fragmented and consist of as
well internal as external sources that have been developed as well intentionally, for
example How-To guides, demos or introductions, or as a result of dialogues and
discussions, such as forum posts, logs, etc. (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006; Lakhani &
von Hippel, 2003; Crowston & Howison, 2005; Scharff, 2002). FLOSS participants are
free to seek their own knowledge by developing their own knowledge paths, while in
formal education the typical student is obliged to study the provided material. This
freedom however goes along with the responsibility of the individual FLOSS participant to
search through a variety of learning resources and discover the information one is seeking
for (Hemetsberger, 2006).
In formal education learning materials are developed in-house, context-based and
internally published and coherent, with a great deal of effort being given in order to
provide students with the right materials at the right time.
3.6.4 Validity of Learning Resources
The validity of learning resources in FLOSS needs to be determined by the learner. A
sensitive point here is that learning materials such as How-To guides, manuals or
knowledge bases have to be prepared by someone, a task which is considered as ‘trivial’ by
FLOSS developers, as reported by many authors (such as Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003;
Crowston & Howison, 2005), and so finding volunteers to do this might be problematic, in
particular for smaller FLOSS projects. Those materials might also be suboptimal from an
educational perspective, mainly because this documentation is fragmented and distributed.
In formal education students are supposed to take this validity as granted, with the educator
performing the filtering and collation task.
77
FLOSS production is a highly collaborative construction process targeted at solving
complex problems (Scharff, 2002) and characterized by commons-based peer production
(Benkler, 2002) with learning in FLOSS being often driven by collaboratively solving
complex problems. So, how do those key characteristics of the FLOSS production
(Scharff, 2002) compare against learning in higher education?
3.6.5 Personally meaningful Activities
Open source projects must be designed in a way that provides a potentially large group of
individuals with participation opportunities in accordance to their respective motivations or
needs. Through collaborative discussion and construction the community learns about their
mutual needs and then negotiates to produce something that has meaningful elements for
the various community member. For those dialogues the communities use collaborative
technology to share ideas (and software), or to engage in conscious creation of priorities in
the form of ‘wish lists’ and ‘TODO items’ (Scharff, 2002).
In contrast to this in formal education students are in general supposed to engage in
activities related to the course subject only, whether they perceive them to be personally
meaningful or not.
3.6.6 Solutions to ill-structured Problems
Designing software helps create solutions to ill-structured problems and there are often no
optimal solutions or any straightforward notions of the right answer. In such a context
learning is not about the acquisition of facts but it involves the continuous activities of
framing and solving problems alongside the learning pathway (Scharff, 2002).
78
In formal education students usually expect to be provided with the ‘right answer’, but not
to frame it themselves. They are also supposed to acquire clearly articulated and outlined
skills and knowledge, but usually not to create solutions to ill-structured problems.
3.6.7 Shared external Representations
FLOSS communities rely heavily on shared external representations and externalizations
are important as they can be easily shared and then reflected upon (Scharff, 2002).
In formal education students usually rely on educators and expect those to guide them and
explain to them what is relevant and what not. Reflection might take place upon topics that
are introduced by the educator, but it is usually not the responsibility of students to bring in
their prior knowledge or experiences to help framing a course and reflect upon the things
they brought in.
3.6.8 Collaborative Technologies
In FLOSS collaborative technologies are used intensively and in most FLOSS projects,
computer-based collaborative tools are the primary media for communication (Scharff,
2002).
In formal educational settings the classroom is the central collaboration space with the
exception of distance learning programmes.
3.6.9 Continuous integration of Contributions
In FLOSS, all user contributions are incremental and continuously integrated in one or the
other way providing an example of how boundaries in learning activities can be more fluid
(Scharff 2002). Many interesting problems are continuous and learning situations are often
79
constrained by numbers of participants, available time, geographic locality and neither the
problems nor the communities are static, but dynamic and fluid (Scharff 2002).
In formal education there is no continuity, but a start and end point with predefined
processes and content. There is also – usually – no structured approach to incorporate
students’ contributions into the course, so that they could be of use for next year’s students.
3.6.10 Summary
All of the points presented at section 3.6 show advantages as well as potential
disadvantages of the type learning materials to be found in FLOSS and the situation they
are embedded at. Despite being potentially rich, manifold and up to date, learning
resources in FLOSS are not of a guaranteed nature as in formal education. In formal
education a given curriculum must be studied within a given time, requiring a given level
of instruction and guidance at a predetermined quality level. Taking elements from the
FLOSS case presented at section 3.6 into a formal educational context would therefore
likely require to provide mechanisms that would allow to keep a certain level of
structuredness, to assure the availability of core learning resources or some type of quality
assurance of all types of learning resources featured; the ones provided by the educator as
well as those ones created by learners or leveraged into the course by them.
3.7 Summary
Chapter three provided an overview of learning as it takes place in the FLOSS learning
ecosystem and the type of learning resources featured. As has been shown, learning in
FLOSS is usually a mixture of more than one approach and unlike formal education the
learner and not the educator usually selects the learning materials, but perhaps as
importantly, those learning materials are commonly generated by the community itself and
80
also include the code and dialogues between contributors. To achieve similar conditions
within Open Course settings other than is the case in FLOSS it might be therefore required
to create learning ecosystems that not only include content rich, manifold and up to date
learning materials, but also the history of other learners and contributions made, including
a linkage between ‘different cohorts of students’. In FLOSS the communities use
collaborative technology to share ideas or to engage in conscious creation of priorities in
the form of ‘wish lists’ and ‘TO-DO items’. Open Course design therefore might need to
establish similar conditions, so that learners would be enabled and encouraged to articulate
what it is perceived to be personal meaningful and to help shaping the course and its
environment. Further on learners in FLOSS are not acting in isolation from previous
cohorts of learners, but the history of other learners and contributors, and their remaining
availability for follow up contacts, constitutes a vital element of the learning materials
(Weller & Meiszner, 2008). FLOSS participants also take on tasks such as knowledge
brokering (Sowe, et al., 2006) therefore taking information and knowledge forward and
backward between groups, communities or even language domains. One difference to
formal education appears to be that learning in FLOSS serves to directly apply the acquired
skills in practice. Therefore the learner selects what should be learnt and what might be
less relevant for the moment. In formal education however the learning objectives and the
underlying pedagogical approach are given and not negotiable. This can be seen as
desirable and required for formal education in order to allow students to progress smoothly
through their studies in a structured and well-defined way. Nonetheless, this does not
imperatively mean that students could not contribute to the learning processes and
resources and to actively help to improve the learning provision from year to year, as for
example also suggested by the Progressive Inquiry model presented at section 3.5. A well-
formulated curriculum for example does not exclude that students could contribute to the
course by – for example – bringing in their prior knowledge therefore enriching the
learning experiences for all. As described by Felder & Brent (2007), strong students
81
themselves benefit when supporting weak students, and therefore might be encouraged and
awarded credits of taking on an active role on developing the course further. A significant
difference could be shown for learning materials in FLOSS vs. Higher Education. Though
it is desirable to provide students with clear guidance and to assure their progress in the
given time, it is equally desirable to enable students to build upon the achievements of
prior cohorts, or to benefit from the lessons learnt of those prior cohorts instead of starting
from scratch. Even less able students, and analogue to newbies or lurkers at the FLOSS
case, would potentially benefit from the content richness to be found in FLOSS, or the fact
that they can easily follow the process that others used to solve a problem or to achieve a
task. Building on prior learning, such as already answered questions, might also release the
teacher to answer the same questions over and over again. The largest FLOSS user group
for example consists of lurkers that only observe without active contribution. This group
might be comparable with less able or new students that rather consume resources, but
don’t give back. In FLOSS however, resources are not consumed as browsing a forum does
not consume anything (except bandwidth perhaps), demanding teacher’s time does. But
even if time is consumed in the FLOSS case, by for example asking for individual help, the
output (answer) is again ‘in the commons’ and therefore could potentially serve as a
learning resource for others.
In answer to the ‘Research Question 1’ of this work, the key characteristics that could be
identified throughout this chapter are illustrated in Figures 3-5 and 3-6 and follow on
detailed. Figure 3-5 illustrates the key characteristics of learning in FLOSS, with Figure 3-
6 illustrating the characteristics related to learning resources. A scale ranking from 0 to 10
has been applied, in accordance to the descriptions provided within this chapter, to indicate
the strength of the respective characteristics.
82
Figure 3-5: Key Characteristics of Learning in FLOSS
This chapter further identified a number of preconditions that are key to learning in FLOSS
such as:
• To enable re-experience
• To provide structures and opportunities to build on what others did
• To allow and foster user contributions
• Modular design that facilitates contributions
• Processes at which participants engage around the content, discuss and reflect on it,
put it into context to related situations, develop solutions to it and evaluate how
they work out
• Structures that stimulate information / knowledge brokering activities
• To provide incentives, gains and win-win solutions for the various activities and
roles participants are encouraged to take on’.
83
From a cooperative / collaborative learning perspective identified key characteristics were
to create situations that allow for and foster:
• Real experience
• Cooperative development
• Cooperative learning from peers
• Being responsible for one another's learning as well as the own
• Active exchange of ideas within groups
• Informal learning spaces and opportunities that provide freedom to ‘try things out’,
to adopt multiple roles, to make use of prior knowledge, or to take risks and make
mistakes
From a problem, case, project or inquiry based perspective key characteristics of learning
in FLOSS included to:
• Provide project or case based learning activities at which learners can explore the
subject from multiple perspectives, learn how to ‘frame’ the situation within its
particular context, make use their own professional knowledge or the knowledge of
others, determine the consequences of alternative courses of their actions, choose
and justify a solution, and create a plan to evaluate its effectiveness.
• Allow engagement with ill-structured problems with unstated goals and constraints,
multiple solutions, solution paths, or no solutions at all.
• Create situations in which learners can take on the role of scientists and to tinker,
experiment, try things out, develop own research questions or working theories,
explain their own findings and ideas to others, and encourage learners to engage in
an extended process of question and explanation driven inquiry.
84
• Encourage learner to first check if a similar learning process has been documented
before asking for help. If this is not the case, or if the documentation is not
comprehensive enough, learners might request for additional help and guidance (for
• Encourage learner to publish the results of their work, not only to allow reflecting
on those results, but also for them (the results / published work) to become a
learning resource for future students.
• Provide guidance through the provision of possible decisions and action plans to
solve the dilemma, or identify and explain examples of best practice in the domain;
specifications for a desired end product (build a rocket, design a website, etc.); a
thorough debriefing at the conclusion of the learning experience.
As can be seen in Figure 3-6, key characteristics of Learning Resources might not be
always an acronym for ‘desirable’ and as has been detailed at section 3.6 might be
problematic within an educational setting, such as the validity of learning resources or the
fact that they are widely dispersed.
85
Figure 3-6: Key Characteristics of Learning Resources in FLOSS
As a conclusion of this chapter the main characteristics presented throughout this chapter
that could potentially benefit formal education in general and Open Course design and
delivery in particular might be summarized as to:
• Allow for a greater range of inputs – not just from the educator, but from all
contributors so the collective is the source of knowledge, not one individual.
• Provide a more personalized learning experience – instead of learning objectives
that apply to a whole cohort, a FLOSS approach allows learners to gather the
elements of knowledge they require.
• Foster a greater sharing of knowledge – in higher education much of the previous
input is lost, whereas in FLOSS the dialogue, resources, and outputs remain as
learning resources.
86
• Establish peer production and review opportunities – active engagement in
producing something with a set of peers is a powerful motivational and educational
driving force.
• Enable learners to engage at real activities – engaging in legitimate activities that
are not restricted to an artificial university setting also provides valuable
experience.
• Implement peer support mechanisms – a large support network provided
voluntarily by peers in a collaborative manner nearly 24/7.
• Create and nurse an open learning ecosystem at which the sum is bigger than its
parts.
Despite the advantages that FLOSS as a learning ecosystem provides it nonetheless is
assumed that there are likely to be a number of practices from higher education that are
desirable to be retained. To assure that learners would be able to study a given curriculum
it might still be required to keep a certain level of structuredness, to assure the availability
of core learning resources or some type of quality assurance of all types of learning
resources involved. Therefore some practices from higher education might still be retained,
such as:
• Educator input – although the educator may no longer be the main source of
information, they likely still have an important role to play in offering guidance.
• Structure – learners approaching a new subject area perhaps still expect a certain
structuredness and focus offered by a course, in which case means of providing this
reassurance within the looser community based model would need to be found.
• Learning objectives – it might be still important to set out for students what they
should be able to learn through the experience.
87
• Assessment and Quality assurance – some form of formal assessment and quality
assurance mechanisms would probably still be required, although the nature of
those might change.
With chapter two and three being focused on identifying and detailing the key
characteristics of FLOSS communities as a learning environment and learning ecosystem
the fourth chapter will present the methodology for the research presented within chapter
six to twelve, with the subsequent fifth chapter providing a robust framework that draws on
such key characteristics and provides guidance on Open Course design from an educational
perspective.
88
4 Methodology
4.1 Introduction
This work applies a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods. As detailed by
Scacchi (2006b) qualitative research methods appear to be well suited for research in
structures and processes within FLOSS, and as explained throughout this chapter will also
constitute a vital part of the research carried out within this work. Research methods
applied throughout this work consist of literature reviews, desktop research, case study
research, focus group interviews and reflective practice and (participatory) action research.
4.2 Steps of Work & Methodologies
The methodologies applied throughout this work vary depending on the research phases
and objectives as following detailed and as illustrated at Table 4-1.
Steps and related Methods Sources
chapter
Step 1 (Chapter 2 & 3): Literature review Literature & online sources
Key characteristics FLOSS & Desktop
as an informal and well- Research
established online learning
ecosystems
Step 2 (Chapter 5): Literature review Literature & online sources
Existing educational & Desktop
organizational frameworks Research
Step 3 (Chapter 6 & 9): Desktop Research Online sources, mining of online
Case studies of established / Case study artifacts & validation of cases through
89
practices of courses within Research the educators of respective cases
formal education that
operate to a certain degree
‘in the open’
Step 4 (Chapter 7.4, 7.5, 8 Desktop Workshops and round table
& 9.4): Key characteristics Research, discussions, mining of online artifacts
from the FLOSS case and / Application Trial, during FLOSSCom summer university
or Meta-design (1) that are Focus Group
also inherent within the work
reviewed Open Course
cases
Step 5 (Chapter 8, 10, 11): Reflective Workshops and round table
Organizational practice, discussions, virtual sessions and
frameworks for Open participatory qualitative questionnaire, mining of
Course design & delivery action research, online artifacts, qualitative survey for
qualitative and participants of the first NetGeners.Net
quantitative application trial (Annex 1.1) and a
surveys quantitative survey for participants of
the second application trial (Annex
1.2)
Step 6 (Chapter 11 & 12): Focus groups Workshops and round table
Revised hybrid discussions
organizational framework
for Open Course design
Table 4-1: Steps of work & methodologies
90
In more detail the objectives and methodologies per step included:
Step 1: To identify and review mature and well-established online learning ecosystems,
with the focus being on the Free / Libre Open Source Software communities (FLOSS).
Methodology used: Literature review, desktop research, including a desktop research
exercise in which 80 different FLOSS projects have been examined.
Step 2: To identify a suitable conceptual framework for this work that develops an initial
understanding of the nature of Open Courses and to identify requirements for and to
provide an organizational framework for such Open Course design and delivery.
Methodology used: Literature review, desktop research
Step 3: To identify and understand established practices of courses within formal education
operating to a certain degree ‘in the open’; with the objective to analyse analogies to and
deviations from the FLOSS case and Meta-design.
Methodology used: Case study research
Step 4: To conduct a comparative analysis of the results obtained through steps one to
three of this work with the objective to develop a deeper understanding on the nature of
Open Courses and to identify the different types of potential Open Course scenarios.
Methodology used: This comparative analysis has been further supported through focus
groups to stimulate reaction to ideas, to ask participants for solutions and to allow ideas to
be built cumulatively.
Step 5: To identify requirements and to provide organizational frameworks for Open
Course design and delivery. This fifth step introduces a hybrid Open Course organizational
framework that will be subject to two application trials.
Methodology used: Reflective practice and participatory action research and the use of
focus groups to stimulate reaction to ideas, to ask participants for solutions and to allow
ideas to be built cumulatively, including a qualitative survey for participants of the first
91
NetGeners.Net application trial and a quantitative survey for participants of the second
application trial.
Step 6: To provide a revised hybrid organizational framework for Open Course design
Methodology used: The development of this revised hybrid organizational framework for
Open Course design has been further supported through focus groups to stimulate reaction
to ideas, to ask participants for solutions and to allow ideas to be built cumulatively.
4.2.1 Sources of Evidences and Stakeholder Involvement
Stakeholders have been closely involved in the entire research process, including the
application trials carried out within the work and as detailed in the following.
Chapter seven: The FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU)
The methods used for the FSU included focus-group sessions with the course team and
analysis of recorded conversations and artifacts created by the different participants. Focus
group activities included two face-to-face sessions with the course team and educators and
practitioners:
• Workshop at the Aristotle University, Sept 2007 – Greece (target group: educators)
• Workshop at the OpenLearn conference, October 2007 – UK (target group:
educators and practitioners active in OER)
Chapter ten: The NetGeners.Net experimental application trials
The main research methodologies used for the two NetGeners.Net experimental
application trials included reflective practice and participatory action research and focus
group works such as:
• Continuous virtual discussions during March to September 2008 (target group:
participating students)
92
• Round table discussions, a panel discussion & presentations at the FKFT
conference, July 2008 – ES (target group: participating students; educators &
practitioners active in FLOSS, OER, Open Access & related)
• One round table discussion in Greece, September 2008 (target group: participating
students)
• One virtual Discussion with EDUCOO (Open Office Education project), January
2009 (target group: educators & practitioners active in FLOSS)
• Participation at Mozilla Educamp, February 2009 – BE (target group: educators &
practitioners active in FLOSS)
• One workshop at the OSS09 conference, June 2009 – SE (target group: educators &
practitioners active in FLOSS)
• Aristotle students’ presentations & round table discussion, June 2009 – GR (target
group: students)
Data collection methods for the two NetGeners.Net trials further included the gathering of
recorded conversations and artifacts created. Data collection methods for the second trial
also included a survey consisting of quantitative questions and a number of open-ended
questions as part of the regular end of term survey targeted at Aristotle University’s ISE
students.
4.3 Common Methodologies applied for Research in FLOSS
Research in open virtual environments, such as FLOSS, enables the researcher to access
data that are usually difficult to obtain and trace and to observe processes that otherwise
remain invisible (Scacchi, 2006b). These open virtual environments often feature
transparent structures and processes, with a large degree of communications, collaborations
and activities being recorded and stored, providing access to a wide range of artifacts, for
93
example versioning systems or discourse in mailing lists or forums, and ultimately making
this large amount of data publicly available.
4.3.1 Quantitative Research Methods
Research in FLOSS often uses quantitative research methods and instruments like surveys
to obtain information on perceptions, motivations and further quantifiable information
(Scacchi, 2006b). However, the use of quantitative research problems might be critical for
research that is aimed at exploring complex socio-technical processes that are highly
situated and interdependent (Scacchi, 2006b). Within of common research methodologies
in FLOSS Scacchi (2006b) found out that quantitative research methodologies are often
comparatively weak to qualitative research methodologies to analyse structures and
performance of socio-technical processes.
One of the objectives of this work has been to understand how to create similar socio-
technical environments, organizational structures and processes as to be found within
FLOSS and their communities and to better understand the nature of Open Educational
approaches, such a Open Courses, and the requirements on organizational frameworks that
would support such Open Course design and delivery. In line with the findings of Scacchi
(2006b) qualitative research methods were also seen to be the more appropriate ones for
the socio-technical environments analysed throughout this work. Quantitative research
methods have however been applied throughout this work for research questions that
investigated frequencies, such as the initial desktop research exercise on the type of
communication tools commonly used within FLOSS projects (see chapter two and three)
and also the Aristotle students’ survey carried out alongside the second NetGeners.Net
application trial.
94
4.3.2 Qualitative Research Methods
Qualitative research methods might be more appropriate to study “the structure and
performance of complex work practices, community dynamics, or socio-technical
development processes whose activities and participant roles are highly situated and
interdependent, yet occur in relatively low frequency and evolve over time” (Scacchi,
2006b p.57). The qualitative research methods selected for this work are reflective
practice, (participatory) action research and case study research detailed as follows.
4.4 Reflective Practice & (Participatory) Action Research
Reflective practice and (participatory) action research fall in general within the qualitative
research domain, though they might be supported by a mixed approach that also includes
quantitative methods. The work from Hemetsberger & Reinhardt provides some evidence
that both methods are a suitable choice for the type of work to be carried out within this
study. Reflective practice has been applied as a methodology to identify interests,
motivations, perceptions and experiences of FLOSS community member (for example
Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006), meanwhile action research as a research methodology
has produced some interesting findings with regards to FLOSS communities from an
educational point of view (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004). Apart from the
aforementioned studies that were carried out by Hemetsberger and Reinhardt action
research or participatory action research has also been the methodology of choice by
studies on FLOSS release management (Michlmayr, 2005), on educating software
engineers through FLOSS approaches (Jaccheri & Mork, 2006), lessons from a large scale
FLOSS implementation (Fitzgerald & Kenny, 2004), on developing cooperative
environment web-services (Motschnig-Pitrik et al., 2004), or the Moodle study on how to
use learning communities to create an open source course management system (Dougiamas
& Taylor, 2003).
95
4.4.1 Reflective Practice
Reflective practice is both an action that can be found in FLOSS (see also section 3.6) and
an applied research method. Learning in FLOSS itself consists of reflective practice where
the learners reflect on their actions. Thus the reflective practice as an applied methodology
is very close to the approach used within the analyzed environment of FLOSS
communities, though it might be assumed that many learners in FLOSS will follow this
methodology rather unconsciously and in a not explicitly planned manner.
Hinett (2002) defines reflective practice as “an approach, which promotes autonomous
learning that aims to develop students’ understanding and critical thinking skills.
Techniques such as self and peer assessment, problem-based learning, personal
development planning and group work can all be used to support a reflective approach”.
Schön (1987) distinguishes two types of reflections with the first one being a reflection IN
action, which means to reflect on something while doing it, and the second being reflection
ON action, which is a retrospective reflection after having done something. The difference
of reflection IN action and reflection ON action is therefore the time at which the reflection
takes place, but also the knowledge involved. This is to say that reflection IN action is a
form of less structured and more intuitive spontaneous reflection, which requires a good
level of experiences or routine to be carried out within the very moment the action takes
place (Schön, 1987). Reflection ON action, in retrospect, on the other hand takes place
once reflecting on more complex situations in which it would not have been possible to
reflect at the very moment intuitively (Schön, 1987). Schön (1987) also points out that
reflection might not always result in solving a problem, but might on the contrary even
cause further ones; at the very least, however, these reflections would provide a basis to
encounter solutions to a problem. The unit of analysis within reflective practice is typically
at the individual level, which might consist of a person or a group. Reflective practice can
be a suitable methodology to derive practical examples that can be leveraged to provide
96
practical advice, for example to advise organisations on how to improve their structures
and processes, or how to introduce new ones (Scacchi, 2006b). As a drawback of this
method it has been noted that it is often applied in a rather uncritical manner in terms of
prior scholarship or theoretical interpretation, or in an unsystematic way, which might lead
to the fact that the results of a study offer a limited basis for further research or
comparative analysis (Scacchi, 2006b).
Within this work reflective practice has been applied during the first NetGeners.Net course
round at which participants were expected to reflect on their actions. Such reflections, and
as detailed at chapter 10.4.4, have been taken place throughout the course and also at the
end of the course. At given moments of the course participants been provided with an
initial set of questions that then built the base for their reflections.
4.4.2 Action Research
Action research is the systematic enquiry with the objective to obtain practical results that
allow for improving a specific aspect of practice and to make those results available for
further scrutiny and testing (Wright, 2008). Action research, analogue to reflective
practice, follows a four stages cycle (Figure 4-1) that emphasizes the importance of
reflection on action (McMahon, 2007).
Figure 4-1: Action Research Cycle (Wright, 2008)
An important difference between AR and reflective practice is the planned action and
strategy behind AR and the continuity of re-progressing through the cycle again. Such
97
strategies of AR might include observations, interviews or transcript analyses (McMahon,
2007).
“In both models the reflection is intended to be transformative. In the case of the learning cycle this
transformation can be mainly internal (i.e. concerned with knowledge or attitude). Whereas, in the
case of the action research spiral, there is always an explicit strategic attempt to improve
practice…What, then, distinguishes action research from the reflective practitioner model of learning?
Are they two ways of describing the same thing? The answer is emphatically not. Action research is
distinguished by a deliberate and planned intent to solve a particular problem (or set of problems). By
its nature, action research involves strategic action. Such strategic action is not integral to the
reflective practitioner model of learning and teaching (though, of course, it may result). That the
reflective practitioner model involves going through part of the action research spiral (as expressed,
for example, in Kolb’s learning cycle) does not make it action research. Merely going through the
spiral (even all of it) will not result in action research.“ (McMahon, 2007 p.167)
Action research is driven by the objective to delivering practical results that can be used
towards improving or correcting a current state.
“However, in terms of the reflective practitioner model of teaching and learning, the strategic
dimension is not only the most valid distinguishing feature but also the key to an understanding of
how the two can be usefully related in practice. Reflective practice can be used to identify problems,
action research can seek to provide solutions.” (McMahon, 2007 p.168)
Action Research is also based on the interplay of dialogue and action, it emphasizes the
importance of emergence in sense making and might support change across organisational
systems by – for example – involvement of a group of ‘stakeholders’ that are engaged in an
inquiry process and collaboratively engage in a continuous cycle of analysis, reflection,
planning and action (Burns, 2006). Following Burns (2006) one challenge action research
faces is that the inquiry process often includes a small and relative heterogeneous group
only, with the results of this inquiry process being equally one sided. An alternative to this
could be to make use of large events at which all stakeholder groups would come together
to provide a heterogeneous inquiry space. The drawback of such events is on the other
hand that these are often ‘one time only’ events, therefore conflicting with the objective to
98
establish a continuous inquiry circle. During the course of this work it was the aim to find
an equal balance between ‘continuity’ and ‘one time only events’: for the trials presented
in chapter ten, it has been the attempt to make use of both small scale focus group works
that include a single stakeholder group only working together for an extended period of
time, and also ‘one time only events’, such as workshops or virtual discussions.
4.4.3 Participatory Action Research
Using Friedlander’s (2001) classification participatory action research (PAR) could be
understood as a sub-group of action research. PAR might be briefly described as action
that is researched, changed and re-researched under the involvement of the people that are
researched (Wadsworth, 1998; Friedlander, 2001).
“Action research is known by many other names, including participatory research, collaborative
inquiry, emancipatory research, action learning, and contextual action research, but all are variations
on a theme. Put simply, action research is ‘learning by doing’ - a group of people identify a problem,
do something to resolve it, see how successful their efforts were, and if not satisfied, try again. While
this is the essence of the approach, there are other key attributes of action research that differentiate it
from common problem-solving activities that we all engage in every day.”(O’Brien, 1998 p.1)
Participatory Action Research (PAR), like also action research, aims at providing concrete
‘solutions’ to – for example – identified problems. One of the main differences to action
research is, that PAR aims to involve the overall community to which the problem or
solution relates, including involvement in the problem definition and solving process.
“Action research will denote research directed toward a purposeful goal with a specific set of people,
with a consultant who manages the process. It is usually sponsored by an organization and is intended
to help fulfil an organization purpose. PAR, on the other hand, is usually sponsored by an independent
group or community, is directed toward the discovery of information about an issue or opportunity of
community concern, is aided by a facilitator, and often results in empowerment of the community of
people involved.”(Friedlander, 2001 p.2)
99
PAR also acknowledges that the researcher is, through his interference and his own action,
changing the subject that he is researching. This interference might be either ‘planned’ or
‘incidental’. It in general acknowledges that ‘things’ are not static, but dynamic and that
they are within a process of continuous change where changes in one attribute immediately
influence the others.
“In participatory action research, while there is a conceptual difference between the ‘participation’
‘action’ and ‘research’ elements, in its most developed state these differences begin to dissolve in
practice. That is, there is not participation followed by research and then hopefully action. Instead
there are countless tiny cycles of participatory reflection on action, learning about action and then new
informed action which is in turn the subject of further reflection. Every minute of every hour may see
participants absorbing new ways of seeing or thinking in the light of their experience, leading to new
related actions being taken on the spot. Often these will pass unnoticed and unrecorded, but with
practice these too become the subject of further reflection and group self-understanding. Change does
not happen at ‘the end’ - it happens throughout.” (Wadsworth, 1998 p.7)
As explained before, one fundamental aspect of PAR is the involvement of the participants
within the research process to assure a high relevance of the results for the target group
(participants). The involvement of the target group is also at the heart of the Meta-design
conceptual framework (chapter five) for the same motives as it is the case in PAR. The
systematic involvement of the target group is seen to be crucial to establish systems or
solutions that match with the expectations of the target group and are therefore ‘of use’.
Finally it might be noted that the boundaries between reflective practice, action research
and participatory action research as methodologies applied within this work are blurring
and – time wise speaking – overlapping.
100
4.5 Case Studies
4.5.1 Case Study Research
The term case study might refer to a case study as a unit of analysis, or to case studies as a
qualitative research method (Myers, 1997). Following Yin, a case study constitutes an
empirical inquiry that is investigating a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life
context and might be especially suitable once the boundaries between the phenomenon and
the context are not clearly evident (Yin, 2003). Case study inquiry copes with a technically
distinctive situation that features a larger number of variables of interest than it features
data points, it relies on multiple sources of evidence (Yin, 2003). Case studies are often the
methodology of choice for organizational studies across the social sciences and are used as
data collection techniques for example interviews such as one on one or focus groups,
observations like analytic memos, guided observations, think aloud protocol, or recorded
conversations at for example forums or mailing lists, but might also make use of available
video or audio data (Feather-Gannon et al., 2004; Kohlbacher, 2006). The case study
findings are often valuable for generating hypotheses or to build up theories (Kohlbacher,
2006). Having conducted a number of case studies on similar movements could allow
aggregating findings, to identify commonalities or to generalize findings (Goldsmith,
2004). Following Tellis (1997) case studies might be classified as either exploratory,
explanatory, or descriptive in nature; and could be either single or multiple-case studies:
• Exploratory case studies: they usually consist of fieldwork and data collection and
may be undertaken prior to the definition of the final research questions and
hypotheses as a help to frame those (research hypothesis and questions).
• Explanatory case studies: these are suitable for doing causal studies. In very
complex and multivariate cases, the analysis can make use of pattern-matching
techniques.
101
• Descriptive cases studies: those require that the investigator begin with a
descriptive theory, or face the possibility that problems will occur during the
project. This type of study implies the formation of hypotheses of cause-effect
relationships. Hence the descriptive theory must cover the depth and scope of the
case under study. The selection of cases and the unit of analysis are developed in
the same manner as the other types of case studies.
According to Tellis (1997), and similar to Scacchi (2006b), the unit of analysis is a critical
factor in the case study and consists typically of a system of action rather than an
individual or group of individuals. Case studies tend to be selective with a focus on a small
number of issues that appear to be fundamental to understand the respective case (system)
that is examined. Case studies research often includes ‘multi-perspective’ analyses at
which the researcher not only considers the voice and perspective of one or more actors,
but also of the relevant groups of actors and the interaction between them. A reason for this
is to give a voice to the powerless and voiceless (Tellis, 1997). Using Flyvbjerg’s (2006)
criteria on the selection of cases (Figure 4-2), the Open Course case studies presented in
chapter six and nine might be seen as an information-oriented selection, since their
selection depended on a number of prior developed selection criteria, such as for example
‘openness’.
102
Figure 4-2: Strategies for the selection of samples and cases (Flyvbjerg, 2006)
In conclusion it might be noted that the three experimental application trials that were
carried out within this work, and as presented at chapter seven and ten, are case studies
themselves and might be classified as explanatory case studies.
4.5.2 Case Study Indicators of this Work
The initial set of case study indicators has been derived from the results of the literature
review, including chapter five on the Meta-design conceptual framework and Courses as
Seeds process model. This initial set has then been subsequently enhanced by new sets of
indicators that were derived as a result of the workshops, experimental application trials or
focus group works. The initial and enhanced set of indicators consisted of:
Chapter 2: Indicators related to Key Characteristics of FLOSS as a Learning Environment
Key characteristics of FLOSS as a learning environment were seen to be: the first
characteristic: ‘openness’ or ‘inclusivity’; the second characteristic: volunteering and
volatility with FLOSS participants voluntarily deciding which role(s) they play or which
responsibilities to take on; the third characteristic: use of large-scale networks and the way
103
they are established and maintained; the fourth characteristics: content-richness and
specialisation and the fifth characteristic: modularity.
Chapter 3: Indicators related to Key Characteristics of Learning in FLOSS
Overall, the characteristics of learning in FLOSS deemed to be desirable were seen to be:
1. User generated content & a greater range of inputs – not just from the educator, but
from all contributors so the collective is the source of knowledge, not one
individual.
2. A more personalized learning experience – instead of learning objectives that apply
to a whole cohort, allowing learners to gather the elements of knowledge they
require.
3. Contribution to the process & greater sharing of knowledge – including re-use of
previous input such as: students’ dialogue, resources brought in by them, and
outputs produced that would be available as learning resources for future cohorts of
students.
4. Peer production – active engagement in producing something with a set of peers.
5. Real activities – engaging in legitimate activities that are not restricted to an
artificial university setting also provides valuable experience.
6. Peer support – a large support network provided voluntarily by peers in a
collaborative manner nearly 24/7.
7. Use of a range of technologies [for its usefulness] and being comfortable to act
within such disperse environments.
8. Informal learning – including access to peers and a community, rather than formal
structured support systems.
104
9. Open learning environment – The sum is bigger than its parts, thus open
educational models and scenarios might not be limited to students formally enrolled
at a course.
10. Underlying revenue models to assure self-sustainability – open educational
scenarios demand self-sustainability models analogue to the ones established at
FLOSS.
Chapter 5: Indicators provided by Meta-design and Courses as Seeds
From the Meta-design (Fischer, 2002) and Courses as Seeds (de Paula et al., 2001)
perspective analogies to be looked at and reflected on within the cases studies include:
• Standardization and improvisation; Meta-design encourages a large variety of small
user contributions. The reseeding phase of the Courses as Seeds / SER model
addresses this problem
o Seeding – to lay out the initial structure of the system that is supposed to
evolve over time later.
o Evolutionary Growth – a rather unplanned evolution as a result of user
perceptions, demands and contributions with the seed.
o Reseeding – to organize, formalize and generalize the created knowledge,
including structures and processes.
• Consumers are designers
• Enabling co-creation; environments must allow users to become co-designers.
• Ease of use revisited; ’Ease-of-use’, ‘burden of learning something’
• Motivation and rewards; users must be motivated and receive some reward.
105
• New design space of Meta-design; Courses as Seeds should be built by the
following characteristics:
o A growing and evolving information space, driven by course activities.
o Student-initiated contributions indicating personal interests and reflections.
o Rich interaction among all participants, as opposed to strictly between
student and instructor.
o Knowledge building, including extensions to the original seed as well as to
new ideas contributed by participants.
o Discussions and artifacts that can be incorporated into the seed for the next
course in a reseeding process.
Chapter 7: Results obtained through workshops and FLOSSCom Summer University
application trial
This initial set of indicators has then been enhanced by the results obtained through the
FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU) and the associated workshops. The main additions
to the initial set of indicators consisted of practices from Higher Education that might be
retained, namely:
1. Educator input
Although the educator may no longer be the main source of information, they still have an
important role to play in offering guidance.
2. Structure
Learners approaching a new subject area value the structure and focus offered by a course.
Therefore means of providing a sufficient degree of structuredness within a looser
community based model are important to be established
3. Learning objectives
106
It would still be important to set out for students what they should be able to learn through
the experience.
4. Assessment
Some form of formal assessment would probably still be required, in particular for
formally enrolled students studying for a formal degree. The nature of assessment
nevertheless might be significantly different to traditional forms, such as the exam, towards
forms that might include some type of peer-assessment, or in the long term an educational
counterpart to the system of meritocracy (Merriam-Webster, n.d.) as to be found within
FLOSS (see also chapter 2.7.1).
4.6 Desktop Research
Desktop research has been an important instrument not only during the literature review
phase, but also for the case studies and experimental application trials. Data sources
included the notes, publications, reflections, recorded conversations and artifacts, or any
other type of online available information that provided information on the design, delivery
and outcomes of the six reviewed courses, and constituted also a vital instrument for data
collection within the three application trials. The collection and review of recorded
conversations and artifacts created by participants is particularly suitable for research in
FLOSS and comparable virtual communities (Myers, 1997; Scacchi, 2006b). FLOSS in
general and FLOSS communities in particular allow an access to data and information that
would not be available in offline environments and might be hard to obtain in other online
environments due to the open and transparent structure that is inherent to FLOSS and the
tools applied.
“The world of FOSS does however provide a new opportunity for study that previously was
unavailable or at least uncommon in the software research community. One such opportunity arises
from the public accessibility of the source code and related development and communication artifacts
107
associated with FOSS project Web sites or FOSS community repositories or portals like
SourceForge.org and others..” (Scacchi, 2006b p.59)
FLOSS source code and artifact repositories have proved to be valuable data sources,
where the retrieved data can be subject to various types of analyses, both in quantitative
and qualitative terms (Lin 2005; Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006; Scacchi, 2006b).
Recorded conversations and created artifacts, are not limited to the case of FLOSS, but
inherent to all open online interactions and therefore constitute a potentially valuable data
source for further quantitative or qualitative analysis. Within this work the gathering,
review and analysis of recorded conversations and artifacts created constitutes an equally
important data source, in particular for the FLOSSCom Summer University, during the
NetGeners.Net trials, within the six Open Course cases, but also for the virtual meetings
and workshops that have been conducted within this research work.
4.7 Focus Groups
Focus groups were seen to be a suitable data collection method since they allowed for a
more open discussion and reflection on research questions and at which participants were
also able to interact with each other. Such a ‘free flow of mind’ on the downside however
results at times in a shift of focus as the group advanced by time with their discussion into
unintended directions (Lewis, 2007). One of the characteristics of FLOSS development, in
comparison to traditional product developments, is that developer and user are interacting
not only within the same environments, but that users are also co-developer, or at least
communicate within the same open communication channels, with the result of having a
higher influence on the product requirement specifications than is the case in traditional
product development (Eisenberg, 2005; Noll, 2007). FLOSS developer and user
communities, albeit significantly larger in size, provide some analogies to traditional focus
groups, but also particular distinctions, which according to Watson (2005) are:
108
• Focus groups rarely involve more than a hundred people. Open source can involve
thousands and still turn things around faster than more traditional approaches.
• Focus groups usually ask people to react to ideas. Open source asks people for
solutions and allows ideas to build cumulatively.
• Focus groups rely on a representative sample of people who are ‘ordinary’ and by
definition uninterested. Open source relies on people who are articulate, passionate
and enthusiastic.
• Classical innovation is usually driven by a single leader with a team following
detailed notes. The end result is faithful in letter and spirit to the original objective.
Open source, in contrast, involves individuals improvising against a background
score. Sometimes there is no leader or set framework and the results can be quite
unexpected.
This research work is attempting to make use of focus groups in terms of reaction to ideas,
to ask participants for solutions and to allow ideas to be built cumulatively. Focus groups
within this work are targeted at course participants, fellow researcher, educators and
practitioners from the open source domain. Its aim was to attract participants who are
articulate, passionate and enthusiastic and that are eager to make a difference to open
approaches in education, instead of focusing on stakeholders that might only consist of
people with critical ideas, but no constructive solutions. The interrelation of the different
target groups within the focus group work has been also illustrated in Figure 1-1, section
1.7, ‘research pathway & stakeholders’.
109
4.8 Surveys
The NetGeners.Net application trial made use of qualitative questionnaires for the first trial
and quantitative questionnaires for the second as presented at Annex 1. The second
application trial has been carried out in association with the ISE ‘Introduction to Software
Engineering’ course at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. As part of the course
evaluation the ISE course team each semester conducts a students’ survey, to which a
number of questions related to the NetGeners.Net trial has been added as displayed at
annex 1.2. Questions consisted of basic quantitative questions (yes / no option) and open-
ended questions that the ISE team has translated to Greek, with the students’ answers being
subsequently translated back by the course team to English.
110
5 Conceptual Framework: Meta-design & Courses as Seeds (SER)
5.1 Introduction
Having had a look at FLOSS communities as an example of mature learning ecosystems
and at learning in FLOSS and associated pedagogies this chapter aims at introducing a
conceptual framework that would support the design and growing of courses that follow
some of the FLOSS principles identified at chapters two and three and that draw on the
collaborative power of the internet or the digital literacy of learners and their potential to
act as co-designer in a collaborate manner together with their peers by engaging in
personal meaningful tasks. Brown and Adler (2008) for example describe the importance
of social learning and the emergence of Open Participatory Learning Ecosystems (OPLE)
to support social learning styles. Following their description OPLE consist of lightweight,
bottom-up, emergent socio-technical structures with a shifted focus from the content of a
subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is
situated. Within the concept of social learning they further explain the effectiveness of
learning groups, of learners taking on different roles such as teacher, the importance of not
only ‘learning about’ the subject matter but also ‘learning to be’ a full participant in the
field, and how to acquire those skills through practice, plus gaining soft skills on the fly as
part of their learning activities. As an example Brown and Adler point to FLOSS
communities and also Wikipedia, which are showing how the digital preservation and
availability of processes and products enable a new kind of critical reading that they
describe as almost a new form of literacy that calls on the reader to consider what
information might be reliable or important (Brown and Adler, 2008)
Equally inspired by the FLOSS case are the Meta-design conceptual framework (Fischer,
2007) and underlying Courses as Seeds process model (de Paula et al., 2001). Both are
aimed to support the design and growing of courses that follow some of the FLOSS
principles and that are based on the notion of the collaborative power of the internet
111
(technical component) and a general increasing digital literacy of learners and their
potential to act as co-designer in a collaborate manner together with their peers by
engaging in personal meaningful tasks (social component). Meta-design and its underlying
Courses as Seeds process model want to provide practical solutions to the changing
educational demands as for example outlined by Wiley (2006). They recognize the need of
lifelong learning and the role and value that ICT and the Internet can add to education.
They further recognize that citizens in the information age need an enlarged set of skills
beyond the ones traditionally taught at school, like writing, reading and mathematics.
Those new skills include internet literacy, critical and analytical thinking, self-learning
abilities, to cope with ill structured problems in complex virtual environments that involve
heterogeneous teams (Fischer & Sugimoto, 2006).
5.2 Community Based vs. Traditional Course Design
Meta-design and Courses as Seeds do not consider the design of courses as a ‘one-time-
only’ activity at which updates and revisions would take place only periodically and at pre-
defined dates. Within Meta-design and Courses as Seeds the learners’ role is not
considered to be the one of a ‘consumer’ only, but instead to take on an active role as a co-
producer with regards to the course design, development and framing. Learners’ as co-
producer and developer actively shape and develop the course, its environment and the
resources further throughout the course and as part of their learning activities. This is very
much in line with the FLOSS case, but in marked contrast to the traditional notion of
course design and the types of stakeholders and the roles they assume within those
traditional course design approaches. As detailed in chapter two and three, FLOSS
communities provides users with various types of learning resources, the ‘common’ ones
that also can be found in traditional educational settings, like manuals, tutorials, or wikis;
but also resources that might not be recognized at first as learning resources or content.
112
Those types of content sources, like for example at mailing lists, forums, blogs or source
code control systems (SVS / CVS), help to make learning processes visible and to avoid
answering the same questions over and over again. As shown in Figure 5-1, one common
aspect of all of the different types of content is that they are jointly generated by users and
developers and after their generation continuously updated and improved (Glott et al.,
2007).
Figure 5-1: FLOSS community places – example Ubuntu project (Meiszner et al., 2008b p.2)
In the 2008 work of Iiyoshi & Kumar on “Opening up education” – a book dedicated to the
emerging field of open education – Lee (in Iiyoshi & Kumar, 2008 p.58) concludes that the
“simplistic pigeonholing of tutor and student is about 30 years out of date already, so to see
it replicated in IT systems developed this century indicates a major flaw in the design
process - namely a gap between system designers and practitioners, or more probably
highlighting a different target market”. In traditional educational settings the course design,
the development of the virtual learning environments, the selection of communication and
collaboration tools, or the selection of learning resources is usually the product of few
authors with few contributions from people other than authors. This content is infrequent
released and feedback to it is only seldom considered, resulting in a low degree of updates
113
with no continuous development cycle (González-Barahona et al., 2005a, 2005b). Learning
usually does not include the prior learning outcomes and processes of learners, which are
consequently not systematically available and searchable for future learners as one can see
it in FLOSS at for example mailing lists, forums or within the commented code (Meiszner
et al., 2008b). On a reflection on Learning Design Dalziel (in Iiyoshi & Kumar, 2008
p.376) recognizes that if one “could share descriptions of educational processes together
with advice on the reasons for their design, then not only could a novice educator benefit
from the work of experts, but all educators could collectively adapt and improve each
others’ work, leading to improved quality overall” and then continues to ask: “Could the
collaborative development processes of open source software be applied to open teaching?
Harnessing the collective expertise of the world’s educators to achieve greater efficiency
and improved quality would transform education as we know it.” Despite considering the
FLOSS case as a reference Dalziel emphasis that course design and stakeholders involved
seems to mirror a rather traditional point of view in which the course design and shaping is
the solely responsibility of educators. The production models and the underlying
complexity of production is still very different to what one can observe in FLOSS, or the
Web at large (Glott et al., 2007; Weller et al., 2008). Figure 5-2 provides an example of the
content production approach in traditional educational settings. As one can see, this
approach follows the traditional expert model with complex and well-defined development
structures. Students’ learning processes, outcomes and contributions for example are not
considered in this model and students’ involvement appears to be limited to providing
some feedback on the final product.
114
Figure 5-2: Learning resources in traditional education – Expert Production Model (Diagram:
Workflow for metadata creation for Learning materials, 2006)
The FLOSS model on the other hand combines expert production with users input, plus
featuring additional user generated contents in various forms, formats and that was built for
various purposes at various times (Scacchi, 2002; Hemetsberger, 2006). The production of
the software within FLOSS, or at least the core code of it, might be comparable with the
expert production model as shown in Figure 5-2, but FLOSS community members at large,
and as illustrated in Figure 5-3, are equally valuable contributors that create content ‘on the
fly’ due to their interactions and activities, but also in a more organized way by compiling
manuals, instructions and live demos, or by establishing own sub-projects to extend the
core functionalities of a respective software (Glott et al., 2007; Weller et al., 2008).
115
Figure 5-3: Learning resources in FLOSS (Meiszner et al., 2008b p.4)
The team of the Edukalibre project (González-Barahona et al., 2005b) for example
suggested that a course design approach that would follow characteristics of the FLOSS
case will potentially add a value for the creation and maintenance of educational materials.
The team argues further that those educational materials might be located mainly on the
Web and would be produced by groups of educators coming from different institutions and
being geographically dispersed. Those materials would also be used, commented and
modified by students; with educators and students using tools that enable them to
collaborate in the way FLOSS developers do, making their produced materials publicly
available to enable further collaboration on them with third parties (González-Barahona et
al., 2005b).
Unlike traditional course design approaches, models and frameworks the Meta-design
framework and Courses as Seeds process model draws on collaborative course design
concepts such as to be found in FLOSS; with the main differences between traditional
course design and Meta-design being shown at Table 5-1.
116
Table 5-1: Traditional design vs. Meta-design (Fischer & Giaccardi, E 2006)
5.3 Meta-design
The Meta-design conceptual framework aims at “defining and creating socio-technical
environments as living entities. It extends existing design methodologies focused on the
development of a system at design time by allowing users to become co-designers at use
time” (Fischer, 2007 p.1). Meta-design is aimed to support self-directed learners within
virtual learning communities by creating socio-technical environments that support new
forms of collaborative design. The framework pays tribute to the fact that future uses and
problems of socio-technical systems can not be totally anticipated by the design time, must
be flexible to changes during use time and allow for an evolution through changed or
identified user needs. The Meta-design framework also places users as active participants
within socio-technical environments that bring in their ideas and help to shape and form
the environment. The Meta-design framework is thus describing relatively precisely what
can be observed in practice within the FLOSS sphere. Following early pilots in 2001,
where the team of the Centre of LifeLong Learning & Design (l3d) at the University of
117
Colorado at Boulder (US) aimed at applying some FLOSS principles to collaborative
learning environments (Scharff, 2002), it was recognized that “emerging success models,
such as open source software and Wikipedia, have provided evidence of the great potential
of socio-technical environments in which users can be active contributors.” (Fischer, 2007
p.3).
“By allowing users to be designers, sociotechnical environments offer the possibility to achieve the
best fit between systems and their ever-changing context of use, problems, domains, users, and
communities of users. They empower users, as owners of a problem, to engage actively and
collaboratively in the continual development of systems capable of sustaining personally meaningful
activities and coping with their emergent needs. Sociotechnical environments evolve as a result of a
flexible and collaborative development process, which in turn modifies the terms of participation itself
in the production of software.”(Fischer, 2007 p.2)
Figure 5-4: Design time and use time (Fischer, 2007 p.4)
Meta-design is based on the notion of the collaborative power of the internet (technical
component) and a general increasing digital literacy of users and their potential to act as
co-designer in a collaborate manner together with their peers by engaging in personal
meaningful tasks (social component). Some of the key aspects of Meta-design are:
• Systems should be open to change during use time and involve all stakeholders in
the design process during design time and use time
118
• Systems need to be underdesigned at design time (Figure 5-4) to allow users
(‘owner of problems’) to create solutions at use time. Some of the fundamental
challenges associated with this are:
• How can we support skilled domain workers to achieve their goals?
• How can we create co-adaptive environments where users change because
they learn and systems change due to the users role as a co-developer and
contributor?
• How can we provide users with opportunities, tools and social reward
mechanisms to extend systems to fit their needs?
• The seeding, evolutionary growth and reseeding (SER) model to support the
appliance of Meta-design
Meta-design does not assume that each user would or should become an active Meta-
designer, but that users would reside somewhere between those both ends and that some
users would with time gradually advance from the passive consumer to an active designer
as shown in Figure 5-5.
Figure 5-5: The consumer / designer spectrum (Fischer & Giaccardi, 2006 p.8)
This consumer / designer spectrum follows closely the groupings that can also be found in
FLOSS projects where typically the largest group resides at the passive axis, with vast
119
decreasing numbers of group participants as higher as the level of activity and skill
becomes as earlier illustrated at section 2.3 and shown again in Figure 5-6.
a.) Onion Model b.) Onion-Pyramid Model

