Open Content Education (was Quiz robot)

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

On Sun, Jan 31, 1999 at 03:18:37PM +0800, Rhandeev Singh wrote:

> On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, the next to last of the red-hot fakirs wrote:
> > >Why does the database have to be open to the students?

I think this is one of the best threads on seul-edu so far!  After 6 years
of enjoying the huge benefits and fruits of the open source free software
movement in my work as system administrator, I am very ripe for a similar
movement in my more important work as a teacher.  I am really really tired
of the limitations of every single "teacher cooperative" efforts I have
witnessed in my 20 year career so far (with the hopeful exception of
seul-edu).  Though we mostly work in the non-profit sector, we guard the
fruits of our labour as if we:

1. fear losing our jobs if our "trade secrets" became openly available to
   the public

2. hope that this is our big chance to become millionaires.

Furthermore, I see way too many talented teachers working very hard in one
way or another with no long term reward for themselves or their schools (let
alone for the cause of providing a free education for all):

1. sending bug reports, suggestions, writing extension modules that improve
   the sales of the various commercial educational platforms (yet still
   forcing the school to pay for yearly licences or upgrades)

2. working in non-profit associations which impose commercial-style restrictions 
   on the use of their data banks.  (forcing schools to pay for memberships
   year after year or lose rights-of-use)

3. pirating software and data banks (yet another bad habit with little hope of
   sustainability like the above two)

> > Nobody will know if the people downloading the free, online
> > databases are teachers making quizzes or students making ethical
> > violations.  Shrug.

Ethical violations?  If it is open content, it would not be unethical! How
can you pirate open source software?  I think it is high time we made a
paradigm shift here.

> With an open license, it is only a matter of time before nobody needs
> to know any longer.
 
Yes.  I think many of us teachers think that our prime directive is to
prevent students from "cheating", to continuously guide them to swallowing
the educational pills as close as possible to how we planned it.  
 
> Imagine a database with 10 million multiple choice questions, a
> hundred thousand open ended questions and fifty two and a half answers
> to each open-ended question, and in 50 different languages (translated
> automatically via something like e.g. the babelfish mechanism -- see
> http://babelfish.digital.altavista.com).

Good image.  Nonetheless, the "old school" could argue that it would be
trivial to write a search tool for this database.  So a student doing a
quiz, can open up a second session and do the database searches so as to
correctly answer the quiz.  We must deal with the issue head on; secrecy
through obscurity, complexity or vastness is not sustainable.  The issue is:

CAN we ASSESS students with an OPEN database of course materials and
test-bank items?

> If such a database is open to students, it can even be a teaching aid,
> helping students to understand what the questions want out of them,
> much like a ten-year series, only much better because it can be used
> for web-based instruction, to build HOWTOs, to compare and contrast
> alternative answers, etc...

exactly!  right on!

> Self-study becomes a viable option, and also a myriad of hitherto
> unthought of modes of teaching and learning, many of which can at last
> be automated interactively!  Even the database itself can receive
> contributions from students (moderated by the database maintainers).

exactly! right on!

> In fact, if a fellow student (yes, I'm a student too) is actually able
> to remember all that information, I think he more or less deserves an
> award for it :-)

true.  However, as I mention above... this argument is not sustainable in
the old paradigm.

> You see, it is not the database that needs to be kept secret; it is,
> rather, the choice of questions.  And this can be kept secret via any
> of a selection of well-known public key cryptographic techniques
> designed into the applications that make use of the database.

Close.  We are looking for a way to certify that a student has mastered a
topic.  If everyone knows (through an open database) what the criteria and
actual assessment items are for mastering a topic, then anyone can PGP
certify that such and such student has mastered a particular topic
(Scout/Guide style).  Each teacher or school can determine who they trust
and only accept PGP certificates from their list of trusted people (and that
can be as conservative as allowing only the math teacher of the school to
certify math mastery via a closely monitored random sample quiz).

> I can see many legal issues, though, e.g. concerning the ownership and
> maintainership of the database and its recognition, or lack thereof,
> by relevant authorities... this in fact mirrors the analogous issue of
> accountability of source code in the open source community.  Why do
> the commercial elite like IBM and Netscape trust open source?

I fear that if we (the open content educators) don't do this, then a
multinational will and will become the defacto standard for all schools on
the planet before long.  It will likely be a "free" service filled with
advertizing and restrictive licencing. (see www.freetest.com)

> My hope is that the education industry will demonstrate itself to have
> a similar wealth of community-spirited people, as has been found in
> the open source software community.

me too.

> What we will need is for groups of educational institutions to combine
> resources (e.g. over the Internet), and set up volunteer bodies that
> inspect or otherwise moderate modifications to the database(s).

yes.  But this won't happen until the idea of an consciously-open
open-content test-bank and curricular resource database begins to be
accepted among teachers and administrators. 

> Educators who discover mistakes would be able to suggest corrections
> to these bodies, and hopefully, the techies among them can try to
> locate the origins of the errors (and discover phracks if any were
> involved).

yes. Thank you.

Bruno