20 Questions With Rich Baraniuk

If you haven’t had a chance to view Richard Baraniuk’s Talk on TED, then you owe it to yourself to follow the link in our side bar to the right and watch it. It won’t take very long, but it will change the way you’ll think about text books forever. That was our experience when we saw it last year. His vision of Open Educational Resources and how they can change the future of education is contagious. So we counted ourselves lucky when we had the opportunity last December to sit down and ask him a few questions about how the Open Source movement might impact the business of education.

How did you go from being an Electrical engineer to becoming a leader in Open Source Educational Resources, how did you get from Electrical Engineering to Connexions?

Rich: That’s a good question, and it’s a question that the answer will be, I think, familiar, the more people that you talk with who are involved in Open Education. My story is the standard “itch-that-needed-to-be-scratched” story. I am still an Electrical Engineering Professor at Rice University and I do a lot of research, but I also teach.

I’d taught a number of classes, and in particular, the same Junior Level Engineering course about four or five time when it started to dawn on me pretty strongly that there really wasn’t a good textbook out there that covered the topics that I was interested in, in the way that I really wanted to get them across to my class. So, like a lot of people, I developed my own course notes and students really liked them. The class learned a lot and they were well received but there was no way for me to scale that up, to reach a broader audience than the thirty students I would teach every year. So, like any academic frustrated in this way, you would think of writing your own book. If you talk to any faculty member, they probably have three books that they’re working on in their head, right?

I was just very lucky. Instead of writing the book, I looked around and spoke with people who had written textbooks and I realized that it would have been a mistake. I probably would have written the book and it would’ve taken three, four, five years to write, it would have had middling success, it would have sold a couple thousand copies, and probably gone out of print in about three or four or five years. I would’ve just felt frustrated all over again. What I realized is the whole system by which we think about writing books and actually create them, have them published and distributed, and edited, is just completely broken. I started to think about a better way and, very luckily, happened, at the same point in time, to be switching all of my research groups work stations to Linux. So, this is back in 1999, and I realized what a wonderful system it was and how it was supported by such a wonderful community of contributors. So, really, it was just ten minutes one Saturday morning when I realized that we could do the same thing for textbooks. Just like software, we could modularize books by cutting them up into little Lego-block pieces and then make them open source so that they are not only free for anyone in the world, but also remixable reusable in many different contexts…

 

and, so you can build a community…

Rich: Exactly. The book now becomes surrounded by a community of people who are constantly tending to it, improving it, making sure, if it’s a high school science book, that when Pluto is declared not to be a planet, it’s taken out of the book.

 

We saw your 2006 TED presentation on Connexions. How is Connexions doing since since then? Is it being adopted as widely as you hoped or did you ever have real concrete expectations?

Rich: We do have concrete expectations. We have a very well organized team running Connexions. I’ve been actually really happy with the growth over the last nine years and particularly over the last two years. In October we passed through the milestone of over one million unique users per month coming to our site, we’re being used in over 200 countries now (basically every one that is connected to the internet) and we have started to see not just individuals start to contribute to Connexions, but also increasingly large organizations. One example is a large community college open textbook project that’s being organized out of Foothill DeAnza Community College in California that’s developing a number of community college textbooks. There’s a crisis in community college because, for some students, the books actually cost more than tuition every semester. So when kids are dropping out of school, it’s not because their tuition’s too high, it’s because their books are too costly. So we’re working with a number of community colleges around the country on an Intro Statistics book that’s being used by about 500 students this semester. We’re also working with a large project out of South Africa from the Shuttleworth Foundation called Siyavula that’s going to be deploying a complete K-12 open access curriculum in Connexions over the next couple years.

 

Do you see Connexions as a text publishing system or is it becoming a full course development system and does it have that potential?

Rich: That’s a really good question because we get that all the time. I would say that we are really a Course and Textbook Publishing and Remixing Site. And what I mean by that is we really focus on the actual educational materials, the authoring tools that you need to build them, the tools that you need to remix them, and then the tools that you need to push them out as a free web material or to a varying extent as print on demand. We’re really in the collaborative publishing world, so we’re not a course management system. There’s no overlap with anything like a Moodle. In fact, it’s a very complimentary sort of role that Connexions and a project like Moodle serve.

 

What are some of the challenges facing open educational resources? Are there barriers to entry in public education?

Rich: The biggest barrier for this entire movement is fragmentation due to incompatibilities of all sorts. Whether they’re proprietary incompatibilities between proprietary systems, or even incompatibilities between open source systems but based on different standards. I think there are a lot of lessons to learn from the open software world. If you don’t get the IP right, if you don’t get the underlying technology right, you’re never going to build a big enough community to reach critical mass.

 

Are your products in direct competition with the products of textbook publishers at this point, or are you under their radar?…

Rich: Well, we talk to a lot of publishers, and two out of three publishers totally understand that there are sweeping changes that are going to be making their way through the publishing industry. One out of three still doesn’t get it. But for the two out of three we’re actually on their radar and we’re talking with a lot of different publishers about potential collaborative projects or complimentary projects. There are actually a number of publishers who are becoming very interested in open access, or at least the interplay with open access.

There is a certain sub-community of people in Open Education who basically view any kind of commercial exploitation as bad. And these are the kind of people who, while they will use an open license like a creative commons, they will use a noncommercial use clause which really prohibits commercial publishers from getting involved with that content. Connexions has absolutely the opposite view. Our view is that the Open Education world can and should coexist side by side with the for-profit publishing world, and it’s only by getting for-profit entities interested and involved with Open Education that we can really make sure the materials that are being developed really truly have the impact that they’re capable of.