Figure 5-6: An organizational structure of a typical FLOSS community (left model: Aberdour, 2007
p.59; right model: Crowston & Howison, 2005)
Following Fischer & Giaccardi (2006) there are several lessons to be learnt from FLOSS,
including: making changes must be possible; changes must be technically feasible; benefits
must be perceived; environments must support tasks at which people can engage in; or that
there must be low barriers to share changes. Finding from pilots (Fischer, 2007) have
shown that even if users do have the opportunity to become active co-designer and
contributors they might opt out of making use of this opportunity, in particular if this
opportunity does not relate to their personally meaningful problems. Those pilots also
indicated that the Meta-design approach seem not to work out if users are brought into the
design process at a late stage, since users might feel misused of fixing someone’s else
problems instead of modelling the system in order to help it fixing their own problems.
General challenges in applying Meta-design in practice (Fischer & Giaccardi, 2006) were
seen to be:
• Standardization and improvisation; meanwhile from the industry point of view the
number of user modifications should be as small as possible, Meta-design
encourages a large variety of small user contributions. The reseeding phase of the
SER model addresses this problem and has analogies to the FLOSS system where
patches and small releases are integrated into the next major software release.
120
• Consumers are designers; a great amount of new media is designed to see users
only as consumers but not as designers.
• Enabling co-creation; environments must allow users to become co-designers.
• Ease of use revisited; ’Ease-of-use’ along with the ‘burden of learning something’
might be used as arguments why people decide to not engage in design. For this
reason even if building systems that support users to act as designers and not just as
consumers, one should be prepared that users still decide to not become active
(Fischer & Giaccardi, 2006).
• Motivation and rewards; users must be motivated and receive some reward. This
need to be addressed together with a change in culture (as the point above) as has
been the case in FLOSS.
• New design space of Meta-design; “Meta-design encompasses three levels of
design, meant as a new ‘design space’. These three levels of design can be
summarized as: (1) designing design; (2) designing together; and (3) designing the
‘in-between’. Such levels of design refer to the field of meanings that the term
Meta-design has developed in the course of its various uses. They correspond, quite
evidently, to the anticipatory, participatory, and socio-technical issues raised by
Meta-design, and highlighted in this chapter. We can think of the design space of
Meta-design as a three-fold design space (Giaccardi, 2003) aimed at integrating the
design of (1) a technical infrastructure that is evolvable, (2) a learning environment
and work organization that allows users to become active contributors, and (3) a
socio-technical system in which users can relate and find motivations and rewards”
(Fischer & Giaccardi, 2006 p.20). The different levels of the design space for Meta-
design are illustrated at Table 5-2.
121
Table 5-2: Overview of the design space for Meta-design (Fischer & Giaccardi, 2006 p.20)
5.4 Courses as Seeds
The Courses as Seeds (Seeding, Evolutionary growth, re-seeding / SER) process model
aims to support collaborative learning that makes use of community based learning
theories that are coupled with innovative collaborative technologies (de Paula et al., 2001).
The model was inspired by the evolutionary and decentralized development of open
systems, as for example FLOSS. The SER model sees Courses as Seeds and not as finished
122
products, which is in sharp contrast to the traditional view where courses are finished
products.
“The seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding (SER) model (Fischer & Ostwald, 2002) is an
emerging descriptive and prescriptive model for creating software systems that best fit an emerging
and evolving context. In the past, large and complex software systems were built as complete artifacts
through the large efforts of a small number of people. Instead of attempting to build complete systems,
the SER model advocates building seeds that can evolve over time through the small contributions of a
large number of people. It postulates that systems that evolve over a sustained time span must
continually alternate between periods of planned activity and unplanned evolution, and periods of
deliberate (re)structuring and enhancement. A seed is something that has the potential to change and
grow. In socio-technical environments, seeds need to be designed and created for the technical as well
as the social component of the environment.” (Fischer, 2007 p.5)
The SER model assumes that “the traditional paradigm of education is not appropriate for
understanding and learning to resolve the types of open-ended and multidisciplinary
problems that are most pressing to our society. These problems, which typically involve a
combination of social and technological issues, require a different paradigm of education
and learning skills, including self-directed learning, active collaboration, and consideration
of multiple perspectives. Problems of this nature do not have ‘right’ answers, and the
knowledge to understand and resolve them is changing rapidly, thus requiring an ongoing
and evolutionary approach to learning.” (de Paula et al., 2001 p.1) The model therefore
pays contribution to the fact that educational demands are consequently changing and that
students need to be prepared to become self-responsible learners that are capable to tackle
the various problems they have to face throughout their professional career.
A particular challenge of applying this model lies within the structure of current
educational systems and the cultural attitudes towards education as a consumable good.
Current educational systems are based on pre-designed courses with given and fixed
content and are usually limited to a semester with students (and society) expectations of
students being imparted this pre-defined knowledge, including just the right answers.
123
The SER model has the objective of creating a culture of collective inquiry where students
can take on an active role in their own learning process and where this learning process is
embedded in collaborative activities and supported by innovative technologies. It further
aims to enable students to adapt a mindset that understands that initial plans must not
correspond to final outcomes and that the students must be prepared for interpreting
unexpected results. One key characteristic of the SER model is that it aims to capture
discussions and decisions so that those could become artifacts that help future students in
their learning process, thereby creating an environment of current improvement and
building upon what others built. By its design the SER model does not aim at structuring
classes by a syllabus, but instead by a framework for planning and situated action within an
evolutionary learning process (de Paula et al., 2001). The SER model therefore is close to
the way FLOSS communities function (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004, 2006;
Hemetsberger, 2006). Another analogy to FLOSS is that the SER model is based on a
variety of small (user) contributions that would become part of the course, instead of few
and large (designer) contributions. This is indeed one of the characteristics that can be
found in FLOSS (Stürmer, 2005) where many participants are engaged in smaller sub-
projects that can be either integrated into the product (like contributions, modules, plug-
ins, extensions), or are of a supportive nature (like manuals, live demos, how-to guides,
translations).
The three components of the SER model are:
• Seeding – means to lay out the initial structure of the system that is supposed to
evolve later. The system should be designed by designers and instructors to be as
complete as possible, but still remaining open-ended to allow future evolution.
• Evolutionary Growth – this phase consists of a rather unplanned evolution as a
result of user perceptions, demands and contributions with the seed.
124
• Reseeding – once the system has evolved there would be the need to organize,
formalize and generalize the created knowledge, including structures and processes.
This phase might be illustrated with the major release of a new software version
that integrates all of the patches of the prior version, some of the contributions and
newly developed features.
As future users are likely to be more interested in contextualized content, instead of
individual assignments, the reseeding phase should impose a more general structure on the
content that makes sense to those that did not participate in its creation (Fischer, 1998).
As mentioned above the current cultural attitudes and mindsets within educational systems
proof to be – at the minimum – a challenge for the SER model to be applied. The main
differences between the Courses as Seeds model and the courses as finished products
model are shown at Table 5-3.
Table 5-3: Courses as finished products vs. Courses as Seeds (de Paula et al., 2001 p.3)
In terms of technology the SER model aims at applying new technologies not to ‘re-create
education as it is’, but to support activities like:
• Learning discourse and social capital – where courses should not be passive
repositories, but living information and community based learning spaces
125
• Building, referring, extending – as opposed to delivering pre-fabricated
information. Users should advance the state of knowledge, collaboratively
construct new knowledge and not only consume current knowledge
• Formalizing, restructuring, re-using – The contributions to each course become part
of the future course allowing future learners “to go beyond where they could have
gone if they started from scratch” (de Paula et al., 2001 p.4).
To reach those objectives Courses as Seeds should be build by the following characteristics
(de Paula et al., 2001 p.4):
• A growing and evolving information space, driven by course activities
• Student-initiated contributions indicating personal interests and reflections
• Rich interaction among all participants, as opposed to strictly between student and
instructor
• Knowledge building, including extensions to the original seed as well as to new
ideas contributed by participants
• Discussions and artifacts that can be incorporated into the seed for the next course
in a reseeding process
5.5 Lessons Learnt from initial Pilots at University of Colorado, Boulder – US
Early pilots at l3d intended not only to make course material freely available, but also to
consider the role of the community to allow an evolution of the academic resources. The
pilots aimed at applying FLOSS principles in educational settings at a university pilot
course. Identified FLOSS principles to be applied were (Scharff, 2002):
• Open source participants engage in personally meaningful activities.
• Designing software helps create solutions to ill-structured problems.
126
• Communities rely heavily on shared external representations.
• Collaborative Technologies are used extensively.
• Contributions are incremental and continuously integrated.
During the first pilot students were allowed to establish their own projects and build teams.
Unlike traditional courses those pilots did not expect students to study pre-outlined course
materials, instead the course was envisioned “as a collaborative learning experience where
students would gain exposure to the various conceptual issues through collaboration with
each other. One goal in the execution of this course was to think of courses as ‘seeds’,
rather than as finished products” (Scharff, 2002 p.3). The pilot course adopted the
following features to be found in open source projects: Students would engage in concrete
projects of their own design; teams created their own work assignments; projects have a
leader; projects have frequent, incremental, public deliverables; final project deliverables
were open; and projects relied on collaborative technology.
This early pilot study showed that applying FLOSS principles brought up several
challenges and limitations. One of the strong hurdles to overcome was the simple fact that
students were not used to act in such a somehow unorganized structure and to take on an
active role. This was seen partly due to the fact that students are used to act as consumer of
education, but also a missing day-to-day involvement into the design and evolution of such
environment. Such a day-to-day involvement might be problematic to realize as university
courses are of a very limited period – usually a semester or maximum two. With a 100%
community fluctuation it also seems to be challenging within the current education systems
to allow for establishing a community that includes ‘old foxes’, where seniors or
facilitators help novices become familiar with the environment, or where those ‘old foxes’
would act as information and knowledge broker as it is the case within the FLOSS
communities (Glott, Meiszner & Sowe, 2007; Meiszner et al., 2008; Weller & Meiszner,
2008). Students further expressed problems on addressing ill-structured projects, with
127
open-ended and lacked fixed solutions. Another result of the pilot, and analogue to FLOSS,
was that tasks or problems that no one decided to tackle remained unsolved.
Aspects that turned out to facilitate this FLOSS-type of learning were to produce
incremental deliverables with fixed deadlines – though unlike in FLOSS, or in the ‘real
world’, those deadlines were real ‘fixed’ deadlines and not arbitrary. One further
significant finding was that the deadlines seemed to help observing, reflecting and refining
the work, a key characteristic of learning in FLOSS (Hemetsberger, 2006).
5.6 Summary
As detailed within this chapter the Meta-design conceptual framework and the underlying
Courses as Seeds /SER process model appear indeed to be suitable for the design and
delivery of Open Courses. Meta-design and Courses as Seeds consider many of the
characteristics that are inherent in related ‘Open’ approaches including the FLOSS case
presented at chapter two and three. The Meta-design concept fits into observations and
results of studies on collaboration in FLOSS (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004, 2006;
Hemetsberger, 2006), the structures, processes and tools of and within FLOSS
communities (Scacchi, 2001; Scacchi, 2002; Crowston & Howison, 2005; Giuri et al.,
2004; Scacchi, 2005; Demaziere et al., 2006; Meiszner, 2007), or the different involved
roles and motivational aspects (Krishnamurthy, 2002; Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003; Giuri
et al. 2004; Ghosh & Glott, 2005b; Demaziere et al., 2006).
However there are a number of characteristics detailed in chapters two and three that
apparently have not been considered at Meta-design, such as the FLOSS support system
(Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003), or the required critical mass and to allow for continuity to
build up and maintain communities. The Meta-design framework further does not answer
the question on how to establish the type of win / win situations between information
provider and information seeker that can be observed at the FLOSS support system. The
128
framework also does not provide examples of motivation mechanisms to stimulate users to
become active, although Meta-design acknowledges the importance of finding motivations
and rewards. As a final point it might be mentioned that although the framework has been
applied at various pilots it seems that those pilots have not taken off by now.
Like the Meta-design framework the Courses as Seeds / SER model has to face not only
the challenge of not matching to current educational systems and cultural attitudes, but also
in finding the right motivational factors that would stimulate learners to become active
contributors. The SER model does not provide any clear details, nor evidences, nor good
practice examples, that could illustrate how to provide those, but only the general notion
that ‘it’ (courses, activities, contributions) must be meaningful for the learner in order for
him/her to be motivated to participate and that contributions could be further stimulated by
reward mechanisms. Another analogy that the SER model has with the Meta-design
framework is that it does not explicitly addresses the need of a critical mass of participants
and a continuous evolutionary community growth, to keep in some of the ‘old foxes’ /
‘power users’ and the people in between those and the beginners. Without the foregoing
mentioned factors it also would be problematic to create a community based support
system as to be found for example within FLOSS.
The suitability of Meta-design and Courses as Seeds /SER for Open Course design and
delivery, as well as the apparent gaps or weaknesses, will be looked at during the case
studies presented at chapter six and nine of this work, with further evidence being gathered
throughout the application trials presented at chapter ten, with an overall conclusion and
lessons learnt being presented at chapter eleven.
129
6 Open Course Case Studies: An ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ Perspective
6.1 Introduction
Chapter six will focus on ‘Research Question 2’ and is aimed to explore the nature of Open
Courses. This chapter, like chapter nine, will identify characteristics of Open Courses,
possible application scenarios, potential stakeholders within Open Course scenarios, the
respective roles, or motivations and gains of the different stakeholders involved. Together
with chapter nine and the FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU) application trial
presented in chapter seven this chapter further aims to provide information on the elements
of traditional formal education that might be preserved. The case studies reviewed will also
be compared against FLOSS as a learning ecosystem (chapter two and three) or the Meta-
design conceptual framework and Courses as Seeds / SER process model (chapter five) to
identify – inter alia – analogies and deviations. This chapter will look at established
practices of courses within formal education that operate to a certain degree ‘in the open’.
For this reason an initial number of four case studies of formal educational courses have
been conducted. Not all of these four cases feature the same type of openness, or the same
type of participation opportunities. The four cases could be roughly divided into an ‘inside’
or ‘outside’ perspective, as discussed in detail at chapter eight of this work. The ‘inside’
perspective refers to principles commonly found in FLOSS that also could be found within
a given course – this is to say that similar conditions to those in FLOSS as a learning
environment have been established within the course space. The ‘outside’ perspective
refers to courses in which the students have been ‘sent out’ into external online
environments that are similar or identical to the FLOSS case. This is to say that students
are expected to engage in such existing external environments, instead of operating
isolated within the internal course space. The first two cases presented at this chapter
feature an ‘inside’ perspective with the courses also being open to the outside world in the
sense of accessibility, but with little opportunity to participate. The latter two courses
130
present an ‘outside’ perspective in the sense that the formally enrolled students engage
within well-established open learning ecosystems, namely within Open Source (FLOSS)
projects and Wikipedia.
6.2 Case Study St. Cloud State University Minnesota, US
6.2.1 Course Facts
Course area: Introduction to Rhetorical and Analytical Writing (Spring 2008, Fall 2007,
Spring 2007, Fall 2006, Spring 2005 and Fall 2005), Writing in the Professions (Spring
2008, Fall 2007 and Spring 2007), Writing for the Web (Spring 2008), Teaching College
Writing (Fall 2007), Computers English and Pedagogy (Spring 2007), Advanced
Rhetorical Writing (Fall 2006), Computers and English (Fall 2006, Fall 2005), History of
Rhetorical Theory (Spring 2006)
Type of community: Higher education
Principle type of user: Students, general audience
Course Environment: Blogs, forums, wikis – (uses the open source software TikiWiki)
6.2.2 Course Description:
The above listed courses are all lectured by Matt Barton, an assistant professor of English
at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota (USA), where he teaches courses in rhetoric,
new media, and computers and writing. All courses make intensive use of Tikiwiki, an
open source platform, which allows readers to interact with each other through blogs,
forums and wikis. Following Matt Barton the small time investment that students make
learning these new tools will pay off immensely in the long run, with overall no persistent
difficulties encountered over time in using Tikiwiki for any of the students, and as
highlighted by student quotes below. A large number of students valued the experience and
131
reported that it helped them improving their writing skills. Some of the strengths reported
were that the courses are interesting, informative and fun4. Despite the overall satisfaction
with the course, upon being questioned if students would like to exchange 1 out of 2
weekly classes against online classes 11 out of 18 students declared that they would prefer
sticking to face 2 face classes5. The reasons expressed for this by the 11 students were all
going in the same direction, namely ‘more difficult to learn’, lack of ‘personal interaction’,
helps them to stay ‘prompt and on task’, or ‘too many distractions’ at home. For the 7
students in favour of this amongst the main motivations were ‘time saving’ and
‘flexibility’. Though one of the students also made clear that until his first distance class on
another course he thought online classes were inferior, but after this course his view
changed. Unfortunately there is no indication if other students not comfortable with online
classes base their point of view on experience or assumptions. Overall the students’
responses indicate that despite the value the virtual component apparently adds to the
course face 2 face lectures are still seen to facilitate the learning.
6.2.3 Course Particularities
Course activities
In each course the student is assigned to several projects, including by times peer
reviewing the projects of the classmates, with activities consisting as well of face to face
class discussions, as virtual ones within the forums or blogs. Each student is expected to
make a contribution of a least 500 words to the Tikiwiki site on a weekly base selecting
one out of four options: Creating a blog post and answering to one of the ‘suggested topics’
for the week or inventing a new one; creating a forum post and either creating a new topic
or responding to an existing one on the forums; responding to a blog post and adding a
4
Source: http://www.mattbarton.net/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Student+Comments
5
Source: http://www.mattbarton.net/tikiwiki/tiki-
view_forum_thread.php?comments_parentId=1213&topics_offset=19&forumId=2
132
comment to someone else's blog post; or adding a comment to a page or asking a question
about one of the assignment pages on the site.
Involved content
The content used consists of lecturer’s sources, including presentations, publicly available
third party literature such as wiki books or opinion articles; and students’ contributions
within the wikis, blogs and forums.
Purpose content was used / developed for
The reason for using the wikis, forums and blogs was to evaluate what students have
learned from the lecturer’s presentations and readings. Since the wikis, blogs and forums
are designed to give the participants an opportunity to share their thoughts and receive
feedback; they are seen as a suitable medium for students to apply what they have learned
and to put their ideas into their own words.
Involved stakeholders
Course participants are the lecturer and formally enrolled students. In all courses each
student has to contribute at a minimum 500 words to the Tikiwiki on a weekly base by
creating or answering to a Blog/Forum Post. In some of the courses, namely ‘Introduction
to Rhetorical and Analytical Writing’ the student has also to submit 5 projects and peer
review the projects of classmates. Therefore students are forced to become active
contributors, whether they want to or not.
Inclusivity
Access
As common for Tikiwiki all content of the forums and blogs are publicly available.
Contribution
133
Despite the fact that all of the content at the Tikiwikiare space is publicly available,
including forum or blog posts, only enrolled students and the lecturer can actively
participate.
Student roles
During the course students are not only acting as learner, but also adopted roles such as
content creators or peer reviewers of the classmates projects.
Use of prior learning
Students’ outcomes that are available consist mainly of discourse such as forum posts,
bloggings, wiki edits and further resources that previous students created. Students’
assignments in the form of for example papers are on the other hand not available therefore
limiting the opportunity of making use of prior learning.
Connection to further content
Students’ assignments make use of commonly available content from the Web such as
Wikipedia articles, wiki books and opinion articles. Thus content is not limited to pre-
designed learning materials, but consists of a broad mixture. A common point of content,
however, seems to be the fact that it is digital and freely available. Concrete outcomes
produced by students such as papers, reports or presentations are not systematically made
available resulting in the fact that discourse and ‘products’ are somewhat disconnected.
Involves peer-review
Students are supposed to act also as peers within some of the courses, like for example
‘Introduction to Rhetorical and Analytical Writing’ or ‘Writing in the Professions’.
134
Learner assessment
The student assessment varies from course to course. For example, in the ‘Introduction to
Rhetorical and Analytical Writing’6 course the students’ grade depends on the criteria as
illustrated in Figure 6-1.
Figure 6-1: Students’ grading approach I
The ‘Teaching and College Writing’7 course on the other hand uses a different grading
approach as illustrated in Figure 6-2, which again is tailored to the activities performed by
the students.
Figure 6-2: Students’ grading approach II
6
Source: http://mattbarton.net/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=English+191+Syllabus
7
Source: http://mattbarton.net/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=English+332+Syllabus
135
Existent support system
Support is provided both in class and on-line and in most of the cases through the lecturer
with peer support assuming a subordinated role. Since the courses make intensive use of
online resources the Tikiwiki webpage contains a large amount of explanations,
comparable to what is commonly referred to as FAQs. As it had become clear that those
students not being comfortable with using the virtual space are those not being comfortable
with PCs in general, an upfront warning (called ‘BartonCompositionChecklist’8) has been
placed that informs students prior to their enrolment and assists them to determine whether
or not the courses are right for them.
6.2.4 Comparison against the FLOSS Case
The main similarities to the FLOSS case might be seen in the activities students perform,
namely the participation in the forums, blogs and wikis, the peer review of the projects,
with all learning processes and outcomes of students are preserved therefore being of a
potential use as a learning resource for future students. Students’ learning processes at
TikiWiki, be it their own publications or commenting on the work of their peers, become
part of the learning resources for future students. However, there are some aspects that
limit benefits for future students: only students enrolled at the course can become active at
the environment; future students likely won’t be able to advance discussions with earlier
students, since they finished their course; the environment is open to enrolled students only
resulting in a 100% community turnover per semester and consequently there is an absence
of a community that includes ‘old foxes’, nor does it allow a support system as one can
find in FLOSS; concrete outcomes produced by students such as papers, reports or
presentations are not captured systematically resulting in the fact that discourse and
external sources are not linked to those and are therefore somewhat disconnected.
8
Source: http://www.mattbarton.net/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=BartonCompositionChecklist
136
6.2.5 Comparison against Meta-design & SER
Using Giaccardi’s (2003) course design comparison, Table 6-1 illustrates where the
reviewed case is situated in between traditional course design on the left end and Meta-
design and the SER concept at the right end.
Table 6-1: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study St. Cloud
The case of St. Cloud consists of both; some of the elements of traditional course design
and those ones of Meta-design. With regards to the SER concept a course seeding and
evolutionary growth can be observed to a certain degree, despite taking place within
relative clear and defined course structures that remain unaltered. A re-seeding on the other
hand is rather absent, although the artifacts created by course participants remain to be
present for future cohorts of students. There is however no system in place that would
assure that the contributions to each course become part of the future course allowing
future learners “to go beyond where they could have gone if they started from scratch” (de
Paula et al., 2001 p.4). There also seems to be no learning community to previous years’
students to allow some type of continuity and to help future students to draw on the things
created before.
137
6.2.6 Summary
The case of St. Cloud shows how conditions similar to the ones in FLOSS can be
established within a formal educational course. Despite a number of organizational and
structural similarities to the FLOSS case (chapter two and three) or Meta-design (5.4) there
are also clear differences: The case of St. Cloud is for example neither truly open, nor does
it make systematically use of the different types of artifacts created by the students’ such as
papers, reports or presentations; resulting in the fact that discourse and external sources are
not linked to those and are therefore somewhat disconnected, which is also a marked
contrast to the ‘re-seeding’ idea of the SER model (5.4).
6.3 Case Study Utopia Discovery / ADM - Douglas County School District, US
6.3.1 Course Facts
Course area: Citizenship, social studies, futurology (students create a vision of a future
society)
Type of community: K12
Principle type of user: K12 students, general audience
Course Environment: Web based tools consisting of free / open source software, including
wikis, blogs, calendars, forums, tags, guides, manuals, demos & use cases (knowledge
base)
6.3.2 Course Description
The Discovery Utopias Project9 course is modelled as an Authentic Learning Environment
that asks students to create products with real purposes and a real world audience. The
9
URL: http://discoveryutopias.wikispaces.com
138
Authentic Learning approach (Proposal, 2007) consists of ‘Six Strings’, namely:
Contextual, Connected, Collaborative, Change-Directed, Conversational, and Continuous.
This means that all course activities, assignments, and assessments are based upon the idea
that ‘learning’ can and should last longer than the course. The course applies the Academy
of Discovery Model (ADM) that is built upon collaboration and connectivity, all major
software and resources are based upon open-source and Creative-Commons platforms.
This means that all of the connections made with experts, all of the collaboration with
classmates, and all of the information resources can be accessed virtually for free. By
teaching students to use and improve upon existing free resources, the ADM teaches them
that learning is an open and collaborative process. The Academy of Discovery Model aims
at creating a culture of learning that will not fit into the traditional classroom. The ADM
does not assume that by throwing technology at students, learning will occur. It
systematically works to ensure that students own their learning by making it valuable and
relevant to their lives, thus incentivising the learning process by intrinsic means. Following
Wilkoff (2007) students enjoyed this new learning environment, which is important in
terms of providing the right incentives and motivations. In particular the virtual
collaboration with students from a foreign school has been mentioned as an exiting
experience for the students.
139
Course activities
Each year, the class creates multiple visions of a perfect society. This is to say that each
student creates his own project; expressing and describing his view of how the world
should be. At the year 2007 the students are, unlike at prior years, going to create a
pluralistic vision of perfection. The course website10 includes a wiki space at which
students’ are expected to answer all of the great questions of society (What is the role of
government?, What is the responsibility of the individual?, etc.) and come to a
collaborative consensus about what a society truly needs in order to run smoothly. The
students are supposed to follow a predefined course outline and to use the discussion tab in
order to debate their ideas and the history tab to see the evolution of their ideas. Students
are further asked to embed media to show their concepts in different ways; to link to one
another, creating a Web of ideas; to add pages explaining their thoughts, coming together
and splitting from one another at times. In addition to this students are further expected to
adhere to the blogging rules laid out by the course team and to those rules that they have
been set out by themselves in their perfect societies. As a final task students are then asked
to transform the Utopia Template into a working society of their own creation using
multiple types of text. During the course students are supposed to acquire skills within the
four following interdisciplinary principles of ADM (Proposal, 2007), allowing them to
pursue learning that they see as benefiting their own lives:
• Real literacy has a real purpose and a real audience.
• All history has a context.
• Math, logic, and problem-solving are fundamental to every-day experiences.
• Observing and learning about how the world works is a hands-on process.
10
URL: http://discoveryutopias.wikispaces.com
140
These principles aim to ensure an authentic classroom environment filled with student
ownership and engagement. Instruction focuses on project-based learning with a
constructivist base, in turn creating a platform for interdisciplinary study and thematic
exploration. Basic skills are more deeply understood because students can see their
relevance, and higher-order thinking skills are enhanced because teachers use the methods
of inquiry.
Involved content
Content consists of instructional materials, freely available content at the Web and prior
students’ projects. Content is manifold, has different formats and is built upon
collaboration and connectivity using different tools and environments. This means that
learning resources do also include connections made with experts, collaboration with
classmates, and all of the information resources the Web provides. By teaching students to
use and improve upon existing free resources, the ADM teaches them that learning is an
open and collaborative process.
The course aims to join collaborative and inquiry-based technologies of discourse with the
pedagogy of project-based learning, constructivism, and interdisciplinary study to create an
authentic learning environment that necessitates student ownership, engagement, and
achievement. All content and teaching decisions draw on the ADM model and ‘The Six C's
of Authentic Learning’ (Proposal, 2007) a kind of definition of what makes assignments,
assessments, and instruction different in an ADM classroom:
• Contextual (Relevant) - All information that is disseminated, and content that is
uncovered has a greater context in the past, present, or future lives of the students.
• Connected (Hyperlinked) - All concepts are linked to others' ideas, whether they be
original source documents, experts in the field, or student experts who already have
an advanced understanding.
141
• Collaborative - Each assignment has the potential for working with others to
brainstorm, create, refine, or revise.
• Change-directed - All knowledge is constantly changing, and so are students
understanding and demonstration of knowledge.
• Conversational - Understanding is created through thoughtful discussion,
conversation, and debate.
• Continuous (Spontaneous) - Students can pursue all of their inspiration for learning.
It does not have to wait until they get to the next class or until they get home
because they have access to the technology and the freedom of the environment.
The primary target group are the formally enrolled students of the course, albeit all
information is open to be viewed for anyone interested at it. On some occasions students
have also been engaging as part of the course with student from a foreign school that were
doing some similar work, though on a more informal base (Wilkoff, 2007).
The course environment consists of both: a central internal information space (the wiki)
that hosts instructional materials and projects from past years’ students, but also uses the
Web at large. Content is developed within the students’ projects by building on existing
content from various sources, involving a broad range of web-spaces and technologies as
following outlined:
1. Online interactive notebooks: students have all notes in the same place; students can add
pictures, graphs, and video to their notes; students can hyperlink to other information that
gives a greater context to the text; and a greater reflection can occur when students can
make significant connections between the four major disciplines.
142
2. Collaborative note taking: students can work together on creating a master set of notes
that can be used by the classroom. Because each student will get something different from
a classroom session, they can add their unique knowledge and perspective to the notes.
3. Curriculum Wikis that are edited by students: All directions, instruction, and resources
are easily available and editable online; students can influence the curriculum by making
directions more clear or adding a great new resource for the lesson and lesson plans
become both more refined and expansive when students can add new options that teachers
may not have thought of.
4. Thematic strands of curriculum that students could learn all disciplines within: students
can see how each discipline affects the others; students won't have to artificially separate
events from their context, literature from the economic concepts that helped to create it.
5. Synchronous and Asynchronous online discussion: students can voice their opinions
both at school and at home in audio forums, discussion boards, video comments, and
textual critiques, thus providing an avenue for all voices to be heard.
6. Online Digital Portfolios: students can take their work with them from year to year; they
can showcase their best work and receive feedback from peers, teachers, and other
interested parties around the world; each student's body of evidence is unique, and because
of this, more clearly shows their particular interests and skill sets.
Inclusivity
Access
All of the involved online spaces are accessible for the general public
Contribution
Only formally enrolled students are supposed to contribute directly at a given students’
project. There are however some spaces at the course wiki that do allow outsiders to
provide feedback, or even to start their own projects - though not as an integrated member
143
of the overall course community. The possibility of contribution further depends on the
context: Students’ own projects at the wiki space are supposed to be the work of the
respective student, with only those working on them. Other areas that are designed for
course internal participation only, seek contributions from formally enrolled students;
meanwhile some areas at the wiki space explicitly invite third parties to contribute. Once
students engage at spaces at the wider Web type of interactions and contributions also
depend on tools and spaces used.
Student roles
Students take on several roles, depending on their current activities and objectives. On the
one hand students are learners and inquirers who develop their own projects and with this
create new content and gain new knowledge. But students are also peers and collaborators,
both on an internal level, for example when adding their individual class notes to one
single wiki space, and on an external level, for example when engaging in online forums to
learn using a software or tool. Students are also supposed to act as internal support
providers by using their respective skills and helping other students that still lack these. In
order to circumvent the unwelcome stress and extra work associated with ICT the ADM
harnesses the power of student passion and expertise. The ADM prescribes a format of
student tech support that allows the students to gain valuable 21st century skills, while
providing a vital service to the classroom. As noted by Wilkoff (Digital Learner Mentors,
2007), “students are much more likely to learn how to be self-sufficient from a peer than
from a teacher; they may let a teacher fix a problem on their computer, but they will learn
how to fix the problem themselves from a peer. […] Students are always finding new and
more efficient ways of doing work on a computer, and this knowledge should be shared
and cherished among the teaching staff. In this students can adapt a mentorship role, where
both students and teachers become learners”.
144
Future cohorts of students have access to the projects and resources that last year students
created; with prior learning processes on the other hand being less visible within the course
environments. However, there are some indications, like within the course wiki11, that
some processes take place online and are thus available for future students.
Students’ projects make use of commonly available content from the Web or content that is
created by them at web-spaces as a part of their project. Thus content is not limited to pre-
designed learning materials, but consists of a broad mixture.
Students are supposed to act also as peers within the course environment, including peer
reviewing activities at collaborative web-spaces.
Learner assessment
In general students are assessed as defined by ADM through ‘Authentic assessment’
(Accountability, 2007) using Jon Mueller's ‘Authentic assessment definition’ in which
students are assessed upon performed real-world tasks that demonstrate a meaningful
application of essential knowledge and skills (Müller, 2008). This definition demonstrates
how ADM uses assessment as a way of furthering the learning process, rather than
detracting from it. ADM utilizes a portfolio system in which both students and teachers
will select the best work to be presented in the online arena. This type of assessment is
based upon two values: change and mastery (Accountability, 2007); as following further
detailed.
11
URL: http://discoveryutopias.wikispaces.com/message/list/home
145
1. Valuing Change:
Because each student comes into the model at a different proficiency level, the
expectations must therefore be different for each student. This model allows teachers the
ability to tailor goals for individual students based upon their needs and then take the
achievement of these goals into consideration in determining their grade.
2. Valuing Mastery:
Each core discipline will identify certain skills that can be mastered in middle school. Once
each student has demonstrated mastery of the topic, concept, or skill, they will become
certified to teach others. This model allows students to become experts and mentors for
other students, thus fully rendering the classroom environment a place of apprenticeship
learning. During the course students are then expected to provide progress reports that are
aimed to support the students’ assessment.
Besides support provided by the teacher, students inform each other about existing tools or
manuals that they found at the Web and also provide some type of peer support and
assistance or teach each other (Digital Learner Mentors, 2007).
There are a number of similarities to FLOSS as a learning environment and to learning in
FLOSS. The activities students perform, the dispersed environments they engage in, the
multitude of tools and spaces involved, or the way students engage with others and the
underlying cultural manifestation (openness, collaboration, etc.) are all similar to the
FLOSS case. This is true for both the course design with its underlying ADM model and
the manner in which the course is delivered. Project actions and activities are to a certain
degree pre-defined and students can’t pick up any project of interest, but need to work on a
146
given subject with (somewhat) pre-defined activities, which is different to the FLOSS case.
Students can however focus on areas and tools of their interest, and they become active
knowledge creators, or provide peer support, as is the case in FLOSS. Another analogy to
the FLOSS case is the modularity of the course with students working on individual project
assignments. The artifacts students create as a result of this project work are preserved and
are an integrated part of the course environment, with part of the underlying discourse
being also preserved, albeit to a much lesser degree as in FLOSS.
Despite many similarities there are also clear differences to the FLOSS case regarding the
type of actors involved, the roles adopted and the way the course environment and web-
spaces are used. All of the involved online spaces are accessible by the general public, as is
the case in FLOSS, but other than formally enrolled students are not supposed to actively
contribute. Albeit past students’ projects and parts of the discourse are preserved for future
students, content and discourse are not connected in the same way as in FLOSS and future
course editions do not draw on those sources or aim to develop them further. Therefore the
continuous improvement and evolutionary growth that is a key characteristic of FLOSS is
missing and there is no overall sustainable development of products and processes or
community growth. Also the type of support system is different to the one featured in
FLOSS as there is no large scale network of volunteering support provider, nor ‘old foxes’,
or recorded problem solving processes or other development activities that could serve for
future students as a learning resource.
147
Table 6-2: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study ADM
ADM is very close to Meta-design (5.3) in regards to the underlying assumptions to
learning and course design as can be seen for example in the ‘Six Strings’ of its Authentic
Learning approach: Contextual, Connected, Collaborative, Change-Directed,
Conversational, and Continuous. There is however a difference between the SER idea (5.4)
and ADM. Within ADM learners are expected to be come active contributors or designers
and to re-use and build on existing sources. To systematically build on all types of artifacts
created by learners or leveraged into the course space, so that they could be ‘re-seeded’ to
enhance the original course is not that much present within ADM.
6.3.6 Summary
Within the course students create their own projects, that become final stand alone
products that are integrated into the central course environment, with external project
sources (for example Slideshare) being embedded at the students’ project page through
hyperlinks. Therefore each of those projects potentially serves as a learning resource for
future cohorts of students. Unfortunately much of the underlying discourse and
collaboration associated to those projects is invisible, although the ADM model suggests
148
that a high degree of discourse and collaboration exists. Overall, a missing element at the
course, in contrast to the SER idea, is ‘to build upon the things created’, which easily could
be achieved given the clear structured integration of the student projects into the course. As
initially noted, students enjoyed this new learning environment, which is important in
terms of providing the right incentives and motivations. In particular the virtual
collaboration with students from a foreign school has been mentioned as an exiting
experience for the students. Despite the positive experience such type of collaboration with
other schools has not been followed up by now.
6.4 Case Study University of Washington Bothell, US
6.4.1 Course Facts
Course area: Environmental: History and Globalization; Conservation and Sustainable
Development
Type of community: Higher education
Principle type of user: Student, general audience
Course Environment: Wikis (Wikipedia)
This case study features two courses that are given by Martha Groom12 and illustrate how
Wikipedia13 has been used to support students’ learning. The two courses were
(Environmental) History and Globalization (BIS303, Autumn 2006) and Conservation and
Sustainable Development (BIS 459, Spring 2007). As part of the courses students were
given an assignment and supposed to research Wikipedia and write articles for submission
12
URL: http://www.bothell.washington.edu/IAS/faculty/mgroom.xhtml
13
URL: http://wikipedia.org
149
to it. Following Groom and Brockhaus (2007), the structure of the traditional term paper
can limit its educational value and to make the students’ assignment more meaningful, the
students at this two courses published their papers in Wikipedia.
The reasoning for using Wikipedia for students’ term paper assignments (Groom &
Brockhaus, 2007) was driven by the following questions:
• How to make a term paper a larger learning experience (rather than a limited
academic exercise)?
• How to provide authentic peer review?
• How to connect and engage an external community?
• How to make a term paper benefit a wider community?
• How to motivate students to do their best work?
• How to have students think more deeply about the issue of creating knowledge?
• How to go beyond just thinking about the paper topic?
The result of those two pilot courses showed that with one exception, students in both
courses felt that this was a valuable experience, superior to the typical term paper. Overall
there were no persistent difficulties in navigating Wikipedia or in publication to Wikipedia
for any student, but using external environments also means to give up some control
(Groom & Brockhaus, 2007). A students’ contributions to one article was for example
deleted within 24 hours of posting, another 4 articles were deleted after discussion and the
material merged into existing articles, intervention was required for 1 article and some
discussion comments from Wikipedia community were delivered rudely (Groom &
Brockhaus, 2007). As noted by Groom and Brockhaus (2007), not all went out just perfect
and some areas of improvement that had been identified were: too much choice that led to
some poor postings (which were deleted); the question of timing and publishing once at the
end of course that brought up questions such as, would it be better to publish in stages, or
150
would it be better to post a deadline with at least one week left to course; students need
extra guidance to create high quality articles in encyclopaedia style; need for more
instructor time to shepherd students through the entire process.
Course activities
For the first course in autumn 2006 students were given a term paper assignment with the
objective to large edit or to write a new Wikipedia article with a minimum of 1500 words.
During the second course in spring 2007 the objective was for students to create a
Wikipedia article or sub-article as a collaborative group work among students. The
improvement from the first to the second pilot was a more specific guidance and stricter
oversight on selection of projects and to focus on collaborative projects that allowed
greater student oversight.
Involved content
The content consisted of instructional materials, general readings and reviewing Wikipedia
contributions, that were made as part of the course in autumn 2006, the content /
information used to write the Wikipedia article consisted of printed literature and web-
sources, such as BBC14 or Annual Reviews15.
The reason to let students contribute to Wikipedia was to provide some meaning to the
college-level term paper, which typically has an audience of one (the professor) before
ending its career in a recycling bin. Groom hoped that assigning students the task of
creating a Wikipedia entry would make the effort more meaningful, since students were
writing for what might be a wider audience and with the intention of providing a general
14
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk
15
URL: http://www.annualreviews.org
151
public benefit. She also suggested that the project would be a good introduction to the
academic world, which focuses on the production and dissemination of knowledge. The
motivation for letting students engage at Wikipedia and contributing to it was that writing a
Wikipedia article can be a more sophisticated learning experience, that it enhances quality
of research and writing as well as the student understanding of the research process. If
further highlights importance of using verifiable and credible sources, increases pride in
work and encourages a collaborative model of knowledge creation.
Thus with students engaging at Wikipedia they gained a perspective on the value of
credible sources, and complete citations. Also peer review became a more purposeful
effort; with good critiques being more highly valued than bad ones. The results of the two
courses also showed that students invested more in their work, felt greater ownership, and
experienced greater returns for their efforts with the result of generally better-written
Wikipedia contributions than the typical term papers.
Part of the nature of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit the content from someone else and
so was the case for the contributions of the students. Getting familiar with the fact that
content is being edited on the fly, by people that one never met before, and getting used to
constant revisions by regular contributors was a part of the experience. Students posting
material to the site would also learn to stop viewing their work as ‘sacrosanct’. But this
Wikipedia characteristic of peer editing also led to a further challenge with some
Wikipedia editors didn’t find some of the students’ articles relevant enough to warrant
their own topics; meanwhile other contributions (Figure 6-3) were seen to be of sufficient
quality and relevance.
152
Figure 6-3: Example of good quality feedback16
Some students’ contributions were either deleted or merged (Figure 6-4) with existing
articles. That reality is in part a function of Wikipedia’s vast breadth, which already covers
virtually any topic in which there is sufficient public knowledge.
Figure 6-4: Example of insufficient quality feedback17
Inclusivity
Access
As common for Wikipedia all content is publicly available and therefore no one
Contribution
As common for Wikipedia all content can be edited.
16
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Communal_Wildlife_Conservancies_in_Namibia
17
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gralo#Renewable_energy_in_Africa
153
Student roles
During the course students were not only acting as learner, but also adopted roles such as
active investigator and researcher (Figure 6-5), as editor (Figure 6-6), or collaborator with
peers (Figure 6-7).
Figure 6-5: Example for students as a researcher18
Figure 6-6: Example for students as an editor19
Figure 6-7: Example for students acting as peers20
18
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MCoca
19
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Wildlife_Conservancies_in_Namibia
20
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Bracine
154
Prior learning that students’ could be build on seemed to be limited to resources created by
Wikipedia users that for example help contributors to learn how to compile a professional
Wikipedia article and how to use the involved technology. Additionally, students have to
provide a brief review of their ongoing’ discourse at the projects, which potentially could
be of use for future learners.
Yes, as common for Wikipedia.
Peer review is one of the characteristics of Wikipedia and therefore also student
contributions were reviewed by classmates and others (Figure 6-8).
Figure 6-8: Revision history of students’ contribution21
Learner assessment
Students’ work was assessed as well by Wikipedia users (Figure 6-8), as it was on a class
level to officially grade the students’ work (Figure 6-9). For the first course in autumn
2006 60% of the course grade was based upon the students’ work at Wikipedia, and for the
21
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Renewable_energy_in_Africa&action=history
155
second course in spring 2007 40% course grade (Groom & Brockhaus, 2007). The
students’ work within Wikipedia was assessed by the criteria as illustrated in Figure 6-9.
Figure 6-9: Assessment grid (Groom & Brockhaus, 2007)
Support is provided in class by the teacher and through one-on-one help and online through
the Wikipedia community.
Since students seemed to be new to Wikipedia they initially needed extra help shifting
voice from ‘essay’ to ‘encyclopaedia entry’. Thus initial support focused on the following
aspects: Technology issues and solutions, copyright, referencing, linking to internal and
external sources, or on finding topics to add to Wikipedia
Looking at the similarities to the FLOSS case one must take into account the environment
in which those pilots took place: Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself might be one of the closest
examples to the FLOSS case, though relatively different to FLOSS as a learning
environment. Similarities to FLOSS start with cultural manifestations and go up to the
collaborative production process. Therefore initially the similarities between Wikipedia
and the FLOSS model will be briefly described, before looking separately at the pilot
156
courses from Washington Bothell. As for the FLOSS case Wikipedia stands for some
freedoms, like:
• Freedom to access information from the commons
• Freedom to analyse and edit the information
• Freedom to co-operate
• Freedom to synthesis new information and contribute it to the commons
The most obvious link between Wikipedia and the FLOSS model might lay in the
commons-based peer production approach (Benkler, 2002) that both follow. Development
is tracked through versioning systems allowing users to understand what changed over
time and also why it changed, with discussions on changes being displayed at a separate
discussion space. Though having some hierarchies in place Wikipedia explicitly invites
newcomers to become active participants. The case of Washington Bothell shows a
blended type of learning environment, with students’ engagement taking place face to face
within the classroom and virtually at Wikipedia. This actually is something one can also
find within FLOSS, for example the existence of local open source project teams that
regularly meet up, so participants meet up not only at the Web, but also in the real world.
Unlike FLOSS projects Wikipedia uses a quite centralized and even more basic
environment. FLOSS environments consist of a number of communication, collaboration
and development spaces, meanwhile Wikipedia on the other hands attempts to centralize
all communication and collaboration on its wiki space. Though working on a Wikipedia
article might take part as a form of collaborative project based work, and might involves
some problem solving tasks, it can’t be compared with its FLOSS counterparts. On the one
hand FLOSS projects do have typically a roadmap, a feature list that is partly derived from
users’ needs and feedback, and established teams that are assigned to a broad range of
tasks and sub-projects. Therefore FLOSS features a much higher degree of organization
157
and planning than is the case of Wikipedia. On the other hand ‘solving problems’ is a
driving force within FLOSS with solved problems being an important learning resource
and part of its support system, but also constitutes an important element of the product
requirement definition process. Linked to this; a major difference to FLOSS is the
availability of a (learner) support system. Looking at for example the FLOSS user support
system, that includes user postings, user compiled how-to guides and so on, it becomes
apparent that Wikipedia is quite different. Though Wikipedia has a versioning system and
discussion pages, much of the collaborative nature that the (usually) forum based FLOSS
support system (section 2.6) characterises is absent in Wikipedia, or takes place outside of
this environment and is therefore ‘lost’. Users at Wikipedia either engage at Wikipedia to
retrieve information or to submit information, but they do not engage with its content as
part of their learning process as it is the case within FLOSS. Thus the type of re-experience
as common in FLOSS is absent.
158
Table 6-3: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study Washington Bothell
The course design concept of the Washington Bothell case is twofold: The internal course
structure might follow a more traditional approach with clear defined structures or
processes, the use of Wikipedia as an external part of the course is however close to Meta-
design (5.3). Given the collaborative nature of Wikipedia, ‘seeding’, ‘evolutionary growth’
or ‘re-seeding’ is a constant given of it, and therefore matches well with the SER idea
(5.4). However, ‘re-seeding’ in the SER meaning of students’ contributions becoming an
integral part of future course editions is less evident.
6.4.6 Summary
The case of Washington Bothell shows how well established external online spaces might
be used to provide students with more meaningful learning experiences and activities. The
case has also shown that engaging within such external spaces implies to give up control,
be prepared for more uncertainty and to deal with real life situations. This could be seen
for example in the student’s contributions to Wikipedia that were deleted, questioned,
criticised or edited by other Wikipedia members. The internal course space on the other
hand remained to be isolated from the external one, with only formally enrolled students
being able to follow for example lectures or readings. To make students’ projects not only
a useful contribution to Wikipedia, but also to help future students within their learning
process and to provide them with continuous updated and growing learning resources, as
for example suggested by the SER model, it might be required to also provide access to the
internal course space and to establish preserve and embed the artifacts created by students
within the course space.
159
6.5 Case Study Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University, Greece
6.5.1 Course Facts
Course area: Software engineering
Type of community: Higher education, FLOSS
Principle type of user: Students, FLOSS communities
Course Environment: FLOSS environments
This case study features the Software Engineering course at Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki. The information following provided have been made available by the ISE
course team within the EU funded FLOSSCom research project (FLOSSCom Project,
2008). In spring 2005 the course team implemented a revised course framework as a pilot
study within the teaching and learning context of the ‘Introduction to Software
Engineering’ course (ISE), a course that is lectured for approximately 12.5 weeks – though
students have the right to continue their project based works beyond the lectured period.
ISE is one of the 72 undergraduate courses offered by the department of informatics. The
course is compulsory for computer science majors and is offered during the 5th semester.
The objectives of the course are to provide students with a pragmatic picture of software
engineering research and practice; to expose students to the principles software
engineering as a laboratory and practical science; and to equip students with software
engineering knowledge and skills which will enable them to effectively participate and
contribute to the information society.
During the course, students have 2hrs/week lectures and 2hrs/week of laboratory work. As
part of their assignments students work in small groups and write and execute test plans for
their group projects. Topics covered in the course range from software development
160
models and processes, project planning and management, system design, software
maintenance, etc, to testing individual programs and complete systems. As part of the ISE
course students are supposed to learn the difference between testing small programs they
write for themselves and large scale software products that they might have to deal with
after graduation. The teaching and learning context focuses on the identification of
software faults and failures, unit and integration testing, function and performance testing,
writing and execution of test plans/cases, etc. To support the students’ learning experience
the framework implemented at ISE aims to provide opportunities for the students to work
on what they considered interesting themselves, as well as to impart students real-world
experiences of working at large scale software projects.
To achieve these aims the developed course framework makes use of existing FLOSS
projects at which students will need to engage in. The framework as shown in Figure 6-10
consists of three phases. Students will have to select a project, download and test (smoke
testing) the software. Any problems they encounter in the use of the software are to be
reported to the project's community and to be followed up until they are acknowledged or
rejected (for example known bugs, not real bugs, etc.).
Figure 6-10: Aristotle ISE course structure (FLOSSCom Project, 2008)
Initial findings have shown that students are often worried about a potential failure to meet
the assigned tasks at the course start, but by the end of the course found this kind of
endeavour interesting and challenging. A good number of students continued to participate
161
at the respective open source projects beyond the course duration, which further suggests
that this type of learning activities motivates students and allows them to engage at
something that is personal meaningful to them. By doing so however students add an extra
burden to the course team on how to reward students or grade their participation after the
semester or course have ended?
Students’ feedback on the course was both: of a positive and negative nature.
Positive aspects / experiences included:
• Very interesting experience
• Realistic conditions
• Found something new, projects, software, etc.
• Experiencing dual-boot (Linux-Windows)
• Know the people behind their software and 'talk' to them
• Freedom, work when and wherever they want
• Freedom to select a project and own to pursue ones own learning style / rhythm
• See their contribution appreciated and online in projects
• Encouragement from people they don't know
As one can see positive aspects are not limited to professional skills developed, but include
also aspects of motivation and personal meaningful learning.
Negative aspects / experiences included:
• To find an interesting project was difficult
• The software was not running as expected
• The community was not responsive.
• Anxiety syndrome: “will I get good grades?”
162
• Extra effort needed before starting.
Course activities
Students are supposed to choose a FLOSS project, to test the software, to report bugs and
engage within the wider community. They also need to test the software using a number of
different techniques and learn about the respective bug reporting and monitoring processes.
Students are allowed to work on their projects anytime and anywhere they feel like
following a testing strategy as shown in Figure 6-11.
Figure 6-11: Student’s FLOSS project activities (FLOSSCom Project, 2008)
Involved content
At the beginning of the course students are provided with instructional and the course’s
learning materials provided within the internal course environment, including a guide on
how to participate in FLOSS projects. At the end of the introductory lectures the students
163
are guided to explore the Sourceforge website22, a repository of FLOSS projects to give the
students an overview about the existing number and type of FLOSS projects they could
choose from. Besides the instructional and course learning materials developed by the
course team, students are expected to make use of and engage with the multitude
instructional and learning materials that the respective FLOSS project but also the Web at
large provide.
One of the objectives is to provide students with the opportunity to work on what they
considered interesting themselves, and to provide them with a real-world experience on
what it means to work on large software projects. Besides the initial resources and lectures
provided by the course team, aimed at imparting students the initially required basic set of
skills, students are supposed to experience a genuine FLOSS type learning experience,
including the learners freedom to learn what they deem fit into their own worldviews,
expediencies, potentials, abilities and skills. Figure 6-12 outlines the way in which the
FLOSS framework seeks to engage students within FLOSS projects; building on what is
referred to the principle of CID (Communication, Interaction, Dialogue). Within the
framework students are supposed to engage with FLOSS projects, learn software
engineering concepts and skills (how to test), communicate with fellow participants
(software developers and users), and learn the essentials of participating in a distributed
software development environment (using bug tracking systems). The ISE course also
benefits from the students’ feedback on their experiences that supports the re-design and
improvement of teaching and learning strategies currently in place.
22
URL: http://sourceforge.net
164
Figure 6-12: Model for involving Students in FLOSS projects (FLOSSCom Project, 2008)
The stakeholders involved are formally enrolled students and educators and also the wider
FLOSS community domain. Besides in-house materials developed by the course team,
students have access to a large and diverse pool of content that was developed and is
shared within the FLOSS communities. Participants are continuously building on existing
content from various sources, involving a broad range of tools. Students’ contributions
themselves become a part of the respective FLOSS project they are working on, to be later
reflected on by the wider community and further used in case their contributions are found
to be useful.
Inclusivity
Access
Students’ testing activities and their engagement with the various FLOSS communities in
their projects are publicly available at the respective bug tracking systems, forums, mailing
lists (Figure 6-13 shows a typical forum contribution). Naturally, engagement within the
165
FLOSS projects is truly inclusive, the ISE course environment itself on the other hand is
only open for students formally enrolled.
Figure 6-13: Example student’s contribution / interaction23
Contribution
The external environments used by Aristotle’s students are – analogue to the FLOSS case –
open and editable for all. The internal environments however are reserved for their
(Aristotle) own students only.
Student roles
Student roles consisted of the following: Student/Learner - Students as learners;
Practitioner - Students act for example as bug tester, developer, etc.; Peers - Students may
choose to test in a project together and peer-review their participation.
23
Source: http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=3002&highlight
166
Yes, though the prior learning that is accessible resides within the respective FLOSS
communities, but not within the course’ learning environment.
Yes, within the respective FLOSS communities
The first batch of students (2005) only peer reviewed their classmates of the same year. In
subsequent pilot studies the course team assists in identifying students across years (for
example those ones that haven’t finished their project yet) who work on similar projects
and software categories to help, exchange ideas and peer review each others work.
Learner assessment
At the end of the course students are evaluated based on the presentations they made in
class, their participation in their respective FLOSS projects, and their testing activities.
Furthermore, the course team conducts two online surveys in order to capture the students’
opinions and experiences in testing in FLOSS projects.
Students grading takes into account the following aspects: Class presentations (10%);
Project participation (12%); Working with testing tools (13%); Testing activity (TA)
(15%).
Students can rely on course instructors that usually provide support through email
exchanges, or one-to-one and group meetings. Fellow students and community members of
the various FLOSS projects the students engage at also provided a further source of
support.
167
Since students are participating at FLOSS projects it is obviously very closely aligned with
FLOSS principles including active participation, observation, use of technologies, software
testing and community monitoring. Furthermore, students are free to choose what projects
they wish to work on, when to work (test), how much time they should dedicate to their
work. The ISE course includes a formal assessment element, which is usually not part of
FLOSS that deploys evaluation systems based on meritocracy. Though the students’
learning experience will be potentially the same ones as experienced within FLOSS, the
course design and environment involved on the other hand shows a number of differences.
Most of the students experiences, the artifacts created, the associated discourse, etc., do not
become a part of future course editions and are lost for future cohorts of students.
Table 6-4: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study Aristotle University
168
The course design concept of the Aristotle case is twofold: The internal course structure
follow a traditional approach with clear defined structures or processes, the students’
engagement within FLOSS projects as an external part of the course is however very close
to Meta-design (5.3). Given the collaborative nature of FLOSS projects, ‘seeding’,
‘evolutionary growth’ or ‘re-seeding’ is a constant given of it, and therefore matches well
with the SER idea (5.4). However, ‘re-seeding’ in the SER meaning of students’
contributions becoming an integral part of future course editions is absent.
6.5.6 Summary
The Aristotle case, analogue to the Washington Bothell one, is showing how well
established external ecosystems might be used to enhance the students’ learning
experience. Though the case is making use of FLOSS and their communities, and therefore
truly follows FLOSS principles, there are a number of differences, to the FLOSS case and
Meta-design (5.3) and Courses as Seeds / SER (5.4), in the way the overall ISE course is
organized and structured. Students’ interactions within their respective FLOSS projects are
not connected to the overall course and thus most of the students’ contributions and lessons
learnt will be lost for other or future cohorts of students. The design of the course does not
seek to integrate the students’ experiences, their projects executed and artifacts created into
the course. The closedness of the internal environment further prevents that course
materials could be improved, enriched and complemented by the various external
stakeholders involved. Given that students are permitted to work on their projects beyond
the lectured period this theoretically would allow establish some type of continuity at a
course level and to connect last year students to new cohorts of students therefore
increasing collaboration between years; however in practice this has not been happening.
169
6.6 Summary
The cases reviewed at this chapter detail how a number of principles common to the
FLOSS case have been applied. The cases further indicate that there appear to be two
different ways of applying FLOSS principles at a course level:
• An inside way of creating similar conditions within the course environment as
could be seen at St. Cloud or Utopia Discovery / ADM.
• An outside way, that sends out students into well established external
environments, as shown at the cases of Aristotle and Washington Bothell
All of the four cases draw on some of the design principles and fundamentals of the Meta-
design concept. What has been however less evident within the reviewed cases are the
concepts of ‘seeding’, ‘evolutionary growth’ and ‘re-seeding’ of the Courses as Seeds /
SER (5.4) model. Despite all cases showing some type of ‘seeding’ and ‘evolutionary
growth’, these elements appear to be less structured and not an integral concept of the
respective course designs, with the ‘re-seeding’ idea being absent in all of the cases.
The following chapter seven will provide information about the FLOSSCom Summer
University (FSU), an initial application trial to apply some of the FLOSS characteristics
identified throughout chapter two and three within an educational context. Meanwhile the
cases presented throughout chapter six mostly show how characteristics of FLOSS
communities were also successfully applied within formal educational settings, the FSU
will show the importance that some of the principles from traditional formal education
might be preserved.
170
7 The FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU) – an initial FLOSS Type
Application Trial
7.1 Introduction
This chapter presents the experiences of a first attempt, the FLOSSCom Summer
University (FSU), at applying FLOSS characteristics within an educational context. The
FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU) has been an initial application trial to apply some
of the FLOSS characteristics identified throughout chapter two and three within an
educational context. The FSU design further followed the Meta-design framework (5.3)
and Courses as Seeds / SER process model (5.4) and aimed at allowing participants to
become active contributors. The objective of the FSU was to create a similar learning
ecosystem within a more formal educational context as could be found within FLOSS and
much effort has been spent on integrating FLOSS key characteristics within an educational
setting. As will be shown throughout this chapter it also had a major weakness: it ignored
much of the principles of traditional course design, including lack of structure, focus, or a
clear understanding of the actual needs and interest of the target groups.
The FSU was carried out as a part of the EU funded FLOSSCom project (10/2006 to
09/2008) during the period July to October 2007 and was conducted at a rather early stage
of this research work and partly in parallel to the Open Course Case Studies presented at
chapter six. Unlike the cases reviewed in chapter six the FSU did not count on any
formally enrolled students, but instead was intended to be ‘open to anyone interested in the
subject area’. More generally the FSU was targeted at students, educators, practitioners and
free learner outside of formal education on an equal base.
7.2 Design Outline
The design of the course environment generally followed the Meta-design framework and
Courses as Seeds / SER process model and aimed at allowing participants to become active
171
contributors and to jointly develop a toolkit on ‘Learning the Open Source Way’. The
toolkit was aimed at students and educators who are interested in the open source approach
and what it can tell about learning, to assist others who want to create or adapt their
educational courses using the principles found in FLOSS communities and aimed at
providing information about learning in an open source manner. The FSU was carried out
jointly with the Ubuntu Education24 project and made use of a range of different virtual
environments, including the FLOSSCom project web-space (mailing list, community
builder, on-board chat function), the Ubuntu Wikispace, Launchpad25, which is a
collaboration and Bazaar code hosting platform for software projects, or videoconferencing
tools such as flashmeeting26. It was further aimed to run regular chats, though in practice
flashmeeting and the Launchpad Question & Answer section turned out to be the main
mean for asynchronous communication.
Based on the initial review of FLOSS as a learning environment and learning in FLOSS a
‘FLOSS / Open Source like learning checklist’ (Table 7-1) was developed that served as a
blueprint for the design of the learning environment and activities.
24
URL: http://edubuntu.org
25
URL: https://launchpad.net
26
URL: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/flosscom/talks
172
Table 7-1: FLOSS / Open Source like learning checklist (FLOSSCom Project, 2007)
173
As a following step the FSU environment was set up, providing detailed instructional
materials, some type of initial resources, and an activity list. Initial resources consisted of:
• FAQ’s at the FLOSSCom space
• Set of Questions and Answers at Launchpad
• ‘Learning the Open Source Way’ - Set of Questions at the Ubuntu Wiki. For all
questions a sample answer template was provided and some of those questions
were initially answered.
• Introduction guides on slideshows at Slideshare
FSU participants were also provided with the opportunity to obtain a “Certificate” for their
participation in the name of the FLOSSCom project partners’ and the Ubuntu Education
project, which was hoped to serve as an incentive to participate at such an activity. An
additional incentive provided was that the 10 most active participants would be invited to a
final international workshop.
7.3 FSU Execution Summary
The FSU started with a promotion campaign making use of the FLOSSCom partners and
Ubuntu’s existent networks as well as popular web-spaces and project spaces of related
research projects as illustrated in Figure 7-1.
174
Figure 7-1: FSU promotions (FLOSSCom Project, 2007)
Despite the considerably wide outreach of the promotion campaign, an increased number
of hits at the FLOSSCom project website, and a large number of views of the introduction
guides, the FSU nonetheless struggled to attract active participants. As learned from the
Ubuntu Education team the FSU design and objectives were too overwhelming, with some
of the academic partner involved noting that the structure was just too challenging or
confusing for educators and students with little knowledge in engaging in such disperse
virtual environments; with information being too scattered through the Web and the tools
being too difficult to use, for example editing text within a wiki format or using chat client.
As a response to this a tree-structured index was introduced and collaboration spaces were
more clearly detailed and defined through revised instructions and guides.
From the responses gathered, from both the FSU team and from potentially interested
participants, one of the main problems appeared to be that the FSU did not provide a clear
175
entrance, with potentially interested participants being unclear about how to participate or
what to do (Figure 7-2).
Figure 7-2: FSU entrance problem (FLOSSCom Project, 2007)
Albeit some of the participants provided assistance to others on what to do and where to
go, the overall FSU design turned out to be a major problem, including a lack of a single
easy to access ‘meeting point’. The selected regular video meetings through flashmeeting27
allowed for media rich meet-ups with replay functionality, but appeared to be less welcome
by educators and students on the one hand and – being a proprietary solution – also not
welcome by open source practitioners.
7.4 Lessons Learnt for Open Course Design
7.4.1 FSU practical Findings
The FSU experiences have provided a number of findings and lessons learnt. First of all it
became clear that the use of a multitude of spaces from the very start made it very difficult
27
URL: http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk
176
for potentially interested participants to join into the FSU. Instead of making use of a
limited set of collaboration and communication spaces, the FSU tried to provide from day
one a large set of spaces and tools. This notion is supported by the fact that those ones that
participated at the FSU suggested to new interested participants to the start with
engagement at wiki, which they thought to be the least complex space to engage at. In
retrospect the decision of the FSU team in favour the videoconferencing tool flashmeeting
instead of the use of IRC chats was very likely a mistake since the flashmeeting tool has
been difficult to use for educators and students and unpopular for open source practitioners
since it is based on proprietary software. A second weakness of the FSU, and as noted by
open source practitioners, was that the FSU was ‘overwhelming’ and did not allow
participants to ‘scratch their own itch’. This is to say that the design and objectives were
not clear enough and the activities participants were supposed to engage were not
appealing. The FSU did not allow educators and students that are not familiar with the
open source field to actively engage due to the confusing structure and lack of domain
knowledge to bring in, meanwhile open source practitioners apparently showed little
interest in the FSU, reacting to the FSU more as ‘Doing the job of others’ – instead of
meeting a personal need. As noted by Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) major motives why
users would voluntarily work on these basic tasks are a user’s direct need for the software
and software improvements worked upon; enjoyment of the work itself; and the enhanced
reputation that may flow from making high-quality contributions to an open source project.
The FSU appeared not to have attracted practitioners from the open source field that saw a
need for such a toolkit, or did not consider it to be worthwhile to invest the time. Equally,
and on the other side of the targeted user spectrum, the targeted students have shown
limited interest in such a learning exercise that would not count for official credits within
their study field. Educators’ on the other hand, and as reported by the Scottish FLOSSCom
partner, have shown some type of interest in the general subject area, but found the
entrance burden too high to participate. Entrance burden in this regard refers to user
177
friendliness and structuredness. Thus motivational aspects coupled with the overall design
failures of the FSU made it apparently hard and less attractive for any side to participate in
such an exercise, with the opportunities provided to become active not being well enough
defined, evident, or existent. Given the fixed start and end date of the FSU however it is
unclear whether or not an improvement, re-launch or re-positioning would have resolved
these points. What became clear nonetheless is that it is crucial to start with a simple
structure and to provide clear and appealing opportunities for participants that match to
their personal needs and interests.
7.4.2 Educators’ Responses on the FSU
As part of the FSU two workshops have been carried out, one at the Aristotle University,
September 2007 – Greece (target group: educators) and another one co-located with the
OpenLearn conference, October 2007 – UK (target group: educators & practitioners active
in OER). Within the two workshops participants put forward what they considered to be
pre-requisites for any type of educational offer, including for Open Course design and
where the FSU might have gone wrong. The pre-requisites were seen to be:
• An educational scope; mostly analyzed in educational objectives.
• The need for an instructor; even in a differentiated role, such as ‘mentor’ or
‘facilitator’.
• Instructional material; such as books, URLs or other relevant resources.
• A kind of practice; be it exercises, projects or other.
• A kind of assessment; be it examinations, project based assessment, or other.
Within the Greek workshop participants also articulated a number of crucial parameters,
which might shed some further light on reasons for the FSU failure, namely:
• Projects are assigned to the students from the beginning.

