Expert answer:Annotated Bibliography
Solved by verified expert:Here is 6 sources that the annotated bibliography should be written about (150-200 words per source)https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/01/over-60-of-americans-back-tuition-free-college-survey-says.htmlhttps://books.google.com/books?id=bboKAQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttps://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/20/should-college-be-free/the-problem-is-that-free-college-isnt-freehttp://www.denverpost.com/2013/10/03/should-public-colleges-be-free-no/https://www.collegeraptor.com/find-colleges/articles/affordability-college-cost/pros-cons-tuition-free-college/and one is included as a PDF document ( should education be free). All the requirements are included in the word document (annotated req)
should_education_be_free.pdf
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Should higher
education course
materials be
free to all?
In recent months, UC Berkeley and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology have, respectively, announced
and achieved their intention to make entire lecture and
course materials freely available online – to anyone.
Leo Pollak argues that while British universities lag far
behind in online course provision, the UK is uniquely
placed to innovate further than MIT, and to once again
radically redefine the basis of opportunity, learning and
social mobility.
B
36
The rise of open
courseware
Open courseware – freely-accessible, internet-provider-cleared, comprehensive, university course materials – is already beginning to take off. Web-published course syllabi, reading lists with links to open access
articles, course and lecture notes,
video/audio lectures and audio-synched
slideshows, together with essay assignments,
problem sets, past exam papers and full-text
readings, are now being used by self-learners, existing students, and young entrepreneurs worldwide.
A small number of vanguard universities
are already publishing swathes of their
undergraduate and postgraduate course
materials, most notably the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US,
whose open courseware site, ocw.mit.edu,
has been established, employing just 26
people.
MIT released its pilot version of open
courseware in late 2002, placing 50 courses
online, with Spanish and Portuguese transpublic policy research – March-May 2008
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 ippr
efore the advent of the internet, higher education course
materials were a scarce
resource, restricted to those
who could afford to enrol.
Unfair, perhaps, but face-to-face contact
with lecturers, a seat in a lecture hall, a
place at a seminar, a library ticket: all these
things cost money.
However, in an age of digital abundance,
free-to-use, free-to-modify text, audio,
video, user-generative and interactive tools
can now reproduce the vast majority of university course materials at negligible cost.
This possibility flips the dominant debate
about higher education. Rather than ask
how we can make restricted access fairer,
should we simply let everybody in?
Why limit access to online higher educational materials, when educational opportunity is so closely linked to social and economic outcomes? Why should the (supposed) vast sea of potential users of higher
education not be let past the degree course
dam?
In just four years, MIT’s open
courseware unit has overseen
the publication of complete
educational materials for
over 1,800 of its courses
As the open courseware movement
expands and innovates at institutions
worldwide, the UK’s sole offering comes
from the Open University and its
OpenLearn programme. Beyond this, the
current UK model operates with those
paying partial tuition fees receiving the full
benefits of a face-to-face educational expe-
rience, while all others receive little personal tangible benefit from higher education, be it face-to-face or online. This,
despite the fact that over 70 per cent of the
costs of higher education’s teaching and
research costs are covered by the taxpayer
(Dearing 1997).
The return on this public investment was
based on the idea of an elite class of highly
skilled graduates unleashing their learning
and human capital on a grateful, taxpaying,
underskilled population of non-graduates.
This idea, thanks to far-reaching digital and
economic change, no longer has the backing of economic evidence, nor of social sentiment.
The Open Access proposal
If Britain is to maintain (or, indeed, regain)
its position as a progressive innovator in
‘world class’ institutions, it must keep up,
and go further, than the pioneers at MIT. I
propose the Government takes swift action
on the following:
1. To establish a centralised online hub of diverse
British open courseware offerings at the free domain
www.ocw.ac.uk, accessible to teachers, students and
the general public alike.