 

What can be done to move Open Education into the main stream? It seems that you’re saying that if you have a healthy open source movement, proprietary developers have to be involved.

Rich: Well, yeah, I really believe so, just take the very simple example of the Linux operating system. Where would Linux be if Linus Torvald had used a noncommercial license when he developed Linux. Would IBM be involved? Would Red Hat be involved? Would Linux be used at all?

 

So, then, is profit motive crucial to any industry, even education?

Rich: Not necessarily profit. I really think its inclusivity. I think that you just need a license that lets everyone participate in the development and use of the materials and that the more open the license is, the more likely you are to have materials getting used.

 

How do you currently market Connexions or is it just kind of word of mouth, evangelists and that kind of thing?

Rich: Up until now it really has been word of mouth and just a few evangelists. That was on purpose because we really wanted to make sure we didn’t oversell ourselves, oversell our content, or oversell our technology. But now that we’re starting to see such tremendous use and such a large amount of material being contributed we’re starting to get to the point where we have enough content in there that more broad-based marketing is appropriate. I think that when we’re getting involved with organizations like the Shuttleworth foundation with this K-12 project and when we’re getting involved with the IEEE on a big quality review project, we’re seeing that those organizations are also very interested in helping us market the collaboration and about donations in particular

 

In terms of quality control, currently you have the lens system for peer reviews. Is that sufficient for most public school systems?

Rich: Yeah, In fact, the tools that we’ve built in connexions are completely sufficient for serving up material within a public school system for a number of reasons. The first is that even though the Connexions materials are capable of continuously evolving and improving over time it’s possible through our system to freeze in time a particular version of the material. So you could have a particular physics textbook that’s been adopted for use in a state and maybe that material continues to improve and be developed by a community. But the particular version that was carefully reviewed and adopted can be sort of locked down within the system and it’s given a unique web address. Then through our lens system you’d be able to direct users from that state to the official approved version very easily.

 

Are there any examples of Connexions text being broadly adopted in a public school system at this point?

Rich: No. It turns out that we have some fantastic material on music theory for kids and young adults and most of the usage of those material are from K-12 institutions in the United states, according to the IP addresses.

 

So you know they are being used, but they’re not being officially adopted as a curriculum.

Rich: I fully expect that, as we start rolling out this very high quality K-12 material developed with the Shuttleworth foundation, that material is going to make it into a form that is adopted in places not only around the world but in the United States.

 

What is the Cape town Declaration, what does it mean for Open Education, and how you are involved?

Rich: The Cape Town Declaration is a declaration by the initial and emerging community of people who support the idea of Open Educational Resources and who want to accomplish a couple things. One is to express support for this movement, and the second is to try to help codify a little bit what the movement really stands for. In particular, what does “Open” really mean as far as Open Educational Resources, how materials can and should be licensed, how they can be shared, and on what kind of platforms should they be developed. It is a declaration that now has been signed by three thousand individuals and organizations around the world.

One of the reasons for doing this is a similar declaration called the Budapest Open Declaration that was signed a number of years ago. It basically said that we should move more towards open access scientific publication. This initiative has been extraordinarily successful and this declaration spawned a number of new open journals in the scientific world. Some of the most high impact medical and biology journals are now actually completely open access and it was actually the beginning of the movement that culminated in a law being passed stating that if a scientists research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, within six months of publishing any scientific article, it has to be put in an open access free database called Pubmed Central. So the idea is to really galvanize the education community in a way similar to how the Budapest Open Initiative really galvanized the academic research community.

 

What other open source education movements are seeing success?

Rich: So far, the two main movements really revolve around content. I think content and textbooks are really what we’re talking about right now in open educational resources. The other is the burgeoning open source software movement for learning management, and for course management for assessment. Moodle is a great example in general and Sakai is an interesting example in the higher education space.

 

What type of CMS are you using for Connexions?

Rich: Connexions is a conglomeration of a number of different systems because it’s actually very sophisticated. It’s all based on XML, a version control system, a number of different database systems, we integrate all these together to form our platform we call Rhaptos. All of the tools that form Rhaptos are open source and the main basis is a system called Plone, which is a very powerful open source content management system

 

What’s your next project after Connexions or is a project that will keep you busy for the foreseeable future?

Rich: Well I think this is going to take us a long time. It’s still early days. Even though in my case I’ve been at this nine years, it’s still early days for Open Education and there’s still tremendous amounts of work that need to be done. It’s clear to me at least what the next steps are. The immediate steps that Connexions and I think all open education projects are taking is trying to get up to critical mass in terms of content and the amount of users and really build a really massive global community that is sustainable into the indefinite future. The thing that I’m very interested in now is figuring out how to exploit these open materials, to move away from a world where every kid in a class, or across an entire state, or across the entire country gets the exact same textbook. Basically like going into a suit store and just buying off the rack and never having anything tailored to you and moving toward a world where educational materials are personalized for each individual, personalized to their learning style, to their interests, and to their context. I think that this idea of personalization as well as building a much more rich, interactive, immersive kind of experience rather than just reading text on a computer screen or in a book, really working with interactive simulations, problem based learning, these are ideas that are just perfectly set up for Open Education to play a big role. I think that is when we’re going to see not just a tremendous increase in the access to and diversity of educational content, but a real step change in the quality of actual learning.

For the next several months Standard Imagination will be devoting its site to covering issues and topics important to eLearning professionals. This will include a series of interviews with important and influential individuals in the industry. If there’s anyone you feel we should interview, please contact us and let us know.