178
• Projects have to be small and must be easily to fulfil within the given time.
• The students should be able to complete the projects with a certain degree of study
and scaffolding from the educational material.
• Students might work in (small) groups, albeit there is the concern of ‘lurkers’ that
would engage little themselves, but only gain credits. A proposal was to change the
constitution of the groups, or to let them work on their own.
• Every project has a strict deadline; the next project is assigned immediately and is
(slightly or fair) harder.
• Educational material is proposed to be studied that could consist of books, URLs,
CDs, prior solved paradigms and/or exercises or other resources. But: Less control
might lead to lower quality of learning materials. This needs to be carefully
considered.
• Forums and wikis could assist to establish a cooperative and interactive
environment to facilitate the knowledge exchange between the participants.
• Students should deliver the deliverable on deadline. At this point, a peer-
assessment cycle could be initialized, where every group (or individual) should
review and comment on the work of the others. This procedure repeats, until all
stated educational objectives are met. After each step the MVC (Most Valuable
Contributor) should be pinpointed. This confronts in a second level the problem of
the lurkers. Also, a “star point system” was proposed, according to which every
student gains “stars” for every contribution. In this way, one more assessment of
every participant’s performance can be made.
• The instructor follows all activities, avoiding to interfere, unless it is necessary, for
example in cases of misunderstandings, or great deviation from the educational
objectives.
179
• Interface management is crucial in creating learning objects in an open source way.
This is to say that modularity requires that interfaces are clearly defined.
The pre-requisites articulated by the participants second the practical findings of the FSU
with regards to the need of providing structuredness and clearly formulated objectives,
activities, tasks or outcomes; the need to better support learners within such type of open
learning scenario; and the need to clearly articulate what the learning outcomes or time
requirements of such an exercise or course would be. ‘Small’, ‘manageable’ and ‘realistic
to fulfil’ were seen to be key criteria for students’ assignments and tasks. Criteria, which in
the case of the FSU have been absent, but which are common for the cases reviewed at
chapter six.
The two workshops also brought up opportunities, as well as challenges, that might be
considered within Open Course scenarios such as:
• Quality assurance and evaluation (for both content and learner).
Some emphasized the high importance of experts, and doubted that an anarchistic FLOSS
type environment could enhance learning and learning resources. Others explained that a
faster feedback loop on resources and questions/problems could improve quality and that
quality depends on the context of learning, hence cannot be determined for others. It was
further suggested that advanced rating and tagging mechanisms might be implemented to
overcome perceived or actual quality issues and that experts (old foxes) and leaders play an
important role in FLOSS communities as well as task assignment and therefore similar
situations would need to be created within such an Open Course approach.
• The need to meet a given curriculum and to provide ground rules
A FLOSS type environment might provide a meta-layer or learning contexts, including
guidance on how to create resources or how to combine them. Therefore it was suggested
that a focus might be less on content, but on activities. This notion matches well with the
180
modular structure of FLOSS development and task focus (2.9), but would need to be
embedded in a way that allows to meet the demands of a given curriculum.
• Cultural resistance to change, and community development aspects
Throughout the two workshops there was a common sense that the culture of learning
versus a system based on accreditation provides a potential for conflicts, which might be in
particular true for the ‘Next generation university’ idea (exam-only + external bodies for
learning, or: ‘learning for free and assessment and certification against fees’). It further
was highlighted that there is a social element of learning embedded in FLOSS
communities that must be taken forward to open educational scenarios, this has also been
stressed within the findings of a later workshop presented at section 10.5.5.
The findings of the two workshops support the findings from the FLOSSCom project team
that the FSU had a clear lack of structuredness if compared to the criteria and
considerations suggested by the workshop participants. Criteria and considerations were in
general close to the theoretical grounding of Meta-design (5.3) and Courses as Seeds / SER
(5.4), but also to the traditional course design principles that might be maintained and that
could be observed within the cases presented at chapter six. In addition to this, or as a
consequence, the FSU had also a lack of participants, since it was not providing clear gains
for the respective target groups, or the target group was just too broad. Concluding from
this it therefore can be seen as important to identify, know and address the respective target
group, which in an Open Course scenario might not be limited to formally enrolled
students’ only.
181
8 Open Course Scenarios: ‘Inside’, ‘Outside’ or ‘Hybrid’ Approach
Chapter eight will follow up on ‘Research Question 2’ and the nature of Open Courses
focusing on possible application scenarios and potential stakeholders to be considered for
Open Courses. This chapter draws on the theoretical findings of chapter two, three and five
and the cases reviewed throughout chapter six, and to a lesser extent on chapter seven by
drawing on the lessons learnt from the FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU).
8.1 Introduction
There appear to be three different approaches for Open Course scenarios; the ‘inside’ and
the ‘outside’ approach, which could be observed within the case studies provided in
chapter six, and the ‘in-between’ that might be described as a ‘hybrid’ approach. Each of
these three approaches seems to come with a different level of complexity and a different
set of benefits, as will be detailed throughout this chapter. The Open Course case studies
provided in chapter six suggest the existence of an inside approach, i.e. adopting principles
that are common to FLOSS within a traditional HE establishment, as well as the existence
of an outside approach, i.e. exposing students to well established online ecosystems, such
as FLOSS ones or also Wikipedia. If we view the inside and outside approaches as
opposite ends of a spectrum, then there is clearly a range of blended, hybrid approaches in
the middle, which take components of both elements and at which we will look closer
during the remaining course of this study.
8.2 Inside Approach
The inside approach refers to the practice of taking the principles as for example found in
FLOSS communities and applying them within the higher education context. In line with
Fischer’s work (2007), this approach involves mapping the key principles online learning
182
ecosystems such as the FLOSS one onto education, including an evolutionary growth of
the course and its environment. In the ultimate case this would enable current students to
build upon the work of earlier students, developing course and content further year by year,
therefore improving content quality and richness and providing regular feedback. Such
feedback might refer to course structure, material, processes or tools. The inside approach
thus takes the sort of characteristics and tools that are found in FLOSS as its inspiration.
The ‘Meta-design’ and ‘Courses as Seeds’ process model (Fischer, 2007) is one example
for a structured attempt of the inside approach aimed at supporting self-directed learners
within virtual learning communities by creating socio-technical environments that support
new forms of collaborative design. Fischer talks of users creating socio-technical
environments and has a continuum of participation ranging from passive consumer to
Meta-designer. This mirrors some of the roles of engagement in FLOSS communities
which range from passive users to core developers.
Within the ‘inside approach’ institutions might also decide to ‘open up’ their virtual
learning environments to fellow universities or the general public to view what is going on
within the environment, or allow those outside groups to participate and engage in this
environment, and in doing so, taking a first step towards a hybrid approach. Depending on
the degree of openness, for example open to view, open to consume, open to participate,
open to change, the outside world might remain largely or totally disconnected. An
example for a semi-open environment is MIT’s Open Course Ware project28 that is
partially open for outside observers, but participation at the courses that are lectured at
MIT is limited to formally enrolled students only. Thus the outside world remains
disconnected from the inside one. An inside approach that would only allow outsiders to
view, but not to participate, would further be limited with regards to ‘community building’
and ‘evolutionary growth’, since a given course could only draw on the student population,
28
URL: http://ocw.mit.edu
183
which has (a) a 100% student turnover per semester / course and (b) a comparatively small
number of potential community members (formally enrolled students of a course).
Within such an inside attempt perhaps not all of the desirable FLOSS characteristics can be
implemented that were indentified as areas of improvement or potential weaknesses by the
two case studies (6.2 and 6.3) in chapter six. However, it could facilitate the retention of
some key features of traditional higher education, such as a fundamental distinction
between learners and teachers, performers and evaluators, since the educator retains
control about organizational structures and processes, and even access rights. An inside
approach therefore might be a compromise between the old and the new and requires
careful planning from those who design and manage the transfer processes. For this reason
the inside approach might be relatively easy to implement since the technology should
already be in place in most higher education institutions, or available at low or no cost. On
the down side the inside approach would keep the students of the institution within this
learning environment preventing their semi-structured engagement and collaboration with
the wider Web. It would also limit the opportunities of ‘best of breed’, as the wider Web
might provide better technological solutions, practices, or already established and mature
communities for respective study fields.
8.3 Outside Approach
The ‘outside approach’ is when institutions send their students out into already well-
established and mature ecosystems to engage in and collaborate within those communities
on pre-defined tasks. In contrast to the inside approach, the outside approach might take
traditional education as the starting point by providing theoretical information ‘in-class’
and then sends the students ‘outside’ to find well established communities, such as the
FLOSS ones, to work within those communities and to apply and deepen their theoretical
knowledge.
184
In particular for the area of software engineering this approach might be suitable due to the
existence of a large number of mature FLOSS projects and a myriad of educational
resources. This is seen in the work of the Aristotle University in Greece (6.5), where
undergraduate students are sent out into real FLOSS communities as part of their degree in
software engineering. Students are provided with an initial academic background in
principles of software engineering, testing software and the tools and approach in FLOSS
communities and then required to choose and engage with a real project. This clearly has
benefits in computer science as it gives students real experience of collaborating with other
developers and also of the different types of role and work required in software
development. The outside approach, however, is not restricted to computer science. It can
be realized whenever there is an external, ‘real’ community that is operating on FLOSS
type principles. The case of Washington Bothell (6.4) is a good example for this where
students were required to contribute to actual Wikipedia articles as part of their assignment
work, thus gaining much of the practical experience of collaboration and authenticity
experienced by the software programmers at Thessaloniki.
The outside approach might be the least complex and almost cost neutral; and therefore
relatively easy to implement. One of the likely drawbacks of the outside approach however
is that the results of students’ collaborative learning and knowledge production would
remain within this outside community and therefore would be lost for future students. This
scenario likely would also not provide next year students with an easy access as no former
learners are present at the institutional level, nor the resources they created, to facilitate the
newbie entrance. The use of external spaces and communities comes also at the price of
giving up control and certainty, as could be seen within both, the Aristotle and the
Washington Bothell case. In both of the cases this has not been problematic and students
have still been able to acquire the expected skills, it is however an aspect to be prepared for
and to be taken into account.
185
8.4 Hybrid Approach
If one views the inside and the outside approaches as opposite ends of a spectrum, then
there is clearly a range of blended, hybrid approaches in the middle, which take
components of both elements. Such a ‘hybrid’ approach might be seen as the best option as
it allows a continuous evaluation (by educators, students and the wider world) of what ‘the
best of both worlds’ is and how the transferred elements actually suit in their respective
new environments. One of the underlying assumptions is that using a hybrid approach
could allow for a ‘best of breed’ and also could be a response to challenges such as a 100%
student turnover per semester as (a) not all participating students (and educators) should
start at the same time and (b) free learners outside of formal education and practitioners are
not bound to any course schedule.
Perhaps one such model for this hybrid approach is that of an open participatory learning
ecosystem, as outlined by Brown and Adler (2008). The concept here is that some of the
principles of FLOSS communities are adopted in education (thus it is an inside approach),
such as collaboration, use of technologies, peer production. People learn by doing, for
example by remixing or re-mashing content that is viewed by others. However these
activities occur in a broader ecosystem that is open for everyone combining students, free
learners, tutors, experts, organizations, etc, and in this manner it is an outside approach
since learners are engaged in a real community. Such a hybrid approach might make use of
a number of environments, spaces and communities where students could engage at in a
semi-structured way and where guidance and support is provided through the use of
technologies (for example RSS, suggested contents, etc.) and the use of the human factor
(for example knowledge brokers, community support, etc.). However, the experience of the
FSU have shown the negative impact such a potentially broad and confusing ecosystem
might create and therefore any hybrid approach might be embedded within educational
structures of proven success.
186
The hybrid approach also has the potential to open new doors for (a) new revenue models
that could be based in assessment of learners outside of formal education against fees and
formal recognition of informally acquired skills, (b) the provision of niche courses and
faster identification of potential new courses, (c) up to date learning resources and
continuous improvement of processes and products, or (d) an evolutionary growing
community including the inherent support system.
The drawback of the hybrid approach might be that it probably requires the most drastic
overhaul of higher educational practices and might be the most complex to implement. It
also would be challenging to combine the required structuredness and guidance provided
within traditional formal education with the more fluid, unstructured and endless learning
opportunities provided by the Web.
Table 8-1 provides an overview of key aspects and characteristics potentially inherent to
the inside, outside or hybrid approach, and also the opportunities that such approaches
could provide.
8.5 Comparative Overview: Inside, Outside and Hybrid Approach
The Table 8-1 suggests key characteristics of the inside, outside or hybrid approach and
briefly outlines their potential strength or limitations. The characteristics presented at Table
8-1 for the inside and the outside approach have been derived from the case studies
presented in chapter six, with the characteristics of the hybrid approach being of a rather
hypothetical nature and being looked at more in detail throughout chapter nine.
187
Open Educational Scenarios: Inside, Outside & Hybrid Approach
Inside Outside Hybrid
Open Learning Environment / Ecosystem
HE institutional X X
virtual spaces
Outside virtual X X
community
space(s)
Interactions
F2F on campus X - of 1 institution X - of 1 institution X - of various participating
institutions
Virtual X X X
Learning user At a course level At a course level At a course level and self
groups organized learning groups,
analogue to for example
Linux User Groups that meet
F2F
Level of Openness
Static Content Educator/Student can Educator/Student & Educator/Student, Free
edit / Free learner can practitioner can view & learner & practitioner can
view, might even allow edit view & edit
outsiders to participate
to some degree
Dynamic content Educator/Student can Educator/Student & Educator/Student, Free
(for example edit / Free learner might practitioner can view & learner & practitioner can
discourse) view, might even allow edit view & edit
to some degree
188
Participation Educator/Student can Educator/Student & Educator/Student, Free
edit / Free learner likely practitioner can learner & practitioner can
not, but might even participate participate
allow outsiders to
participate to some
degree
Characteristics
User generated Educator/Student - Educator/Student & Educator/Student, Free
content rather small scale – practitioner - potentially learner & practitioner -
except if allowing large scale potentially very large scale
Peer production Educator/Student - Educator/Student & Educator/Student, Free
rather small peer group – practitioner - potentially learner & practitioner -
except if allowing larger peer groups and / or potentially high number of
outsiders to participate higher number of groups peer groups and break down
in sub-groups working on
particular subjects / projects.
Sub-groups might consist of
formally enrolled students
only, or mixed groups
Contribution to Educator/Student - Educator/Student & Educator/Student, free learner
the process rather limited but very practitioners - though the & practitioners - though again
structured later might assume a once "invading" the outside
dominating role as the space of established
student has a fixed communities (for example
entrance and exit date and Wikipedia) practitioners
therefore might be seen might assume a dominating
rather as a "Newbie" role
Greater sharing Educator/Student - Educator/Student & Educator/Student, Free
of knowledge rather limited – except if practitioner - potentially learner & practitioner -
189
allowing outsiders to large scale potentially very large scale
participate
Connection of Only if earlier and future Yes, though based at the Very likely since this
content & students are involved in Web and therefore might scenario involves as well
discourse current students' be disconnected for future formally enrolled students,
activities – for example students, or at least from various institutions, as
earlier students as requires them to figure free learners outside of
mentors, future students out the connection formal education and
as lurkers themselves. Earlier and practitioner. Students from
future students might be different institutions will also
involved in current have different start and end
students' activities to times that could help to
allow a connection - for assure an equilibrated ratio of
example Earlier students students, free learner and
as mentors, future practitioners and lead to
students as lurkers. continuity and evolution.
Students are only "guests"
at the outside space and
therefore the space is not
shaped for their needs
Peer support Educator/Student - Predominantly by Educator/Student, Free
rather limited, except if practitioners learner & practitioner -
allowing outsiders to potential for robust support
participate structure
Peer assessment Educator/Student There might be a peer Two types of peer
assessment, either assessment: can be

- rather limited
unorganized by unorganized or as well
practitioners or organized organized and provided by
by other students practitioners, other students
or free learners
190
Real activities Educator/Student - Educator/Student & Educator/Student, Free
rather limited practitioner - potential for learner & practitioner -
engagement in real potential for engagement in
activities real activities
Personalized Educator/Student - Educator/Student & Educator/Student, Free
learning rather limited / Free practitioner - potential for learner & practitioner -
experience learner can ‘consume’ personalizing the learning potential for truly
what they are personally experience personalized learning
interested at – might also experiences
be allowed to participate
Informal learning Yes, but potentially Formal and informal Formal and informal learning
limited learning - formal learning - formal learning more
clearly structured unstructured
Use of Limited to available Limited to available tools Large and diverse range of
technologies institutional tools, used by outside involved tools and spaces,
respectively course’ community, though based "out" at the Web as
tools students can select the well as across participating
outside environment and institutions. Likelihood of
therefore indirectly also having "champ hosts" for
the type of tools. different modules that could
be institutional or existing
web-communities.
Speed of Likely rather slow Depending on outside Fast, perpetual beta
innovation and community, potentially
evolution faster than inside
approach
Speed of Likely fast Depending on outside Depending on the learner and
learning community, potentially type of support provided for
slower than inside formally enrolled students.
approach Likely slower for newbies,
191
but faster for ICT literate
learner
Scope of Limited, predictable Enhanced, fairly Widest, with guaranteed
learning predictable minimum scope for formally
enrolled students depending
on institutional guidance
Unique Selling • Transparency of • Real life learning with • Transparency of
Points (USP) / environments resulting higher environments improves
Key features improves quality degree of soft skills, quality
key and practical

• Meets social • Meets social
skills
responsibility responsibility
• Enhanced
• Possibility to attract • Possibility to attracts
employability chances
higher number of higher number of future
as a result of the
future students (that students (that might also
points above
might also match match better - "know
better - "know before • Opportunity to meet before what they buy").
what they buy") future employer • Real life learning with
resulting higher degree of
soft skills, key and
practical skills
• Enhanced employability
chances
• Opportunity to meet
future employer
• Allows for new HE
business models - for
example learning for free
as you go, pay for
services (f2f classes,
192
formal assessment,
degrees)
• Allows for niche courses

and identification of
rising stars at lower costs.
Examples
Utopia Discovery Aristotle University See chapter 9 (opeEd
Syllabus & CCK08)