This site would have several purposes, solving a number of problems in higher education today:
i. It would provide an integrated single
point of reference for the range of highquality guidance and information on
effective teaching practice, promoting
diverse teaching methods while sharing
best practice and driving up standards. A
central open courseware site would also
better enable educators, students and
recruiters to assess the comparative value
of a plurality of university programmes in
Britain.
ii. The seemingly intractable opposition
between academic autonomy and public
accountability would be overcome with
online ‘distance auditing’, possible for
1. For links and details of open courseware-providing universities, see www.ocwconsortium.org, site of the Open Courseware
Consortium, which, since 2005, has been aiding the development and sharing of open courseware models and setups
between contributing universities.
public policy research – March-May 2008
37
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 ippr
lations added shortly after. In just four
years, MIT’s open courseware unit has
overseen the publication of complete educational materials for over 1,800 of its
courses, almost its entire course catalogue,
with materials contributed from 90 per
cent of its professors. In November 2007,
they finally achieved ‘steady state’, with
200 new and updated courses to be added
annually.
Kyoto, Tokyo, Yale, ParisTech and 200
other universities worldwide have followed
suit.1 In addition to these open courseware
offerings, UC Berkeley last October
launched its own YouTube page, with full
lecture courses placed freely online. On a
similar tack, the Connexions programme at
Rice University (Houston, Texas) has
explored new models of dynamic peer
review scholarship, while simultaneously
developing high-quality open educational
resources, communally generated by academics.
These leading global universities have
been making their existing offerings universally available online, providing for a showcase of their teaching practices, a more flexible learning experience for students within
and without the university, and a new
dimension of institutional morale.
2. To establish the right and capacity for non-students and non-graduates to take the same exams as
enrolled students, through the provision of open
access exam sessions.
i. The cost of open exam entrance would
be covered by a premium fee paid by
the entrant. This would be small
enough so as not to be prohibitive, and
yet great enough to discourage abuse of
the right, as well as cover the cost of
printing, staging and marking the
examination.
ii. An ‘open degree’ course qualification
would be granted, designating the specific content of the course papers taken, and
would complement – rather than compete with – existing face-to-face course
degrees. Guarantees would be in place to
ensure open access exam entrants are
tested to the same level as face-to-face students, are marked as stringently, and as
part of the same invisible entrance system.
iii.Specific courses in which hands-on learning is essential – towards professional
licences, as in medical degrees, for example – would not be included in the system.
38
3. To pass an Open Access Act through Parliament,
establishing a new class of open degree, achieved
solely using open courseware.
i. An open courseware/certification
enabling act would (following the recommendations of the Gowers Review of
Intellectual Property [Gowers 2006])
extend copyright exemptions on all taxpayer-funded educational materials.
ii. To minimise interference in academic
teaching and research, specialised open
courseware publication teams would be
put in place at each university to assemble and maintain their open courseware
offerings.
iii.The Act would provide server capacity
and other necessary infrastructure
upgrades for managing open courseware
content and for hosting its distribution of
content online. Additional equipment
would constitute video cameras, microphones, scanning equipment and automated content management systems (as
per the model being developed at UC
Berkeley).
iv. It would provide pre-emptive regulation
mechanisms for any subsequent support
services that arise – essay feedback,
supervision, exam practice, and so on –
for those using a university’s open courseware and pursuing its open degree.
v. It would provide for the functional integration and adjustment of the various
quango remits – the Learning and Skills
Council, Office for Fair Access, Adult
Learning Inspectorate, British
Educational Communications and
Technology Agency, Joint Information
Systems Committee, and the Quality
Assurance Agency.
vi.An explicit guarantee would be given
that there be no deviation from or dampening of the current policy to expand
access to enrolled face-to-face university
learning.
4. To conduct a high-profile public information
campaign, promoting the opportunities afforded by
open courseware and open access examinations and
degrees, targeted at adult learners, excluded minorities and students at pre-university age.
public policy research – March-May 2008
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 ippr
courses that publish comprehensive and
up-to-date course materials. This principle would establish a more efficient
mechanism for teaching and (if published
openly) research assessment, freeing up
time and resources for actual teaching
and actual research.
iii.With its onus on encouraging consumption of diverse course materials in different areas of study, such a hub would
help guard against restrictive framings
of syllabus materials, limited course prescriptions and research literatures. This
would go some way to contributing to a
reassessment of research funding metrics, away from narrow citation towards
a broader and richer research. This
could, in the long term, help to overcome some of the limitations of peer
review as a critical, competitive exercise,
creating space for stifled intellectual
innovations.
