Scott E. Siddall (siddall@denison.edu)
Denison University
The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) is a multi-institutional, multi-year project led by MIT and Stanford and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is a highly collaborative effort to enhance learning by creating an open programming environment that supports sharing and pedagogical experimentation. The initiative is in its second year of work, and has spawned much interest and high expectations in the international educational community. It is important that expectations for the products of the OKI are realistic, especially in light of rapid growth in enterprise-wide academic systems such as Blackboard and WebCT, the academic counterparts to our administrative systems.
The following summary of the initiative is couched in non-technical terms to aid small colleges and universities as they prepare to use and to contribute to the OKI.
The OKI has short- and long-term goals. The short term goals are to set standards for software development, to develop a set of basic software tools which are needed by most educational software, and finally to create some exemplary educational software. As of this writing (October, 2002), many of these short-term goals have been met although it is likely to be late in 2003 before our institutions will be able to use OKI products. The long-term goals are to create a community of software developers who can adopt, extend and improve on the OKI standards and software, and to ensure that the Initiative can be sustained in the face of constantly changing technologies.
At the core of the OKI are fully public software standards that define an open programming environment to foster pedagogical experimentation and sharing. This open programming environment is based on delivery of learning materials through standard web browsers. This means that software written to the OKI standards will be accessible to users of nearly all modern computers, and the content will be accessible wherever there is an Internet connection.
The OKI can be most easily understood when viewed as a set of four layers. Each activity of the Initiative is based upon the layer below it. The bottom-most layer is the infrastructure of the campus: the campus network and associated hardware and software that is the responsibility of each campus. Built upon this foundational layer are OKI "common services" and "educational services." Common services are modules of software that perform relatively limited functions. Educational services comprise the next layer and perform more complex functions. Many educational services are created by the integration of several common services. The OKI defines the function of these services and how they interact with one another. Finally, at the topmost layer are "educational applications" which are complex systems that integrate common services and educational services into more comprehensive learning systems.
The availability of publicly defined common services and educational services makes it possible for programmers to focus on their pedagogical goals by using and reusing software modules as building blocks for more complex educational software. For instance, the OKI defines common and educational services such as how students and faculty log into an OKI-compliant system, how workgroups of learners are managed, or how files are shared among students and faculty. Programmers will need many such services to integrate into more complex educational software that meet pedagogical needs.
An educational application is software that has one or more specific pedagogical goals and is built upon the architecture defined by the OKI. For instance, student electronic portfolios could be an educational application. An e-portfolio application might integrate many OKI-defined services such as authenticating the identity of a student, managing the files in a portfolio, and allowing portfolio files to be annotated and assessed.
OKI staff members have not only defined the standards for these services, they are implementing many of them so that developers of educational software can take early advantage of the OKI effort. The common services are being written in the Java programming language but because the definitions of these programs are public, others can create the same functionality by writing their own services in programming languages of their choice. Thus, the OKI is not dependent upon a single programming language or a single computing platform for shared development or access to educational content.
It is important to note that the OKI is not a comprehensive course management system, although comprehensive educational applications are being developed on the OKI standards. These included Stanford’s CourseWork, MIT’s Stellar and The University of Michigan’s CHEF, among others. For instance, the latest release of CourseWork complies with many of the OKI standards and is being assessed in courses at several institutions this academic year.
It is also important to mention that the Initiative will not produce “free” software. The OKI is a non-commercial project based on the “open-source” model of software licensing. This gives us the freedom to adapt the products of OKI to our needs, but supporting our use of OKI products will not be free. Our institutions will not avoid the costs of course management systems simply by adopting the products of the OKI.
Open source software is distributed freely and includes all the source materials that will allow a programmer to improve the software, adapt it to their needs and to fix bugs. Open source software is thus maintained and extended by a community of programmers. [For more information on the open source movement, visit http://opensource.org]. However, the usual avenues for software support don’t exist for open source software that is distributed freely. There is not likely to be a 24-hour phone number to call for help. More likely, our institutions’ knowledgeable support staff will be able to post inquiries to an e-mail list or browse web resources for answers to support questions. Thus technical support for open source software is a cost center.
Our institutions will be able to adopt the products of the OKI if they have the staff time and expertise to install and maintain the software they select. The costs of using OKI products will come from meeting hardware needs for the products (servers, backup, etc), installing the applications, connecting them to institutional databases as needed, and supporting the local user community. The benefits of the OKI will come as we gain access to diverse educational applications contributed to the OKI community by colleges, universities and other developers. For example, Stanford University is developing an assignment and assessment manager to deliver online assessments that are discipline-specific and teaching method-specific, and to allow faculty to embed assessments into online content for better formative feedback.
Commercial developers are able to contribute educational applications to the OKI (and Blackboard and WebCT have announced they will), but we will have to license those commercial products even if they do fit into the freely distributed OKI framework.
Our institutions will be able to contribute to the OKI if they have the staff time and expertise to develop new modules that comply with the OKI standards. Developing OKI applications implies a higher level of resource commitment and expertise than just using the products of the OKI. Several major institutions in the US and UK are core collaborators or application developers for the OKI, so the outlook for a rich suite of educational applications is excellent. There is still plenty of room for the smaller colleges and universities to contribute. For many of our institutions, a strong focus on undergraduate learning outcomes puts us in a unique position to design effective educational applications in the OKI framework. Our ability to implement such applications will depend on our commitment of technical resources and the challenges of integrating basic OKI services into effective pedagogical software. Those who wish to contribute to the OKI effort should participate in the OKI Developer’s Network the first meeting of which will take place at MIT in March, 2003.
For much more official information about the Open Knowledge Initiative, visit http://web.mit.edu/oki/
* This brief is a subjective assessment of the Open Knowledge Initiative from someone who has been involved in several OKI planning workshops and focus groups. This brief relates the opinions of the author and is not an official statement from the OKI management. Much more information is available at the official OKI web site. Return to top.