St. Cloud State
University Washington Bothell
Table 8-1: Application scenarios of open educational approaches
8.6 Stakeholders in Open Education: Educators, Students, Free Learners &
Practitioners
All of the three approaches presented at chapter eight involve educators and formally
enrolled students, as common for traditional formal education. Open Educational scenarios
are however not limited to these two stakeholder groups and, depending on the type of
openness, might include also fellow students and educators, practitioners of the respective
external communities, or free learners outside of formal education. Within the inside
approach (6.2, 6.3) the main stakeholder groups consist of formally enrolled students and
educators, with further stakeholders perhaps residing of the peripherals depending on the
type of openness granted to the outside world. Two distinct groups characterize the outside
approach (6.4, 6.5): The first group consists of formally enrolled students and educators on
the one hand throughout the lectures and related activities carried out within the institution.
The second distinct group consists of all type of stakeholders students would engage with
during their activities within the ‘outer world’, notably practitioners. Within a hybrid
scenario however the inside as well as the outside groups would potentially come together
and interact in a semi-structured way.
193
Unlike in traditional educational settings, Open Course scenarios, and in particular the
hybrid one, feature two ‘new’ stakeholder groups: ‘free learners’ and ‘practitioners’.
‘Free learners’ are learners outside of formal education that participate with the intentional
objective to learn. It is suggested that ‘free learners’ are (1) a consumer within the inside
approach, though in the ideal case they might be allowed to participate, (2) an active group
in the outside approach, but not connected in a structured way to formally enrolled students
or the underlying course, and (3) an active group in the hybrid approach and connected to
formally enrolled students in a structured or semi-structured way. Strictly speaking, ‘free
learners’ might also consist of fellow students (formally enrolled at another institution or
formally enrolled at the same institution, but not the same course) or might also include
fellow educators. McMartin (in Iiyoshi & Kumar M, 2008 p.143) states that “Designers of
open educational content and sites assume [that] there are three categories of users: faculty
members, students formally enrolled in higher education, and more informal learners—for
example, the curious or those who are unable to participate in formal education for
whatever reason.” What McMartin coins the ‘Informal learner’ corresponds well to the
‘free learner’ group, which might be indeed an informal learner only, but might also well
be someone who follows an entire course without formal enrolment.
A fourth group that might be considered within open educational scenarios, in particular
within the outside or hybrid approach, are ‘practitioners’. ‘Practitioners’ can be found at
the outside (6.4, 6.5) and hybrid approach and are the regular participants of a given
community (for example a FLOSS community, Wikipedia, or other virtual communities).
Practitioners and free learners might be the very same person, but still taking on the one or
other role depending on their motivation to participate and activities carried out.
With regards to the hybrid approach to Open Course design there are a number of aspects
that remain unclear for the moment, notably:
194
• The required organizational structures of such a hybrid Open Course ecosystem at
which the diverse stakeholder groups could come together
• The type of win / win situations required to provide the right motivations and
incentives for the different stakeholders to participate, apart from formally enrolled
students that are motivated by assessment and grading or practitioners that are
motivated by potential students’ contributions.
8.7 Reflections
This chapter has shown two distinct approaches that might be adopted for Open Course
design: the inside approach and the outside approach. It has also shown that the potentially
highest gain perhaps would be achieved from a hybrid approach, though no evidence could
be provided at this point, but will be the focus of chapter nine.
Using the classification introduced within this chapter, the inside approach (6.2, 6.3) refers
to the practice of taking the principles found in FLOSS communities and applying them
within the higher education context. In line with Fischer’s work (2007), this approach
involves mapping the key principles of online learning ecosystems such as that of FLOSS,
onto education, including an evolutionary growth of the course and its environment. Such
an inside approach might be ‘closed’ to the outside world, ‘open’ to the outside world to
view, or ‘open’ to the outside world to participate. Inviting the outside world to participate
is likely to be a first step towards the hybrid approach, as the major cultural and legal
challenges should have been already overcome at this point. The outside approach (6.4,
6.5) allows educators to provide students with a real life experience, to provide them with
richer and more up to date learning materials and to gain soft and key skills ‘on the fly’
through real interactions in the virtual world. This obviously has benefits in the field of
software development, but also in other subject areas as it gives students experience of real
collaboration and accepting feedback. However, the opportunities for this type of approach
195
may be limited, since it relies on an existing community to be realised, and these may not
be present in every subject area. Additionally the outside world is not connected to the
institutions inside world resulting in a loss of the created / involved artifacts, lessons learnt,
or external expertise with future students not being able to benefit from those.
Drawing on the earlier chapter two and three of this work, there are a number of open
questions for which neither the literature, nor the Meta-design framework (5.3) and
Courses as Seeds / SER model (5.4), nor the FSU at chapter seven or reviewed cases at
chapter six could provide answers by now with regards to Open Course design. One of
such questions (Research Question 3) is how the concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’ of
the Courses as Seeds / SER process model (5.4), which is a key characteristic of the
FLOSS case, could be translated to Open Course design. Further questions that still could
not be answered relate to the following FLOSS characteristics:
• First: The availability of a large number of (volunteering) participants
In the case of FLOSS communities this is characterized by volunteering and volatility, is
probably one of the cornerstones of the efficiency of the FLOSS community as a learning
environment. A crucial question for transferring FLOSS principles to formal education is
how similar networks can be created within formal environments, which usually have
small classes. On the other hand, FLOSS community members have regular contact with
only 1 to 5 other community members (Glott et al., 2007) and therefore a question is how
to reap similar network effects from small networks in formal education. While the
‘outside approach’ is taking advantage of existing online communities, the ‘inside
approach’ and the hybrid approach will need to establish own structures, incentives and
motivations to bring together the different involved stakeholders and to establish such a
community; or alternatively to systematically integrate existing ones. In addition to this,
semester based structures that are inherent to traditional education provide almost ‘per-se’
a challenge to establish a learning ecosystem that would allow for continuous and
196
evolutionary growth; as well on a community level, including the full spectrum of
participants ranging from newbies over advanced learners to old foxes, as on a learning
resource level. The hybrid approach has been identified as being a potential way to allow
for continuity.
o Second: How to allow for re-experience, continuity and evolutionary
growth (of learning resources, spaces and tools, communities involved);
establish a transactive group memory; how to keep learning resources
(initial ones as well as those leveraged into the course by the students),
artifacts created by students and underlying discourse within a context
and structure that would allow future cohorts of students to re-
experience, build on and improve what others did; how to easily allow
for a ‘re-seeding’ and to organize, formalize and generalize the created
knowledge, including structures and processes?
Within FLOSS much of the learning processes and outcomes are made visible and
therefore allow future learners to learn from what others did and to build upon those
experiences, for the cases reviewed this however has not occurred and no organizational
structures could be identified that support such an approach. Also Meta-design (5.3) and
the Courses as Seeds / SER model (5.4) do not provide any practical guidance on how to
achieve conditions that facilitate a re-seeding of a course.
• Third: The motivational aspect
As earlier described, motivations to participate in FLOSS include ‘to learn’, ‘gaining
reputation’ or ‘personal enjoyment’, but also a clear ‘win / win scenario’ between
information seeker and information provider resulting in learning benefits for both sides
(Demaziere, 2006). These motivational aspects might be difficult to transfer to and apply
within Open Course scenarios. Motivational aspects for formally enrolled students
participating at such Open Courses certainly relate to obtaining a formal degree. The same
197
would be true for fellow students participating at such Open Courses as part of their
official degree studies, but how about free learners or practitioners? While learning in the
FLOSS community is efficient because ‘project managers’ and ‘community managers’
(and many more roles) voluntarily assume responsibility for organising work, tasks,
content, and communication, in formal educational settings roles, tasks, and
responsibilities are more pre-determined and rigid (Glott et al. 2007). Thus, even if
allowing for such roles within Open Course scenarios, what would be the motivation to
assume such roles – apart from being part of the assessment for formally enrolled students?
There are a number of theoretical solutions and possibilities to provide incentives within
Open Course scenarios, such as rewards for students who voluntarily assume positions,
similar to project or community managers in FLOSS, or to include into the curricula the
obligation of more experienced students to share their knowledge with the less
experienced. Free learners outside of formal education might also be offered a certification
of their learning outcomes against fees, or a virtual credit account that rewards them for
taking on roles such as mentor, facilitator, moderator or tutor. Those virtual credits then
might be used to pay for assessment and certifications. With regards to incentives for
practitioners to participate one possibility might be to involve learners in real project works
– for example analogous to the Aristotle case (6.5) that provides computer science students
with the opportunity to take on some tasks at a respective open source project. Participants
of FLOSS communities are also aware that the skills they learn have a positive value on
the labour market and are able to judge this value realistically (2.3, 2.7, 2.10).
Preconditions for competing with others that have a comparable formal degree are that
informally attained skills in the FLOSS community must be provable (Glott et al. 2007).
Peer-reviewing and recognition within the community is very important in this regard (2.7)
to build up a repute that can be shown to possible employer. Similar opportunities, as well
for students as for free learner, therefore might be desirable within an educational setting.
198
Even if addressing all the points above it might still be a challenge to provide an easy
entrance strategy for students from fellow universities or free learners outside of formal
education, as could be learnt from the FSU at chapter seven. This challenge relates to
questions such as ‘what are learners supposed to do’ or ‘how to get involved’.
The case studies provided in chapter six suggest that the ‘inside approach’ and the
‘outside-approach’ are overall viable, despite featuring some shortcomings in comparison
to the FLOSS case that has been presented at chapter two and three. The Hybrid model
potentially offers the highest benefits but remains to be explored and will be subject of the
following ninth chapter of this work.
199
9 Open Course Case Studies: A hybrid Perspective
Chapter nine aims to provide further answers to ‘Research Question 2’ about the nature of
Open Courses, with a particular focus on the hybrid approach introduced in chapter eight,
and its possible characteristics as detailed in Table 8-1. The chapter will look as well at
course design and delivery aspects, at the stakeholders involved and their respective roles,
motivations and gains. It will also pay close attention to elements of traditional formal
education that might be preserved (7.4). Chapter nine will also follow up on Research
Question 2 with regards to the shortcomings of established practices of courses within
formal education as presented at chapter six and within the Meta-design framework (5.3)
and Courses as Seeds / SER model (5.4) in comparison to the FLOSS case. Finally, chapter
nine will also address Research Question 4 of how the concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-
seeding’ might be translated into Open Course design.
9.1 Introduction
Unlike the cases reviewed during chapter six, the following two cases might be classified
as being ‘truly open’, with the second case (Manitoba) further providing a foresight on
possible revenue models to support self-sustainability of Open Course provision. By the
time of writing a number of spin-offs and replicates of the two cases presented in chapter
nine have been emerged that would all qualify to be subjects of further research. Given the
scope and timeframe of this work however, those cases had to be neglected.
9.2 Case study OpenEd Syllabus, Utah State University, US
9.2.1 Course Facts
Course area: INST 7150 Introduction to Open Education, Fall 2007
Type of community: Higher education, open educational resource.
200
Principle type of user: Educators, students, general audience
Course Environment: Blogs, Wikis, partly Web 2.0 spaces at large
The Open Ed Syllabus29 is an introductory course into open education. It is a pilot course
comparable with a 3 credit graduate-level course and free for anyone to attend, but does
not offer any formal certificate for not formally enrolled students. The goals of the course
are to give a firm grounding in the current state of the field of open education, including
related topics like copyright, licensing, and sustainability; to help locate open education in
the context of mainstream instructional technologies like learning objects; and to get
students thinking, writing, and dialoguing creatively and critically about current practices
and possible alternative practices in open education. The course is a fully virtual course
without face-to-face meetings, with communications taking place mainly asynchronously,
with optional synchronous ‘social’ meetings. Following the initial course design the course
also includes some type of formal grading, with each weekly assignment being worth 10
points and a total of 150 possible points that could be achieved for the entire course.
Weekly assignments are supposed to be graded according to (1) the degree to which they
completely answer the questions asked, (2) the degree to which they demonstrate
understanding of the assigned reading material, and (3) the degree to which original
thinking is evident in the writing. An extra point may be awarded when a student draws on
and references others student writing effectively. The course started with 53 students, out
of which 27 attended the course more or less active and with approximately 20 of them
keeping an active blog as requested by the course outline. Despite being open, and having
‘introduction to open education’ as its main focus, the course was designed, implemented
and delivered in a rather traditional way from week one till ‘week X’.
29
URL: http://www.opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus
201
Figure 9-1: Week X post (Participant’s Blog, 2007) 30
Week X (Figure 9-1) shows the dissatisfaction of course participants with the degree of
interactions and activities being limited to read assigned papers or to comment on others’
blogs. As noted by Wiley (Figure 9-2) this might have been partly a result of a change of
structure during the first two weeks of the course.
Figure 9-2: Week X Response David Wiley (David Wiley’s Blog, 2007) 31
Initially Wiley would comment on students’ bloggings at his own blog, therefore providing
a common meeting point at which students come together and a certain structure to connect
the widely scattered individual students’ bloggings with the weekly assignments. Once
Wiley stopped doing so, participants stopped lost this structure and started to get lost, as
also becomes visible by the participant’s response to Wiley’s blog post presented in Figure
9-3.
30
Source: http://www.edocet.net/wordpress/2007/10/19/opened-week-x
31
Source: http://www.edocet.net/wordpress/2007/10/19/opened-week-x
202
Figure 9-3: Participant’s response to Week X dialogue (David Wiley’s Blog, 2007) 32
As a result of this ‘week X’ the course has then been re-designed by Wiley based on the
participants’ suggestions and based on the things that realistically could be changed at such
a late stage of the course.
Course activities
The course is structured in a formal and traditional way with well-defined activities, roles
and structures consisting of weekly assignments, namely readings and bloggings. Students
are supposed to read the weekly assigned materials and to blog answers to pre-formulated
questions, or simply complete assignments for weeks when there are no readings or
questions. Bloggings are supposed to demonstrate students’ understanding of the assigned
reading material and to include original thoughts and synthesis. The initial course outline
primarily requires self-studying through reading given materials and to answer given
questions through individual students’ bloggings. As a result of a course re-design after
week X course activities were enhanced with students also being asked to read through the
blogs of other students and to comment on them. Besides those blog peer reviews the
current course structure does not foresee any particular type of collaborations between the
students.
32
Source: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/383
203
Involved content
All of the content is available online and the majority of it consists of reading materials
like online books and papers, with a minority consisting of videos, OER project websites
and the students’ blogs.
Self-studying is the pre-dominant form of learning, with the main type of contents being
pre-selected materials provided by the lecturer, and after the course revision also including
the blog posts of other students to be peer reviewed.
Most of the content used was developed by subject matter experts like educators or
professional authors and has been selected and provided by the course lecturer, with the
exception of students’ blogs that are used as content sources themselves as part of the peer
reviewing process.
Inclusivity
Access
The course is open to everyone whishing to participate, with all materials being available
online, including students learning outcomes that are made available within their personal
blogs.
Contribution
Besides the students’ bloggings33 the content used in this course is static. This is to say that
there is no possibility for students to work with the content to either improve it, update it,
to annotate it, or engage with it in any way that would be of benefit for future students,
except their own bloggings that are scattered on the Web.
33
Blogging is a commonly used expression for ‘blog posts’ – see also:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/askbruce/articles/browse/blogging_1.shtml
204
Student roles
The course uses mainly the traditional role model with the teacher on the one side and the
learner on the other, with the role of peers being relatively limited to the review of
students’ bloggings.
In theory prior learning outcomes are made available for future learners through the
individual students’ bloggings and would therefore remain available for other learners. In
practice this apparently turned out to be difficult since the students’ blogs are not linked in
a structured manner to weekly assignments and therefore one would need to browse
through them on a one by one base. Learning processes remain invisible with the exception
of students’ bloggings that might reflect on their individual learning processes. Students’
bloggings provide some connection of content and discourse that could be of use for future
learners.
The learning materials consist mainly of pre-defined readings (sources), with only some of
the assignments pointing to repositories, like OER project websites, that allow for further
third sources to be connected to those.
The course contains some peer reviewing activities with students being expected to review
other students’ bloggings and to reflect on them.
Learner assessment
Following the initial course design the course also includes grading with each weekly
assignment being worth 10 points, for a total of 150 possible points for the course. Weekly
assignments are supposed to be graded according to (1) the degree to which they
completely answer the questions asked, (2) the degree to which they demonstrate
205
understanding of the assigned reading material, and (3) the degree to which original
thinking is evident in the writing. A review of the course spaces however did not show any
examples of students’ assessments.
Support is provided mainly by the teacher, though peer support activities could also be
observed.
The OpenEd Syllabus case shows some similarities to learning within FLOSS as presented
at chapter two and three of this work. One of the main similarities lies with ‘openness’.
This is to say that the course is open to be attended by anyone, with all contents used being
freely available, including the students’ blogs. Analogous to FLOSS, self-studying is an
important form of learning, with ‘learning from what others did’ being at least partially
addressed within the OpenEd Syllabus case. The course also uses a variety of information
spaces, but only a small range of communication and collaboration spaces, namely a wiki
and blogs. On the other hand the course shows clear borders to the FLOSS case, despite its
open intention and focus. One of the borders is the course structure: The course was
designed following a traditional course design approach with classic teacher / student roles,
given assignments and traditional assessment. As could be learnt at the FSU at chapter
seven, a clear course structure and well-defined task might still be required within Open
Course settings, but the structures found within the openEd Syllabus case hinder that
students would become active co-constructors or co-designer and for example bring in
their prior knowledge, start their own activities, or form teams around those activities. In
general communication and collaboration takes place at a low level and peers play a
subordinate role, with no structure being in place to capture discourse and relate it to the
course materials in such a way that would allow others to build on it. As a consequence of
206
this learning processes remain mostly invisible and learning outcomes are loosely spread
over the Web and therefore are not easily detectible by future learners. The course further
does not provide any information on motivational aspects and incentives, other than ‘being
interested in the course subject’, why free learners might opt to participate at such an
event.
design (5.3) and the Courses as Seeds / SER concept (5.4) at the right end. It shows an
increased similarity between the reviewed case and Meta-design and SER concept, in
comparison to the cases reviewed in chapter six.
Table 9-1: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study openEd Syllabus
The course design follows largely a traditional concept and is carried out by the educator.
Participants do however become active co-designers in terms of designing the course
space, for example by setting up their own blogs, or in terms of creating content. This
could also be observed within the four cases in chapter six, but unlike those the openEd
Syllabus case brings together as well formally enrolled students as free learners outside of
207
formal education that jointly take this course. As for the initial four cases, one can observe
a ‘seeding’ and ‘evolutionary growth’ of the course space and its contents, but no
structures have been established that would facilitate a ‘re-seeding’ of the course.
9.2.6 Summary
The course clearly addresses the first key aspect of FLOSS communities, openness and
inclusivity. Other key characteristics of FLOSS such as volunteering, volatility, use of
large scale networks, content richness and the commons component, or modularity are not
that well addressed by the course; which is a clear deviance to the FLOSS case (2.10).
In accordance to the Courses as Seeds / SER model (5.4), the course is adaptive to
identified students’ needs and has been adapted accordingly during its use time as could be
seen in Figures 9-1, 9-2 and 9.3. This could be observed as well during the course as by its
end with students themselves identifying areas of improvement, such a to have more space
for collaborative activities and to review the work of others to comment on it or to learn
from it. This goes in the direction of learning in FLOSS, where we see learning from
others, peer reviewing and provision of feedback.
One significant difference to the FLOSS case has been that no community or structure has
been in place that would allow students to cope with far scattered information or
information ‘overload’, or structures that facilitate to find the information they are seeking.
As shown in chapter two and three, learner in FLOSS often can benefit from a structure
that allows for finding relevant information, at which information are preserved within a
context, and at which humans acting as information brokers who point others to the right
resources. This type of information brokerage as found in FLOSS was also discussed
between the students of the openEd Syllabus course and resulted in suggestions on how to
improve the course, as has been exemplified within Figure 9-1. However, it is not clear if a
different structure would have resolved this situation, given that still no continuity would
208
have been established beyond the course duration. This is to say that a revised structure
might have resolved the situation for the current course edition, but not for the next cohort
of students.
The openEd Syllabus course has also shown a number of student roles and a move from
passive learner towards a more pro-active role where students would actually bring in
course materials. This is well in line with Meta-design (5.3) and something that can be
seen within FLOSS and that ultimately allows the learner to enter the course at his current
knowledge stage, with other students being able to benefit from more advanced students’
knowledge.
9.3 Case study CCK08 – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, University
of Manitoba, CA
9.3.1 Course Facts
Course area: CCK08 - Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
Type of community: Higher education, Certificate in Emerging Technologies for Learning
Principle type of user: Educators, students, general audience
Course Environment: Blogs, Wikis, Moodle, large range of Web 2.0 tools and spaces
Connectivism and Connective Knowledge34 is a twelve week course aimed at exploring the
concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and their application as a framework
for theories of teaching and learning, outlining a connectivist understanding of educational
systems of the future. The course is a fully virtual course with a study load of 8 hours per
34
URL: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism_2008
209
week, consisting of asynchronous and synchronous elements. The course is structured in a
formal and traditional way with well-defined activities that consist of:
• Lectures or equivalent: recorded presentations (1hour), live video sessions (1 hour,
for example at Elluminate35), Conversations (1 hour, for example at UStream36)
• Readings of papers listed in the course wiki (2 hours)
• Lab work, for example discussion at forums (2 hours)
• Assignments and outputs such as blog posts, papers, etc (1 hour)
CCK08 is open for both, formally enrolled students as well as free learners, with
approximately 2200 participants taking the course as a free learner outside of formal
education and approximately 25 students taking it for credits (Downes, 2009).
The course follows 4 key principles:
• Diversity – Students are supposed to engage with diverse readings, environments or
discussions
• Autonomy – Students are supposed to chart their own course, select their own
software and pursue their own learning
• Interaction / connectedness – The knowledge of the course was seen to emerge as a
result of the interactions between students and educators
• Openness – the course is truly open and all participants, whether formally enrolled
or not, are seen to be alike
The course was designed to operate in a distributed environment, which is to say that the
course did not use one single central platform or technology only, but made use of a range
of them. Formal course environment components included a wiki, in which the course
outline and major links were provided; a blog, in which course announcements and updates
35
URL: http://www.elluminate.com
36
URL: http://www.ustream.tv
210
were made; a Moodle installation, in which threaded discussions were held; an Elluminate
environment, in which synchronous discussions were held; and an aggregator and
newsletter, in which student contributions were collected and distributed. In addition to this
students were encouraged to create their own course components, which would be linked
to the course structure. Students contributed to the course, amongst others: three separate
Second Life communities, two of which were in Spanish; a 170 individual blogs, on
platforms ranging from Blogger to edublogs to WordPress; numerous concept maps and
other diagrams; Wordle summaries; and Google groups, including a separate group for
registered participants (Downes, 2009).
Course activities
Course activities included readings, discussions and debates, and the compilation of three
short papers, one concept map and one final project work outcome (an individual reflection
on the course). Students were expected to identify and select from the learning resources
provided by the course team only those ones that were of personal interest to them and that
would support them within the discussions carried out at part of the course.
Involved content
All of the content is available online consisting of a diverse range of initially provided
learning resources such as papers, videocasts, bloggings or presentations. Those learning
resources were then enriched throughout the course through materials brought into the
course by the students, artifacts created by them, or enhanced through the discourse and
debates that have been taken place within the different spaces involved (for example blogs,
Moodle forum, Google groups, etc.).
211
The content was aimed at allowing self-studying as well as supporting dialogues,
discussions and debates.
Downes (2008) identified six different types of groups that participated at the course37 in
addition to the course team, namely:
1) For-credit learners, which have participated in forums, blogs, and through emails
with instructors
2) Actively engaged in conversation participants: those that are highly engaged in
conversations in Moodle, often digging down into nuanced considerations of
subject matter. Those participants were not only engaging with materials initially
provided, but also presenting their own views and frameworks of sensemaking.
3) Actively engaged with course content participants - these are participants who are
not engaged in the conversation, but who are reading ‘The Daily’38 and provide
fairly comprehensive weekly summaries.
4) Other modality participants - these participants are reading course literature, but are
not active in the main forums. Discussions may be occurring in their preferred
language, in Second Life, listservs, or other modes.
5) Peripheral participants - periodically posting in Moodle or blogs and that
subscribed to ‘The Daily’. Those ones might follow blogs/postings, but are not
directly engaged with others. As noted by Downes, it is difficult to determine the
degree of the engagement of this group with course material as they are not posting
reactions or comments. Their continued subscription to ‘The Daily’ has been taken
as an indicator that suggests that this group is still actively participating.
37
Source: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=152
38
URL: http://connect.downes.ca/thedaily.htm
212
6) Disinterested/discontinued learners. For whatever reason, these are participants
who signed up, but have since discontinued the course.
Inclusivity
Access
All materials are available online, including students learning outcomes and ongoing
dialogues.
Contribution
CCK08 allowed a great deal of students’ contribution to the course with only the initial
course structure, timetable, and assignments being a given number. Students were able to
contribute to the learning resources involved, with discourse and dialogue being an
important course element and a learning resource themselves. Given the number of
participants and the assignments CCK08 potentially created a large number of new
learning resources in the form of completed student assignments, discourse and dialogue,
or new resources brought into the course by them. As it happened most of the completed
student assignments appear to be rather invisible and scattered across the Web, which is
also partly true for discourse and dialogue, or learning resources brought into the course. A
main tool provided to course participants to identify those sources was ‘The Daily’
newsletter39 aggregating and distributing course content and that served as their lifeline.
Student roles
Student roles were manifold and include as well the traditional role of the learner as also
peer activities. Downes (2009) noted that “by combining participants from a wide range of
skill sets, people were able to - and did - help each other out. This ranged from people
answering questions and providing examples in the discussion areas, to people
39
URL: http://connect.downes.ca/thedaily.htm
213
commenting on and supporting each others' blogs, to those with more skills setting up
resources and facilities, such as the translations and Second Life discussion areas.”
Learning activities and outcomes are available for future learners within the different
involved environments used throughout the course and are also potentially identifiable
through archives of ‘The Daily’ newsletter. Therefore they are of a possible use for future
cohorts of students, though in practice this might turn out to be difficult since all of those
sources could be too difficult to find for future students, in particular with regards to
supporting them on their weekly assignments or tasks, or to easily see and understand what
earlier cohorts of students did, to learn form and to build on this. Learning activities and
outcomes of current students apparently are not expected to become an integrated part of
the overall course, and as it appears it likely would require a significant work from the
course team to re-integrate those sources into a future version of the course themselves. It
is also less likely that future cohorts of students would be helped or supported by earlier
cohorts of students, or pointed by them to relevant sources, since each edition of the course
has a fixed start and end date resulting in a 100% community turnover.
The different types of learning resources are highly interrelated and connected to each
other for example through participants’ tagging and a RSS aggregator.
The course contains a large degree of peer activities, including peer reviews, with students
being expected to engage in debates and discussions.
Learner assessment
Formal assessment was part of the course for formally enrolled students, who were
expected to submit assignments for grading and received course credit based on this.
214
Besides the students enrolled at University of Manitoba, one student from another country
was also assessed and graded by the own institution. Assignment descriptions were
publicly available and the assessment metric distributed, so other institutions could know
everything needed in order to provide evaluation and feedback.
Though peer reviewing was part of the participants’ activities, it apparently has not been
used for students’ assessments.
Support is provided as well by the course team as by the course participants. A frequent
problem within semester based closed approaches, with regards to community support
provision, usually consist in the small number of potential support provider and the
comparatively heterogeneous set of students skills that further limit the chance of a larger
number of ‘domain experts’ that would qualify for support provision. Due to the open
nature, large number of initial participants (app. 2200) and heterogeneous set of
participants’ skills CCK08 however could bypass those limitations to a certain degree.
Certain degree in this respect means, that albeit a type of community support system could
be established for the present CCK08 course, there is no guarantee that this would be
replicable for future versions of this course, but more importantly, future versions of this
course would not be able to truly benefit from the support provided by last years’
participants since those left the course, therefore likely would not be available for follow
up questions or clarifications. In addition to this no conditions have been established at
which the preserved discourse clearly relates to the things produced, such as the
assignments, that would enable future cohorts of students to easily re-experience what
others did and build on it.
215
Analogous to FLOSS, the course CCK08 is freely available and open to anyone to join; it
makes use of a range of Web 2.0 tools and spaces, both pre-outlined and designed by the
course team as well as those ones brought in by the participants. The CCK08 course
consists of a range of spaces including a central course environment plus numerous
external spaces that students set up as part of their collaborations. This actually is very
close to FLOSS as a learning environment and to learning in FLOSS (chapter two and
three). Looking at the CCK08 case one can see, as with FLOSS, a large number of
volunteering participants that contribute with their different sets of skills and to the overall
course development through the creation of for example spaces or content. In FLOSS
participants voluntarily decide which role(s) they play or which responsibilities to take on.
This equally could be seen in CCK08 with participants taking on roles such as information
broker or to leverage knowledge amongst language domains. A further similarity is that
students also started to self-organize their activities in their own spaces of choice, acted as
domain experts, or became teachers to others.
As is the case in FLOSS, or the Web at large, the number of active participants was also
significantly lower than the number of those that observed (the so called lurkers),
providing the typical pyramid or onion type community structure. The large number of
participants moreover allowed establishing a community support system, therefore
bypassing to some degree the challenge of semester based structures and resulting small
group of potential support provider. Since participants possessed a very heterogeneous set
of skills it was further possible to draw on support provided by domain experts, as is the
case for the FLOSS support system.
Discussion around readings and the short presentations provided formed a part of the
learning experience, which – in combination with self-studying – is also one of the core
elements of learning in FLOSS. Students’ learning processes and outcomes are visible
216
within the various spaces used throughout the course and potentially could become a part
of the course itself therefore serving as learning resources for future students. One of the
course objectives was that the knowledge of the course should emerge as a result of the
interactions between students and educators. Given the type of artifacts produced
throughout the course, it may be assumed that this objective has been met in some ways. It
remains to be seen however if the knowledge and artifacts that have been created
throughout the course will be of a value and use for future cohorts of students, for the
reasons outlined as follows. As it appears most of the completed student assignments are
rather invisible with students’ contributions overall being far scattered at the Web and not
systematically embedded within the overall course. Although FLOSS as a learning
environment consists of equally diverse and far-scattered spaces they are often relatively
‘easy to spot’ since each open source project has one main development and community
space with the relating components, such as modules, add-ons, etc., usually easily
detectible as they can be located through for example associated directories or forges.
These directories or forges are frequently integrated within the respective open source
project in a relative structured way, but also can be spotted through less structured sources
such as for example lists compiled by individual members that are placed at well known
knowledge bases (for example forums or wikis). As detailed throughout chapter two,
FLOSS projects commonly have a structured approach in place, featuring inter alia forums,
mailing lists or directories (2.2). Those knowledge spaces are then connected through for
example a task focus that allow to preserve all of those artifacts in a context (2.4, 2.5, 2.8,
2.9). In the case of CCK08 an overview of the involved spaces40 is equally provided that
might allow future students to build upon earlier students’ achievements. One significant
difference here might be seen in the fact that in FLOSS there is a goal to be pursued that
leads to a final outcome, with all of the surrounding activities being related to this final
outcome – and organizational structures that support all of this and enable others to re-
40
URL: http://connect.downes.ca/places.htm
217
experience what has been done and why (2.4, 2.5, 2.8, 2.9). In FLOSS the overall objective
is to develop or advance a software solution, the product, with all interactions emerging
from this, be it related to the development of the core software product, be it the
development of components enhancing the product, or be it related to learning on how to
use it. This is to say that as well as the main product, the sub-products have a clear
function, description, development map, associated discussion spaces – and so on – with
all of those spaces relatively conveniently identified, and within a context that can be
understood. The CCK08 course on the other hand appears not to be designed in a way that
individual students’ contributions would become a structured part of ‘something’, an
element or learning resource of the course, so that those contributions would enrich the
course and its content further year by year. Though participants of CCK08 broke out into
groups, created their own learning spaces and carried out individual or collaborative
learning activities, the course did not provide a central space for those contributions and
artifacts to be displayed or presented in an integrative way.
As detailed at chapter two and three, one characteristic of FLOSS is that it allows
benefiting and learning from what others did, the artifacts created or things experienced.
This is partly achieved through the fact that learning processes are made visible (for
example in forum posts), through commented code, or other types of guidelines compiled
by the community. But it is also facilitated through modular structures (see 2.9) that – in an
educational context – might be translated to smaller sub-projects that are executed by the
participants, which could form an integral part of the overall course and allow others to
learn from those sub-projects. This is not much different from classroom-based lectures in
which students would work on a number of different projects, individually or within
groups, with the outcomes of those projects being presented to the class at large. In the
virtual space however, all the communications and collaborations that lead to a project
outcome are preserved and therefore have the potential to serve as a learning resource
itself, as it is the case in FLOSS. Downes (2009) notes that “the design of the course - as a
218
distributed connectivist-model course - created a structure in which the course contents
formed a cluster of resources around a subject-area, rather than a linear set of materials that
all students must follow, because participants were creating their own materials, in addition
to the resources found and created” by the course team. This indicates that the design
approach selected by the course team should allow a move towards a modular project
based course design without the need of major re-structuring of the overall course, so that
course participants would frame and execute their projects, showcase and present the
outcomes, with all of those being preserved within some type of directories or forges for
future course editions.
As earlier mentioned one of the cornerstones of learning in FLOSS, is to ‘enable re-
experience’, to ‘learn from what others did’, or ‘collective reflection’ and ‘virtual
experimentation’ (see also section 2.4.2 Re-experience and Re-use), with all of those
actions taking place around ‘a given constant’ (for example a project to be completed, an
articulated problem to be solved, a goal to be achieved, a product feature to be developed,
etc.). Most of the discourse, debates or discussions of the CCK08 course are very close to
the FLOSS case, a significant difference however is that those activities do not culminate
within a ‘solution’, ‘product’, ‘guide’, ‘report’ or other type of ‘concrete outcome’ that
would allow future cohorts to take this outcome as a starting point, with the underlying and
recorded discourse, debates and discussions serving as a second layer to provide further
information on the reasoning behind and ‘development pathway’.
The course CCK08 successfully established a learning community, including a
volunteering community support system. Unlike the FLOSS case however the course did
not seek to maintain this community and to seed it, which in the FLOSS case enables the
communities to build up a transactive group memory (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006;
section 2.4.2). This type of group memory would allow for past experiences or solutions to
be available for future generations, so that content and discourse is kept within a context,
219
to benefit from experienced community members that would provide hints and
clarifications whenever required, that bridge gaps or – more generally - that take on the
role of information and knowledge brokers. Establishing a similar system on a course
level, means looking for alternatives to provide continuity. FLOSS communities
commonly consist of a number of participants that possess a heterogeneous set of skills,
with types of members ranging from experts to newbies, and engaging in diverse number
of different tasks, activities and roles. CCK08 shows some similarities with all of this for
example in the type of participants, their heterogeneous skills, diversity of tasks, and range
of activities carried out and roles assumed. In contrary to the FLOSS case participants in
CCK08 all have the same weekly assignments and outputs to be produced. Independently
of their prior existing knowledge, the skills they bring in to the course, or personal learning
motivations on what they intend to get out of the course they all need to follow the same
learning exercises. The course structure does not – formally – provide the option to focus
on parts of the course only, to establish learning project groups where individual
participants could take on an active ‘lead’ in an area of their personal interest or in which
they are already skilled (for example chair a session, lead a project, etc.), yet benefiting at
the same time from the group works of others (presented to them). Even if all of the
aspects above were to be addressed, an open question still would be the ‘ownership’ of
spaces involved, such as the 170 individual blogs, Google discussion groups, or other
created spaces. Without active participation of the owners of such spaces at future course
editions, new cohorts of students would either be required to establish new spaces and re-
integrate the resources from the older ones into those, or seek to acquire the ownership of
those initial spaces. For spaces others than individual blogs this might be achieved, for
individual blogs on the other hand another solution would be needed.
220
Using Giaccardi’s (2003) course design comparison at Table 9-2 illustrates where the
design (5.3) and the Courses as Seeds / SER concept (5.4) at the right end. As can be seen
in the table there is an increased similarity between the reviewed case and Meta-design and
SER concept, in comparison to the cases reviewed at chapter six, but also to the openEd
Syllabus case.
Table 9-2: Traditional vs. Meta-design – Case Study CCK08
The CCK08 course design draws on the traditional concept, but involves the various
stakeholders from a very early moment on and allows them to later on become active co-
designer and co-constructors. The CCK08 case appears to be a good example of how
Meta-design can be applied in practice. CCK08 provided the same type of content richness
as the FLOSS case and during the course duration the course, its content and the processes
have seen a type of evolutionary growth, which would allow for a continuous improvement
of the course in future years. CCK08 might therefore be seen as a practical example of
Fischer’s (2007) ‘Meta-design’ framework. Albeit much of the content has been pre-
selected by the course team, such as weekly readings and assignments, the course actively
221
asks students to contribute to the course structure and development providing them with
ample of opportunities to become co-designers.
Despite the fact that the course shows a vast evolutionary growth as a result of its seeding,
no actions have been taken to facilitate a ‘re-seeding’ of the course. The created structures
theoretically could support such a re-seeding given that the course shows a high level of
modularity at which different groups work jointly together on their respective tasks
towards achieving a common goal, such as assignments. However, no organizational
structures have been implemented at which the various modules would end up into an
overall product and at which discourse can be clearly related to such production activities
at a modular or course level.
9.3.6 Summary
The case of CCK08 is very close to well-established online learning ecosystems, such as
the FLOSS one, and appears to be a good example for Meta-design (5.3) and also the
Courses as Seeds / SER model (5.4). Through the implementation of organizational
structures that would facilitate re-seeding and continuity the participants’ activities and
outputs potentially could potentially become part of future course editions, allowing future
cohorts of students to re-use those as a starting point, to learn from and to build on, instead
of starting from scratch. The clear course structure and outline appeared to facilitate
students’ interactions within such a scattered and diverse environment and the RSS
aggregator, described as a ‘lifeline’ by Downes (2009), further contributed positively to
this. The course also provides hints on funding models that would allow for the self-
sustainability of such type of free and open learning provision, with the opportunity to
obtain formal credits or certificates being at the same time an incentive for individuals to
participate. Having participants with a heterogeneous set of skills, different motivations,
and different learning objectives allowed the course to introduce some type of modularity
222
at which participants shaped their own learning spaces, organized their works and
collaborated with each other. It remains however unclear what such an adapted
organizational framework would look like that facilitates re-seeding, that allows for re-
experience and to draw on prior achievements, that would establish some type of
continuity and assure the availability of a transactive course memory over time.
To provide opportunities to complete assignments beyond the lectured period, analogue to
the Aristotle case, might add to establishing some type of continuity and to maintain a
certain community size beyond fixed start and end dates.
9.4 Summary
The cases of openEd Syllabus and CCK08 provided an overview of the nature of hybrid
Open Courses (Research Question 2), their course design and delivery aspects and the type
of stakeholders involved, their respective roles, or motivations and gains. As shown
throughout the chapter, and as illustrated in Tables 9-1 and 9-2, the Meta-design concept
(5.3) appears to be a reasonable framework that might be used to explain the course design
and delivery, in particular for the case of CCK08. The case of CCK08 has further shown
how networks might be created by bringing together formally enrolled students and free
learners and how those different groups might interact in a semi-structured and partly self-
organized way, one of the shortcomings (Research Question 3) identified in chapter eight
for the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ approach. With this the CCK08 case provides a suitable
practical example on. Both of the cases further support the notion that elements of
traditional formal education, as detailed in chapter seven, might be preserved, such as
structuredness, clear formulated learning objectives, or guidance and support. The cases, in
particular CCK08, have however shown at the same time that the overall structuredness of
a course can sit well along with the less structured learning spaces, activities or resources
created by the learners or leveraged into the course space by them. This is quite similar to
223
the FLOSS case in which the ‘core’ code is open to a small group of people only, with the
majority of the community engaging in surrounding tasks (see section 2.3). Both of the
cases have further shown how community support can be provided in addition to the one
provided by the course team and that those community support might also be provided
within external spaces that have been established by the course participants themselves. On
the other hand, both of the cases, and in particular the CCK08 one, show that such hybrid
Open Courses come at the price of giving up control and that free learners not formally
enrolled on a course might not receive the same type of individual guidance and coaching
then their formally enrolled counterparts. The case of CCK08 further provided some type
of evidence, or at the very least a notion, on possible self-sustainability models within such
hybrid Open Course scenarios at which free learners outside of participation can participate
at no cost. Possible self-sustainability models included: an added value for formally
enrolled students, free learners outside of formal education that perhaps decide to enrol
formally on the course and pay for it, or collaborations with fellow institutions and shared
cost and burdens.
With regards to Research Question 4 on how the concept of ‘seeding’, ‘evolutionary
growth’ and ‘re-seeding’ might be translated to Open Course design both of the cases have
shown:
a. A type of modularity with regard to students’ works at which students work – alone
or in groups – on respective subjects within self-selected or self-created learning
sub-spaces. The artifacts created by students also appeared to be of some value for
part of the current student population, a systematic exploitation and integration into
the overall course could however not be observed.
b. That free learners might opt not to follow the course and fulfil all assignments as
outlined in the course syllabus, but instead focus on aspects of their personal
interest only, including becoming active co-designer of a course. Foci not only
224
included ‘to study the course’, but also active co-design, which is very much in line
with the FLOSS case. Though such ‘free user choice’ seemed to benefit the
courses, the FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU) has also shown that, such ‘free
user choice’ might need to occur within an overall well-structured course, where
‘free user choice’ is accepted and encouraged alongside the ‘tasks students are
expected to carry out’.
With reference to motivational aspects concerning why free learners might participate in
such a learning exercise neither of the cases show any incentives besides ‘personal interest
at the subject area’. It might also be noted that participants of this course were advanced
learners and overall literate on the Web – for this reason it remains to be seen whether or
not such hybrid Open Course approaches would be replicable or produce the same results
by involving a more typical student population at under graduate level.
None of the cases clearly shows how such networks might be maintained beyond the
course duration, or how conditions could be created that: allow re-experience, continuity
and evolutionary growth [of learning resources, spaces and tools, communities involved];
establish a transactive group/course memory; keep learning resources (initial ones as well
as those leveraged into the course by the students), artifacts created by students and
underlying discourse within a context and structure that would allow future cohorts of
students to re-experience, build on and improve what others did; easily allow for a ‘re-
seeding’ and to organize, formalize and generalize the created knowledge, including
structures and processes.
The case of CCK08 suggests that the artifacts created by students have been of use for a
part of the current student population and the participants’ activities and outputs potentially
could become part of future course editions, allowing future cohorts of students to re-use
those as a starting point, to learn from and to build on, instead of starting from scratch. The
clear course structure and outline of CCK08 appeared to further facilitate students’
225
interactions within such a scattered and diverse environment and the RSS aggregator,
described as a ‘lifeline’ by Downes (2009), further contributed positively to this.
With this CCK08 appeared to be closest to meeting the four conditions above, it remains
however unclear what such an adapted organizational framework might look like in detail.
To provide opportunities to complete assignments beyond the lectured period, analogous to
the Aristotle case (6.5), might add to establishing some type of continuity and to maintain a
certain community size beyond fixed start and end dates. Similar to the RSS aggregator
that served as a ‘lifeline’ (Downes, 2009) for the case of CCK08, the FLOSS system shows
how patches and small releases can become a part of the next major software release
(Fischer 2007). Such a concept might also be applicable for the contributions provided by
the students and where students would be expected to produce a concrete outcomes that
then would be made available by them, with the articulated objective that other students
should be able to benefit from those outcomes, to understand what has been done and for
which reason, or to use the produced outcome as an ‘stand alone’ learning resources. The
following chapter ten will follow up on those potential solutions and aims to provide
further answers to Research Question 4 on how the concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’
(5.4) might be translated to Open Course design.
226
10 The NetGeners.Net Trials: A hybrid Perspective – Experiences & Lessons
Learnt
10.1 Introduction
Chapter ten will focus on two distinct questions: Research Question 4 on how the concept
of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’ of the Courses as Seeds / SER model (5.4) could be translated
to Open Course design; and the motivational aspects of the various stakeholders’ involved
on why they actively engage within an Open Course setting, in particular for formally
enrolled students and free learners.
This chapter presents two application trials that were carried out between March 2008 and
February 2009. The first experimental application, NetGeners.Net, has been carried out
alongside the EU funded FLOSSCom41 project during the period March to July 2008. The
second experimental application was carried out during the period October 2008 to
February 2009 together with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and within their ISE
– Introduction to Software Engineering course, which was one of the Open Course Case
Studies presented at chapter six (6.5). The approach that was adopted for both
experimental trials drew on the lessons learnt from the initial understanding gained from
the Open Course Case Studies in chapter six, from the FSU as presented in chapter seven
and from the application scenarios developed and detailed in chapter eight. The two
applications trials also partly drew on the experiences and results presented in chapter nine.
Partly in this regards means that the CCK08 case presented in chapter nine has only been
taking place since October 2008, therefore after the first application trial that is presented
at this chapter and in parallel to the second one presented in this chapter.
41
URL: http://www.openedworld.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1&Itemid=
227
10.2 Course Environment: General Design Approach
The design of the course environment42 took as a starting point the Meta-design framework
(5.3) and Courses as Seeds / SER process model (5.4). In addition to this, the design of the
course environment also considered FLOSS particularities such as Forges and Modularity
(see chapters two and three). The design approach paid special attention to the three
questions that appeared to be unaddressed within the reviewed Open Course scenarios
(chapter six and nine) and for which no practical guidance is provided through Meta-
design and SER, namely:
1. How to allow for a continuity and evolutionary growth of learning resources,
spaces and tools, communities involved (internal and / or external ones), or the
transactive group memory?
2. How to keep learning resources (initial ones as well as those leveraged into the
experience, build on and improve what others did?
3. How to easily allow for a ‘re-seeding’ and to organize, formalize and generalize the
created knowledge, including structures and processes?
A FLOSS product commonly consists of the ‘core product’ that can be relatively easily
enhanced by modules, sometimes also known as extensions or add-ons. Since developing a
module is far less complex and demanding than developing entire FLOSS systems it
enables participants with fewer skills, or less time, to participate with a lower entry burden
(Mockus et al., 2002; Stürmer, 2005). ‘Modularity’ plays not only an important role in
reducing complexity and lowering the entrance burden, but also helps to provide a certain
structure, to conveniently identify what one is looking for, and to find prior discourse that
relates to a single module, be it through an individual’s own search actions or by being
42
URL: http://www.netgeners.net
228
pointed to those sources by other community members. Much of the ongoing discourse in
FLOSS clearly relates to tasks such as ‘a product to be developed’, ‘a task to be fulfilled’,
or ‘a solution to be found for a problem’, with all of those interactions being embedded
within the respective FLOSS ecosystem and being kept in a context due to a combination
of technological solutions in place and individuals acting as knowledge and information
broker.
Similar to modularity in FLOSS, the course design introduced the concept of student
driven learning projects that are manageable within the given timeframe, in which students
would work individually or as a group. This means that students would be expected to
produce concrete outcomes that are then made available by them, with the articulated
objective that other students should be able to benefit from those outcomes, to understand
what has been done and for what reason, or to use the produced outcome as a ‘stand alone’
learning resource. The Meta-design framework (Fischer, 2007) for example highlights as
one of the values of the FLOSS system that patches and small releases are integrated into
the next major software release, one of the aspects the course design approach aimed to
exactly reproduce through students driven learning projects that need to produce clear
outcomes that could be further used.
The design approach further aimed at keeping learning resources and artifacts created by
students (outcomes) within a context to the underlying discourse by introducing a forge /
directory type learning environment that would allow students to register their learning
projects, to provide some key information on what they are about, and then link to the
associated collaboration and communication spaces used by them, such as wikis, forums,
chats, or blogs. Figure 10-1 briefly illustrates how modularity and forges have been
considered in the course design by drawing on the FLOSS particularities detailed in
chapters two and three of this work.
229
Figure 10-1: Open Course Scenario: Modular & Forge Style
Applying the concept of learning projects within such a forge / directory type environment
was intended to serve as a bridge, analogous to the FLOSS case, between the instructional
and learning resources provided by the course team (‘static’ content) on the one hand and
assignments, discourse and artifacts created by the students on the other hand. Such an
approach did not aim to provide the learner with a finished set of expert developed ‘static’
content to be consumed only, but instead expects the learner to actively embed the artifacts
they create within the course environment and to link to external sources and spaces
involved.
With regards to motivational aspects it was hoped that such students’ driven learning
projects might further foster a perceived personal meaningfulness, since students could – to
a certain degree – decide themselves on foci, activities, resources or spaces. As learnt from
the FSU (7.4.1) and confirmed through the workshops (7.4.2) however, a too high degree
of autonomy and too little structure should be avoided and learner should be provided with
clear guidance, structure and well articulated learning outcomes to be acquired.
230
10.3 Organizational Aspects and possible Limitations
Perhaps one of the most crucial and challenging questions was how to allow continuity and
evolutionary growth at a community level and to bypass the limitations imposed by fixed
start and end dates resulting in a 100% community turnover. The availability of a large
number of (volunteering) participants, which in the case of FLOSS communities
characterized by a large number of participants, by volunteering and volatility, is probably
one of the cornerstones of the efficiency of the FLOSS community as a learning
environment (Glott et al., 2007). A crucial question for transferring such principles to
formal education is therefore how similar networks can be created within formal
environments, which usually have small classes and 100% course turnover. On the other
hand the FLOSS case also shows that community members have regular contacts to only 1
to 5 other community members (Glott et al., 2007) and therefore a question is how to reap
similar network effects from small networks in formal education. A solution to this could
be to bring together different learner groups, such as fellow university students, free
learners outside of formal education, or by making use and strategically embedding well-
established external communities.
One of the challenges associated with such a strategic involvement relates to the
motivational aspect, on how to provide motivations for free learners outside of formal
education or practitioners to participate at such an Open Course? Theoretical solutions
have been described at the end of chapter eight, but would those ones be applicable in
practice? Given the scope of the two trials presented in this chapter very likely most of
those potential motivational aspects and incentives would be out of the scope for such
application trials. It nonetheless was aimed at obtaining feedback from the participants’ of
those trials on their point of view with regards to motivational aspects or on why to
participate or why to become an active contributor at such type of free / open educational
scenarios.
231
10.4 The NetGeners.Net Case
10.4.1 Introduction
The NetGeners.Net trial has been carried out alongside the EU funded FLOSSCom project
during the period March to July 2008. It was a small scale trial with ten volunteering
students from Greece and Spain, which were located in five different countries and
supported on a regular base by one course facilitator and two less regular participating
members from the FLOSSCom project.
The objective of the Netgeners.Net course was to impart participants some of the skills and
abilities required for using the Web to support self-studying and self-dependent learning,
including identification, evaluation and use of freely available online resources.
Participants were expected to establish groups, with each of those groups working together
on one learning project. As part of their work they had to collaborate with others, to use the
tools required to do so, to find relevant resources at the Web and to critically evaluate and
analyse them. The projects had to fall within one of five given broad areas: content; people
and communities; tools; soft skills; and legal aspects.
For each learning project a sample structure has been suggested, but no learning resources
that should be studied. The reasoning for not providing learning resources was that learners
were expected to find their way through a learning project themselves; with educators
input being limited to participate at reflective discussions and to guide the learners
throughout their learning projects. Learning resources then would be provided ad-hoc by
the educator by pointing learners to freely available web-based sources to discuss their
appropriateness for the purpose of a specific learning project (analogue to Brown and
Adler, 2008 or Fischer, 2006). Participants were provided with an initial set of instructional
materials and asked to:
1. Build (small) groups, of 2 to 4 participants for each learning project
2. Define objectives of their learning project (what do we want to show)
232
3. Review existing content at the Web relevant to this project, this should be in
accordance to their objectives
4. Debate pro’s and con’s of the retrieved information within the group and the course
facilitator.
5. Develop / set up a for example wiki page summarizing the findings
6. Present the project results by means of a presentation
7. Evaluate the work they have done and also the projects of others
In addition to this participants were explained that the results of their work should be
understandable and of use for others outside of the project group and should be presented
in a manner that would allow for it.
10.4.2 Specific Design Outline
The NetGeners.Net learning environment provided the same type of tools as identified
within the FLOSS case and tried to take into account FLOSS particularities such as
modularity and project based work (chapter two and three). It was aimed to provide
learners on the one hand with a basic ‘on-board’ set of communication and collaboration
tools (Blog, Chat, Forum and Wiki) and on the other hand providing a personal space and a
space for personal learning projects, including rating and commenting systems. The
concept of project based learning projects was seen as a potential bridge between ‘static’
content on the one hand and learning processes and activities (discourse) on the other hand
that perhaps would allow for a similar type of ‘re-experience’ to FLOSS. Such learning
projects therefore might allow for a FLOSS type engagement, at which content is often
taken forward and backward, contextualized, adapted, translated, re-mixed, embedded into
processes or feed into new products by individuals that act as knowledge brokers allowing
content to be dynamic and causing it to continuously change. This approach did not intend
233
to provide the learner with a finished set of expert developed ‘static’ content to be
consumed, but instead expected them to become an active participant in the respective
study field, to acquire subject matter skills through practice, and providing the potential of
gaining key and soft skills as a result of their activities and engagement. An underlying
belief was that for many ‘questions’ or ‘needs’ the answer, or an approximate to it, is
already ‘somewhere out there at the Web’ and therefore, instead of ‘reinventing the wheel’
each time, learners should learn how to find, analyse, evaluate and use what already exists
at the Web and to incorporate it into their own work.
The concept of learning projects also followed the Courses as Seeds (dePaula et al., 2001;
Fischer, 1998, 2007) objective of creating a culture of collective inquiry; where learner
could take on an active role in their own learning process; that would be embedded in
collaborative activities and supported by innovative technologies; with learners adapting a
mindset that understands that initial plans must not correspond to final outcomes; that
learners are prepared for interpreting unexpected results, where discussions and decisions
would be captured and therefore potentially could become artifacts that help future
students in their learning process; and where all of those would lead to an environment of
current improvement and building upon what others built. In addition to this two key
aspects of Meta-design, and as already detailed within chapter five, were considered during
the design time:
• A system should be open to change during use time and involves all stakeholders in
the design process during design time and use time (Fischer, 2007).
Though the initial core environment has been largely designed without stakeholders’
participation, it allowed for stakeholder modifications from day one of its use time
• A system should be underdesigned at design time to allow learners (‘owner of
problems’) to create solutions at use time (Fischer, 2007).
234
This was taken into consideration by allowing learners to make use of the communication
and collaboration spaces provided ‘on-board’ or to use any other space at the Web that
they felt more comfortable with and to link those spaces to the existing learning
environment. Learners also had the freedom to decide within the overall course objective
on the specific objectives, tasks and activities, roadmap of their learning projects and to
define its outcomes. To support and guide learners regular chats had been organized, at
which learners would also be asked for feedback on things they thought might be
improved. The course environment similarly to the individual learning projects was kept
‘open’ in a sense that others would have the opportunity to join the course after its official
start. With regards to motivational aspects and incentives of why to participate at such an
Open Course, apart from personal interest in the subject area, two incentives were
provided:
• A stipend to participate at the end of the course at a conference in Spain to present
the results
• A certificate in the name of the FLOSSCom project of having participated at such a
course
10.4.3 Course Summary
Out of the ten participants nine actually participated actively throughout the course
duration, working on three different learning projects:
1. DWTDI – Different Ways To Disseminate Information
This project consisted of 4 participants one Spanish graduate student located in the UK,
three Greek undergraduate students with two being located in Sweden and one in Greece
2. Copyleft vs. Copyright
235
This project consisted of three Greek participants, two PhD students and one
undergraduate student – all located in Greece.
3. Ética, tecnología y libre elección: abordando dilemas en red
This project consisted of two Spanish graduate students, one located in Spain and one in
Argentina.
At the introductory period during the first two weeks students were asked to form three
groups and selecting a learning project focus area. The subject Copyleft vs. Copyright was
the only predefined learning project that included an initial subject outline and some
information and was established by a doctor in law of the University of Vienna to support
the kick-off phase of the course. Most of the weekly chats took place on a learning project
level with only random ones being hold at a course level; though this has not been a
planned structure but rather emerged out of the initial chats at a course level. As a follow
up activity of chats the course facilitator compiled the chat minutes and uploaded them to
the NetGeners.Net forum as well as uploading the original chat transcript to the repository
and linking to it. The first group however took on this activity occasionally (three out of
eight times) and followed up on the organization of future chats autonomously. The first
project group had a relatively clear idea on the subject line they choose, with the Spanish
graduate student taking on some type of project management role. The second project
group that took on a predefined subject area had some initial problems of getting into the
topic from a practical perspective, but managed to overcome those fairly easy. The third
group had initially a clear idea on what they wanted to do, but then ‘got lost’ throughout
their work and decided to refocus and to launch a new project. Communication in general
took place in English with the Greek participants of group one and two occasionally
communicating in Greek, meanwhile the two Spanish participants of the third group
usually communicated in Spanish amongst them, and in a mixture of Spanish, English and
236
Portuguese during the group chats with the course facilitator or in English during chats and
meetings at a course level.
10.4.3.1 Learning Project: DWTDI – Different Ways To Disseminate Information
This project group had a relatively clear idea on what they intended to achieve as part of
their learning project. The group quickly established a roadmap and selected and
customized their working spaces. The group opted to not use the chat and wiki provided
‘on-board’ at the NetGeners.Net side, but instead established their own spaces that
consisted of Google docs, a wiki space at Wikidot and Freenode for chats. As can be seen
in Figure 10-2 the group started to work in a very self-organized and relatively autonomous
way from the very beginning.
Figure 10-2: Chat Minutes DWTDI project43
In fact, the group worked so autonomously that for about two weeks they organized all of
their sessions through the mailing list that they set up themselves over Google without the
43
Source: http://www.netgeners.net/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=28&topic=24.0
237
course facilitator even being aware that they have started with their work. Interestingly the
group did not only provide information and links at the NetGeners.Net learning project
directory about the working spaces they were going to use, but also reverse links back from
their Wikidot space to the Netgeners.Net side as shown in Figure 10-3.
Figure 10-3: DWTDI collaborative development space at Wikidot44
Despite this overall positive and proactive attitude for such a ‘learning exercise’ outside of
formal education, ‘time’ and ‘competing with their regular studies or employment’, turned
out to be an issue resulting in the fact that the objectives they wanted to achieve and
articulated within their roadmap have not been met. With regards to the outputs produced
as part of their project work, it might be concluded that they could be considered of a
reasonable quality and structure that would allow future students to build on them. An
interesting aspect to mention perhaps is that the learning project page at the NetGeners.Net
directory has been ranked by Google with the importance “2”, compared to a “0” for the
other two projects or the learning project directory itself. The used Wikidot space of this
project has also been indexed with the rank “3”. For a project of this scope and duration
this can be seen as a remarkable result.
44
Source: http://www.netgeners.net/index.php?option=com_mtree&task=viewlink&link_id=29&Itemid=37
238
10.4.3.2 Learning Project: Copyleft vs. Copyright
The second project group took on a project within a predefined subject area45, which had
been established with the help of a doctor in law of the University of Vienna, Austria, prior
to the start of the course. This project already had an initial roadmap and introductory
outline, with the participants being expected to take over the project and to develop it
further. Once taking on the project the group carefully drew up their roadmap taking into
account that the results of the project should be understandable for others outside of the
project team. Initially the roadmap only included the next steps forward, with the overall
goal of the learning project being only broadly defined. It was decided to first provide an
initial review of the field and to provide a comparative overview of existing licenses. This
step would be followed by a gathering of practical examples and case studies to illustrate
how licenses might be applied in practice. The course facilitator actively participated in the
project by providing guidance and links to sources that addressed the practical side.
Since the initial project space has been within the NetGeners.Net wiki the project team
continued to work at this space during the first seven weeks. There was however a
dissatisfaction with the working space and upon pointing the group to the external space
that has been established by the first group the team copied this approach and set up a
similar space on ‘PB works’ as shown in Figure 10-4.
45
URL: http://www.netgeners.net/index.php?option=com_mtree&task=viewlink&link_id=24&Itemid=37
239
Figure 10-4: Copyleft vs. Copyright PB Works project space46
The on board chat function on the other hand, which was disliked by the other two groups,
met the group expectations and was used throughout the course for project chats.
Like the first group, time availability turned out to be one of the main challenges, since this
‘learning exercise’ had to compete with more profound obligations, such as formal studies
and work commitments. Despite this time limitation the group managed to provide an
almost final version of the project at the end of the course.
10.4.3.3 Learning Project: Ética, tecnología y libre elección: abordando dilemas en
red
This project47 consisted of two Spanish graduate students, one located in Spain and one in
Argentina. One specific aspect of this group, though not turning out to be a problem in
practice, related to English language skills. Being overall more comfortable writing and
communicating in Spanish it was agreed that all project works would be carried out in
Spanish, meanwhile communications with the course facilitator took place by using at a
46
Source: http://copyleftvscopyright.pbworks.com/FrontPage
47
URL: http://www.netgeners.net/index.php?option=com_mtree&task=viewlink&link_id=28&Itemid=37
and http://www.netgeners.net/index.php?option=com_mtree&task=viewlink&link_id=30&Itemid=37
240
same time a mixture of English, Portuguese and Spanish. Analogue to the other two project
groups, time limitation turned out to be an important aspect and slowed down the work
significantly.
Initially the group had a relatively clear idea on what they wanted to achieve and the way
to go, but then ‘got lost’ on their ideas as shown in Figure 10-548. As a result of this they
changed the focus and launched a new project that they managed to almost finalize.
Figure 10-5: Extract from a weekly chat; session I49
The initial project focused on the impact of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt)
campaigns on free user choices, with the new project slightly changing the focus (Figure
10-6) towards ‘Ethics, technology and free users choice – overcoming dilemmas at the
Web’50.
Figure 10-6: Extract from a weekly chat; session II51
As a result of this refocus the further work went relatively smoothly and the team managed
to produce a coherent output that corresponded to the objectives they had established
themselves (Figure 10-7).
48
Note: ‘hoja de ruta’ means ‘roadmap’
49
Source: http://www.netgeners.net/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=22&Itemid=29
50
Translated from Spanish, the original title of the project is ‘Ética, tecnología y libre elección: abordando
debates en red’
51
241
Figure 10-7: Final project wiki page52
One of the objectives of this project was to reflect on ‘dilemmas’ that users face once
acting on the Web and as a second step to promote a discussion on those dilemmas, so
others outside of the project team could comment and complement the work they started.
For this reason, and in addition to the wiki space that presented their works produced, they
also decided to set up a blog53 to provide a supportive space for dialogues and discussions.
Similar to the first group, this group also decided not to use the chat provided within the
course environment, but instead established their own chat space at jabber and provided a
link and introductory text within their wiki space detailing how to use the chat and how to
join it (Figure 10-8).
52
Source:
http://wiki.netgeners.net/index.php?title=%C3%89tica%2C_tecnolog%C3%ADa_y_libre_elecci%C3%B3n:_
abordando_debates_en_red
53
URL: http://tecnologiaetica.wordpress.com
242
Figure 10-8: Instruction guide on how to participate at project group chats54
The reason for not using the onboard chat was discomfort with it on the one hand and on
the other hand knowledge about alternative solutions perceived to be superior and regularly
used by the group. Overall, and as is the case for the two other projects, the group
autonomously set up their project environment by making use of both, the spaces provided
within the course environment as well as those ones freely available through the net.
10.4.3.4 Course Level Summary
The course itself was developed in a less structured way than the six cases presented in
chapters six and nine; yet it kept the type of structure as for example suggested within the
FSU workshops (section 7.5). Participants were expected to identify and develop their own
learning projects, to be active participants in their respective study field, and to acquire
subject matter skills through practice. Most of the learning resources were identified
throughout the course with the course facilitator supporting the participants by providing
links to resources of potential relevance throughout the chats.
Throughout the duration of the course, the course facilitator and participants met for a total
of thirty chats, with only the initial and the four final ones taking place at a course level
and the majority at a project group level. Chats, as a main medium for synchronous
communication, were organized regularly, but not weekly, with subsequent chats being
agreed on at a one by one base. A final face-to-face meeting in Spain to which participants
were invited followed this virtual interaction.
Not all of the spaces and functions that the course environment offered were ultimately
used, nor were they used in the way it was initially expected when designing the course
environment. Each of the three project groups selected their preferred working tools and
engaged within the course environment and external spaces in a different way. The
54
Source: http://wiki.netgeners.net/index.php?title=Conferencia_jabber
243
learning project directory however allowed for identifying the spaces and tools used by
each of the project groups, with the onboard forum mainly serving as a central space to
provide information on weekly chats and chat summaries.
Despite the small scope of each of the three learning projects the overall visibility of them
was quite impressive, at least if taking ‘Google Search’ as an indicator for measuring this.
Figure 10-9: Learning project visibility at Google Search55
As shown in Figure 10-9 a key word search for the title of each learning project, or just
some words of the title, featured the learning projects within the first three results
presented by Google. In addition to this, the Google page rank of the NetGeners.Net course
environment showed a rank value of ‘5’, which is a comparatively high page rank, shortly
after the course had been launched.
Towards the end of the course the course participants articulated their experiences gained
throughout the course, to be later subject to a round table and a panel discussion at the
FKFT conference in Spain. To gather participants’ experiences a set of initial questions
55
Source: Google Search www.google.com
244
was drafted and placed within the course wiki, with participants being asked to respond to
those questions, or to add new ones that they considered to be of relevance (Figure 10-10).
Figure 10-10: Forum extract of feedback gathering process on course experience56
Part of the questions aimed at comparing the participants’ experiences against their
experiences of learning within formal higher educational settings, with others aimed at
comparing them against their experiences of learning within open source communities.
Since all participants had experiences from both fields they were in a reasonably good
position to carry out such a cross comparison. The initial set of questions was derived from
the desirable characteristics of FLOSS as a learning environment and learning in FLOSS,
from the identified desirable characteristics of traditional educational settings that might be
retained, and the lessons learnt from the case studies or the FSU. In addition to
encouraging the course participants to contribute with further questions, the team of the
associated FLOSSCom project was also invited to contribute with questions. This virtual
discussion and exchange then was followed by a face-to-face round table discussion that
took place in parallel to the FKFT conference in Spain and at which both course
participants and FLOSSCom team members participated. As a follow up activity to this
physical event two further chat sessions throughout July and August and a final face-to-
face round table discussion in Greece have been organized. The final face-to-face session
in Greece included some of the NetGeners.Net participants as well as some of the
FLOSSCom project members. The results of those feedback collections and discussions
are following presented.
56
Source: http://wiki.netgeners.net/index.php?title=The_future_of_Free_/_Open_Education_-_Part_1
245
10.4.4 Course Findings
Note: All of the quotes presented within this section have been obtained from the course
wiki.57
Despite the small group size of participants, this initial trial provided a lot of valuable
information. The findings presented in this section are grouped by identified (1) course
design weaknesses, (2) learning experience: perceived benefits and drawbacks, (3)
suggestions on transferability to traditional course scenarios, and (4) motivational aspects
for Open Course scenarios. The findings have been obtained through intensive focus
groups works with the participants and involving them in online reflections and inquiries
initiated through an initial set of qualitative questions (see Figure 10-11 and Annex 1.1), or
face-2-face meetings at which also the researchers of the FLOSSCom project and other
stakeholders participated (see also chapter three methodology or section 1.7 for further
details).
Figure 10-11: Wiki extract of feedback gathering process on course experience58
57
URL: http://wiki.netgeners.net/index.php?title=The_future_of_Free_/_Open_Education_-_Part_1
58
Source: http://wiki.netgeners.net/index.php?title=The_future_of_Free_/_Open_Education_-_Part_1
246
10.4.4.1 Weaknesses
Identified weaknesses might be broadly grouped into three different categories: (1) the
need for an easily understandable course structure and instructional materials, (2) a
perceived lack of available domain expertise through the course team, (3) demand for
better group interactions and being able to easily see and follow what others do.
(1) Easily understandable course structure and instructional materials
An overall identified weakness related to the structure of the course; though structure in
this regard must not be mistaken with being generally inferior to courses designed in a
traditional way. What has been asked for was a more precise and clear outline of the
general objectives of the course and course instructions, such as the fact that participants
were expected to drive and gear their learning projects in a self-responsible way, assuming
different roles such as learner, teacher, developer, researcher, buddy, or peer. In contrary,
all participants were also well aware that a higher level of organization and more rigid
structures would come at the price of less freedom, for example the freedom to focus on
their areas of interest, to organize the work themselves, or to build up their own learning
spaces and gather their own learning resources. Thus they agreed that a good balance has
to be found between the former (structure) and the latter (freedom).
The NetGeners.Net website ‘feeling’ was further perceived to have room for improvement
moving away from a ‘course look’ towards a ‘project look’ to also make it easier and
clearer for newcomers to join into ongoing learning projects. Generally there was the
strong notion that the ‘course concept’ conflicts with the ‘community idea’ and therefore a
bridge between both should be found, though they could suggest no alternative concept.
(2) Perceived lack of domain experts to provide support
Even though participants liked the freedom of learning that they experienced during the
course, all of the participants expressed that they felt that there should have been a better
247
availability of domain experts to facilitate their way through the course and who could
have told them where to stop and where to go on.
Figure 10-12: Participant quote: Perceived lack vs. de-facto lack on guidance
Two skills to be learned as part of the course have been ‘self-dependent decision making’
based on ones own critical analysis, individually or within the group, and to ‘learn how to
find subject matter expertise’ at the Web and how to use this expertise. For this reason the
provision of support has been a two-edged undertaking for the course team to find a right
balance between a sufficient level of stimulating ‘self-dependent decision making’,
‘critical analysis’, or to ‘learn how to find subject matter expertise’, yet allowing
participants to progress through the course smoothly and supporting them adequately.
Judging from the positive feedback received at the end of the course, and the outputs
produced by the participants, it might be concluded that a sub-optimal balance had been
found. Despite the perceived lack of support and domain expertise, the learning outcomes
and reflections indicate that this ‘perceived lack’ (Figure 10-12) has not resulted in a ‘de-
facto lack’. Nonetheless, the course outline should have made it clearer that ‘self-
dependent’ learning was a core part of the course objectives to be trained.
(3) Better group interactions and seeing what others do
Potential for optimization identified by participants consisted of a higher degree of group
interaction with talks, chats or any other types of virtual meetings taking more often place
at a course level, and not being limited to the learning project level. Participants believed
that such group activities would support community building, foster an exchange of ideas,
would allow for social exchange and getting to know the others, to see other people's
working techniques, to learn with the others, or to identify synergies between learning
projects.
248
Figure 10-13: Participant quote: Desired to see what others do
In line with this (Figure 10-13) it was seen to be desirable to make learning project
outcomes public in a more unstructured way and therefore at a much earlier stage, so that
participants could see what others are doing, to learn from this, to support each other and to
allow different projects to connect. It has been shown earlier in this section that the second
project group expressed their dissatisfaction with the course internal wiki space, and set up
a new external one after having seen the external space created by group one. This is just
one example of what participants would have liked to see happening at a larger scale, more
information exchange at a course level and a culture of ‘releasing often and early’.
Interestingly, all of the three groups themselves have been encouraged by the course
facilitator to ‘release early’, but preferred to work more ‘closed’ at the beginning and to
only make resources publicly available at a later and therefore more mature stage. Thus
there has been a discrepancy between the things they would have liked to see from others
and their own behaviour.
Another aspect mentioned by participants was a lack of face to face meetings, which they
felt would have further facilitated and supported their learning process, or as one
participant expressed it there is a difference in the way that people interact when they meet
with each other face to face in order to discuss an issue, share their opinions and
accomplish a team task. Apart from seeing such face to face meetings as being desirable
and supportive, by the end of the course participants expressed that even through their
virtual collaborations a type of community feeling has been established, including mutual
trust and recognition, with all of them working together as part of the ‘NetGeners.Net
team’.
249
Finally, it was recommended to provide some type of ‘wish list’ within the course
environment, as to be found frequently within FLOSS projects, to facilitate students
feedback and recommendations and channel them clearly throughout the course, to allow
others to comment on those, and ultimately to enable participants to easily help shaping
and improving the course.
10.4.4.2 Learning Experience
All but one of the participants knew at least one of the others prior to the start of the
course. Despite knowing each other a group identity was clearly absent at the start of the
course. This however changed significantly during the course, with the meeting in Spain
clearly demonstrating that a community identity has been established (Figure 10-14), most
notably at a group level, but also at an overall course level.
Figure 10-14: Participant quote: Community identity
Therefore one learning experience, though not related to the course subject area, was to
shape and build an online community, to organize communications, to plan and execute
their virtual collaborative works, or to select and shape the tools and places to do all of
this. Participants overall liked the flexibility regarding choice of learning, what projects to
choose, when to learn and how to learn. This perceived benefit nonetheless conflicted with
the desire of clear structures and outlines. This is to say that they liked a high level of
flexibility and self-responsibility on the one hand, but at the same time also liked to be
provided with guidance and support – which they felt could have been stronger by times.
250
Figure 10-15: Participant quote: Freedom of choice
‘Freedom of choice’ (Figure 10-15, 10-16) has been one of the strong advantages
perceived by the participants, be it the dynamic roles, with no perceived difference
between teacher and students, be it the fact that they could make use of anything they
found and considered to be of relevance, be it the absence of limits, but also – be it the
absence of degrees that they would have to fear.
Figure 10-16: Participant quote: No fear of degrees
The learning experience of this course mostly falls in two categories: (1) ‘how they have
learnt’ and (2) ‘what they have learnt’ as detailed following and concluded with a short
reflection on their perceived (3) ‘speed and scope of learning’.
(1) ‘How they have learnt’
It could be observed that learning took place as well through individual actions, such as
finding resources, reading, evaluating and understanding them, as through collaboration
with their peers – by discussing their findings and deciding on ways to merge their
individual works together.
Figure 10-17: Participant quote: Finding your way around
251
Merging their work together required finding an agreement on both (Figure 10-17): types
of content that would be used as well as agreeing on spaces and structures on where to
present those works.
Figure 10-18: Participant quote: Not about what, but how I learned
One of the course objectives was ‘learning by doing’ and the responses of the participants
indicate (Figure 10-18) that this objective could be achieved, or as one put it “learning is
done – not received”, which expressed the feeling that in traditional educational settings
students are supposed to ‘consume’ what is given to them, meanwhile this course expected
them to ‘create’ their own learning with the objective that whatever they ‘produce’ should
be of a potential use for others and understandable for those others.
(2) ‘What they have learnt’
Participants overall acquired an understanding on the subject area (Figure 10-19) of their
learning project, but also a larger set of skills as a result of their virtual collaborations,
including – inter alia – the use of a range of technologies, online search and evaluation of
sources, to organize work within virtual distributed teams, to present and discuss their
works, and ultimately English language skills.
252
Figure 10-19: Participant quote: What we learned
It is very likely that not all of the participants will have learnt the same things, for example
due to the different subjects they focused on, the different activities, and ultimately the
different degree of time they invested. Nonetheless, it appears that the learning outcomes
are comparable in so far as all of them became more familiar with some type of ‘self-
directed’ and ‘self-responsible’ learning within virtual distributed teams, to organize and
carry out their work in a self-responsible manner in collaboration with peers, to present and
discuss their results, and ultimately to become familiar with doing all of those things
publicly and by using a language other than their mother tongue. This notion is very much
in line with the experiences presented within the literature review of this work throughout
chapter two and three, most notably those one presented at sections 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4.
(3) ‘Speed & Scope of learning’
Given that participants possessed both experiences of learning in FLOSS and formal higher
education they have also been asked about their perceived ‘speed and scope of learning’.
Apart from the challenges mentioned earlier, there has also been the notion that the
freedom of making use of freely available resources at the Web has the additional
advantage of having ‘up to date’ information and materials (Figure 10-20).
253
Figure 10-20: Participant quote: Static vs. dynamic learning materials
The FLOSS case is known for its ‘speed of innovation’ (Von Hippel & Krogh, 2003)
therefore it has also been evaluated how such Open Course scenarios compare against the
FLOSS case or traditional courses. Given the small scale of this course it was decided to
shed some light on this aspect through open ended discussions about the perceived speed
and scope of learning in comparison to their experiences within traditional higher
education on the one side and learning in FLOSS on the other side. Compared to traditional
courses the speed of learning was seen to be slightly slower due to the overwhelming
amount of information that they found, the need to ‘filter’ that information through their
own evaluation on the reliability of sources, or the quality of such sources and relevance
for their work. On the positive side participants developed a deeper understanding of their
respective subject areas, were more comfortable explaining their subject and opinions to
others, or to present the findings within the wikis. Learning in formal education was
perceived to be faster, meanwhile learning in such an open environment was perceived to
be richer and deeper. Compared to learning in FLOSS the speed and scope of learning was
perceived to be almost equal. This perception is very much in line with the information
provided within the literature review at chapter two and three and also the observations
made within the case studies presented at chapter six and nine of this work.
10.4.4.3 Comparison against Traditional Educational Settings, Learning Theories
and Fundamental Assumptions to Learning
In contrast to the formal and traditional way of learning that the participants experienced
throughout their regular studies, this type of learning experience was perceived to be more
appealing, with the restrictions as outlined at section 10.4.4.1.
254
Besides the already mentioned ‘freedom of choice’, the opportunity to become active, to
experiment, to trigger, to find out and to explore were seen to be strong aspects that they
missed within their traditional counterparts. Participants could trigger and explore, take the
risk of failure and re-trigger and re-explore, without any fear of sanctions or bad grading
that might result out of those actions.
Figure 10-21: Participant quote: Flexible schedule
This was seen as a major advantage (Figure 10-21) to the courses they experienced
throughout their regular studies and there was a common agreement that new types of
assessment would need to be found in order to encourage students to adopt such roles and
behaviours. Unlike in traditional settings participants could ‘contribute to the process’,
instead of having to follow a given way and using a limited set of pre-selected resources.
To ‘find things on the Web’ to then be presented to and discussed with the group has been
proven to be quite motivating for the course participants. This type of self-directed learning
(Figure 10-22) overall worked out in a motivational way as exemplified at the following
quote:
Figure 10-22: Participant quote: Learning is done not received
Within their work on learning technologies to support self-directed learning Fischer and
Scharff (1998) drew on Resnick’s (1989) six fundamental assumptions for learning and
derive from these some key characteristics that learning environments should feature. As
has been shown in chapter two, FLOSS as a learning environment inherits – to a certain
degree – all of those six characteristics. So how did this NetGeners.Net course compared
against these 6 fundamental aspects as outlined by Fischer and Scharff (1998)?
255
Figure 10-23: Participant quote: Rendering knowledge useless in Higher Education
Figure 10-23 shows a clear negative attitude towards traditional courses, with many of the
‘course activities’ perceived to be ‘pointless’. ‘Rendering knowledge useless’ and ‘most
things forgotten along the way’ actually supports the first assumption that learning is a
process of knowledge construction not of knowledge recording or absorption (Harel and
Papert, 1991) and that it would require environments in which learners can be active
designers and contributors rather than passive consumers (Fischer and Scharff, 1998). It
could be observed that participants did become active contributors and designers, taking on
voluntarily a number of different roles, and constructed the knowledge ‘along their way’,
which is well in line with this first assumption.
The second assumption states that learning is highly tuned to the situation in which it
takes place, requires environments that are domain-oriented, support human problem-
domain interaction (the connection between people and the domain specific problems that
they face) and not just human-computer interaction (Fischer and Scharff, 1998).
It could be seen throughout the course that participants reflected on their actions, as well
‘in action’ as ‘on-action’, with the ‘project goal’ being the connection point that drove the
group with collaborations and actions emerging around the project. For all of the three
projects it could also be seen that the course facilitator provided task-relevant support and
assumed the crucial role of ‘steering’, ‘guiding’, ‘critical reader’ or just to help overcoming
hurdles. Besides those supporting roles assumed by the facilitator participants developed
and executed their projects self-responsible.
256
Figure 10-24: Participant quote: Take the responsibility of ones own learning
In contrast to traditional courses participants had the freedom (Figure 10-24) to select their
own learning resources, greater flexibility with regards to time or procedures to be
established and followed. All of this certainly bears a large potential for conflicts,
problems or challenges to be overcome, but despite the absence of physical classes, the
regular chats were seen to provide the required minimum level of support to avoid or
overcome those.
The third assumption refers to the knowledge-dependency of learning, which means that
people will use their existing knowledge in order to construct new knowledge. Such a
knowledge-dependency requires learning environments that support user-tailored
information presentations; such as differential descriptions of new information (Fischer
and Scharff, 1998). In line with this the NetGener.Net course expected participants to
frame their own learning projects and to bring in their prior knowledge as a starting point
and to then select learning resources from the Web that correspond to state of their current
knowledge.
Figure 10-25: Participant quote: Wider scope of learning
Figure 10-25 shows the perceived difference between individual learning, a common part
of formal traditional education, and collaborative learning, as frequently takes place on the
257
Web. It could be seen that participants build on their own prior knowledge, as well as that
provided by the group. It could however not be seen whether or not the NetGeners.Net
approach and learning project concept would ultimately allow for a re-experience beyond
the current course population.
The fourth assumption claims that learning needs to account for distributed cognition, by
which the knowledge and effort required to solve a problem is distributed among various
participants and where knowledge is distributed amongst many stakeholders and ‘the
answer’ does not exist or is not known (Fischer and Scharff, 1998). The NetGeners.Net
course explicitly aimed at supporting collaborative learning through the concept of
learning projects, to foster and stimulate participatory and collaborative learning, and it
could be observed that the knowledge and effort required to develop the learning projects
was indeed distributed among various participants. The results of the NetGeners.Net
course therefore support this fourth assumption, as also further illustrated by the quotes
below.
Figure 10-26: Participant quote: Sharing, reflection, discussion & re-use
As explained earlier, identity building has been taking place during the course, which is
also visible in Figure 10-26. Participants liked to meet up with ‘course mates’ and
generally wanted ‘to come together’. The fifth assumption from Fischer and Scharff
(1998) explains that learning is affected as much by motivational issues as by cognitive
issues and that therefore environments are required that let people experience and
understand why they should learn or to contribute something and users should take pride in
their contributions and be rewarded for them. It appears that the type of learning
258
experience provided throughout the course is a good example of such a motivation and also
perceived rewards.
Figure 10-27: Participant quote: Find out about everything
As can be seen in Figure 10-27, and mentioned various times by participants, formal
grades and traditional ways of assessment could be a serious issue for the mainstreaming of
such a course concept as introduced at the NetGeners.Net course and therefore alternative
means would need to be found which would correspond with this type of course design.
Despite this form of learning provision being perceived as being very motivating within
the context of a non degree-awarding course, there nonetheless would be the need to
provide other ‘gains’ comparable to ‘degrees’ when talking about the provision of ‘Open
Courses’ (see also 10.4.4.5).
As a sixth assumption Fischer and Scharff (1998) point out that learning is not limited to
any discrete group of individuals, with changing roles that go beyond the teacher-learner
pattern and where tasks and responsibilities change (Figure 10-28).
Figure 10-28: Participant quote: Roles are dynamic
Throughout the course it was observed that participants took on a number of roles,
changing responsibilities, or drew on their varying domain expertise. These dynamics of
roles in combination with an absence of ‘fear’ additionally supported a ‘joyful learning’
259
experience and encouraged participants to tinker and explore their respective subject fields
and to play with supporting tools to present their work.
Based on the six assumptions on learning it might be concluded that overall the design
approach chosen did indeed provide a course scenario that fostered self-directed learning
and lead to a learning experience that was – overall – perceived to be more appealing to the
courses participants would usually attend.
However, the results have also shown that a right balance of ‘freedom’ and ‘structure’
must be found and the importance of having domain experts present.
10.4.4.4 Potential Transferability of Course Approach to Open Course Scenarios
Given that the participants had experienced a relatively heterogeneous set of courses in
their traditional higher education studies, ranging from undergraduate to postgraduate
research studies, and involving higher education systems from at least five different
countries, they were further asked about how they could imagine taking some of the
principles of such an Open Course forward to common course scenarios.
The ‘learning project’ approach, including groups of virtual distributed participants, was
seen to be a desirable aspect to be taken forward and to implemented; though it was again
highlighted that there should be the right balance (Figure 10-29) between freedom of
choice and structuredness and guidance.
Figure 10-29: Participant quote: Freedom of choice, structuredness and guidance
Within this it was stressed that different means of grading would be desirable (Figure 10-
30) to not limit students’ creativity and wisdom to explore and to consider such activities
260
as part of the students’ grading and to introduce complementary grading measures
analogue to meritocracy as to be found for example in FLOSS.
Figure 10-30: Participant quote: Creation of content by learners
It was suggested that the focus on students’ assessment might move away from focusing on
students' participation in the class, assignment or a final exam. Given that at such an Open
Course scenario students assume a number of different roles and act as active course
participants and developers there would be room for assessment procedures that might rely
on the students' work for the educational material (what have they produced), the
interactions among the participants in problem solving (how have they supported the
course), the students' work in the update of the material (how have they contributed
towards improvement of existing resources and structures).
Two of the participants that were at a postgraduate level, and that taught a course
themselves, believed that the constant participation of the learner and its transformation to
an active learner rather than a passive listener is the main principle that can transform
higher education. As a means to achieve such active participation less pre-defined and
determined course approaches were seen to be a good way in which educators and students
would actively frame and develop the course, analogous to the way the NetGeners.Net
course was designed.
10.4.4.5 Motivational Aspects to Participate in Open Courses
This question was aimed at learning what could be motivational factors for free learners
outside of formal educational settings to participate at such an Open Course.
261
First and foremost, being interested in the subject area was seen as a pre-condition to
participate in an Open Course, with the second major condition being to gain something
out of it (Figure 10-31).
Figure 10-31: Participant quote: Need to gain something out of learning
Participants expressed that generally there must be something ‘to be gained’ and that this
gain must become visible therefore adding value to their CV (Figure 10-32).
Figure 10-32: Participant quote: Motivational factors of learning
The quote in Figure 10-32 mirrors that some type of virtual learning portfolio might be
required that would allow exposure of the learning outcomes of participants within such an
Open Course scenario. It was suggested that such a portfolio might include a number of
parameters that feature learning outcomes and allow others to assess what has been
learned. Individual performances and commitment, artifacts created, or review of peers and
crediting good contributions were seen as possible elements of such a portfolio. However,
it was also noticed that such outcomes must be generally accepted by for example potential
employer, as it is the case within FLOSS. From a more traditional perspective it was
suggested that, in the case of free learners outside of formal education, there still could be
the option to obtain some type of formal certificate issued through an educational
institution.
262
Figure 10-33: Participant quote: Advantages to participate in Open Education
To mainstream open educational scenarios (Figure 10-33) and to establish it as a
commonly accepted part of education was seen to be important to allow a gain through the
learning outcomes obtained through such Open Course scenarios – analogous to the added
value participants could achieve through their active participation within open source
projects.
10.5 The Case of Software Engineering at Aristotle University
10.5.1 Introduction
Since the academic year 2005/2006 the 5th semester course ‘Introduction in Software
Engineering’ (ISE) at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki applies an ‘outside approach’
(see 6.5) in which students are given first an initial in-class introduction and are then
subsequently sent out into FLOSS communities to engage with real life open source
projects. The duration of the ISE course is 12.5 weeks and has an average student number
of 150 with one of the students’ assignments being to participate at a FLOSS project or –
in former years – a proprietary software exercise. In the case selected, the assignment
counts for 40% of the total grade. Also, students can work on their assignments beyond the
12.5 weeks of the official lecturing period and submit it at a later time at 3 pre-defined
dates per year – by the end of the course in February, or alternatively in June and
September.
263
In the year 2005/2006 15 students volunteered for the FLOSS assignment with the
objective of testing FLOSS and to identify bugs. In the second academic year of the course
(2006/2007), which had 24 students opting for a FLOSS assignment, the framework
remained the same with the main difference being that students now had two options: to
test FLOSS or to develop FLOSS. In the third academic year (2007/2008) the framework
for conducting the course was modified, with the only remaining possible assignment
option for students being FLOSS projects, but no proprietary software exercises. Further to
this students now had three options: to test FLOSS, to develop FLOSS, or to write a
requirements specification documentation for a FLOSS project that had none. For that
academic year 55 students accomplished their assignment by June 2008.
Based upon these earlier experiences, the lessons learnt on the first two attempts and on the
application scenarios developed on FLOSS type characteristics it was aimed to pilot a
‘hybrid approach’ for the 2008/2009 course ‘Introduction to software engineering’. Hybrid
in this respect means that on the hand the learning environment used in this course was
opened up for participation by any individual interested in the subject (inviting in), and on
the other hand Aristotle’s software engineering students were – as with previous years –
expected to engage in student-driven small scale learning projects, with each of these
learning projects being associated with an open source project (sending out).
10.5.2 Specific Design Outline
Albeit having sent out students to engage in and to learn with real FLOSS project
communities over some semesters, the ISE course itself could still be seen as a relative
traditional one; with all of the course environments being closed to the outside world. Such
closed structures do not only prevent that ISE students could engage and collaborate within
the course environment in a ‘semi-structured’ way with peers from fellow universities or
the wider world, but also that the ISE course learning resources might be improved or
264
enhanced through external sources that are brought in by the different stakeholders. The
ISE course team has been aware that the artifacts students create as part of their project
work, or their individual experiences and tips, often became a part of the ‘informal course
learning materials’ and are passed on to future students. The drawback of such an informal
exchange nonetheless is that it puts the burden on the next cohort of students to discover
these and to collect them one by one, or even worse that those artifacts, experiences and
information are lost. A further drawback is that much of the students’ interactions within
the respective FLOSS projects and the artifacts created are disconnected from the course
itself and do not become a part of it. For this reason and with the motivation of providing a
space were students could meet with peers a public course space was established building
on the environment that has been initially used for the NetGeners.Net trial. The
environment featured the same type of tools as the original NetGeners.Net one and
provided the students with a basic ‘on-board’ set of communication and collaboration tools
including a blog space, chats, forum or a wiki a personal profile, and most notably the
learning project directory. Since the ISE course used a project-based approach, with
students carrying out individual projects, the course approach matched to the earlier
established concept of ‘learning projects’. In this students were expected to register their
individual projects within the learning project directory, to provide a small summary what
it is about, and to link to a space at which they would publish a report about their project
that would include a summary of their activities, the work plan they developed to carry out
their project (for example selection criteria, list of your activities) and the results of their
project.
The original NetGeners.Net space then was modified (Figure 10-34) in accordance to the
ISE course outline providing individual spaces for the three activities that the students
were expected to carry out, namely: to test FLOSS, to develop FLOSS, or to write a
requirement specification documentation for a FLOSS project that still had none.
265
Figure 10-34: ISE course space
The course team also prepared a set of introduction and instructional materials (Figure 10-
35), both in Greek and in English language, and uploaded those as well to the online course
environment as to public spaces such as Slideshare59.
Figure 10-35: ISE guide for requirement analysis projects
Besides the potential benefits that such a hybrid learning environment provides the course
team was aware that the initial cohort of students for the year 2008/2009 won’t be able to
59
URL: http://www.slideshare.net
266
gain from earlier students’ works, since these were not available to the course team, and
therefore other means were looked for so students would find the new course space of an
added value. However, at this stage, the course team decided to not make use of the new
course space mandatory and leaving students the free choice of using it – or not. Despite a
clear outline of the type of students’ activities the course team would like students to
pursue in the new environment, in the end the decision was left to them and was not related
to students’ assessment or grading. Instead the course team aimed at providing an added
value in the course space by organizing, for example, regular chats, to assure prompt
responses to online forum posts, or to make available and upload instructional and
supporting materials. The course team further aimed to encourage past year students, who
had already accomplished their assignments, to participate within this environment and to
offer their help to the current students. The course team itself frequently provided help on
campus and therefore they hoped to be able to take part in the online discussion. Despite
having this new environment in place the course team initially offered to interact with the
students in parallel through the earlier established communication channels, notably e-mail
exchange.
10.5.3 Course Summary
First and foremost it might be noted that this pilot, as well as the ISE course itself, was
affected through the sad events of the 2008 / 2009 Greek riots, with lectures being
suspended for a number of weeks. Therefore the opportunity to work with students has
been much less than would have been normally the case, affecting the course itself as well
as the piloted virtual component.
Since the start of the ISE course and until May 2009 there have been 46 registrations in the
course space in total, out of which 37 have been from students of the ISE course.
267
The ISE course team had some concerns with regards to the mandatory use of this new
course space, not wanting to place an additional time burden on students or to make the
course appear more difficult to the students formally enrolled. For this reason they decided
to introduce the course space to the students as a parallel informal site in which students
could exchange information and knowledge, with the registration of individual learning
projects being encouraged but not mandatory. Within the first weeks students requested the
implementation of RSS functions that would provide information on changes of running or
registration of new learning projects, new or changed wiki pages, or new forum posts –
with all of these being subsequently implemented by the course team. Besides general
instructional materials the course team further added some homework from last years’
students60, relevant literature or guidelines to the course repository to provide students with
some additional materials to add extra value to the course environment. The course team
further asked for the support of an undergraduate student currently writing their thesis to
launch a first sample learning project to provide ISE students with a showcase on what a
learning project might look like. It was hoped that this might be of help for ISE students
and serve as a guide on what they were expected to do. Apart from this sample project
another 5 projects were registered by ISE students, providing some information, though
none of them provided the detail that had been asked for in the course environment
introduction materials (Figure 10-36) nor did they provide details on the work they had
carried out or their final results.
60
268
Figure 10-36: ISE course, expected outcomes of students’ project works
The types of information provided by the students within the learning projects registered at
the course page were:
Learning project: Vdrift
• Short introduction on what the project itself is about
• Link to open source project main page & forum
Learning project: RetroShare: secure communications with friends
• Link to open source project main page
Learning project: BlueWriter - Java Word Processor
• A summary on the personal experiences on the work, and suggestions for future
students
269
Learning project: taxi dispatcher
Learning project: eBook Library
As can be seen the scope of the information provided was far below the scope that they had
been asked to provide within the course instructions, with the most valuable information
provided being perhaps the personal experiences of one of the students (Learning Project
Blue Writer). Similarly, students preferred communicating with the course team by means
of e-mail exchange, as they had done traditionally, instead of using the opportunity of
attending the weekly chats or the forum. Eight weeks into the course the course team
decided however to inform students that questions would now only be answered if posted
to the forum, and no longer by e-mail. As a response to the apparently absent value of
using the chat and to provide extra value, the course team promoted the ISE course within
the open source field and aimed at organizing some virtual sessions with open source
practitioners and students and therefore supporting the students’ path into the ‘open source
world’. The results of these promotions were twofold: on the one side similar educational
approaches could be discovered, such as the Mozilla education project61, and on the other
hand a number of project leads of smaller open source projects expressed their interest in
‘taking in’ students and to mentor their work. One of these projects leads immediately
went to the course page to register his project as a ‘learning project’ and to announce the
availability of a mentorship to students, while another projects lead asked to have his
project and the mentoring opportunity posted on the course side. As a result of this request
the course team decided to introduce a new criteria for the ‘learning projects’ and to
distinguish between those projects that were registered and carried out by students and
61
URL: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Education
270
those that were registered by open source practitioners that were offering mentorship to
students (Figure 10-37).
Figure 10-37: ISE course, criteria on learning projects allowing practitioners to offer mentoring
In total four learning projects were registered by practitioners that were offering
mentorship to students, namely:
• osCMall
• CSQL project
• RetroMessenger
• Dooble Secure Web-Browser
As previously mentioned, due to the Greek riots happening at the time of this course and
the resulting suspended lectures, the course team faced serious challenges in lecturing the
course with many of the planned actions and activities not having taken place, such as the
envisaged live sessions together with practitioners from open source projects. Nonetheless,
the course team still decided to, at the very least, discuss the approach developed for this
course with practitioners from open source projects that were engaged in similar attempts.
It was hoped to learn about their point of view on the course approach and underlying
model, to identify strengths and weaknesses, and to reflect on similarities or differences in
their approaches and models.
271
10.5.4 Course Findings
This section will present the experiences gained throughout the course building on two
sources of feedback gathered:
• Students’ feedback
• Experiences from the course team
10.5.4.1 Students’ Feedback
Students’ feedback has been obtained as well through a survey as detailed in Annex 1.2
and through sessions between the course team and students. As shown in Table 10-1, 26
out of the 38 students that responded to the survey have actually visited the course
environment. Given that at least 30 students registered at the website prior to the survey it
can be expected that not all of the students’ responded to it. Six out of those students that
explored the course environment were not comfortable with the fact that much of the
information was provided in English, with the remaining 20 being comfortable with it.
Selected students' responses from survey (n=38) Number
Explored the course environment 26
Comfortable with materials provided in English within the course
environment (Yes) 20
(No) 6
Tried to explore what others did 16
Willing to help future ISE students (in some way) 25
Willing to provide some type of mentorship for future ISE students 16
Willing to make their works available at the course site,
for example a summary/presentation of their assignments 23
Table 10-1: Selected students’ responses
272
The feedback gathered from students has shown that there is room for improvement with
regards to the design of the course environment and proper explanation of what is expected
from the students. The students’ responses show that the space was understood as being of
a supportive nature in which they could find some relevant information or discuss with the
course team and peers.
Figure 10-38: ISE participant quote: It didn’t bother me
What has not become clear to the students however (Figure 10-38) was that the they were
expected to register their individual projects within the learning project directory, to
provide a small summary about their project, and to link to a space in which they would
publish a report. The reason for this was twofold; firstly the introduction to the course
environment did not provide a clear indication on this aspect and secondly the information
provided within the course environment has not been clear enough. Some of the students
highlighted that the subsequent launch of learning projects throughout the course duration
helped them to develop an understanding of the concept of learning projects and as one
student put it (Figure 10-39):
Figure 10-39: ISE participant quote: Get in contact with more experienced colleagues
This belief that has been expressed by the student matches very well with the ‘things’
students would like to see within such a course environment as the piloted one.
Figure 10-40: ISE participant quote: Assumed usefulness
273
The student’s statement in Figure 10-40 corresponds well to the general students’ response
on the value prior students’ works and experiences would provide to them and that they
believe they would be able to learn from those and build on them. The students’ responses
overall show that an improved version of the course environment would meet students’
needs and could be of an added value to them and support their learning process.
The results of the survey indicate that the reason students were not using the environment
in the way it was expected, or not at all, have been due to the misleading introduction
through the course team, a missing clear design of the course environment and perceived
low added value at the beginning of the course. Being asked if they tried to look at the
learning projects from others and to learn from them one student noted that (Figure 10-41):
Figure 10-41: ISE participant quote: Problem of time
As earlier described, one of the objectives has been to bring the students’ projects online
and to make them visible so that a dialogue could emerge around those projects, with the
resulting projects and dialogues being preserved as a learning resource for future students.
Figure 10-42: ISE participant quote: Did not need any help
The students’ responses re-confirm that such an approach could indeed support future
cohorts of students within their learning process by drawing on the work of earlier students
and additionally would assure that all students have an equal access (figure 10-42) to those
resources that they currently have to organize themselves as can be seen at the quote
above. The students’ overall responses – as a matter of fact – show that their expectations
274
of such a course environment are almost identical to the objectives of the course design,
namely to provide:
• Guidance: to re-experience or build on the things others did
o To see the completed project works from others, what they have done, how
they have done it and what they have experienced – this is close to the
learning project concept
o A market place and directory with detailed information of open source
projects that are looking for students, including a description on the project
and tasks that could be taken on by them, and experiences of earlier students
gathered with the respective project and what those students have done –
this is close to the directory concept
• Support: to establish an open learning community and space
o To get in contact with other students, the course team and people
experienced in open source software development
o The option to work together in groups on a project and preferably assistance
through open source practitioners.
o Online lectures
• Access to a large pool of relevant information
o Literature and tutorials
o Past exams and assignments, including solutions
o Manuals and guides on how to complete the project and things to be
considered by them.
With regards to improved design, structure and ease of use of the course environment the
following aspects could be identified:
275
• Improved user interface and structure with one central place for instructions,
instead of a number of them being spread through several sections and spaces.
• Clear focus, the course environment still included elements from the first
NetGeners.Net trial, which confused students and should therefore be removed.
• Placement of a number of well elaborated sample learning projects posted through
the course team that would allow students to clearly understand what they would be
expected to do and how to display their learning projects.
• Facilitated registration process as well for individuals as for the learning projects
• More detailed and customized description of open source projects that are looking
for students
With regards to improvements at a course level a clearer introduction through the course
team would be required to assure that written instructional materials and the introduction
within the lectures are congruent. It might also be considered to allow students to form
‘teams’ and to work together with their classmates on assignments and to establish more
close ‘mentorship’ ties with practitioners from the open source projects involved.
Although the course environment was designed as a more informal learning space the
survey outcomes indicate that a reason for students to become active in such an
environment is that this engagement would be considered for their assessment, or
conversely, that they did not provide information on their project since it was not related to
their assessment. In contrast to this attitude of not having registered and showcased their
project, since it was not mandatory, is their answer at the end of the course; with 23 of
them expressing their general willingness to support future students by making their work
available at the course site. This finding further supports the notion that ex-ante
‘assessment’ is a strong motivational factor for students in order to participate and become
active; meanwhile ex-post ‘the learning experience and outcome’ plays an equally high
276
role. This is to say that it supports similar findings during Chapters 6, 7, 9 and the first
NetGeners.Net trial presented earlier at this tenth chapter. As shown by the quote above,
only at the end of the course one of the students realized the actual value if all of them
would have made their projects and ongoing work available from the very beginning.
Therefore it might be suggested to make these activities a mandatory part of the course
structure and consider it for students’ assessment. Strictly speaking, the structured
availability of the students’ projects through the course environment’s directory should
even facilitate the students’ assessment as it provides access in a convenient way to
information on their projects and outcomes produced or their pathway towards achieving
these. From this perspective it is no contradiction if such an informal space would be used
to support formal assessment, since assessment might be limited to the students’ project
work, but not necessarily to more informal dialogues or other roles assumed by them.
10.5.4.2 Experiences from the Course Team
As a follow up to the ISE course the course team has been consulted to learn about their
lessons learnt and points to be improved for the next semester, which included inter alia:
• The overall purpose and concept of the NetGeners.Net space and how it shall be
used needs to be better explained to the students, including the provision of sample
learning projects that allow students to easily understand of what they are expected
to do.
• Students should be encouraged to assign their open source projects to categories in
order to allow a structured view of the students’ selections.
277
• Such categorization might comply with the one established by Sourceforge62
(Figure 10-43), which would lead to a tree-view of the projects, almost identical to
the one featured within the current Netgeners.Net learning project directory.
Figure 10-43: Sourceforge tree type structure63
• A SVN-type functionality, as can be found at Sourceforge, might be established so
students could upload the outcomes of their project, such as bug reports, SRS
documents, or source code as well as complementary information on what they
have done, how they did it or what they experienced (Figure 10-44 and 10-45).
62
URL: http://sourceforge.net/
63
Source: http://sourceforge.net/
278
Figure 10-44: Sourceforge SVN structure 164
It might be noted at this point that the suggested SVN structure is close to the structure
currently in place within the NetGeners.Net directory, with the difference that at
Sourceforge all information and files are placed within the Sourceforge environment,
meanwhile the NetGeners.Net approach aimed at linking to external spaces used for this.
64
279
• Since the majority of students use Sourceforge to find a project, another idea was
that the Netgeners.Net space might also establish links to those projects that are
listed at Sourceforge that are looking for help (Figure 10-46 ‘Project Help Wanted’)
and integrate such functionality within the learning project directory to establish a
type of ‘market place’.
Further suggestion on improvements identified by the course team were:
• Automated information provision through RSS or the use of tags to facilitate
finding the right information and to be updated on changes.
• To establish the NetGeners.Net space as the only means for virtual communication
on project related aspects with the AUTH course team. Providing support through
email meant to answer the same type of questions multiple times, meanwhile a shift
to the NetGeners.Net space would allow to build up a body of knowledge usable
for the next students and at the same time helps save time from the course team.
65
66
280
• To assist students in their search of information the forum might be restructured to
feature threads per project type.
• Mailing lists were also seen as an opportunity to facilitate communication and to
keep the students informed.
To allow for some continuity and enable current learner to benefit from the experiences of
earlier students, the course team also considers
• To provide senior students with the opportunity to write their thesis about aspects
related to learning and working in FLOSS, with those senior students being further
expected to take on mentoring responsibility for a defined number of current ISE
students working on their FLOSS assignments.
With this the course design would implement another key characteristic to be found in
FLOSS: knowledge and information brokering (2.8) in which more knowledgeable
members provide less knowledgeable ones with knowledge and information that is already
available ‘somewhere’, but perhaps difficult to detect or that needs to be contextualized
through those more knowledgeable members.
As a final point the course team highlighted that students would prefer to have all the
information and the materials of the site in Greek. This demand however needs to be
evaluated critically, since the actual question should not be whether students ‘prefer’ Greek
over English, but if English would ‘prevent students from learning due to language gaps’.
10.5.5 Educators’ & Practitioners’ Point of View
Alongside the NetGeners.Net trials a number of consultations with educators and
practitioners active in the field have been taken place (see section 1.7) to reflect on the
hybrid course design principle applied for the NetGeners.Net trials. The results presented
at this section have been obtained within the OSS 2009 conference and the 2009 Educamp.
281
10.5.5.1 Organizational Structures / Open Course Design (Learning Projects,
Modularity & Directories / SVN type Structures)
For some educators in computer science education the NetGeners.Net concept appeared to
be overall a logical move and it has been reported that over the last five years one
consistent talking point at OSS conferences has been to combine forces and the work of
different open source projects and a type of Sourceforge environment for students' projects
sounded plausible. However, in practice no combined work was started, despite individual
work going in the same direction. Jesper Holck, for example, at the Copenhagen Business
School Department of Informatics (Denmark) reported at the OSS 2009 workshop about
positive results with a similar design approach that drew on students’ learning projects and
in which future cohorts of students were asked to draw on and improve the project work
from last year’s students. Following Holck (J Holck 2009, pers. comm. 22 June), “the
students certainly learned a lot from having to look at documentation and source code from
last year's students.” It was further reported that “one long-term ambition [I have] is to
create a common ‘Source Code Control System’ repository for some rather big project,
related to an existing organization, and then each year let the students work on improving
last year's results” (J Holck 2009, pers. comm. 22 June). The considered approach was
therefore well in line with the NetGeners.Net concept of learning projects, modularity and
directories / SVN type structures. One of the differences however was that the stakeholders
considered were only formally enrolled students and practitioners, but there were no fellow
students and educators, or free learners. Within the same workshop, Alexey Khoroshilov
from the Russian Academy of Science, second the experience of Holck for his course
stating that indeed the availability of past years’ students’ works to demonstrate best
practice and common mistakes of students is of an added value for future cohorts of
students and allows them to draw on those. Both of the cases indicate that even if no
282
continuous community had been established that would allow students to get in contact
with more experienced members, the availability of last years’ student projects has been of
an added value. From a SER perspective this suggests that the learning project concept,
and the structured availability of such learning projects, might allow for creating the
desired characteristics that the Courses as Seeds / SER model aims to establish (5.4 /
Research Question 4).
Structured availability in this regard, and in its most simple form, means that the educator
would select a range of quality in their examples and provide future students with these. A
directory / SVN type system, which would allow for a more structured approach and
provide rating and commenting functionalities has not been reported to be used by any of
the workshops participants, though it has been considered by the Danish case. The Danish
and Russian cases also have not provided any evidence that the SER model could work out
in its entirety and allow for the above four bullet points to be in place. Further aspects that
have been highlighted within the consultations were:
• 2second pitch – the perceived usefulness of a website, such as NetGeners.Net, must
become clear within 2 seconds – else it would not be used.
• Environment must allow for conversation amongst ‘equals’ – this is inherent to
Web 2.0 and would be expected for such an informal supportive environment.
• Keep the information simple and avoid duplications – simple and appealing design,
with clear structures and objectives, were also one of the lessons learnt on what has
to be improved within the two NetGeners.Net trials.
• The tagging idea, as considered by the Aristotle course team in section 10.5, has
also been suggested (and later on implemented) by Mozilla. Similar to the Aristotle
idea, the objective of such tagging is to allow students to easily identify
participation opportunities and tasks that would be suitable for students’
engagement.
283
10.5.5.2 Motivational Aspects for Students
To motivate students to become active creators has been described by OSS 2009 workshop
participants as a challenge, and as highlighted by a one participant, the upgrade by one
mark was not enough to motivate students to become active and produce something. A
contrary experience from a US business school on the other hand concluded that the mark
was actually not a main motivation for the students to produce something, but the
opportunity to produce something that they see as their own work and can showcase to
others. Within this it was suggested that perhaps students should actively shape their own
learning space, so it would match their expectations and they see it as 'their' own product.
Overall the outcomes of the workshop supported the notion that it should be mandatory
that the students would work on their learning projects within a space such as the
NetGeners.Net one, and therefore become a formal course requirement – analogous to the
cases reviewed in chapter six and nine, and also supported by the application trials in
chapter ten.
10.5.5.3 Motivational Aspects for Educators and Practitioners
There was a general notion at the 2009 Educamp, that hybrid Open Course approaches
need to provide win / win solutions for both of the sides involved – the formal educational
side as well as the virtual community. For the case of Open Source and computer science
education it had been detailed that the interest of both sides must mach, as well as the
willingness to accept and draw on established best practices. Following the team of
Mozilla a hybrid Open Course design therefore would need to map and integrate the
methodologies and tools used by drawing on well established practice, instead of formal
education trying to set up a ‘parallel universe’ itself. In the Open Source case and computer
science education this implies that a hybrid Open Course design would need to incorporate
284
established practices, methodologies and tools instead of setting up a parallel system. This
did not imply the open source projects, such as Mozilla, intend to dictate formal education
on how to design their courses, but rather that one should build upon best practice.
10.5.5.4 Paradigm Breaks
At the 2009 Educamp the team of Mozilla pointed out that a virtual course will not be one
thing but a pooling resources and attention so that all have visibility of others and that there
would be the need to grow such hybrid educational spaces by connecting the various
stakeholder groups and therefore to gradually achieve that a critical mass builds on-line.
The team however also noted that ‘being like the community’ is a novel way of working
for teachers and therefore also requires a paradigm shift on how one sees formal education.
The cases reviewed at chapter six and nine, and also the application trials at this chapter,
suggest that the current semester based approach indeed prevents formal education to fully
draw on the ‘community concept’ and therefore new means would need to be established
to allow for continuity beyond semester terms.
10.6 Conclusion
Chapter ten aimed at providing further answers on Research Question 4 on how the
concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’ might be translated to Open Course design and on
motivational aspects of the various stakeholders’ involved in such Open Courses, drawing
on two application trials that were carried out in between March 2008 and February 2009.
The results of those two application trials, and the stakeholder consultations carried out
alongside those trials, indicated that modularity, the use of forges or a task focus (10.2,
104.2, 10.5.2), indeed could facilitate to create a course environment at which the learning
resources (initial ones as well as those leveraged into the course by the students), artifacts
285
created by students and underlying discourse could remain within a context and structure
that potentially allows future cohorts of students to re-experience, or to build on and to
improve what others did. For this to happen however it is important to clearly explain to
participants what they are expected to do. The learning project concept expects participants
to frame and execute their projects, to showcase and present their project and to make all
outcomes available. This expectation must be clearly articulated and integrated within the
overall course structure. Participants then must be provided with a guide and examples on
how, where, and when they are expected to present their works. In addition to this and
analogue to the CCK08 case (9.3) it should be made clear to all participants that everyone
should be able to benefit and learn from what each participant has done, the artifacts
created or things experienced. Participants should be well aware about this to understand
why they are supposed to make their works publicly available and to provide supportive
information on them. The responses of the participants of both application trials (10.4.4,
10.5.4) further suggest that there still would be the need to maintain the structuredness of
the ‘core’ course, as for example has been the case at the CCK08 course reviewed at
chapter nine. This type of structuredness facilitates that the learner would progress
smoothly through a course and clearly understand what they are expected to do, and also
avoids that participants might get lost. Nonetheless, the students of the ISE course at
Aristotle University stated that the availability of artifacts created by students and
underlying discourse would be of an added value to them and support them in their
learning process and that they would like to make use of those (10.5.4.1). Such an added
value and a richer learning experience has also been reported by participants of the first
application trial (10.4.4.2), with the general agreement that indeed there would be the need
to find the right balance between ‘core’ course and structuredness on the one end and the
opportunity for active co-design, tinkering or experimentations on the other end. Analogue
to the RSS feed that served as a ‘red line’ at the CCK08 course (9.3) to identify such
artifacts created by students or underlying discourse, the ISE students (10.5.4.1) strongly
286
welcomed the idea on the use of forges, directories or similar through which they could
easily find such artifacts. No clear evidence could be provided however that such a
structure would ultimately allow for an easy ‘re-seeding’ of the course and to organize,
formalize and generalize the created knowledge, including structures and processes. It
further remained unclear if the very existence of such artifacts created by students and their
embedment within the structures established might allow future cohorts of students to draw
on those without even the need of any type of manual ‘re-seeding’ through the course
team. With regards to continuity no clear evidence could be provided at this point, though
the ISE course team believed that involving current students into next course editions
might be a first step to allow for this (10.5.4.2). However, as noted by the team of Mozilla
(10.5.5.4) it might be required to look at such spaces from a perspective beyond the course
level and to connect the various stakeholder groups and therefore to gradually achieve that
a ‘critical mass builds on-line’. The team however also noted that ‘being like the
community’ is a novel way of working for teachers and therefore also requires a paradigm
shift on how one sees formal education. The cases reviewed in chapter six and nine, and
also the application trials in this chapter, suggest that the current semester based approach
indeed prevents formal education to fully draw on the ‘community concept’ and therefore
new means would need to be established to allow for continuity beyond semester terms.
Regarding motivational aspects of the various stakeholders’ within Open Course settings
the two application trials suggest that extrinsic as well as intrinsic ones, must be
considered. For formally enrolled students extrinsic motivational factors appear to be more
important by the start of the course (10.4.4, 10.5.4.1) and it therefore might be required
that some elements such as to produce a concrete outcome be mandatory in so far as
participants are expected to:
• Showcase and present their project and to make all outcomes available within the
learning project directory.
287
• ‘Release early’ and to update the information on their learning projects frequently
at the directory.
• Place all questions and answers through the established public channels, such as
forums, instead of using private communication ones, like for example email.
In both of the application trials participants were eager in seeing the work of others and to
learn from those, but on the other hand resisted in making their work available or to
‘release early’ and to ‘update frequently’ (10.5.4.1). The cases reviewed in chapter six and
nine suggest that such mandatory elements do not undermine the desired and more
informal nature of such a space, as long as the focus is not on assessing each and every
step done, but only certain elements such as final outcomes, or early releases at clear
defined dates. The first application trial supported the initial finding at chapter nine that for
free learners extrinsic motivations such as assignments or certificates are not applicable or
at the very least less relevant and therefore rather intrinsic motivations might be
considered, such as a providing them with a personal meaningful learning experience. The
results (10.4.4.5) further suggest that Open Courses should provide some type of validation
opportunities for the learning outcomes that free learners obtained. Such validations might
be traditional certifications, but might also consist of online profiles that would clearly
show what free learners have learnt and achieved throughout the course. In any case,
‘recognition’ has been seen to be very important, which means that for example employers
should recognize such type of ‘validations’. For the case of practitioners extrinsic
motivation perhaps could relate to clear win / win scenarios such as benefiting from the
participants work. As could be seen at the second application trial (10.5.3), and as
supported by the stakeholder consultations (10.5.5), if practitioners understand that there is
a type of win / win situation they might opt to provide for example some type of
mentorship to students in return for the students’ active contribution to the respective field
of work.
288
In conclusion it might be stated that the results of this chapter have backed up earlier
findings of this work and initial assumptions (7.5, chapter eight) and have overall shown
the importance of finding the right balance in between traditional and open course design,
by providing at the same time clear structures and guidance as to allow for a more fluid
development and growth of the surrounding spaces involved. For this to happen it appeared
to be required to provide assignments and tasks to students in which they would be allowed
to tinker, experiment or find out themselves with the focus being more on the ‘learning
experience’ and less on ‘just to pass exams’. To allow finding such a ‘right balance’ the
following chapter eleven will provide some guidelines on aspects that might be considered
for Open Course design and delivery.
289
11 An organizational Framework for hybrid Open Course Design & Delivery
11.1 Introduction
As has been shown throughout the chapters six to ten, Open Course design, is not a
synonym for abolishing traditional educational practices as we know them, but instead
about finding the right balance in between providing clear structures and guidance on the
one side and to allow at the same time for a more fluid development and growth of the
surrounding spaces involved. The reviewed cases in chapter six and nine as well as the
experimental application trials of chapter seven and ten have shown that both ends can
coexist, but also what might go wrong.
The Meta-design framework (5.3) and the Courses as Seeds / SER process model (5.4)
introduced at chapter five considered as well advantages of online learning ecosystems
such as the FLOSS one presented at chapter two and three as it served as a suitable
framework to develop an understanding on the nature of Open Courses throughout the
chapter six to ten. Chapter six, nine and ten also provided practical examples on how the
Meta-design framework and the Courses as Seeds / SER process model might be applied in
practice, with the limitation that no clear evidence could be provided on aspects related to
the ‘reseeding’ idea with regards to continuity or how to organize, formalize and generalize
the created knowledge in a way that does not require a manual reseeding through the
course team, but rather a type of evolutionary growth as could be observed in the FLOSS
case (chapter two and three).
This chapter will summarize the lessons learnt throughout this work in the form of a guide
to Open Course design and delivery and will further suggest a hybrid organizational
framework for Open Course Design. Some of the results of the work have been backed by
strong evidence, such as the need to keep a certain type of structuredness and guidance, or
pre-conditions that must be in place at an internal course level such as openness, or how
external aspects might be considered such as the use of external spaces or communities.
290
Apart from the results of the work that are backed by strong evidence, for other parts only
some anecdotal evidence or suggestions could be provided, such as aspects related to the
‘re-seeding’ idea. Consequently the guide presented in this chapter (11.4) will differentiate
between the former and the latter, with the nature of the lessons learnt perhaps being
divided as follows:
• ‘Keep’
‘Keep’ refers to fundamentals of traditional course design that might be kept unless
differing evidence would become available that suggest otherwise.
• ‘Change’
‘Change’ refers to pre-requirements identified throughout this work that must be
established within the course environment to create the basic conditions for any type of
Open Course scenario. ‘Change’ therefore presents an inside view on conditions that must
be established within the internal course space.
• ‘Integrate’
‘Integrate’ refers to external organizational aspects and how those might be integrated into
the overall course. ‘Integrate’ therefore present an outside view on how external spaces and
communities might be integrated within the course space.
• ‘Consider’
‘Consider’ refers to aspects that provide a potential benefit within Open Course scenarios,
but for which no clear evidence could be provided on how to actually implement those
aspects, or aspects that might come at the risk of giving up a notable level of control.
The classification by ‘Keep’, ‘Change’, ‘Integrate’ and ‘Consider’ aims at allowing
educators to clearly understand and distinguish between necessary pre-conditions, ‘Keep’-
‘Change’-‘Integrate’, for Open Course design, or desirable elements for which no clear
291
information and evidence could be provided on how to establish those conditions and to
assure their functioning in practice.
11.2 Fundamentals of hybrid Open Course Design
This section will address some of the fundamentals to hybrid Open Course Design that are
strongly suggested to be taken into account unless future research would advice other.
11.2.1 The Role of traditional Course Design and the ‘Core’
The six reviewed cases at chapter six and nine, the results of the FSU at chapter seven and
the feedback gathered throughout the application trials presented at chapter ten do all
suggest that the structuredness of traditional course design might be maintained with
regard to clearly articulated learning objectives and outcomes, instructional materials, a set
of learning materials that would allow to master the course, assignments and practices, and
lectures or tutorials. Analogue to the FLOSS case this ‘basic’ course might be seen as a
‘core’ (2.3) that might only be changed by the ‘core developer’, for example the course
team.
Such a core does not only provide the level of structuredness participants likely require,
but it also facilitates to deal with less control and constant change (12.1.4).
Nature: ‘Keep’
11.2.2 Commitment to Openness & Inclusivity
Analogue to the FLOSS case a commitment to ‘openness’ (Schmidt & Surman, 2007) or
‘inclusivity’ is a pre-requirement to any type of hybrid Open Course provision, with the
respective degree to vary within certain borders. Openness and inclusivity means that those
who want to join do not have to pass enrolment procedures or have to pass formal
292
performance assessments. Openness not only allows free access to everyone and
inclusivity, it also fosters transparent structures since the learning ecosystem is openly
accessible, providing access not only to learning resources, but also communications,
discussions and interactions, for example through forums, mailing lists or chats sessions.
However, openness and inclusivity might be limited within a number of ways. To assure
assessment of formally enrolled students, ‘openness to change’ might be limited for the
works that formally enrolled students engage at, with inclusivity being perhaps limited
with regards to guaranteed support provision through educators being available for
formally enrolled students only.
Nature: ‘Change’
11.2.3 Accept an extended Group of Stakeholder to be involved
Hybrid Open Course scenarios potentially involve an extended number of stakeholders
(6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 8.6, 9.2, 9.3, 10.4, 10.5), such as (1) fellow students and educators, (2)
‘free learners’ outside of formal education and (3) practitioners. Each of those stakeholder
groups might be carefully considered and how they might impact the course or engage at it,
or which type of co-operation and collaboration agreements might be established:
• For the case of fellow students and educators, as could be seen at 6.3, this might be
the least problematic case, given that both originate from traditional formal
education and therefore would likely have the same needs or expectations
• Free learners not formally enrolled at the course on the other hand might be a group
that is less common for traditional educational settings and might have different
expectations and motivations than their counterparts and as could be seen at 9.2 or
9.3. Free learners might be only consumers that like to view what is going on (for
example 6.2) at a course or engage in self-studying activities only. They might
293
however be active course participants and follow the overall course or some of its
parts and enter or leave at any moment as could be seen at 9.2 or 9.3.
• Practitioners are regular participants of a given online ecosystems and their
communities that might be involved within an Open Course scenario and could
impact the course in a number of ways as could be seen at 6.4, 6.5, 9.2, 9.3, or 10.5.
Nature: ‘Integrate’
11.2.4 Prepare for less Control and constant Change
The involvement and use of external spaces or communities within a given Open Course
might come at the price of giving up a certain degree of control or certainty (6.4, 6.5, 9.2,
9.3, or 10.5). External communities and spaces have their established structures, practices,
rules or culture and formally enrolled students that wish to engage with those would be
required to behave in accordance (6.4, 6.5, 10.5, 10.5.5). External spaces might also relate
to individual ones established or maintained by course participants themselves and brought
into the course as a part of their active co-designer role (9.2, 9.3), but analogue to the case
of external communities the ownership and control remains with those course participants
and not the course team. This might be considered within Open Course design scenarios
and ‘core’ course components should preferably kept within the control of the course team,
analogue to the cases reviewed at chapter six and nine, or also analogue to the FLOSS
case.
Nature: ‘Change / Integrate’
11.2.5 Co-operation & Collaboration Considerations
Embedding external and well-established online ecosystems and their communities within
Open Course scenarios comes as well with advantages as potential drawbacks. Potential
294
drawbacks are a lower degree of control of those external spaces (6.4) or a non-optimal use
of resources, be it of a human, technological or learning resource nature (6.5). For this
reason it might be possible to agree on certain types of collaboration and collaborations
(10.5.5), or at the very least to be well aware about the way those ecosystems and their
communities function and what the potential risks are. The same holds valid for courses of
fellow institutions that might form a part of a given Open Course, though likely
cooperation and collaboration options are more predictable in comparison to external and
well-established online ecosystems and their communities. Though cooperation and
collaboration arrangements should be considered, none of the cases reviewed in chapter six
and nine show that those arrangements would be preconditions as long as the ‘core’ course
remains within the control of the respective course team.
Nature: ‘Change / Integrate’
11.2.6 Legal Aspects
Though legal aspects appeared to be marginal in all of the cases reviewed throughout the
work, or also the application trials, they might turn out to be a major challenge and could
be of any nature, such as licensing aspects, copyright, quality assurance, or formal degree
and certification aspects.
Nature: ‘Consider’
11.3 Layers of hybrid Open Course Design
The following layers 11.3.3 to 11.3.7 have been identified through the reviews of FLOSS
as a learning ecosystem in chapter two and three, of the similar cases in formal education
in chapter six and nine, and the three application trials presented in chapter seven and ten,
with the layer 11.3.8 referring to the Courses as Seeds process model presented at chapter
295
five and which might be seen as a transversal layer that resides the layers 11.3.3 to 11.3.7.
It is not claimed that those layers are all-inclusive, but rather that they present an initial set
on which to build. The layers detailed at this section will serve as a catalogue for the
practical guidance provided at the subsequent section 11.4.
11.3.1 Content Layer
The content layer includes course materials as it can be found in traditional education, such
as the more static instructional & learning resources, but also those artifacts created by
course participants, be it the things they produce, the resources they leverage into the
course space or the underlying discourse. The content layer therefore is closely linked to
the learning and the technical layer.
1.1 Static resources internally provided
Those are the resources that are typically provided within traditional course settings (3.6,
Andreas 2002, Dean & Leinonen, 2004, Fischer 2007, Tuomi 2005). They are well
designed and include clear learning objectives and pathways towards achieving those.
They can be as well of a theoretical academic or of a practical nature.
1.2 Static resources externally provided
This relates to the resources provided by external communities or other spaces. They might
be leveraged into the course space by any of the stakeholder groups, the educator (6.2, 6.5,
9.2, 9.3, 10.5), formally enrolled students (6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 9.2,9.3), or practitioners and
free learners outside of formal education (9.2, 9.3).
1.3 Dynamic resources
Dynamic resources would typically consist of the collaborative production activities and
associated discourse, or the discourse associated to other study activities, such as debates
or collaborative inquiries (2.2, 2.3, 2.5, 2.8,2.9, 3.4, 3.6, 6, 9, 10, Brown & Duguid, 1991;
296
de Paula et al., 2001; Fischer, 1998; Glott et al., 2007; Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2006;
Weller & Meiszner, 2008).
11.3.2 Teaching / Lecturing Layer
This layer refers to the actual lectures and also includes listen / understand or questions /
answers components, this is a fairly dynamic layer and in traditional class bases setting
most of this layer might not be preserved (2.4, 2.5, 3.6). Within a Open Course context the
teaching / lecturing layer must also consider the different types of stakeholders involved
and roles those ones assume that are related to support provision, such as:
2.1 Educator / Lecturer layer
This refers to the educator / lecturers as to be found in traditional classes and his/her role as
being the domain experts for theoretical academic aspects and the course at large (6.2, 6.3,
6.4, 6.5, 9.2,9.3).
2.2 Practitioner layer
Practitioners are regular participants / members of the outside spaces and communities that
are associated to a given Open Course (6.4, 6.5). Practitioners might take on well-defined
support roles such as for example mentoring, or they might provide support and assistance
on a more fluid and ad-hoc base. Practitioners might focus more on practical course
elements and how theoretic knowledge might be applied within a specific context or
situation.
2.3 Peer layer
Peers could be either other students that are formally enrolled at a course (6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5,
9.2,9.3), they could be fellow students (6.3), or they might be free learners outside of
formal education that engage within the Open Course or associated spaces (9.2, 9.3). The
role of peers might be the same one than the role of practitioners; this is to say that they
297
might engage as well at theoretic academic areas as on the more practical ones and
therefore might act as a bridge between the former and the later (9.3).
11.3.3 Learning Layer
The learning layer refers to all learning processes and associated activities. As for the
teaching / lecturing layer much of this layer might not be preserved within a traditional
class based setting (3.6).
3.1 Pedagogical layer
Considers the different pedagogical approaches suitable for Open Course scenarios, such
as self-directed learning, cooperative learning, problem, case, project and inquiry based
learning or reflective practice (3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5).
3.2 Assignment & Practice layer
This layer refers to the students’ works on their respective assignments, individually or as a
group, and is a relative dynamic one (6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 9.2, 9.3, 10.4, 10.5). The
assignment & practice layer should allow participants to produce concrete outcomes and
preferably fit into modular course structures to facilitate that artifacts created by students
and the underlying discourse could become an integral part of the course and that all of this
would be embedded within a clear contexts (2.3, 2.9, 5, 6, 9, 10, Brown & Duguid, 1991;
Fischer, 1998; de Paula et al., 2001; Hemetsberger, 2006; Hemetsberger & Reinhardt,
2006).
3.3 Studying (silent) layer
The studying layer might be described as a largely invisible and therefore as a silent layer.
Through collaborative activities such as questions and answers, reflections, or other
dialogues it could become however visible (2.4, 2.6, 2.8, 5, 9.2, 9.3, 10.2, Brown &
Duguid, 1991; de Paula et al., 2001; Hemetsberger, 2006; Norman, 1993). Within an
298
online context such discourse potentially can become a valuable learning resource for
others, as it is the case in FLOSS (2.4, 2.5, 3.6), in particular in the case that such discourse
relates to for example production activities or assignments (3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5). The studying
layer can be highly dynamic and perhaps might be the least structured one.
3.4 Motivational layer
The motivation layer can either be of an extrinsic or of an intrinsic nature as has been
summarized at section 10.6. As has been detailed extrinsic motivations might relate to
exams, assignments or other type of evaluations (3.3, 3.4, 6, 7.5, 9, 10, Dean & Leinonen,
2004; Ghosh et al., 2002; Ghosh & Glott, 2005b; Jensen & Scacchi, 2007; Sowe, 2007),
with intrinsic ones relating to being interested in the subject, or enjoying participating at
such an event for any other reason (2.7, 5, 6, 9, 10, Fischer & Scharff, 1998; Scharff, 2002;
Turner, et al., 2006). Extrinsic motivation therefore concerns rather formally enrolled
students, with intrinsic motivations addressing as well formally enrolled students as free
learners outside of formal education. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivational aspect might also
be considered for practitioners and could be very different than the ones of learners, or
might also be identical.
11.3.4 Assessment Layer
The assessment layer (5, 6, 7.5, 9, 10) considers as well traditional and well-established
assessment practices as those ones that can be commonly found within virtual and informal
online learning ecosystems such as the FLOSS one (2.7.1). The assessment layer might
draw on the assignment & practice layer, or also the teaching / lecturing or the social layer
(10.4.4.5).
299
11.3.5 Social Layer
The social layer refers to all aspects that are not directly aimed at studying the course
subject. Components of the social layer might be ‘off-topic’ socializing components, or co-
design aspects that relate to actively shaping and developing the Open Course ecosystem
further and as exemplified at chapter five or as could be seen within the cases presented at
chapter nine or the first application trial presented at chapter 10.
11.3.6 Technological Layer
From the technical perspective the organizational layer might consider as well the internal
course spaces and tools (6.2, 6.3, 9.2, 9.3, 10) as the external ones (6.4, 6.5, 9.2, 9.3, 10). It
should put forward requirements and specifications on how to integrate and optimize the
interplay amongst the former and analogue to the Meta-design (5.3) and Courses as Seeds /
SER process model (5.4) presented at chapter five or the overview provided at section 8.5.
6. 1 Internal technological layer
This relates to all technical aspects with regards to the internal course environment used,
tools, spaces, or also licensing aspects that could interfere (6.2, 6.3, 9.2, 9.3, 10).
6. 2 External technological layer
This relates to all technical aspects with regards to the internal course environment used,
tools, spaces, or also licensing aspects that could interfere (6.4, 6.5, 9.2, 9.3, 10).
11.3.7 Economic Layer
From an economic perspective there are a number of layers that might be considered if
looking at the field of Open Education at large. However, throughout the course of this
work only little evidence could be provided from such an economic point of view. One of
300
the sub-layers for which some evidence could be provided has been the financial economic
layer.
7.1 Financial economic layer
The financial economic layer, at the very basic, is concerned with aspects on how to
finance Open Courses, potential additional cost involved in Open Course provision,
sustainability aspects, or also associated revenue models. All of the cases reviewed
throughout chapter six and nine suggest that Open Courses can be financially sustainable
without external funding, though all of the cases, in particular the ones presented at nine
suggest that a higher workload for the course team might come along with those.
11.3.8 Courses as Seeds / SER Layer
The Courses as Seeds / SER (Seeding, Evolutionary growth, Re-seeding) layer (5.4, de
Paula et al., 2001) is a Meta layer that includes all of the layers above and might be seen as
a transversal layer. As detailed at chapter five it is aimed at a continuous improvement of
processes and products. This starts with the initial seeding of the course, over its growth
during the lectured period, up to the reseeding phase at which the created knowledge,
structures and processes would be organized, formalized and generalized, before the circle
starts again. Within an optimal hybrid organizational framework for Open Course Design,
the SER process would be an integral and almost automated part (10.6) so that by the end
of a course a reseeding has been already taken place, similar to the FLOSS case where the
individual production activities result in the release of the next software version.
11.4 An organizational Guide to hybrid Open Course Design
This section provides a guide to hybrid course design following the course layers as
detailed at section 11.3. It shows the aim for each design or implementation action at the
301
left column ‘aim’, a brief ‘description’ of those, their ‘nature’ as outlined at the
introduction (11.1) and ‘examples’ as derived from earlier parts of this work and the
literature.
Aim Description Nature Examples
1. Content Layer
Provide a modular Content is important, but content alone Change / 2.9, 7.5,
structure and task does not lead to interactions, Implement Brown &
focus, where the collaborations or discourse. Make sure that Duguid, 1991;
focus is less on activities, such as assignments or project Giuri et al.,
content, but on works, are provided alongside the content. 2004; Mockus
activities. et al., 2002;
Scacchi, 2002;
Stürmer, 2005
1.1 Static resources internally provided
Provide a clear Draw on the well-established traditional Keep 6, 7, 9, 10,
course structure, educational principles and provide learner Andreas,
with well-defined with a clear course structure that details 2002; Dean &
learning outcomes the various course components to be Leinonen,
and course studied, the learning outcomes to be 2004; Fischer,
description. achieved, assignments and practice works, 2007
or timeframe.
Provide a core Keep the 'core' - the core course should Keep 2.3, 2.9, 6, 9,
course, including a provide all relevant materials and Tuomi, 2005
set of learning resources required to take the course. A
resources that greater range of content can enhance the
302
would allow course at a later point, but the core course
studying the course might not be affected through this.
without further
input.
1.2 Static resources externally provided
Make use and Those ones might be leveraged into the Implement 2.5, 3.6, 6, 9,
embed external course space by any of the stakeholders 10, Glott et al.,
learning resources. involved, and also consist of the artifacts 2007; Weller
created by participants. & Meiszner,
2008
Consider quality assurance mechanisms Consider 7.5, 10.2, 10.5
that involve the different stakeholders for
example through rating and commenting
systems.
1.3 Dynamic resources
Make use of Artifacts and underlying discussions Change / 2.2, 2.3, 2.5,
artifacts produced should be relatable to the static resources Implement 2.8,2.9, 3.4,
by participants or or assignments, so that they are embedded 3.6, 6, 9, 10,
discourse within a context. Brown &
associated to it. Duguid, 1991;
de Paula et al.,
2001; Fischer,
1998; Glott et
al., 2007;
303
Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt,
2006; Weller
& Meiszner,
2008
Explain to participants that the knowledge Change / 9.3, 10.2,
of the course should emerge as a result of Implement Fischer, 1991;

