Session Title: Open Education Stakeholders - Competitive Advantages
Presenter: Curt Madison, Emerging Tools Specialist, University of Alaska System
Time & Date: 10:15 A.M. - 11:00 A.M., Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Location: Rm. C180
Session Description: Open education institutional stakeholders can be collected into three groups based on use. First, the commonly understood institutions of higher education that admit students, hire faculty, design courses, and grant degrees who sell credentials based on stocks of knowledge. Second, institutions of higher education with scarce resources that limit adequate research knowledge to design courses but who want to grant their own degrees. They hire faculty who assemble courses from open education resources. And, third, institutions that do not admit students, design courses, or grant degrees, but do create significant knowledge objects with an obligation to share results.
The first set of stakeholders, established institutions, sells educational materials and access to faculty resources. Administrators of these institutions wonder why they should give away their resources? The simple reason is because of severe changes in classification of abundance and scarcity. Education is not so much about containing knowledge as it is about discovering it. These institutions need to begin selling something else. Opening access to abundant materials makes intrinsic sense for established institutions. The street value of encyclopedic learning materials is driving to zero. But the value of coordination and sequencing is still high. The value of an interpreted experience is still high. When institutions realize the efficiency of open courseware to improve their internal mechanisms, they will create transparency and disseminate it. The case is clear.
The second set of stakeholders, institutions that adopt open courseware, creates value by delivering audiences to the first set of stakeholders. They lack resources to create all their own courses. This lack of time and money cannot be further stressed with high overhead for discovery, evaluation, customization, and sequencing of open education artifacts. Users of open courseware can leverage their impact on the creators by understanding the concept of product placement.
The third set of stakeholders, current non-consumers of courseware, includes creators of knowledge among science researchers and public policy agencies. These stakeholders are non-consumers of open education in the disruptive innovation sense of Clayton Christensen. They typically do research and report findings but do not create structured access to knowledge domains. The open education movement can work with these sources to provide a venue for use of their knowledge products that fit outreach agendas in more efficient ways than currently available to them.
A clear analysis of stakeholder win conditions provides a communication platform for open education advocates. Creators, users, and non-consumers can find common ground, mutually benefit, and competitive advantage by aligning their agendas.
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