Figure 1. Routes to formal accreditation under an open courseware/certification system.
Note: this process would not apply to courses involving hands-on kinesthetic learning
Enrolled,
face-to-face learning
HIGHER EDUCATION
Examination candidacy,
assessment and certification
Independent, online
learning
The value of a ‘proper’
education
A successful implementation of the open
access policies sketched above would enable
any British citizen, at any point in life, to
develop their knowledge, skills and capacities, and have those capacities formally
recognised in the work arena. The fear will
be that this will devalue existing degrees. If
anyone can obtain a degree online, might
the distinction of the degree, and the intensity of workload and value of face-to-face
learning involved in achieving it, be
watered down?
In fact, the value of a ‘face-to-face’ over
online educational experience would
remain and be reinstated under an open
access system. Making course materials
freely available does not undermine the
added value of the face-to-face benefits of
education. An Open degree would be clearly signified as such, indicating the different
experience and work involved in an organised learning environment.
Moreover, open courseware elsewhere
has created an online visibility in lecture
teachings, encouraging the sharing of best
practice in teaching and driving up standards. This has helped establish a new
guarantee for the quality of teaching interaction for enrolled students that would not
be possible for online learners.2
This fear of inflation in the value of the
degree – the more people have them, the
fewer social and occupational positions one
can ‘buy’ with them – is already real. As
governments have attempted to widen university participation through the expansion
of enrolled learning provision, so society
becomes ever more saturated with certificates, thus reducing their relative value
(Collins 1979). The notion of a ‘credential
crisis’ has never been more applicable to
Britain than it is today. The effect of more
people getting any level of qualification is
simply to delay the drawbridge closing on
social opportunity to Masters, internships
and work experience.
But open access degrees could actually
give new credibility to ‘the degree’, while
simultaneously widening participation in
higher learning. Instead of degrees being
merely certificates to be bought, worked for,
then deployed in the labour market, they
would become a more consistent measure of
an individual’s knowledge and learning
capacity, wherever they are from, however
old they may be.
2. The work of sociologist John Thompson has demonstrated the historical affect of visibility (1996, 2000), most notably in
the political field, where the ‘new visibility’ brought about by new media not only introduced a new dimension to political accountability and to quality of governance, but also new attendant risks, in the potential for scandal. Such visibility in
the field of scholarly education would carry no such risk, with the control of content provision and representation of self
firmly in the hands of educators, providing a chance for reputation and trust to be established anew, to a new generation
of students and stakeholders, and to a far wider audience.
public policy research – March 2008-May 2008
39
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 ippr
COURSE PROVISION
Enrolled, structured
time-scheduled learning
experience with added benefits of
an interactive face-to-face access
to teachers.
Social network and ritual benefits
of university learning
(+ open courseware Syllabi,
reading lists with links to open
access articles and
out-of-copyright/copyright exempt
materials, lecture/course notes,
audio-synched slide-shows essay
assignments, problem sets, past
exam papers.)
Concern from academics is likely to centre
on the impact of open courseware on the
potential to make a living from the private
resale educational course materials. For
those academics operating in departments
subject to severe budgetary constraints, the
right to offer research or ‘consultancy’ services elsewhere, confined to the sponsoring
company or public agency, may seem sacrosanct. However, with the establishment of
any new common space – with a field of
materials available for use, reuse and modification – new business opportunities and
societal benefits would inevitably arise.3
As the economists Shapiro and Varian
have demonstrated, giving knowledge
products away at no or marginal cost may
not be incompatible with generating money
from those products (Shapiro and Varian
1998). Indeed, this is the orthodoxy of the
most successful web corporations –
MySpace, Google, Facebook, and a range
of open source providers – and is emerging
as an organising principle of new business
models within the music industry.