the interaction between the different Hemetsberger,
participant groups and their peers should 2006;
be able to benefit from what has been Hemetsberger
done, the artifacts created or things & Reinhardt,
experienced. Participants should be well 2006
aware about this to understand why they
are supposed to make their works publicly
available and to provide supportive
information on those.
Rating, commenting and tagging Consider 9.2, 9,3, 10.2
mechanisms might be implemented to
facilitate re-use and to highlight good
cases or resources considered to be of use.
2. Teaching / Lecturing Layer
Assure the There will always be the need for an Keep 2.3, 3, 6, 7.5,
availability of instructor; even if in a differentiated role 9, 10,
domain expertise. than traditionally provided. Therefore the Andreas,
course team should provide clear guidance 2002; Dean &
304
and domain expertise. Leinonen,
2004; Fischer,
2007
Use the available knowledge of the Implement 2.3, 2.6, 2.8,
various stakeholders. Sub-level support 6.4, 6.5, 9.2,
perhaps could also be provided by 9.3, Fischer &
practitioners or peers. As the CCK08 case Scharff, 1998;
shows, a large group of course participants Hemetsberger
might possess such a heterogeneous set of & Reinhardt,
skills that would allow providing such 2004;
domain expertise too, therefore supporting Hemetsberger,
the core course team. 2006; Scacchi,
2002; Stürmer,
2005
Establish Be responsive to questions or problems Change / 2.2, 2.3, 2.6,
mechanisms for and establish supportive spaces (for Implement 7.5, 9.2, 9.3,
rapid double example forums) and mechanisms (for Hemetsberger
feedback loops. example commenting functions). & Reinhardt,
2006
Make sure that any type of support Change / 2.4, 2.5, 2.6,
provided could be potentially re-used and Implement 2.8, 2.9, 5.3,

