The Avant Gardist

April 5, 2010

---Diana Oshiro

Principal

SHARE, REMIX, REUSE – “LEGITIMATE PLAGIARISM?”

I returned from a three day conference held on the shores of California’s beautiful Monterey Peninsula with a renewed commitment to transform education. Thompson Academy, an active member of the National Repository for Online Courses, has been working with colleagues from other states to further expand our collective knowledge of online learning. It is quite evident that online courses and web-based technologies are transforming education. So what will be the new role of our teachers and expectations of our students in this new environment? Will we be held hostage by online curriculum providers who will not allow the teacher to customize, individualize and differentiate instruction using the set content? Will our teachers be able to create courses, share content and redesign assessments that can be distributed to anyone?

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open licensing are hot topics in technology and education circles today. The OER movement has increased tremendously from 2005 when the first collaborative content creation projects were funded by the Hewlett and Shuttleworth Foundations. Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Open educational resources include:

• Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
• Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
• Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

Are we possibly doing something illegal by taking available content, re-mixing and then redistributing to anyone who wants it? Does this practice border on “plagiarism”? No, not if everyone agrees to share. This movement may be a new and better way to capture the strongest content, best instructional practices and highest performing students. As our community of learners begins to recognize the importance of shared knowledge, every learner and teacher will collectively benefit and grow. Perhaps this can be called “Legal Plagiarism.”

Thompson Academy has always engaged in innovative, “cutting edge” opportunities that informed new instructional practices and transformed educational environments. Another such opportunity has presented itself. I believe Thompson Academy should play a major role in creating and using OER to improve learning while maximizing and extending resources. This year we provided students from 28 public schools with courses for credit recovery or acceleration toward graduation. This is done without cost to student or regional school. If we share our resources, our teachers and instructional content with all students desiring our services, perhaps we will begin to see how external circumstances like lack of resources, furlough days and derelict facilities will no longer matter. So, what should be our next steps? Developing a plan and strategizing ways to redesign courses, remix content and share it with everyone in the form of credit courses for students or professional development for teachers is the first step. This will not be an easy task but can be done. We’re all about “proving the concept” and Thompson Academy will attempt to “prove this concept” in the near future.