Moreover, as per the current drive to
open up the use of public sector information,
led by the Guardian’s ‘Free our data’ campaign4, the potential benefits for economic
and social innovation following the open
use, reuse and modification of a knowledge
and data common are ample. Even the most
recent Government-commissioned studies
on taxpayer-funded data are pointing in this
direction (Newberry et al 2008).
Implementing an open access higher
education would let the civic and political
role of universities flourish. Democracy
demands that the public have an open,
informed debate about a range of critical
issues, affecting science, domestic and international policy. But the real information,
evidence and ideas on such topics remain
restricted to those in possession of the elusive, expensive keys to understanding: a
university library pass or journal logins.
Furthermore, open source higher education could actually lessen the bureaucratic
load on the academy. It has long been supposed that academic autonomy, free from
state and corporate interests, is at odds with
public accountability (Baert and Shipman
2005), but open courseware and open access
research publication could in fact enhance
both. Visible teaching and open access
research publication would enable a more
efficient mechanism of ‘distance auditing’ of
academia, freeing up time and resources for
actual teaching and research, going some
way to attenuating the long-standing concerns of academics across the sector.5
Far from diminishing the prestige of an
academic institution, the experience of MIT
has shown that a system of open courseware
can have profound positive effects on staff
and student morale, and on alumni support.
Further, by changing the nature of the
teaching process itself, offering the prospect
of an audience running potentially into the
millions, open courseware could be a spur
to high quality and innovative teaching
practices; and enhance the public status of
academics across society.
A progressive distinction
Open courseware has already delivered
enormous and unexpected benefits to its
users and its producers, and yet, its full
emancipatory potential – of incentivising
and empowering all citizens to demonstrate
their actual ability – remains continually
skirted around for fear of change, and a
poverty of imagination. The presentation of
such options allows for nothing short of a
government litmus test on whether it possesses the requisite ambition for the citizens
it serves and on whether it is prepared to
3. The Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock has argued convincingly that there exists a calculable opportunity cost to a
wide range of restrictive intellectual monopolies; not merely to individuals, innovative firms, to jobs, consumers and to the
wider economy, but, most crucially, to the providers of the ‘first copy’, the original content producers (Pollock 2006).
4. www.freeourdata.org.uk/
5. For details of the opposition to the Research Assessment Exercise from the UCU, Britain’s largest union representing university educators, see downloads at www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=1442
40
public policy research – March-May 2008
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 ippr
The value of the public
academic
public policy research – March-May 2008
ities of open courseware? What would
Harold Wilson, who judged the formation of
the OU as his greatest achievement as Prime
Minister, have urged when seeing the chance
for the OU principle to be extended, almost
indefinitely? These leaders of the Labour
movement took on those who dismissed
open education as a ‘blithering nonsense’.
Will the current Labour leaders, who may
expect similar tenors of opposition, do so?
With the Confederation of British
Industry and the Trades Union Congress
both in fits over Britain’s skills gap, and all
parties trying to demonstrate a substantive
commitment to social mobility, the fact
remains that with a little political courage
our publicly funded educational resources
can be made infinitely, digitally abundant,
at a cost close to zero. Higher education,
free at the point of use, and at the click of a
button: what better way to truly ‘unlock the
talents of the British people’?
Leo Pollak is a researcher and activist. To view the
full copy of this analysis and advocacy, visit
www.opentlc.org, or to offer feedback email
leo.pollak@gmail.com. The author would like to
thank Sophie Moullin for editorial support on this
article.
Baert P and Shipman A (2005) ‘Universities under siege?
Accountability and Trust in the Contemporary
Academy’, European Societies 7 (1) 2005: 157-185
Collins R (1979) Credential Society New York: Academic
Press
Dearing R (1997) Higher Education in the Learning
Society London: HMSO
Gowers A (2006) Gowers Review of Intellectual Property
London: HMSO
Newberry D, Bently L and Pollock R (February 2008)
Models of Public Sector Information Provision via
Trading Funds. Available at:
www.berr.gov.uk/files/file45136.pdf
Nye J (2005) Soft Power: the means to success in …
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