remains available for others. 9.2, 9.3, 10,
Hemetsberger,
2006;
Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt,
305
2006
Consider support provision to non- Consider 2.6, 9.2, 9.3,
formally enrolled students, questions of Fischer and
them might also be of relevance to your Scharff, 1998;
own students. Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt,
2004;
Hemetsberger,
2006; Scacchi,
2002; Stürmer,
2005
2.1 Educator / Lecturer Layer
Provide lectures Make sure that lectures are open for all Change 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
that cover the types of participants, as well in-class as Fischer and
fundamental and online. If lectures are given in-class only Scharff, 1998;
theoretical then at the very least they should be made Hemetsberger
information. available for outside participants and & Reinhardt,
presented in a manner that allow for self- 2004;
studying. Hemetsberger
2006; Scacchi,
2002
Provide clear Facilitate the entry of free learners and Change 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
guidance on provide clear guidance on how they might Fischer and
participation for participate. Make clear that free / open Scharff, 1998;
free learners not participation does has limitations Hemetsberger
306
formally enrolled regarding the time educators could & Reinhardt,
at a course. dedicate to free learners, but do avoid 2004;
discriminating free learners. Hemetsberger,
2006; Scacchi,
2002; Stürmer,
2005
2.2 Practitioner Layer
Identify and Participation of students and free learners Implement 2.7, 5, 6.4, 6.5,
engage with within mature and well-established online 10.5, Ghosh et
practitioners and ecosystems can be for the benefit of both: al., 2002,
provide the practitioner side gains through the Lakhani and
opportunities for students / free learners contributions von Hippel,
their participation meanwhile the learner side acquires skills 2003
and support that might be difficult to obtain within
provision. traditional educational settings. Therefore
it is important to make practitioners aware
about this win / win situation and to seek
agreements on strategic co-operation.
Make sure that tacit knowledge can Implement 2.4, 6.4, 6.5,
become visible and observable through the 9.3, Brown &
common practice of and interactions Duguid, 1991;
among competent practitioners. Hemetsberger,
2006; Scacchi,
2002; Scharff
2002; Turner
307
et al., 2006
2.3 Peer Layer
Establish support Be aware that the course team alone likely Consider 2.6, 9.3,
mechanisms that could not provide support and therefore Hemetsberger
would cater a peers should be engaged into support & Reinhardt,
potentially large provision. 2004; Lakhani
number of & von Hippel,
participants. 2003; Swap et
al., 2001
Experts, leader, old foxes and Change / 7.5, Lakhani
knowledgeable community member play Implement & von Hippel,

an important role for support provision, as 2003; Swap et
well as task assignment. Therefore al., 2001
situations should be created within such an
Open Course approaches at which more
knowledgeable members can commit to
tasks.
Reward and foster Information and knowledge brokering Change / 2.8, 9.2, 9.3,
information & activities not only foster interaction, but Implement Felder &
knowledge also allows both sides to learn – as well Brent, 2007;
brokering. the provider as the recipient will benefit Lakhani and
from this. Information and knowledge von Hippel,
brokering is also important to reduce the 2003; Swap et
time educators will need to invest to al., 2001
provide support themselves and therefore
308
might be a mean to allow coping with
potentially very large numbers of
participants.
3. Learning Layer
Establish Learning is by nature a silent process, but Implement 2.4, 2.5, 3.6, 6,
mechanisms that can be made visible, for example through 9, 10.2, Glott
make learning discourse, debates or collaborations. et al., 2007;
'visible'. Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt,
2004; Weller
& Meiszner,
2008
3.1 Pedagogical Layer
Design the course The course must be suitable for self- Change 3.2, 9.2, 9.3,
in a way that is studying, so free learners would be Fischer &
suitable for self- enabled to follow the course. Scharff, 1998;
studying. Ghosh &
Glott, 2005b;
Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt,
2006
Focus on project- Provide activities that enable participants Change / 2.4, 3.4, 5,
based, problem- to take on active roles, to become Implement Duch, Groh &
based, case-based, designer, contributor or collaborator. Let Allen, 2001;
and inquiry-based them work on ill-structured or ill-defined Jonassen,
309
learning activities. problems, debate ideas, plan and conduct 1999, Krajcik
their own experiments, etc. Modular et al., 1994;
design and task focus further facilitate this. Savery, 2006
Allow for Provide activities that allow for Change / 3.2, 3.3, 5, 6,
collaborative collaborative construction process targeted Implement 9, 10, Glott et
learning. at achieving an objective, for example al., 2007;
solving problems or creating something. Mockus et al.,
2002; Scharff,
2002, Stürmer,
2005;
Valverde,
2006
Make sure that Domain orientation and support of human Change / 3.2, 9.2, 9.3,
participants' problem-domain interaction is important,

Implement Fischer &
assignments and to establish a connection between people Scharff, 1998;
projects are and the domain specific problems that they Harel and
preserved in a way face, such as the assignments or projects Papert, 1991;
that allows for they are working on. The availability of Hemetsberger
reflective practice those assignments / projects, the & Reinhardt,
(reflection on surrounding discourse and the availability 2006
action). of the ‘original designers’ provides task-
relevant information required for such a
reflection.
Provide space for Allow for socialisation and informal Change / 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 5,
social learning. learning that include opportunities and Implement 6, 9, 10,

freedom to try things out, to adopt Brown &
310
multiple roles, to make use of prior Adler, 2009;
knowledge, or to take risks and make Gulati 2004
mistakes.
Provide Let participants contribute to and engage Change / 2.4, 6, 9, 10,
participants with a at external well-established and mature Implement Andres, 2002;

real life experience online ecosystems and their communities. Duch, Groh &
through real This allows participants to gain as well Allen, 2001;
interactions in the subject matter skills as key and soft skills Felder &
virtual world. such as an increased level of tolerance and Brent, 2007;
acceptance of other people's viewpoints. Gokhal, 1995
3.2 Assignment & Practice Layer
Provide The work on assignments and projects Change / 2.3, 2.9, 5, 6,
opportunities to should be organized in a way that the Implement 9, 10, Brown

work, individually artifacts produced and underlying & Duguid,
or as a group, on discourse is preserved as contextualized 1991; Fischer,
concrete content “that makes sense to those that did 1998; de Paula
assignments or not participate in its creation” (Fischer et al., 2001;
projects. 1998). Hemetsberger,
2006;
Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt,
2006
Produce For the case of learning projects: Change / 6, 7.5, 9, 10.2,
incremental
• The projects have to be small and Implement Scharff, 2002
deliverables with
must be easily to fulfil within the
311
fixed deadlines. given time and participants should
be able to complete the projects
with a certain degree of study and
scaffolding from the educational
material.
• Every project should also have a
strict deadline.
• Establish a 'release early' culture
and provide rewards for early
releases and frequent updates.
• Explain participants at the
beginning that they will be
expected to showcase and present
their project and to make all
outcomes available (for example
within the learning project
directory).
Require Enable others to see and understand what Change / 6.2, 6.3, 6.4,
participants to peers are doing, to re-use and to build on it Implement 9.2, 9.3,
make the outcomes by requiring participants to make the Fischer and
of their work outcomes of their work available in a Scharff, 1998;
available in a clearly structured form. Establish Hemetsberger,
clearly structured structures that allow identifying how 2006;
form. participants in related circumstances have Hemetsberger
learnt, the resources they used, or & Reinhardt,
312
solutions they brought forward. 2006
Learning projects, modularity or directory Consider 2.4, 2.5, 2.9,
/ SVN structures could allow for 10.2, Brown &
preserving such outcomes in a structured Duguid, 1991;
manner and to keep surrounding discourse Mockus et al.,
within a context. 2002; Scacchi,
2002; Stürmer,
2005
Encourage In the case participants would select an Consider 2.4, 2.5, 3.6, 5,
participants to existing project that was started by earlier 10.5.5, Brown
build on or extend participants, they should build on it and & Duguid,
the outcomes clearly demonstrate their own 1991; Fischer,
produced by earlier achievements and what they have done. 1998; de Paula
cohorts of et al., 2001;
participants. Hemetsberger,
2006;
Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt,
2006
Provide examples Clearly show what participants are Change / 2.5, 6, 9, 10,
and guides. expected to do and how the outcomes Implement Hemetsberger

might look like. & Reinhardt,
2006; Scacchi,
2002; Stürmer,
2005
313
Allow for some To allow participants to engage in Change / 2.7, 5, 6, 9, 10,
'freedom of choice' personal meaningful activities a range of Implement Brown &

so that participants opportunities from which they could select Adler, 2009;
would be able to should be provided, but make clear that Ghosh et al.,
engage to a certain participants are expected to commit to a 2002;
degree in personal given project and carry the responsibility Hemetsberger
meaningful for it. & Reinhardt,
activities. 2006
3.3 Studying (silent) Layer
Promote discourse Make tacit knowledge explicit and Change / 2.4, 2.6, 2.8, 5,
and debates. therefore visible and stimulate Implement 9.2, 9.3, 10.2,
collaborative works on assignments and Brown &
projects to foster discourse and debates Duguid, 1991;
around those. de Paula et al.,
2001;
Hemetsberger,
2006;
Norman, 1993
Organize online Such meet-ups might be of a more Change / 2.2, 2.5, 3.3,
'meet-ups' for informal nature to allow participants to Implement 6.2, 9.2, 9.3,
reflection on express themselves within an environment 10.2, Dean &
lectures or practice that is not marked by a formal assessment Leinonen,
works. culture, but by interest and curiosity. 2004; Scacchi,
2002
314
3.4 Motivational Layer
Promote a culture Encourage tinkering, exploring, trial and Change / 3, 5, 6, 7.5, 9,
of learning, but not error, and inquiry. Establish a ‘release Implement 10, Brown &
on a culture driven early culture’ to enable participants seeing Adler, 2009;
by accreditation what their peers are doing and to provide a Gulati 2004
and assessment. base around which dialogue could emerge.
Assessment is an important element for
formally enrolled students, but it might
conflict with a culture of learning and
therefore should not be on the forefront.
Extrinsic (formally enrolled students)
Use students Ex-ante ‘evaluation’ is a strong Change 3.3, 3.4, 6, 9,
evaluation as a motivational factor for formally enrolled 10, Dean &
means of students to participate and become active, Leinonen,
motivation and meanwhile ex-post ‘the learning 2004
make contributions experience and outcome’ seems to be of a
mandatory!!! high value. For this reason a right balance
must be established between voluntary and
mandatory participation. For formally
enrolled students the submission of
concrete outcomes, such as work on
assignments and projects, should be an
element of their overall evaluation, with
clearly outlined and defined dates on what
they are expected to 'deliver'.
315
Provide incentives Consider incentives such as MVC (Most Change / 6, 7.5, 9, 10,
for a 'higher than Valuable Contributor), which also would Implement Ghosh et al.,
required' confront in a second level the problem of 2002; Jensen
participation and the lurkers. Honour active participation and Scacchi,
value and allow participants to build up an 2007; Sowe,
overachievement. online repute; ‘star point system’ or 2007
similar means could be used for this.
Intrinsic (all types of learner)
Allow for Provide participants with a range of Change / 2.7, 5, 6, 9,
engagement in opportunities to engage at. On the subject Implement 10,Fischer and

personal matter level this might be the opportunity Scharff, 199;
meaningful tasks. to select from a range of assignments or Scharff, 2002;
projects. From the course perspective Turner et al.,
participants must be enabled to actively 2006
'shape' the course space, to take on
ownership and to contribute to it.
4 Assessment Layer
Adapt assessment The artifacts created by participants and Consider 6, 7.5, 9, 10
to the changed underlying discourse might be considered
situation. for students’ evaluation. Within such a
Open Course environment 'learning
processes' can become 'visible' and
therefore students' evaluation might draw
316
on how students have progressed
throughout the course and what they have
learnt (gradual evaluation) instead of
evaluating them at one given moment
only.
Consider new form A peer-assessment cycle might be Consider 2.7.1, 5, 6, 7.5,
of assessment. initialized, where every group (or 9, 10
individual) reviews and comments on the
work of the others, for example completed
assignments or projects. Peer assessment
might take place at given moments, for
example the presentation of a completed
assignment or project, or it might be
alongside the course, such as feedback
received for support provision or active
design achievements.
5. Social Layer
Provide space for Make sure that the course environment Change / 2.7, 6, 9, 10,
socializing & includes some socialising spaces and Implement Crowston &
interactions. provides for opportunities to get together. Howison,
2005; Gosh et
al., 2005;
Valverde,
2006; Weiss &
Moroiu, 2007
317
Encourage active Provide adequate means that facilitate Change / 5, 9.3, 10.2,
co-design of the active involvement in the course design Implement Fischer, 2007;
Open Course process. The use of ‘roadmaps’ and ‘whish Scacchi, 2002
Ecosystem. lists’ would be reasonable approaches so
participants clearly know on how and
where to contribute.
6. Technological Layer
Design 'simple' and Start with a basic set of tools that are Change / 2.2, 5, 6, 9, 10,
grow from there. known to work out, and grow from there. Implement Hemetsberger
More technologies or sophisticated & Reinhardt,
systems can still be added upon the base of 2004;
clearly identified user needs. Meiszner,
2007
Design for Make sure that all technologies allow for Change / 6, 9, 10,
'flexibility' & 'rapid quick modifications and rapid exchange Implement Fischer, 2007;
adaption', use open through the course team or participants in González-
source solutions or accordance to identified needs. Barahona et
freely available al., 2005a,
online tools, 2005b; Kahn,
services or spaces, 2001;
or make sure that Meiszner,
for-paid 2007
proprietary
solutions offer the
same possibilities
and do not come at
318
additional cost.
Design 'open'!!! The course environment must by any Change / 2.5, 6, 9, 10,
mean be truly open: At a minimum ‘open Implement Fischer and

to read’ for core course elements, in Scharff, 1998;
general be ‘open to write or contribute’ Hemetsberger
and when appropriate also ‘open to & Reinhardt,
modify’ the work of others. 2004;
Hemetsberger,
2006; Scacchi,
2002; Stürmer,
2005
Understand the To avoid that participants get lost and to Change / 2.3, 2.9, 6, 7.5,
difference between keep control of the ‘core’ a central course Implement 9, Tuomi,
'core' and 'non- space should be provided that hosts the 2005
core' course core course components, such as course
elements and outline, instructional materials, and an
design in initial set of learning materials or
accordance. assignments. Non core elements might be
either internally or externally located.
Identify the Make sure that only those technological Change / 2.3, 2.4, 2.5,
'core'!!! solutions become a part of the core that are Implement 2.9, 9.2, 9.3,
actually required and carefully consider Tuomi, 2005
implementing additional functionalities.
The main purpose of the core is to provide
the initial course materials, meanwhile the
artifacts created by participants or
319
leveraged into the course space by them,
as well as associated discourse, might well
be located outside of the core.
Provide tools that Forums, mailing lists or wikis could assist Change / 2.4, 3.6, 5, 7.5,
capture discourse to establish a cooperative and interactive

Implement 9.2, 9.3,
and provide means environment and to facilitate the Brown &
so that this knowledge exchange between participants. Duguid, 1991;
discourse is de Paula et al.,

Make use of learning project, directories
contextualized and and SVN type systems, or establish similar 2001; Glott et
relates to al., 2007;

conditions, so that discourse and learning
assignments or Hemetsberger
resources could be referenced and linked
practice works. & Reinhardt,
to concrete works on assignments /
2004; Scacchi,
projects and therefore allows for
2002; Weller
contextualisation.
& Meiszner,
2008
Be aware of the Make use of a ‘best of breed’ in the case Change / 2.3, 2.4, 2.5,
'core course', but the wider Web provides better Implement 2.6, 2.9, 6,
allow for 'best of technological solutions, practices, or in the 9,10, Tuomi,
breed' wherever case of already established and mature 2005
possible. communities for respective study fields.
Map and integrate the methodologies and
tools used on the base of well-established
practice, instead of trying to set up a
‘parallel universe’. Be aware of associated
risks such as giving up control and
320
accepting a higher level of uncertainty.
Make sure that the ‘core course’ remains
functional within the inside space, even if
the outer one would become unavailable.
Allow free learners Recorded lectures, online follow up Change / 2.4, 2.5, 3.6,
to follow lectures. sessions, or live lectures might be Implement 9.2, 9.3,

considered to allow free learners to Fischer and
participate. A separation between inside Scharff, 1998;
and outside course should be avoided and Hemetsberger
therefore the course preferably should be & Reinhardt,
openly available in its entirety. 2004;
Hemetsberger,
2006; Scacchi,
2002
6. 1 Internal technological Layer
Provide a central The internal core course might draw on Change 6, 7.5, 9,
course space as a technical solutions already in place, the 10,Fischer and
‘core’. main requirement is that all course Scharff, 1998;
elements would be 'open to access'. Hemetsberger
& Reinhardt,
2004;
Hemetsberger,
2006; Scacchi,
2002
321
6. 2 External technological Layer
Enable participants Make use of a range of Web 2.0 tools and Implement 2.2, 2.9, 3.6, 5,
to bring in their spaces, both pre-outlined and designed by 6.2, 6.3, 9, 10,
own spaces into the course team, as well as those ones Fischer, 2007;
the course. brought in by the participants. Glott et al.,
2007;
González-
Barahona et
al., 2005a,
2005b;
Hemetsberger,
2006; Iiyoshi
and Vijay
Kumar, 2008;
Meiszner et
al., 2008b,
Scacchi, 2002;
Scharff, 2002;
Weller et al.,
2008
In the simplest form tags could be used so Consider 9.2, 9.3, 10.2
that external courses spaces can potentially
be found and would be associated to the
course.
322
A more integrated approach would be to Consider 2.2, 2.9, 10.2
link to those spaces within the respective
learning projects and therefore being
clearly visible to others.
Automated processes might also be Consider 2.2, 2.9, 10.2
established so that external spaces would
become visible within the internal course
environment.
Be aware of In particular with regards to external Consider 6.4, 6.5, 9.2,
ownership. spaces brought into the course by 9.3
participants. The use of personal blogs for
example might be problematic since the
ownership of this blog is with the
respective participant and therefore the
possible re-use within further course
editions unclear.
7. Economic Layer
7.1 Financial economic Layer
Availability of Open Courses can be designed and Consider 6, 9, 10
external funding is delivered even without external funding,
not a pre- though perhaps at a smaller scale.
requirement.
Be aware of the Design and delivery of hybrid Open Consider 6, 9, 10
difference between Courses might come at an additional cost,
'additional cost' but is also could provide a higher value for
323
and 'value for students formally enrolled, such as
money'. acquiring an enhanced set of skills, a more
up to date and close to market needs
course, or to meet potential employers and
to collaborate with them.
Be aware of Consider the ‘Next generation university’ Consider 7.5, 9.3, 10.5.5
potential new idea: exam-only + external bodies for
revenue models learning, or: ‘learning for free and
that could come assessment and certification against fees’.
along with hybrid
Open Course
provision.
8. Courses as Seeds / SER Layer
Seeding
Seed the course All course elements that do not interfere Change / 6, 8, 9, 10,
and allow it to be with the core might be kept open to allow

Implement Scacchi, 2002;
also shaped by the the wider world to shape and actively Scharff, 2002;
outside world. develop the course. Act upon the maxim Turner et al.,
‘the more the better’, but prevent and 2006; Weller
discourage a culture of consumption, and & Meiszner,
accept that lurkers are likely the largest 2008
course group.
Encourage participants to self-organize Change / 3.3, 3.4, 5, 6.4,
their activities and within their own spaces Implement 6.5, 9.2, 9.3,
of choice, to act as domain experts, or to 10, Fischer,
324
become teachers to others. 1998; Fischer
and Scharff,
1998
Enable participation of free learners Change / 9.2, 9.3,
outside of formal education by allowing Implement Scacchi, 2002;

them to follow the entirety of the course, Scharff, 2002;
including instructional and core learning Turner et al.,
materials, or assignments. 2006
Provide modular course structures to allow Change 2.2, 2.9, 9.2,
engagement at a modular course level, yet 9.3, 10.2,
still providing a required level of structure Brown &
and clear entrance and exit points. Duguid, 1991;
Giuri et al.,
2004; Mockus
et al., 2002;
Scacchi, 2002;
Stürmer, 2005
Provide ‘easy Consider establishing a market place for Change / 10.4.4, 10.5.5,
entrance points’ projects, so learners and practitioners Implement Lakhani and

and win / win could find each other. von Hippel,
situations for 2003
practitioners to
participate.
Evolutionary Growth
Allow for changes Be adaptive to identified participants’ Change / 5, 9.2, 10,
325
throughout the needs and also consider adapting the Implement Fischer, 1998;
course duration if course accordingly during its use time. Fischer and
required. Scharff, 1998
Keep the course Allow for add-hoc participation, or jump Change / 9.2, 9.3,
'open' during its on / jump off participation, but make clear Implement Lakhani &
run-time. that the course team would not provide von Hippel,
support that is required as a result of late 2003
entry.
Re-seeding
Establish continuity Hybrid Open Course scenarios might Change / 9.2, 9.3,
beyond semester attract a large number of participants with Implement 10.5,Brown &
terms. a heterogeneous set of skills and the cases Duguid, 1991;
of openEd Syllabus and CCK08 show that Bacon &
a community can be established around a Dillon, 2006;
course. To assure however continuity and Schmidt,
community growth requires keeping 2007; Schmidt
participants within the course & Surman,
environment beyond semester terms. 2007; Staring,
Therefore it might be considered to 2005
involve senior students that participated at
the course at an earlier stage and
encourage them to take on mentoring
roles, or consider establishing cooperation
agreements with practitioners from
outside communities that would remain
326
available for a number of course editions.
11.5 Summary
Based on the findings of chapters two, three and five to ten of this work, this chapter
suggested a hybrid organizational framework for Open Course Design, including
fundamentals, different layers as well as a brief guide. This chapter focused on the ‘hybrid’
perspective to Open Course design and delivery as introduced in chapter eight and
following detailed in chapter nine and subject to experimental application trials at chapter
ten. As detailed in section 8.4 the hybrid approach has been introduced as residing in the
middle of outside and inside approaches and combining both ends. Consequently the
fundamentals, different layers as well as the brief guide presented at this chapter are of
equal importance for educators wanting to implement and inside or outside approach.
As a final chapter of this work the following twelfth chapter will provide overall
conclusions and summaries of this work, as well as suggested areas for future research in
this domain and concrete projects that have been resulting from it.
327
12 Conclusion
Within the past eleven chapters this work aimed at furthering the understanding of open
education and the nature of open courses, to identify requirements for Open Course design
and delivery and to develop and test a supportive organizational framework for such open
educational provision. The main findings of this work are summarized within this final
twelfth chapter.
12.1 The Nature of Open Courses
The ‘Open Courses’ reviewed throughout this work appeared to be mainly driven on at the
individual educators’ level, but not strategically addressed at the institutional level. They
experimented with a range of different educational approaches, promoted different levels
of openness, incorporated different sets of free and open tools and learning resources, and
– to a varying degree – mixed the formal with the informal; bringing together the different
stakeholders to be found on the Web. What all of these attempts seemed to have in
common however has been the desire to experiment in a more unconventional way and
with less traditional educational restrictions with the opportunities the participatory Web
2.0 provides.
12.1.1 Inside, Outside and Hybrid Perspectives
As detailed in chapter six, eight and nine Open Course scenarios might be differentiated by
‘inside’, ‘outside’ or hybrid approach.
12.1.1.1 The inside Perspective
Within the inside approach (6.2, 6.3, 8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7) some principles as also inherent
within well-established and mature online learning ecosystems, such as the FLOSS case,
328
are applied within the higher education context. The ‘Meta-design’ and ‘Courses as Seeds’
process model (Fischer, 2007) as presented at chapter five is one example for a structured
attempt of the inside approach aimed at supporting self-directed learners within virtual
learning communities by creating socio-technical environments that support new forms of
collaborative design. Fischer (2007) talks of users creating socio-technical environments
and has a continuum of participation ranging from passive consumer to Meta-designer.
Key stakeholders within the ‘inside approach’ are formally enrolled students and the
educator, with practitioners assuming no real importance and free learners outside of
formal education or fellow students institutions being at the very least allowed to observe.
This is to say that the general public is at the minimum allowed to view what is going on
within the environment, but might also be allowed to participate and engage in this
environment. Allowing for such type of participants or engagement would likely be a first
step towards a hybrid approach. Depending on the degree of openness, for example open to
view, open to consume, open to participate, open to change, the outside world remains
largely or totally disconnected from the inside one, the course ‘community’. An inside
approach that would only allow outsiders to view, but not to participate, therefore would
limit the opportunities to establish a course ‘community’ and ‘evolutionary growth’, since
a given course could only draw its own student population (6.2, 6.3), that has (a) a 100%
student turnover per semester / course and (b) a comparatively small number of potential
community member (formally enrolled students of a course). Within such an inside attempt
the educator retains the control about organizational structures and processes, or even
access rights. For this reason the inside approach might be relatively moderate to
implement since the technology should be already in place at most higher education
institutions, or available at low or no cost. On the down side this approach would still keep
the students of the institution within this learning environment preventing their semi-
structured engagement and collaboration within the wider Web. It would also limit the
opportunities of ‘best of breed’, as the wider Web might provide better technological
329
solutions, practices, or already established and mature communities for respective study
fields.
12.1.1.2 The outside Perspective
Within the ‘outside approach’ (6.4, 6.5, 8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7) institutions would send out their
students into already well-established and mature learning ecosystems to engage in and
collaborate within those communities on pre-defined tasks. In contrast to the inside
approach, the outside approach takes traditional education as the starting point by
providing theoretical information ‘in-class’ and then sends the students ‘outside’ to find
well-established communities, such as the FLOSS ones or Wikipedia, to work within those
communities and to apply and deepen their theoretical knowledge. Main stakeholders of
the outside approach are therefore formally enrolled students, the educator and
practitioners of the outside communities involved, with ‘free learners’ likely being present
within the outside world, but not integrated into the overall course structure. The students
are provided with an initial academic background and then required to choose and engage
within well-established and mature online learning ecosystems. This clearly has benefits as
it gives students real experience of collaborating with practitioners and to gain real life
practical experience of collaboration, an authentic learning experience and allows them to
acquire an enhanced set of skills than they would have acquired in traditional class settings
(6.4, 6.5, 9.2, 9.3, 10). The outside approach can be realized whenever there is an external,
‘real’ community that is operating on FLOSS type principles, with openness being the
main criteria that must be met. The outside approach might be the least complex and
almost cost neutral; and therefore relatively easy to implement. One of the drawbacks of
the outside approach is that the results of students’ collaborative learning and knowledge
production likely remains within those outside ecosystems and therefore would be lost for
future students, or at least could not be easily detected. The outside approach therefore
330
does not provide next year’s students (newbies) with an easy access as not only the prior
knowledge created by the students, but also the students themselves would be absent at
future course editions. The use of external spaces and communities comes also at the price
of giving up control and certainty, an aspect for which one needs to be prepared and to be
taken into account.
12.1.1.3 The hybrid Perspective
A hybrid approach to Open Course design (8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 9, 10, 11) is aimed at
connecting the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ ‘course worlds’ in a more structured way and is
close to the concept of ‘open participatory learning ecosystems’ as outlined by Brown &
Adler (2008). Within the hybrid approach some of the principles of well-established and
mature online learning ecosystems are adopted within the inner course, such as
collaboration, use of technologies, peer production. People learn by doing, for example by
remixing or re-mashing content that is viewed by others. However these activities occur in
a broader ecosystem that is open for everyone and that aims to integrate the ‘outer world’
in a more structured manner within the overall course. Stakeholders of a hybrid approach
consist consequently off all stakeholder groups: own students and the course team, free
learners outside of formal education, practitioners and perhaps also fellow students and
educators. Hybrid Open Courses might make use of a number of environments, spaces and
communities where students could engage at in a semi-structured way and where guidance
and support is provided through the use of technologies (for example RSS, suggested
contents, etc.) and the use of the human factor (for example knowledge brokers,
community support, etc.). Hybrid Open Courses should also aim to meet the interest of
both sides involved, the educational one as well as the outside communities involved
(10.5.5), as well as the willingness to accept and draw on established best practices. This
might be achieved by mapping and integrating the methodologies, tools and practices
331
already used and well established of the outside communities involved, instead of formal
education trying to set up a “parallel universe” itself (10.5.5). To allow for continuity,
connectedness, transactive group memories or re-use and re-seeding one might need to
look at courses beyond the semester term and instead look for means to grow such hybrid
educational spaces by connecting the various stakeholder groups and therefore to gradually
achieve that a “critical mass builds on-line” (10.5.5.4). “Being like the community”
however is likely a novel way of working for teachers and therefore perhaps requires also a
paradigm shift on how one sees formal education (10.5.5.4). The case of the CCK08 course
has shown however that such hybrid scenarios can work out with some limitations within
the current semester based approach.
12.1.2 Potential Stakeholders in Open Education
Open Course scenarios involve an extended set of stakeholders than traditional courses and
not only consist of the educator or students formally enrolled, but also include practitioners
as could be seen in the case of Washington-Bothell (6.4) where students had to face critics
or by times unwanted contributions from the members of Wikipedia, or the case of
Aristotle University (6.5) where students collaborated with Open Source practitioners.
Open Courses might further consists of free learners outside of formal education as could
be seen in the case of openEd Syllabus (9.2) or the CCK08 course (9.3); at both of the
courses free learners outnumbered the formally enrolled students at large, and in the case
of CCK08 the ration of free learner to formally enrolled students has been far beyond 50:1.
Open courses might also include fellow educators and fellow students as has been seen at
the case of ADM (6.3) at which the own student population collaborated occasionally with
students that were located at the opposite side of the globe. Within Open Courses students
formally enrolled work together with practitioners (6.4, 6.5) and free learners outside of
formal education (9.2, 9.3) or fellow students (6.3), be it within the course environment
332
(9.2, 9.3), be it at well-established external communities (6.4, 6.5), be it at spaces that were
jointly created around the course (6.3, 9.3), or any hybrid form in between. This is a
fundamental difference to traditional closed course scenarios. The six cases reviewed in
this work throughout chapter six and nine, as well as the NetGeners.Net application trials
presented at chapter ten do suggest that such open collaboration forms can add a value to
the students’ learning experience, or the opposite: none of the cases suggests that such
open scenarios would harm. The type of stakeholders and their degree of association
depends on the type of application scenario as summarized at section 12.1, with the inside
one (12.1.1) mostly involving free learners as more passive observer, the outside one
mainly concerning practitioners (12.1.2), and the hybrid one (12.1.3) considering all
stakeholder groups and assigns them an active role.
12.1.3 Motivations & Gains to engage at Open Courses
As noted at section 11.3.3 motivational aspects for participation in hybrid Open Course
scenarios might be either of an extrinsic or intrinsic nature. Extrinsic motivation concerns
rather formally enrolled students, with intrinsic motivations also addressing formally
enrolled students as well as free learners outside of formal education. Extrinsic and
intrinsic motivational aspects might also be considered for practitioners and could be very
different than the ones of learners, or might also be identical.
12.1.3.1 For formally enrolled Students
Extrinsic motivations for formally enrolled students might relate to exams, assignments or
evaluation and as could be seen at the case of Aristotle (6.5, 10.5) constitutes ex-ante a
strong motivational factor why to become active or why to act as a co-designer. Ex-post
however ‘the learning experience and outcome’ constitutes an further motivational factor
as a result of students realizing the added value provided if the course population at large
333
would share and collaborate for the benefit of all. This suggests that a right balance must
be established between voluntary and mandatory participation, to become active, or to act
as a co-designer. For formally enrolled students the submission of concrete outcomes, such
as work on assignments and projects, might therefore be an element of their overall
evaluation, with clearly outlined and defined dates on what they are expected to 'deliver'.
The cases 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 9.2 or 9.3 suggest that such mandatory elements do not conflict
with intrinsic motivations, or that those elements would conflict with the idea of allowing
students to tinker, experiment, find out and commit mistakes (3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5).
12.1.3.2 For free Learners outside of formal Education
With reference to motivational aspects why free learners might decide to participate at
such a learning exercise the main motivation that could be observed within the cases
reviewed throughout this work has been ‘personal interest in the subject area’ (9.2, 9.3).
The results of the first NetGeners.Net application trial (10.3) suggest further that there
should be some type of opportunity ‘to gain something’, analogue to the assessment of
students’ in formal education that leads to a degree. Degrees in the formal education case
are typically commonly accepted, and the same acceptance would be desired for such
informally acquired learning outcomes that also should translate in some type of general
acceptance and recognition. As suggested at section 10.4.4.5, such gains might be provided
through a virtual learning that would allow visualizing the learning outcomes of
participants within such an Open Course scenario and that might include a number of
parameters that feature learning outcomes and allow others to assess what has been
learned. Individual performances and commitment, artifacts created, or review of peers and
crediting good contributions were seen as possible elements of such a portfolio. However,
participants of the application trial presented in section 10.4 felt that such outcomes must
be generally accepted by for example potential employer, as it is the case within FLOSS.
334
Participants of FLOSS communities are aware that the skills they learn have a positive
value on the labour market and are able to judge this value realistically. Precondition for
competing with others that have a comparable formal degree is that informally attained
skills in the FLOSS community must be provable (2.7, Glott et al. 2007). From a more
traditional perspective, one gain certainly would be to allow free learners outside of formal
education to obtain some type of formal certificate issued through an educational
institution, which could be seen in the case of CCK08 (9.3) at which one participant has
been awarded formal credits from another university, with this other university using the
assessment scheme applied by the CCK08 course team.
12.1.3.3 For formally enrolled Students & free Learners
The opportunity to produce something that participants see as their own work and can
showcase to others can also serve as a strong motivational factor as has been highlighted
by a number of educators (10.5.5) that run courses that could be classified as ‘Open’. A
basic condition that must be met for this to happen appeared to be that participant should
be enabled to actively shape their own learning space, so it would match their expectations
and they see it as 'their' own product. This is well in line with the Meta-design concept
presented at chapter five (Fischer 2007) that also suggests that students must be brought in
early in the design process and that the students otherwise might felt misused.
12.1.3.4 For Educators & Practitioners
Hybrid Open Course approaches should also provide a win / win solutions for both of the
sides involved and as pointed out by open source practitioners (10.5.5) – as well the formal
educational side as the practitioners involved should be provided with some type of gain.
For the case of Open Source and computer science education it has been shown (6.4, 10.5)
that the students’ work did add value to the respective open source project and therefore
335
constituted a clear gain for both sides, the case of Washington-Bothell (6.4) shows
however that students’ contributions are not always seen as a ‘gain’, but might even have
been seen as unwanted. Therefore it might be advisable for educators to consult with the
communities they intend to engage to avoid any negative impact for the students involved.
12.1.4 Semester based Concepts vs. the learning Community Idea
Semester based concepts conflict almost ‘per se’ with the community idea (10.4.4, 10.5.5),
which usually requires continuity. And consequently one of the main differences between
the cases reviewed in chapters six and nine and the FLOSS learning ecosystem as detailed
in chapters two and three relates to aspects that require some type of continuity, such as a
transactive group memory (2.4) or the possibility to get in contact with more experienced
community members (2.6, 2.8). The case of CCK08 (9.3) has shown however that quite
similar conditions can be established within the traditional semester based concept, with
the results of the application trial presented at 10.5 suggesting that involving past years
students at the current course edition or to allow students to work on assignments beyond
semester terms might be a suitable way to foster continuity and community building. As
pointed out by the team of Mozilla (10.5.5.4) one of the biggest challenges might relate to
how one defines formal education and the nature of courses, with ‘being like the
community’ presenting perhaps a novel way of working for teachers and therefore might
also require a paradigm shift on how one sees formal education.
12.1.5 A financial Perspective
The cases reviewed in chapters six and nine suggest that Open Course approaches, be they
inside, outside or hybrid, do not imperatively depend on the availability of additional
funding. The main ‘cost’ of the cases reviewed appeared to relate to the additional
workload involved for educators to design and deliver the courses. For the inside and
336
outside cases reviewed in chapter six, the additional time appeared to be moderate, or in
the best case neutral. The two hybrid Open Course cases presented in chapter nine however
have shown that the time available to educators to deliver a given course constitutes a
limitation with regard to educators’ support that could be provided to non-formally
enrolled students. The two cases have shown that a significant additional time effort and
commitment through the course team might be required to cater and guide a large number
of course participants and that support provision might be limited to formally enrolled
students only. This suggests that hybrid Open Course design might come at the same cost
than any traditional course design, but that a hybrid Course delivery that provides the same
type of support to all types of participants would come at a higher price and therefore
requires either additional revenues or funding, or organizational models at which the
burden of providing support is shared or similar conditions than featured in FLOSS (2.4,
2.5, 2.6, 2.8) that would allow to also draw on the learning of others as a community based
learner support.
12.2 A Framework for Open Course Design & Delivery
The two main objectives of this work have been to develop an initial understanding on the
nature of Open Courses, to identify the different types of potential Open Course scenarios
and requirements on organizational frameworks that would support such Open Course
design and delivery. As could be shown throughout this work there are a number of
analogies between Open Courses and mature and well-established online learning
ecosystems, such as the FLOSS one presented in chapters two and three. Analogies
included the organization of such open and informal participatory learning ecosystems
(Bacon & Dillon, 2006; Brown & Adler, 2009; de Paula et al., 2001; Fischer & Sugimoto,
2006; Fischer, 2007; Scharff, 2002; Staring, 2005), the type of learning resources featured
(Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004, 2006; Hemetsberger, 2006), associated learning
337
technologies (Conole, 2008; Dean & Leinonen, 2004; González-Barahona et al., 2005a,
2005b), underlying pedagogies (Conole, 2008; Glott et al., 2007; Weller & Meiszner,
2008), learning opportunities and activities (Mockus et al., 2002; Stürmer, 2005; Tuomi,
2005), the communities and stakeholders participating in it (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt,
2004, 2006; Hemetsberger, 2006; McMartin in Iiyoshi & Kumar, 2008 p.143), or the
respective participant’ roles (Wenger, 1998; Pór, 2004; Stürmer, 2005).
It however has also been shown throughout the work, most notably within chapter seven,
that there are a number of traditional course design principles that might be retained and
that Open Course design and delivery perhaps should build on top of those, such as the
structuredness, guidance, or assignments provided within traditional courses.
12.2.1 Meta-design & Courses as Seeds / SER
Chapter five has provided an overview of the Meta-design framework and the Courses as
Seeds / SER process model, which both consider advantages of online learning
ecosystems, such as the FLOSS example that has been presented at chapter two and three.
Meta-design also served as a suitable framework to develop an understanding on the nature
of Open Courses throughout the chapter six to ten. Chapters six and nine of this work
compared established practices of educational cases that operate to ‘a certain degree in the
Open’ against the theoretical assumptions of Meta-design and Courses as Seeds /SER. The
application trials and stakeholder consultations presented at chapter ten, then provided
further practical examples on how the Meta-design framework and the Courses as Seeds /
SER process model might be applied in practice – or vice versa – the Meta-design
framework and Courses as Seeds / SER process model helped to develop an understanding
on Open Course design and delivery. This has also become visible in chapter eleven that
drew on the Courses as Seeds / SER process model to serve as a transversal Meta layer to a
continuous improvement of processes and products: the initial seed of the course, its
338
growth during the lectured period, up to the reseeding phase at which the created
knowledge, structures and processes would be organized, formalized and generalized,
before the circle starts again. Within an optimal hybrid organizational framework for Open
Course Design, the SER (seeding, evolutionary growth, re-seeding) process would be an
integral and almost automated part (10.6) so that by the end of a course a reseeding has
been already taken place, as an analogue to the FLOSS case where the individual
production activities result in the release of the next software version.
Nonetheless, the reviews of the cases in chapters six and nine, and also the results of the
application trials and stakeholder consultations presented at chapter ten, have on the other
hand also shown the need to advance on the practical applicability of some theoretical
considerations, in particular those relating the concept of ‘re-seeding’ a course and to allow
for a continuity or how to organize, formalize and generalize the created knowledge in a
way that does not require a manual reseeding through the course team, but rather a type of
evolutionary growth as could be observed in the FLOSS case (chapter two).
12.2.2 Modularity as a Mean to foster Seeding, Evolutionary Growth & Re-
seeding
As detailed in section 2.9, modularity in FLOSS helps to reduce systemic
interdependencies between different files of the same product, allowing a higher level of
task partitioning and a lower level of explicit coordination and interaction among
programmers. Modularity might be achieved through a clear division of labour between the
core product and more ‘external’ features such as modules, add-ons or plug-ins (Mockus et
al., 2002). From a product perspective modularity increases flexibility and
comprehensibility, allows for a reduction in development time, provides well-defined
interfaces to ensure smooth interaction of the various contributions (Stürmer, 2005). From
a learning perspective modularity fosters community building, allows participants to
339
engage in smaller sub-projects that can be either integrated into the product (like
contributions, modules, plug-ins, extensions), or are of a supportive nature (like manuals,
live demos, how-to guides, translations), allows for participation at a lower time
commitment or with less skills and therefore lowers the participation burden (Stürmer,
2005). Modularity plays not only an important role to reduce complexity or to lower the
entrance burden, but additionally helps to provide a certain structure, to conveniently
identify what one is looking for, or to find prior discourse that for example relates to a
single module (2.4), be it through individual’s own search actions be it by being pointed to
those sources by other community members (2.6). Much of the ongoing discourse in
FLOSS clearly relates to for example ‘a product to be developed’, ‘a task to be fulfilled’,
or ‘a solution to be found for a problem’ (Hemetsberger & Reinhardt, 2004, 2006;
Hemetsberger, 2006), with all of those interactions being embedded within the respective
FLOSS ecosystem and being kept in a context due to a combination of technological
solutions in place (2.2) and individuals acting as knowledge and information broker (2.8).
The aspect of modularity is not limited to the FLOSS domain, but can also be seen in other
major online projects such as Wikipedia (Swartz, 2006). Modularity therefore contributes
at different level like providing an easy entrance, offering a large variety of opportunities
to participate, or facilitating collaboration and production. As detailed in section 2.4,
modularity further enables new developers to learn their skills and work practice by
developing code that extends the system’s functionality but does not interfere with its core
functionality (Tuomi, 2005), this not only fosters their social integration, but also allows
such new developers to contribute and to become content and knowledge creators.
Therefore modular approaches in which less skilled people are provided with the
opportunity to enhance ‘non-core’ functions are beneficial in at least three ways: (1) it
allows new and less skilled participants to become knowledgeable practitioners, (2) it
fosters social integration and community building and (3) the artifacts created by those
new and less skilled participants still add a value to the FLOSS project itself.
340
It has been suggested in section 2.10 that in educational terms the core might relate to ‘core
course components’, with modularity referring to either course modules suitable to be
studied alone, or modularity referring to the students’ works, such as working on concrete
projects or similar types of assignments that result in a concrete deliverable to be
developed. For all of the cases reviewed in chapters six and nine the latter has been
evident. Course modules suitable to be studied alone could be observed for the hybrid
cases presented in chapter nine, it nonetheless has not become clear if such modules have
been studied as standalone units in practice, or if those would indeed allow for
participation at a lower time commitment or with less skills and therefore lowers the
participation burden. On the other hand both of the cases show relatively clearly that,
similarly to the FLOSS case, a diverse number of contributions has been made by the
course participants of the CCK08 case that overall appeared to add a value to the course
and where a large number of volunteering participants contributed their different sets of
skills and to the overall course development through the creation of for examples spaces or
content, and where the participants voluntarily decided which role(s) they play or which
responsibilities to take on (9.3.4). The participants took on a diverse set of roles beyond
content and course creation, such as information brokerage, even amongst language
domains, or also support provision and also started to self-organize their activities in their
own spaces of choice, acted as domain experts, or became teachers to others. The first
NetGeners.Net trial produced similar results (10.4.3, 10.4.4), albeit at a smaller
participation level, with the second NetGeners.Net trial showing that students are indeed
eager to be provided with students’ works, such as past projects or similar types of
assignments, or that they believe it would be of help to have such a community in place as
observed in the CCK08 case.
341
12.2.2.1 The Concept of Learning Projects, Directories and SVN-Type Systems
The concept of learning projects, directories and SVN-type systems as introduced at
chapter ten of this work follows the FLOSS concept as summarized at the section 12.2.2
above. A focus has been on the learners’ production activities and where their individual
production activities and discourse could potentially be interrelated. This concept further
aimed to serve as a bridge, similar to the FLOSS case as detailed at section 12.2.2 above,
between the instructional and learning resources provided by the course team (‘static’
content) on the one hand and assignments, discourse and artifacts created by the students
on the other hand. Such an approach did not aim to provide the learner with a finished set
of expert developed ‘static’ content to be consumed only, but instead expects the learner to
actively embed the artifacts they create within the course environment and to link to
external sources and spaces involved (de Paula et al., 2001; Fischer & Sugimoto, 2006;
Fischer, 2007; Scharff, 2002; Staring, 2005). The results of the two NetGeners.Net
application trials have indicated that:
A. Students indeed would value the availability of such resources and believe that
those would help them as they could clearly see what other students have done,
how they have mastered their work, entrance strategies used into the external
environments, or type of problems encountered and how they were overcome. The
students responses indicate that the ‘online concept’ of learning projects, directories
and SVN-type systems corresponds with the ‘offline practice’ of students’ passing
on all type of information of ‘the things they have done’ from one semester to
another.
B. The use of directories could make it easy to spot the works of other students, and
such approaches might even serve as a market place within which internal course
participants and external communities could come together, which in the case of
342
computer science education and open source project means that open source
projects could provide information on mentorship possibilities.
The introduced concept therefore could perhaps indeed facilitate keeping learning
resources (initial ones as well as those leveraged into the course by the students), artifacts
created by students and underlying discourse within a context and structure that would
allow future cohorts of students to re-experience, build on and improve what others did.
The concept therefore could facilitate the ‘seeding, ‘growing’ and notably ‘re-seeding of a
course, as aimed by the ‘Courses as Seeds’ process model (de Paula et al., 2001). Given the
scope of those two trials however, clear evidence could not be provided that the concept of
learning projects, directories and SVN-type systems ultimately would allow for such an
easy ‘re-seeding’ and to organize, formalize and generalize the created knowledge,
including structures and processes. This is to say that it could not be shown that the
introduced concept would allow for a re-seeding without requiring the course team to
manually ‘organize, formalize and generalize’ the knowledge created by the participants.
12.3 Limitations of the Study
One of the overall valid limitations of this study relates to the ‘scope’. The six case studies
of formal educational cases of established practices of courses within formal education that
operate to a certain degree ‘in the open’ has been limited in terms of size as well as in
terms of depth. This is to say that a review of a larger number of cases, or to follow entire
courses and participate at those, perhaps would have allowed the detection of further
relevant practices or principles. The three application trials that have been carried out as
part of this work, and presented in chapters seven and nine, would have benefitted further
from a larger number of participants or from conducting consecutive application trials to
gather further evidence. However, within the given time this has not been an option.
343
With regards to the methodology of the work it also would have been desirable to have all
six case studies completed prior to conducting the three application trials. This however
was not feasible for two reasons: Firstly the FLOSSCom Summer University (FSU) has
been carried out at a predefined time and as part of the EU funded FLOSSCom project,
postponing the FSU therefore was not an option. Secondly, it would have been desirable to
draw on the results of the CCK08 case prior to conducting the two NetGeners.Net
application trials. Given that the CCK08 has been carried out however at a point at which
the two NetGeners.Net trials have been already at an advanced stage this again was not an
option.
In line with the limitation of ‘scope’ comes the limitation of ‘validity’ due to the lack of
clear evidence that could be provided on the applicability and impact of for example the
concept of learning projects, directories and SVN-type systems. To address this however a
number of workshops and focus group works has been carried out and relevant
stakeholders have been consulted (as presented in chapter 7 and 10).
12.4 Suggestions for further Research & Steps forward
Given that the field of Open Courses is a relatively young and emerging one there would
be ample aspects to be looked at or to be developed further. One ending point of this work
has been a suggested hybrid organizational framework for Open Course design and
delivery presented in chapter eleven, including a number of underlying aspects that remain
to be unclear and might be subject for future research.
One of those aspects concerns modular course design, the concept of learning projects, or
their embedment within directories and SVN type systems as introduced at chapter ten.
Those aspects are considered to be important draw on some key characteristics of the
FLOSS learning ecosystem presented at chapter two and three and inherent in the Meta-
design framework and Courses as Seeds / SER process model presented at chapter five,
344
such as to ‘enable re-experience’, to allow for ‘learning from what others did’, or to foster
‘collective reflection’ and ‘virtual experimentation’. The concept of learning projects
(10.2, 10.3, 10.4.2, 10.5.2) therefore suggested that all of the learners’ actions should take
place around ‘a given constant’, which might be a project to be completed, an articulated
problem to be solved, a goal to be achieved, or a product feature to be developed, and that
discourse and dialogue around those given constants would therefore, and analogue to the
FLOSS case (chapter two and three), remain within a context that would allow others to
draw and build on it. Since as well the ‘given constant’ as the surrounding discourse and
dialogues would be preserved within some type of directories or forges they would also
form an integral part of future course editions that could be easily identified and
understood by new cohorts of learners. However, within the scope of this study no clear
evidence could be provided that such a design approach would ultimately deliver the
expected results, despite the positive anecdotal evidence suggests that this might be the
case.
Another aspect that might be looked at within future research is the aspect of ‘ownership’
and ‘control’. The case of CCK08 (9.3) has shown that ‘ownership’ of spaces might raises
some problematic to be addressed. Without active participation of the owners of such
spaces within future course editions, new cohorts of students would either be required to
establish new spaces and re-integrate the resources from the older ones into those, or seek
to acquire the ownership of those initial spaces. To assure a certain ‘ownership of spaces’
and ‘degree of control’ future research might therefore look also at more formal
collaboration and cooperation scenarios that could be established with the respective
external spaces involved.
Extrinsic and intrinsic motivational aspects (12.1.3), continuity beyond semester terms and
community aspects (12.1.4, 12.2), as well as sustainability models for free / open
educational provision (12.1.5) might also be looked at within further research carried out in
345
the Open Course, and Open Educational domain. With regards to sustainability models
further research might not only consider the ‘additional cost’ side, but also look at the ‘cost
saving’ or ‘value for money’ sides. Formally enrolled students benefit from participating at
an Open Course by acquiring and enhanced set of skills as shown throughout chapter two,
three and five to ten that perhaps would have been difficult to be acquired within
traditional course settings. To acquire such an enhanced set of skills within traditional
course settings likely would have caused additional cost too, for example cost for physical
student placements and internships. At a course level hybrid Open Course scenarios
potentially provide a number of learning resources not present within traditional course
settings, with those resources being potentially updated frequently. The involvement of
practitioners further facilitates keeping curricula up to date and to assure that employer
needs are met. All of those aspects might be considered and subject to further analysis to
establish realistic hybrid Open Course cost models. Within hybrid Open Course settings
revenue models might also be twofold: On the one hand they might draw on the traditional
funding schemes as long as it concerns formally enrolled students, meanwhile on the other
hand free learners’ assessment and certification against fees could be a mean to allocate
further staff resources to support provision. Within those two ends there certainly is ample
of space for further sustainability models to emerge, such as ‘in kind contributions and
support provision’ by experienced free learner in exchange of reduced assessment and
certification fees.
In line with those suggested further aspects to be looked at, the two EU funded research
projects presented at Annex 2, the openEd 2.0 and openSE projects, will build on the
hybrid organizational framework for Open Course Design presented at chapter eleven.
Both projects aim at furthering the knowledge on the concepts of modularity, learning
projects and their embedment within directories and SVN type systems. They will further
look at collaboration and cooperation scenarios with well-established online ecosystems, at
extrinsic and intrinsic motivational aspects, and ultimately implement and test
346
sustainability models for free / open educational provision. Or in other words, they will
start at the point where this work ends.
12.5 Contributions of this Work
As detailed at the introductory section 1.6, the results of this work aimed to provide
contributions at three levels: the theoretical-methodological, the descriptive-analytical and
the applied level. In the way those aims were met are as follows:
12.5.1 The theoretical-methodological Level
At the theoretical-methodological level this work has contributed by providing application
scenarios and guidance for Open Course design and delivery. Chapter eight of this work
introduced three different Open Course scenarios: an inside, and outside and a hybrid one
and detailed the strength and limitations of each of those. Chapter five of this work
introduced the Meta-design and its underlying Courses as Seeds / SER process model (de
Paula et al., 2001; Fischer, 2007) as a tool for the design, implementation and delivery of
Open Courses. It has been shown throughout chapters six to ten that both, Meta-design and
Courses as Seeds / SER, can serve as suitable tools to develop, implement and deliver
Open Courses, with chapter six, nine and ten identifying as well aspects to consider as
providing practical examples of the theoretical considerations of Meta-design and Courses
as Seeds / SER. The results of the work throughout chapter five to ten have then resulted in
a hybrid organizational framework presented at chapter eleven, aimed at supporting
educators wishing to provide such Open Course offers.
347
12.5.2 The descriptive-analytical Level
At the descriptive-analytical level this work furthered the knowledge on FLOSS and their
communities as a learning ecosystem, chapters two and three, and by contrasting it to
similar cases within educational settings, chapters six and nine, to illustrate common
elements and approaches and to compare how those worked out within such open
educational settings. It could be shown that many of the key characteristics inherent in
FLOSS as a learning ecosystem can also be found within such educational offers, which
allowed to build up an initial understanding on the nature of Open Courses (12.1). It
however could also be shown that there are a number of fundamental differences: In
comparison to the FLOSS case all of the educational cases reviewed have maintained a
clear course structure and outline, with well defined learning objective, and well designed
learning activities and tasks that must be mastered by course participants (6.6, 7.4, 9.4,
10.4.4.3, 11.2.1). On the other hand it could be shown that a general lack of established
practices within educational offers in comparison to the FLOSS case relates to the aspects
of continuity (2.10), the trans-active group memory (2.4) and the fact that all type user
contributions in FLOSS add a value to the overall FLOSS product, contributing towards its
next release or would be of (re-)use for other (2.5, 2.6, 2.9). Even the case of CCK08 (9.3),
which has been overall very close to the FLOSS learning ecosystem, had some clear
shortages in comparison to the FLOSS case. Though the course CCK08 successfully
established a learning community, including a volunteering community support system it
did not show how to maintain this community and to seed it, which in the FLOSS case
enables the communities to build up a transactive group memory (Hemetsberger &
Reinhardt, 2006, section 2.4.2). Overall, many of the shortages of the educational cases of
chapter six and nine related to the concept of ‘seeding’, ‘growing’ and in particular the ‘re-
seeding’ of courses as detailed within the Courses as Seeds / SER process model at chapter
five (de Paula et al., 2001; Fischer, 2007). The CCK08 case (9.3) has shown a vast
evolutionary growth as a result of its seeding, but no actions have been taken to facilitate a
348
‘re-seeding’ of the course. The course showed a high level of modularity in which different
groups worked jointly together on their respective tasks towards achieving a common goal,
such as assignments. However, no organizational structures have been implemented within
which the various modules would end up in an overall product and at where discourse can
be clearly related to such production activities at a modular or course level.
The Courses as Seeds / SER concept with a focus of re-seeding has consequently also been
a focus of the application trials carried out as part of this work and as presented in chapter
ten, to further analyse the conditions on how the SER idea might be implemented in
practice, as further detailed in the following section.
12.5.3 The applied Level
The review of FLOSS as a learning ecosystem, the theoretical grounding provided through
the Meta-design framework and its underlying Courses as Seeds / SER process model (de
Paula et al., 2001; Fischer, 2007), served as a base to identify and understand key aspects
to be considered for Open Course design and delivery. The lessons learnt of the application
trials and stakeholder consultations carried out as part of this work and as presented in
chapters seven and ten, as well as the cases reviewed throughout chapters six and nine,
resulted in the organizational framework and guidance for hybrid Open Course design and
delivery presented in chapter eleven. With this the work aimed to contribute at the applied
level to provide clear examples and guidance by taking forward the results as presented in
the earlier chapters of this work. This also included practical guidance on how Meta-design
Courses as Seeds / SER (de Paula et al., 2001; Fischer, 2007) might support Open Course
design and delivery and how key characteristics inherent in the FLOSS ecosystem might
be translated into educational practices.
349
12.6 Closing Note
Overall, and despite the limitations highlighted at section 12.3, it is felt that this work has
been delivering on the research questions put forward within the introduction section 1.5. It
has shown the key characteristics and organizational frameworks of informal and well-
established online learning ecosystems, such as the FLOSS case, within the chapter two
and three (Research Question 1), investigated, analyzed and described the nature of Open
Courses and what the different types of Open Course scenarios throughout chapter six to
twelve (Research question 2), identified some of the shortcomings of established practices
of courses within formal education and Meta-design in comparison to the FLOSS case
throughout chapters six to ten (Research question 3), but also practices of traditional
education that might be retained, and – throughout chapters six to ten – provided answers
on a theoretical and practical nature on how the concept of ‘seeding’ and ‘re-seeding’
might be translated to Open Course design and the type of overall organizational
framework that might be required to allow for this (Research question 4).
As noted in section 12.4, some parts of this work have already been taken further and are
subject to future research and it is hoped that the outcomes of this work will be of
relevance to a wider audience, as well of a practical use for educators, as they would
provide a base for future research carried out in this domain.
350
References
Aberdour, M. (2007) ‘Achieving Quality in Open Source Software’, IEEE Software,
Vol. 24 (1), pp.58-64.
‘Accountability’, What is the Academy of Discovery Model for middle school?,
Academyofdiscovery Wiki, wiki article, March 09 2007, viewed 19 November 2010,
<http://academyofdiscovery.wikispaces.com/Accountability#tocAccountability4>
Andres, Y. M. (2002) ‘Art of Collaboration: Awesome Tools and Proven Strategies’,
TechEd Long Beach February 25-27, 2002 TechEd RT 804, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://techedevents.org/LongBeach/Proceedings/RT%20804.pdf>.
Bacon, S. and Dillion, T. (2006) ‘The Potential of Open Source Approaches for
Education’, Futurelab, TeLearn Online, viewed 27 February 2008, <http://telearn.noe-
kaleidoscope.org/warehouse/bacon-2006-OpenSource.pdf>.
Barabasi, A.L. (2002) The New Science of Networks, New York: Perseus Books.
Barabasi, A.L. and Bonabeau, E. (2003) ‘Scale-Free Networks’, Scientific America’.
Vol. 288 (5), pp.50-59.
Barahona, J.M., Lopez, L. and Robles, G. (2004) ‘Community structure of modules in
the Apache project’, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open Source Software
Engineering, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Benham, M.K.P. (1996) ‘The practitioner-scholars’ view of school change: A case-
based approach to teaching and learning’, Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol.12
(2), pp.119-135.
Benkler, Y. (2002) ‘Cboase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm’, 29th
TPRC Conference, 2001, arXiv:cs/0109077v2 [cs.CY], viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf>.
351
Bodzin, A.M. (2004) ‘Promoting Inquiry-Based Science Instruction: The Validation of
the Science Teacher Inquiry Rubric (STIR)’, Paper presented at the 2004 Association
for the Education of Teachers of Science (AETS) Annual Meeting.
Bolstad, S.H. (2006) ‘Learning and knowledge in FLOSS’, MSc Thesis, University of
Bergen, Norway, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/Learning-and-knowledge-in-FLOSS.pdf>.
Brown, J.S. and Adler, R.P. (2008) ‘Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail,
and Learning 2.0.’, EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 43 (no. 1): 16–32.
Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (1991) ‘Organizational Learning and Communities-of-
Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation’, Organization
Science, Special Issue: Organizational Learning: Papers in Honor of (and by) James G.
March, Vol. 2 (1), pp.40-57.
Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Burns, D., (2006) ‘Evaluation in complex governance arenas: the potential of large
system action research’, in B. Williams and I. Imam, Using systems concepts in
evaluation, Fairhaven, MA: American Evaluation Association.
Chen, H., Shen, H., Xiong, J., Tan, S. and Cheng, X., (2006) ‘Social Network Structure
Behind the Mailing Lists’, ICT-IIIS at TREC 2006 Expert Finding Track, The Fifteenth
Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2006) Proceedings, 12.
Coldsmith, J. L. (2004) ‘LULU Movement Outcomes: A Meta-Qualitative Comparative
Analysis of Cases of Localized Movements’, Annual meeting of the American
Sociological Association, Hilton San Francisco, US, August 2004.
352
Conole, G. (2008) ‘New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies’. Ariadne
Issue 56, 30 June 2008, viewed 24 January 2009,
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/>.
Crowston, K. and Howison, J. (2005) ‘The social structure of Free and Open Source
software development’, First Monday, Issue 10 (2). Viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_2/crowston/index.html>.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’, cited in
Fischer, G. and Scharff, E. (1998). ‘Learning Technologies in Support of Self-Directed
Learning’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1998, Vol. 98, pages 98-4.
Dean, P. & Leinonen, T. (2004) ‘Innovative Technology for Collaborative Learning
and Knowledge Building’, final ITCOLE project report, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www.euro-cscl.org/site/itcole/ITCOLE_Final_Report.pdf>.
Demaziere, D., Horn, F. and Jullien, N. (2006) ‘How free software developers work’.
Môle Armoricain de Recherche sur la Société de l’Information et les Usages
d’Internet, 2007.
Denning, P.J. (2004) ‘Network laws’, Communications of the ACM, ACM Press, 47,
pp.15-20.
dePaula, R., Fischer, G. and Ostwald, J. (2001) ‘Courses as Seeds: Expectations and
Realities’. Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer-Supported
Collaborative Learning 2001 (Euro-CSCL 2001), Maastricht, The Netherlands, March
22-24, 2001.
Derry, S. J. & Fischer, G. (2007). ‘Transdisciplinary Graduate Education’,
unpublished manuscript, viewed 28 January 2009,
<http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/transdisciplinary-sharon.pdf>.
353
‘Diagram: Workflow for metadata creation for Learning materials’, (2006), John
Wheatley College, Version 2.2, viewed 19 November 2010,
<http://mandate.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/casestudy.htm>.
‘Digital Learner Mentors’, What is the Academy of Discovery Model for middle
school?, Academyofdiscovery Wiki, wiki article, March 15 2007, viewed 19 November
2010, <http://academyofdiscovery.wikispaces.com/Digital+Learner+Mentors>.
Doolittle, P.E. (1999) ‘Constructivism: The Career and Technical Education
Perspective’. Journal of Vocational and Technical Education. Vol. 16, No 1.
Doolittle, P.E. (2002) ‘Multimedia Learning: Empirical Results and Practical
Applications’, paper presented at the Irish Educational Technology Users’ Conference,
Carlow, Ireland.
Downes, S. (2008) ‘How much time?’, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Blog,
29 September, viewed 14 November 2010,
<http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=152>.
Downes, S. (2009) ‘Access2OER: The CCK08 Solution’, Half an Hour Blogspot, 16
Februar, viewed 14 November 2010,
<http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/02/access2oer-cck08-solution.html>.
Dougiamas, M. and Taylor, P.C. (2003) ‘Moodle: Using Learning Communities to
Create an Open Source Course Management System’, paper presented at EDMEDIA
2003, Curtin University of Technology, Australia.
Duch, B.J., Groh, S.E. and Allen, D.E. (2001) ‘Why problem-based learning? A case
study of institutional change in undergraduate education’, in B. Duch, S. Groh and D.
Allen, eds., The power of problem-based learning, Sterling, VA: Stylus. pp.3-11.
354
Eisenberg, B. (2005) ‘Lessons From Firefox - Open source developers can learn a lot
from Mozilla's new browser’, Pacific Connection, ongoing monthly series in Software
Design. 2007.
Esch, C. (1998) ‘Project-Based and Problem-Based: The same or different?’, viewed
27 January 2009, < http://pblmm.k12.ca.us/PBLGuide/PBL&PBL.htm>.
Feather-Gannon, S., Handy, S., Beacon Keane, L. and O’Connor, B. (2004)
‘Qualitative Case Study Research’, OEIS Technologies, Learning and Performance,
Organizational Systems Research Association 2007.
Felder, R.M. and Brent, R. (2007) ‘Cooperative Learning’ Chapter 4 of P.A. Mabrouk,
ed., Active Learning: Models from the Analytical Sciences, ACS Symposium Series
970. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 2007, a general overview of
definitions and methods of cooperative learning and a review of CL applications in
chemistry, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/CLChapter.pdf>.
Fischer, G. (1991) ‘Supporting Learning on Demand with Design Environments’, paper
presented at the International Conference on the Learning Sciences, Evanston, IL.
Fischer, G. (1998) ‘Beyond ‘Couch Potatoes’: From Consumers to Designers’, Paper
presented at the 3rd Asia Pacific Computer Human Interaction Conference, Kanagawa,
Japan.
Fischer, G. (1998) ‘Seeding, Evolutionary Growth and Reseeding: Constructing,
Capturing and Evolving Knowledge in Domain-Oriented Design Environments’,
Automated Software Engineering, Vol. 5, (4), pp. 447-464, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/ase-093097.pdf>.
Fischer, G. (2007) ‘Meta-Design: Expanding Boundaries and Redistributing Control in
Design’, Proceedings of the Interact'2007 Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
355
September, pp. 193-206; viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/Interact-2007.pdf>.
Fischer, G. and Giaccardi, E. (2006) ‘Meta-Design: A Framework for the Future of
End User Development’, in H. Lieberman, F. Paternò, & V. Wulf (Eds.), End User
Development — Empowering people to flexibly employ advanced information and
communication technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands,
pp. 427-457, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/EUD-meta-design-online.pdf>.
Fischer, G. and Ostwald, J. (2002), ‘Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding:
Enriching Participatory Design with Informed Participation’, in T. Binder, J. Gregory,
I. Wagner (Eds.), Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference (PDC'02),
Malmö University, Sweden, June 2002, CPSR, P.O. Box 717, Palo Alto, CA 94302, pp
135-143, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/pdc2002-ser.pdf>.
Fischer, G. and Scharff, E. (1998) ‘Learning Technologies in Support of Self-Directed
Learning’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1998, Vol. 98, pages 98-4.
Fischer, G. and Sugimoto, M. (2006) ‘Supporting Self-Directed Learners and Learning
Communities with Sociotechnical Environments’, International Journal Research and
Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning (RPTEL), 1(1), pp. 31-64. , viewed 27
February 2008, <http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/final-RPTE.pdf>.
Fischer, G., Nakakoji, K., Ostwald, J., Stahl, G. and Sumner, T. (1993), ‘Embedding
Critics in Design Environments’, The Knowledge Engineering Review Journal, Vol.
8(4), pp.285-307, cited in Fischer, G. and Scharff, E. (1998) ‘Learning Technologies in
Support of Self-Directed Learning’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1998,
Vol. 98, pages 98-4.
356
Fitzgerald, B. and Kenny, T. (2004) ‘Open Source Software in the Trenches: Lessons
from a large scale OSS implementation’, University of Limerick.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006) ‘Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research’, Qualitative
Inquiry, Vol. 12(2), pp.219-245.
FLOSSCom Project, (2007), Data provided by the ISE course team of the Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki as part of the FLOSSCom research project.
Friedlander, F. (2001) ‘Participatory Action Research as a Means of Integrating
Theory and Practice’, Proceedings Fielding Graduate Institute Action Research
Symposium Alexandria, VA.
Ghosh, R.A.& Glott, R. (2005b) ‘The Open Source Community as an environment for
skills development and employment generation’, Proceedings of the European
Academy of Management (EURAM) Conference, Munich, May 4-7.
Ghosh, R.A., Glott, R., Krieger, B. & Robles, G. (2002) ‘Free/Libre and Open Source
Software: Survey and Study’, Part IV: Survey of Developers, Maastricht: International
Institute of Infonomics / Merit, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-
Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.htm>.
Giaccardi, E. (2003) ‘Meta-Design’, viewed 27 February 2008, <http://x.i-
dat.org/~eg/research.htm>.
Giaccardi, E. (2003) ‘Principles of Metadesign: Processes and Levels of Co-Creation
in the New Design Space’, Ph.D. Dissertation, CAiiA-STAR, School of Computing,
Plymouth, UK.
Giuri, P., Ploner, M., Rullani, F. and Torrisi, S. (2004) ‘Skills and Openness of OSS
Projects: Implications for Performance’, MIT OSS Repository, viewed 27 February
2008, <http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/giuri_etal.pdf>.
357
Glasersfeld, E. von. (1989) ‘Constructivism in education’, in Husen, T. & Postlewaite,
N. (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp.162-
163.
Gloor, P.A., Laubacher, R., Dynes, S.B.C. and Zhao, Y. (2003), ‘Visualization of
Communication Patterns in Collaborative Innovation Networks - Analysis of Some
W3C Working Groups’. CIKM '03: Proceedings of the twelfth international conference
on Information and knowledge management, pp.56-60.
Glott et al., (2007) ‘Report on the Learning Environment of FLOSS Communities’,
FLOSSCom Project, 2007, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/FLOSSCom_WP2_Phase_1_Report_v070709_1.pdf
>.
González-Barahona, J. M. G.-B., Chris, T., Vania D., Diego C. and Riccardo, M.
(2005a) ‘Producing educational Resources in the “Libre Way”’, Edukalibre project,
2007, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://edukalibre.org/documentation/iadis_slides.pdf>.
González-Barahona, J. M. G.B., Chris, T., Vania D., Diego, C. and Teo, R. (2005b)
‘Transferring Libre Software Development Practices to the Production of Educational
Resources: the Edukalibre Project’, Edukalibre project, 2007, viewed 27 February
2008, <http://edukalibre.org/documentation/edukalibre-4-page_system-
2005.04.17.pdf>.
Gokhale, A. A. (1995) ‘Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking’, Journal of
Technology Education, ISSN 1045-1064, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/jte-v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html>.
Groom, M. and Brockhaus, A. (2007) ‘Using Wikipedia to Re-envision the term paper’,
Educause 2007, 23rd-26th October, 2007, Seattle.
358
Gulati, S. (2004) ‘Constructivism and emerging online learning pedagogy: a
discussion for formal to acknowledge and promote the informal’, Annual Conference
of the Universities Association for Continuing Education - Regional Futures: Formal
and Informal Learning Perspectives, Centre for Lifelong Learning, University of
Glamorgan, 5-7 April 2004, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00003562.htm>.
Hachen, D. (1996) ‘Sociology cases database project’, cited in Papadopoulos, P.M.,
Demetriadis S.N. and Stamelos I. (2006) ‘Online Case-Based Learning: Design and
Preliminary Evaluation of the eCASE Environment’, Proceedings of the Sixth
International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'06), viewed 27
February 2008, <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01652551>.
Hanneman, R.A. and Riddle, M. (2005) ‘Introduction to social network methods
Introduction to social network methods’, Riverside, CA: University of California.
Harel, I. and Papert, S. (1991) ‘Constructionism’, Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing
Corporation, cited in Fischer, G. and Scharff, E. (1998) ‘Learning Technologies in
Hemetsberger, A. (2006) ‘Understanding Consumers' collective action on the internet:
A conceptualization and empirical investigation of the free and open-source
movement’, Research Synopsis, Cumulative Habilitation at the University of Innsbruck,
April, 2006, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www.hemetsberger.cc/publications/index.html>.
Hemetsberger, A. and Reinhardt, C. (2004) ‘Sharing and creating knowledge in open-
source communities: the case of KDE’, Fifth European Conference on organizational
knowledge, learning and capabilities. Innsbruck, Austria.
359
Hemetsberger, A. and Reinhardt, C. (2006) ‘Learning and Knowledge-building in
Open-Source Communities - a social-experiential approach’. Management Learning,
Vol. 37 (2), pp.187-214.
Hemetsberger, A. and Reinhardt C. (2009) ‘Collective Development in Open-Source
Communities: An Activity Theoretical Perspective on Successful Online
Collaboration,’ Organization Studies, Vol.30 (9), pp.987-1008.
Hendry, G. D. (1996) ‘Constructivism and educational practice’, Australian Journal of
Education, Vol.40 (1), pp.19-45.
Hinett, K. (2002) ‘Developing Reflective Practice in Legal Education’, UK Centre for
Legal Education, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL. 2009.
Hirsch, E. D. (1996) ‘The Schools We Need And Why We Don’t Have Them’. New
York: Doubleday. Iiyoshi, T. & Vijay K.M.S. (2008). Opening up education: the
collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open
knowledge, Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.
Holck, J (2009) email 22 June, jeh.inf@cbs.dk.
‘Hooked on Thinking Inquiry Model’, Wikispaces, wiki article, March 19 2009, viewed
19 November 2010, <http://hooked-on-
thinking.wikispaces.com/HOT+Inquiry+Model>.
Jaccheri, L. and Mork, H. (2006) ‘Studying Open Source Software with Action
Research’, Library of Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Jensen, C. and Scacchi, W. (2007) ‘Role Migration and Advancement Process in OSSD
Projects’, International Conference on Software Engineering, from May 19 to May 27,
2007, Minneapolis, MN.
360
Johnson, S. and Faraj, S. (2005) ‘Preferential Attachment and Mutuality in Electronic
Knowledge Networks’, ICIS 2005 Proceedings, Paper 24, viewed 6 May 2008,
<http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2005/24>.
Jonassen, D.H. (1992) ‘Designing Hypertext for Learning’, in E. Scanlon, and
T.O’Shea., eds., New Directions in Educational Technologies, Berlin: Springer Verlag.
pp.123-130.
Jonassen, D. (1999) ‘Designing Constructivist Learning Environments’, in C. M.
Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional Design Theories and Models: A New Paradigm of
Instructional Theory, Vol. II, pp. 215-239, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Kahn, B.H. (2001) Web-based training: An introduction, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Educational Technology Publications.
Karagiorgi, Y. and Symeou, L. (2005) ’Translating Constructivism into Instructional
Design: Potential and Limitations’, Educational Technology & Society, Vol.8 (1),
pp.17-27, viewed 27 February 2008, <http://www.ifets.info/journals/8_1/5.pdf >.
Kim, J.B. et al, (2000) ‘Web-Based Online Collaborative Learning’, paper at the
American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana,
viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/step/documents/olc3/olc3abstract.html>.
Kohlbacher, F. (2006) ‘The Use of Qualitative Content Analysis in Case Study
Research’, Forum Qualitative Social Research, Vol.7 (1): Art. 21.
Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and
development, NJ, Prentice Hall.
Kollock, P. and Smith, M. (1997) Communities and Cyberspace, New York:
Routledge.
361
Krajcik, J.S., Blumenfeld, P.C., Marx, R.W. and Soloway, E. (1994) ‘A collaborative
model for helping middle grade science teachers learn project-based instruction’, The
Elementary School Journal, Vol.94 (5), pp.483-497.
Krishnamurthy, S. (2002) ‘Cave or Community: An Empirical Examination of 100
Mature Open Source Projects’, First Monday, Vol.7 (2).
Lakhani, K.R. and Von Hippel, E. (2003) ‘How open source software works: “free”
user-to-user assistance’, Research policy, Vol.32, pp.923-943.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lehman, J.D., George, M., Buchanan, P. and Rush, M. (2006) ‘Preparing Teachers to
Use Problem-centered, Inquiry-based Science: Lessons from a Four-Year Professional
Development Project’, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning,
Vol.1 (1), pp.76-99.
Lerner, J. and Tirole, J. (2002) ‘Some simple economics of open source’, Journal of
Industrial Economics, Vol.50 (2), pp.197–234.
Lewis, M. (2007) ‘Focus group interviews in qualitative research: a review of the
literature’, University of Sydney, Australia - AROW (Action Research Open Web).
Madey, G., Freeh, V. and Tynan, R. (2002) ‘The open source software development
phenomenon: An analysis based on social network theory’, Americas conference on
Information Systems (AMCIS2002), pp.1806–1813.
Mayer, R.E. (1992) ‘Cognition and instruction: Their historic meeting within
educational psychology’, Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol.84, pp.405-412.
McMahon, T. (2007) ‘Is reflective practice synonymous with action research?’,
Educational Action Research, Vol.7(1), pp.163 - 169.
362
Meiszner, A. (2007) ‘Communication tools in FLOSS communities: a look at FLOSS
communities at large, beyond the development team’, paper presented at the Web
Based Communities Conference 2007, Salamanca, Spain.
Meiszner, A. (2007b) ‘Information providers – a basic review’, FLOSSCom Project
2007, statistics retrieved from the statistics section of the phpBB, osCommerce, Forum-
Hilfe & Uni-Protokolle websites on 14 February 2007.
Meiszner, A., Glott, R. and Sowe, S. K. (2008b) ‘Free / Libre Open Source Software
(FLOSS) Communities as an Example of successful Open Participatory Learning
Ecosystems’, UPGRADE The European Journal for the Informatics Professional, Vol.
IX, issue no. 3 (June 2008): "Next Generation Technology-Enhanced Learning" ISSN
1684-5285 (Upgrade), ISSN 0211-2124 (Novática).
Merriam-Webster (n.d.), ‘Meritocracy’, viewed 19 November 2010,
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meritocracy>.
Michlmayr, M. (2005) ‘Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free Software Projects:
Exploring the Impact of Release Management’, Centre for Technology Management,
University of Cambridge.
Mockus, A., Fielding, R. and Herbsleb, J.A. (2002) ‘Two case studies of open source
software development: Apache and Mozilla’, ACM Transactions on Software
Engineering and Methodology, Vol.11 (3), pp.1-38.
Morison, T. (2001) ‘Action Learning: A Handbook for Capacity Building Through
Case-Based Learning’, viewed 27 February 2007, < http://www.adbi.org>.
Motschnig-Pitrik., Derntl, M. and Mangler, J. (2004) ‘Developing Cooperative
Environment Web Services based on Action Research’, University of Vienna.
Mutton, P. (2004) ‘Inferring and Visualizing Social Networks on Internet Relay Chat’,
iv, IEEE Computer Society, 00, pp.35-43.
363
Myers, M. D. (1997) ‘Qualitative Research in Information Systems’, MIS Quarterly
(21:2), June 1997, pp. 241-242, MISQ Discovery, archival version, June 1997.
NLIST (2001) ‘Rubric for Evaluating Essential Features of Facilitating Classroom
Inquiry’, The Networking for Leadership, Inquiry, and Systemic Thinking, American
Council of State Science Supervisors, document number: NLIST: Draft Inquiry Rubric
30 Jan2009.
Noll, J. (2007) ‘Innovation in Open Source Software Development’, Santa Clara
University, Computer Engineering Department.
Norman, D. A. (1993) ‘Things That Make Us Smart’, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company.
O’Brien, R. (1998) ‘An Overview of the Methodological Approach of Action
Research’, in Roberto Richardson (Ed.), Teoria e Prática da Pesquisa Ação [Theory
and Practice of Action Research], João Pessoa, Brazil: Universidade Federal da
Paraíba.
Ohira, M., Ohsugi, N., Ohoka, T. and Matsumoto, K. (2005) ‘Accelerating cross-
project knowledge collaboration using collaborative filtering and social networks’,
SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Vol.30, pp.1-5.
O'Reilly, T. (2005) ‘What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the
Next Generation of Software’, O'Reilly Media, viewed 19 November 2010,
<http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html>.
Papadopoulos, P.M., Demetriadis S.N. and Stamelos I. (2006) ‘Online Case-Based
Learning: Design and Preliminary Evaluation of the eCASE Environment’,
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
(ICALT'06), viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01652551>.
364
Pellegrino, J. (2002) ‘Understanding How Students Learn and Inferring What They
Know: Implications for the Design of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment’, NSF
Instructional Materials Development Conference.
Pór, G. (2004) ‘What is new and innovative in collaboration tools that your
organization can use for strategic advantages?’, Introduction to technology platforms
for communities of practice, viewed 27 February 2008, <http://www.community-
intelligence.com/resources/collaboration_tools.htm>.
‘Proposal’, What is the Academy of Discovery Model for middle school?,
Academyofdiscovery Wiki, wiki article, August 20 2007, viewed 19 November 2010,
<http://academyofdiscovery.wikispaces.com/Proposal>.
Raymond, E. (1999) The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open
Source from an Accidental Revolutionary, Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly and Associates.
Resnick, L. B. (1989) ‘Knowing, Learning, and Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert
Glaser’, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, cited in Fischer, G. and
Scharff, E. (1998) ‘Learning Technologies in Support of Self-Directed Learning’,
Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1998, Vol. 98, pages 98-4.
Rittel, H. (1984) ‘Second-Generation Design Methods’. In N. Cross (Ed.),
Developments in Design Methodology, (pp. 317-327), New York: John Wiley and
Sons, cited in Fischer, G. and Scharff, E. (1998) ‘Learning Technologies in Support of
Self-Directed Learning’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1998, Vol. 98,
pages 98-4.
Ritter, S., Anderson, J., Medvedeva, O. and Cytrynowitz, M. (1998) ‘Authoring
Content in the PAT Algebra Tutor’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, Vol.98
(9), cited in Fischer, G. and Scharff, E. (1998) ‘Learning Technologies in Support of
Self-Directed Learning’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1998, Vol. 98,
pages 98-4.
365
Savery, J.R. (2006) ‘Overview of Problem-based Learning: Definitions and
Distinctions’, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 1 (1), pp.9-20.
Scacchi, W. (2001) ‘Software Development Practices in Open Software Development
Communities: A Comparative Case Study’. Information Systems Journal, Volume 12
Issue 1, Pages 7 – 25.
Scacchi, W. (2002) ‘Understanding the Requirements for Developing Open Source
Software Systems’, IEE Proceedings: Software, 149(1), pp 24-39. February 2002.
Scacchi, W. (2005) ‘Collaboration, Leadership, Control, and Conflict Negotiation in
the Netbeans.org Open Source Software Development Community’, Institute for
Software Research, University of California, Irvine, 2007, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Ewscacchi/Papers/New/Jensen-Scacchi-HICSS05.pdf>.
Scacchi, W. (2006a) ‘Understanding Free/Open Source Software Development
Processes’, Software Process Improvement and Practice, Vol.11 (2), pp.95-105.
Scacchi, W. (2006b) ‘Free/Open Source Software Development: Recent Research
Results and Methods’, Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine,
2007, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Ewscacchi/Papers/New/Draft_Chapter_Scacchi.pdf>.
Scharff, E. (2002) ‘Applying Open Source Principles to Collaborative Learning
Environments’, University of Colorado, Center for LifeLong Learning and Design.
Schmidt, J. P. (2007) ‘Open Educational Resources as a higher education strategy for
openness and social development’, GUNI – Global University Network for Innovation,
Newsletter issue September 13, 2007, viewed 6 May 2008, <http://www.guni-
rmies.net/news/detail.php?id=1103>.
Schmidt, J.P. and Surman M. (2007) ‘Open sourcing education - Learning and wisdom
from iSummit 2007’, iCommons.org.
366
Schön, D. (1987) Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for
Teaching and Learning in the Professions, San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Schön, D. (1999 ED) The Reflective Practitioner - How Professionals Think in Action,
New York, NY: Basic Books.
Shulman, J. (2000) ‘Case methods as a bridge between standards and classroom
practice’, [Washington, DC]: U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of Educational Research
and Improvement, Educational Resources Information Center.
Sowe, S.K. (2007) An empirical study of knowledge sharing in free and open source
software projects, PhD thesis, Department of Informatics, Aristotle University,
Thessaloniki, Greece.
Sowe, S.K., Angelis, L. and Stamelos, I. (2006) ‘Identifying Knowledge Brokers that
Yield Software Engineering Knowledge in OSS Projects', Information and Software
Technology, Vol.48, pp.1025-1033.
Sowe, S.K., Stamelos, I. and Angelis, L. (2006b) ‘An Empirical Approach to Evaluate
Students Participation in Free/Open Source Software Projects’, IADIS International
Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age CELDA 2006.
Barcelona, Spain. pp.304-308.
Staring, K. (2005) ‘Educational transformation through open source approaches’,
University of Oslo, Norway, 2007, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://www.hia.no/iris28/Docs/IRIS2028-1106.pdf>.
Strauss, A. (1978) ‘A world social perspective’, cited in Demaziere, D., Horn, F. and
Jullien, N. (2006) ‘How free software developers work’. Môle Armoricain de
Recherche sur la Société de l’Information et les Usages d’Internet, 2007.
367
Stürmer, M. (2005) ‘Open Source Community Building’, University of Bern,
Switzerland. 2007, viewed 27 February 2008,
<http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/sturmer.pdf>.
Suchman, L. A. (1987) ‘Plans and Situated Actions’. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, cited in Fischer, G. and Scharff, E. (1998) ‘Learning Technologies in
Swap, W., Leonard, D., Shields, M. and Abrams, L. (2001) ‘Using mentoring and
storytelling to transfer knowledge in the workplace’, Journal of Management
Information Systems, Vol.18 (1), pp.95-114.
Swartz, A. (2006) ‘Who Writes Wikipedia?’, Aaronsw Weblog, ‘Who Writes
Wikipedia?’, 4 September, viewed 27 January 2009,
<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia>.
Tellis, W. (1997) ‘Introduction to Case Study’, The Qualitative Report, Vol 3 (2).
The Inquiry Page, (n.d.) ‘Learning Begins with a Question’, The Inquiry Page,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, viewed 19 November 2010,
<http://inquiry.illinois.edu>.
‘The Progressive Inquiry Model’, (n.d.) Centre for Research on Networked Learning
and Knowledge Building, University of Helsinki, viewed 19 November 2010,
<http://www.helsinki.fi/science/networkedlearning/images/pim.jpg>.
Tuomi, I. (2001) ‘Internet, Innovation, and Open Source: Actors in the Network’, First
Monday, Vol. 6 (1), viewed 27 January 2009,
<http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_1/tuomi/index.html>.
368
Tuomi, I. (2004) ‘Evolution of the Linux Credits file: Methodological challenges and
reference data for Open Source research’, First Monday, Vol 9 (6), viewed 27 January
2009, <http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/tuomi/index.html>.
Tuomi, I. (2005) ‘What did we learn from open source?’, First Monday, Special Issue
#2: Open Source (October 2005), viewed 27 January 2009,
<http://firstmonday.org/issues/special10_10/tuomi/index.html>.
Turner, W., Bowker, G., Gasser, L. and Zacklad, M. (2006) ‘Information
Infrastructures for Distributed Collective Practices’, Computer Supported Cooperative
Work (CSCW), Vol.15 (2-3), pp.93-110.
Valverde, S., Theraulaz, G., Gautrais, J., Fourcassie, V. and Sole, R.V. (2006) ‘Self-
Organization Patterns in Wasp and Open Source Communities’, IEEE Intelligent
Systems, Vol.21 (2).
VCCS Litonline, (1998) ‘Learning Theories’, VCCS Litonline Online Resources for
Studying Literature Online or On-Campus and Using Literature for Critical Thinking,
viewed 19 November 2010, <http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/usingweb/bckgrnd.htm>.
Von Hippel, E. (2002) ‘How Open Source Software Works: "Free" User-to-User
Assistance’, Research Policy, Vol.32, pp.923-943.
Von Hippel, E. and Von Krogh, G. (2003) ‘Open Source Software and the “private-
Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science’, Organization Science,
Vol. 14 (2), pp.209-223.
Von Krogh, G., Spaeth, S. and Lakhini K. R. (2003) ‘Community, joining, and
specialization in open source software innovation: a case study’, Research Policy,
Vol.32, viewed 27 January 2009, <http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/rp-
vonkroghspaethlakhani.pdf>.
369
Wainwright, S. (n.d.) ‘What is Inquiry Based Learning?’, Center for Inquiry Based
Learning, Duke University, US, viewed 27 January 2009,
<http://www.ciblearning.org/about.inquiry.php>.
Wadsworth, Y. (1998) ‘What is Participatory Action Research?’, Action research
international, refereed on-line journal of action research published under the aegis of
the Institute of Workplace Research, Learning and Development, and Southern Cross
University Press, Australia.
Ward, R. (1998) ‘Active, collaborative, and case-based learning with computer-based
scenarios’, Computer Education, Vol.30 (1/2), pp.103-110.
Watson, R. (2005) ‘A Problem Shared Is a Problem Solved’, Resource Center,
Innovation Station.
Weiss, M. and Moroiu, G. (2007) ‘Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices
Ecology and Dynamics of Open Source Communities’, in S.K. Sowe, I. Stamelos, and
I. Samoladas, I.,eds. (2009) Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices, IGI
Publishing, May, 2007. SBN-10: 159904210X.
Weller J.M. and Meiszner A. (2008) ‘Report on the effectiveness of a FLOSS-like
learning community in formal educational settings’, FLOSSCom Project, 2008.
Wenger, E.C. (2000) ‘Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems’,
Organization, Vol.7 (2), pp.225-246.
Wenger, E.C. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wiley, D. (2006) ‘Higher Education - Dangerously Close to Becoming Irrelevant’,
Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education Panel on
Innovative Teaching and Learning Strategies February 2-3 2006, viewed 25 January
2009, <http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/3rd-meeting/wiley.pdf>.
370
Wilkoff, B. (2007) ‘Discourse about discourse’, Yongesonne.Edublogs, ‘Savety vs.
Panic’, 10 May, viewed 14 November 2010,
<http://yongesonne.edublogs.org/2007/05/10/safety-vs-panic>.
Wright, G. (2008) ‘Action Research’, Learning and Development Centre, University of
Warwick, 26 November, viewed 19 November 2010,
<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/ldc/resource/evaluation/tools/action>
Xu, J., Gao, Y., Christley, S. and Madey, S. (2005) ‘A topological Analysis of the
Open Source Software Development Community’, IEEE Proceedings of the 38th
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE, HICSS '05-Track 7.
Yin, R. K. (2003) Case study research: design and methods, London, Sage.
371
Published Work derived from this Research
Chapter in Books
Meiszner, A., Stamelos, I. and Sowe S.K. (2009) ‘Designing for Participatory Learning
Building from Open Source Success to Develop Free Ways to Share and Learn’, in: C.
Boldyreff et. al. (Eds.), Open Source Ecosystems: Diverse Communities Interacting,
Springer, Boston, 355-356.
Journals / Periodicals
Meiszner, A, Glott, R. and Sowe, S. K. (2008) ‘Preparing the Ne(x)t Generation: Lessons
learnt from Free / Libre Open Source Software’, GUNI – Global University Network for
Innovation, GUNI Newsletter, Issue September 09.
Meiszner, A, Glott, R. and Sowe, S. K. (2008) ‘Las comunidades FLOSS como ejemplo de
ecosistemas exitosos de aprendizaje abierto y participativo’, Novática: Revista de la
Asociación de Técnicos de Informática, ISSN 0211-2124, Nº. 193, 2008 (Ejemplar
dedicado a: El futuro de la tecnología educativa) , pags. 45-50.
Meiszner, A, Glott, R. and Sowe, S. K. (2008) ‘Free / Libre Open Source Software
(FLOSS) Communities as an Example of successful Open Participatory Learning
Ecosystems’, UPGRADE, The European Journal for the Informatics Professional, Vol. IX,
issue no. 3 (June 2008): "Next Generation Technology-Enhanced Learning" ISSN 1684-
5285 (Upgrade).
Conferences
Meiszner, A., Moustaka, K. and Stamelos, I. (2009) ‘A hybrid approach to Computer
Science Education – A case study: Software Engineering at Aristotle University’,
Proceedings of the CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported
Education, Lisbon – Portugal, March 2009.
372
Meiszner, A. (2008) ‘Beyond the Open Educational Resource move – towards Open and
Participatory Learning Ecosystems’, Presentation at the FKFT Free Knowledge, Free
Technology Education for a free information society, First International Conference,
Barcelona July 15th to 17th 2008.
Meiszner, A, Glott, R. and Sowe, S. K. (2008) ‘Preparing the Ne(x)t Generation: Lessons
learnt from Free / Libre Open Source Software - Why free and open are pre-conditions and
not options for higher education!’. Proceedings of the 4th International Barcelona
Conference on Higher Education, Vol. 2. Knowledge technologies for social
transformation. Barcelona: GUNI.
Meiszner, A. (2007) ‘Communication tools in FLOSS communities: A look at FLOSS
communities at large – Beyond the development team’, paper and presentation at the Web
Based Communities Conference 2007, Salamanca – Spain.
Workshops (organized)
Meiszner, A., Glott, R., Sowe,S.K. and Stamelos, I. (2009) ‘1st International Workshop on
D4PL - Designing for participatory learning: Building from open source success to
develop free ways to share and learn’, co-located with OSS 2009, 5th International
Conference on Open Source Systems, June 2009, Skövde – Sweden.
Meiszner, A., Glott, R., Sowe,S.K and Stamelos, I. (2009) ‘The Emergence of Open
Courses: Understanding Open Education by drawing on the Open Source Case’, D4PL
workshop, Knowledge Café 1, co-located with OSS 2009, 5th International Conference on
Open Source Systems, June 2009, Skövde – Sweden.
Hammouda, I., Meiszner, A., Aaltonen, T., Capilupp, A., Glott, R., Sowe S.K., and
Stamelos, I. (2009) ‘Open Source Communities, Open Educational Approaches & Beyond:
Organisation, Skills, Revenue Models and Self-Sustainability’, joint D4PL & OSCOMM
workshop, Knowledge Café 2, co-located with OSS 2009, 5th International Conference on
Open Source Systems, June 2009, Skövde – Sweden.
373
Meiszner, A. (2008) ‘Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS-like) approaches in
educational settings & The NetGeners.Net pilot course’, Panel Discussion at the FKFT
Free Knowledge, Free Technology Education for a free information society, First
International Conference, Barcelona July 15th to 17th 2008.
Meiszner, A., Rae, S. and Weller, M. (2007) ‘FLOSSCom –Learning the open source way:
Can open source principles be applied in educational settings?’, workshop at the
OpenLearn Conference 2007, Milton Keynes – UK.
Workshops (attended)
Meiszner, A. (2008) ‘Web 2.0 as a medium for knowledge sharing and learning space’,
Presentation at the Lexelerator conference, Brussels May 7th 2008.
Meiszner, A. (2007) ‘FLOSSCom - Using the principles of Informal Learning
Environments of FLOSS Communities to improve ICT supported formal education; Initial
findings and questions’, presentation at the Ubuntu Education Summit 2007, Seville –
Spain.
Project reports
Meiszner, A. et al. (2008) ‘Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS-like) education
transfer report’, FLOSSCom Project, 2008.
Weller, M. and Meiszner A. (2008) ‘Report on the effectiveness of a FLOSS-like learning
community in formal educational settings’, FLOSSCom Project, 2008.
Glott, R.; Meiszner A. and Sowe S.K. (2007) ‘Analysis of the Informal Learning
Environment of FLOSS Communities’, FLOSSCom Project, 2007.
374
Other outputs
Contributions to the OER Do-It-Yourself Toolkit of 67the UNESCO online Community on
Open Educational Resources (OER), Source: http://oerwiki.iiep-
unesco.org/index.php?title=UNESCO_OER_Toolkit, 2008 - 2009
6767
375
Annex
Annex 1. NetGeners.Net Questionnaires
Annex 1.1 Qualitative Questionnaire Questions of 1st NetGeners.Net application

Trial
The qualitative questionnaire questions have been used as a basis for the focus group work
with participants of 1st NetGeners.Net application trial
--- Extract as taken from the NetGeners.Net wiki ---
376
--- End of extract ---
377
Annex 1.2 Quantitative Questionnaire Questions of 2nd NetGeners.Net application
Trial
The questions have been extracted from the questionnaire handed out to the students each
semester at the end of the ISE course.
--- Set of questions added to the overall questionnaire ---
--- End of questions ---
378
Annex 2. Future Research Projects resulting from this Work
Annex 2.1 The openEd 2.0 Project
The 33 months running EU funded (€474k) openEd 2.0 project aims at applying principles
of open source communities and to ‘open-up’ the OU’s course ‘Practice Based Research in
Educational Technology’ to be run as a free and open course with the objectives to:
evaluate the applicability of such approaches, evolution of content and communities, speed
of innovation, quality of learning provision and learning outcomes, and possible revenue
models to support such type of free/open learning provision within cross-cultural and
multilingual settings. The openEd project will draw on the results of this work and aims to:
(1) Develop experimental approaches for participatory learning within open
educational environments
(2) Implement and test those approaches by means of 3 consecutive pilots to promote
continuity, community building and evolutionary growth
(3) Develop and test revenue models – in accordance with pilots’ results – to assure
financial self-sustainability
(4) Analyse the results & benchmark them against initial assumptions
(5) Evaluate the project, disseminate outcomes and take the results further to the wider
community
The piloted open course would not award any credits, though it is aimed to test “for fee”
assessment and credit award mechanisms alongside the pilot as part of the sustainability
framework that will be developed. The course would be truly open to: the project partners’
student/trainee population; educational providers outside the project partnership; and free
learners outside of formal education.
379
Project partnership
• Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – Department of Software Engineering, GR
• EEDE - Hellenic Management Association, GR
• ELIG – European Learning Industry Group, through Linksys, AT
• HES-SO / University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, School of Business
Administration
• SPI – Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação, PT
• The Open University, UK
Project website:
• http://olnet.org/node/101
380
Annex 2.2 The openSE Project
The 25 months running EU funded (€400k) openSE project aims at developing an open
educational framework for computer science Software Engineering and has the overall
objective to:
• Set up an Open Educational Framework for Software Engineering bringing together
academia, formally enrolled students, fellow students, free learners outside of
formal education and open source practitioners and enterprises.
• Systematically combine formal and informal learning within an unfettered informal
learning environment.
• Stimulate participatory learning experiences and foster practical ‘hands-on’
sessions where learning activities and output become a learning resource itself.
• Enable current and future learners to benefit continuously and fully from others'
achievements, regardless where these achievements have been made.
The openSE project brings together higher education institutions, open source projects and
enterprises from different countries, from Europe and beyond, to collaboratively build up a
common learning ecosystem. The openSE framework is an open approach to computer
science Software Engineering and aims at the continuous provision of up to date and
relevant learning materials and opportunities that match students' interests and employers'
demand; providing firms with better educated employees and allow learners to acquire an
enhanced set of skills than traditional educational provision does. The openSE framework
will be open to any type of learner: students of partnering universities, learners from the
enterprise field, or 'free learners' outside of any type of formal educational context. The
openSE project will draw on ongoing initiatives and prior experiences on open educational
provision or experiences of computer science education within open source projects,
including – inter alia – the outcomes presented within this work.
381
Project partnership:
• Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – Greece (Pilot Lead)
• ELIG – European Learning Industry Group, through Linksys, AT
• EPITA, Ecole pour l'Informatique et les Techniques Avancées – France
• Free Technology Academy - The Netherlands (Content Lead)
• Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação - Portugal (co-ordinator)
• Tampere University of Technology, Department of Software Systems – Finland
• The Open University, Institute of Educational Technology (IET) – UK
• Universidade Rey Juan Carlos, Departamento de Sistemas Telemáticos y
Computación – Spain (Technical Lead)
• University of Oxford - OSSWatch, UK (Learner support Lead)
• UNU-MERIT: United Nations University MERIT, The Netherlands (Evaluation
Lead)
Project website:
• www.openSE.net
382
… end of work …
Revised version submitted for final approval 24th of November 2010
Canidelo, Vila Nova de Gaia – Porto | Portugal
Andreas Meiszner
andreasmeiszner@gmail.com
or
Meiszner@merit.unu.edu
383

The Emergence of Free / Open Courses - Lessons From The Open Source Movement

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

The Emergence of Free / Open Courses - Lessons From The Open Source Movement

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Lessons from the Open Source Movement

Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology &

November 24th, 2010

Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Creative Commons License

throughout the work. Free/Open Education is an emerging field, which is interdisciplinary

in nature, drawing on educational sciences, on computer science and technology, and on

‘open’ principles in particular.

Courses’ seem to experiment with a range of different educational approaches, to promote

different stakeholders to be found on the web.

(FLOSS) Learning Ecosystem.

Institute of Educational Technology

Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

November 24th, 2010

Creative Commons License

provide her with as much support as I received.

provided to me during this time.

and the Open University (UK).

allowed me to organize and participate at a number of workshops, conferences or to

UNU-MERIT so that I could continue my research path there.

a) Which are the key characteristics of FLOSS communities as a learning environment

and learning ecosystem?

b) Who are the stakeholders?

implementation and delivery of Open Courses?

of Open Course scenarios?

b) Who are the potential stakeholders within Open Course scenarios?

Research Question 3: Are there any shortcomings of established practices of courses

within formal education and Meta-design in comparison to the FLOSS case?

a) What are key characteristics deemed to be desirable of well-established online

to allow for this?

establish a transactive group memory?

course by the students), artifacts created by students and underlying discourse

experience, build on them and to improve what others did?

structures and processes within the ‘re-seeding’ phase?

resources featured, associated learning technologies, the learning opportunities and

activities provided, the communities and stakeholders participating in it, or individual

identifies some of the underlying key characteristics of FLOSS as a learning ecosystem

such as ‘openness’ or ‘inclusivity’, volunteering and volatility, the use of large-scale

networks, content-richness and specialisation, or modularity.

characteristics on learning in FLOSS communities and contrasts it to the way learning

usually takes place in higher education.

those methodologies frequently applied at research within the FLOSS ecosystem.

increasing digital literacy of learners and their potential to act as co-designer in a

on the elements of traditional formal education that might be preserved.

focusing on possible application scenarios and potential stakeholders to be considered for

point, but will be the focus of chapter nine.

will be looked at during the application trials presented in chapter ten.

looks at motivational aspects of the various stakeholders’ involved on why to actively

learners outside of formal education.

educators wanting to implement an inside or outside approach.

enabled through information and communication technologies. And indeed it appears as if

richer learning experience, foster collaborative learning and knowledge production, or

allow for the establishment of continuous and evolutionary growing educational

multimedia applications, allowing participants’ to develop critical thinking and analytical

‘mobile’ (Wiley, 2006).

the teaching process (they are consumers).” (Wiley, 2006 p.1)

are commonly available to them.

1.2 Recent Trends: Open Educational Resources & Open Courses

Resource movement, a movement largely strategically driven at institutional levels. With

an alternative to traditional educational environments, aiming at opening the door to the

next generation of higher education provision.

(Schmidt & Surman, 2007).