During the 2024-25 academic year, the University of Saskatchewan will celebrate an important milestone. At least, I think it’s important. Ten years ago, an instructor in our College of Agriculture and Bioresources adopted the OpenStax Economics textbook. It was the first adoption of an OER in a large class at USask. That year, students saved about $30,000.
This year, students at USask will save about $1.95 million. While our provincial government, administration, and students focus mostly on student savings (it helps when tuition and housing costs continue to rise), open isn’t just about cost savings or even access.
For an open pedagogy project, students in our College of Pharmacy and Nutrition created brochures for community organizations to provide valuable nutrition information for those who may not have access.
Students in Women and Gender Studies have been working on an open pedagogy project. They are building a website where members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community can find information about various supports for them throughout Saskatoon.
Our Faculty Fellowship focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) also included teaching those faculty members about OER and other open educational practices and how to use them to integrate the SDGs into their courses. This was an easy match since the use of OER aligns with several of the SDGs. Our Faculty Fellowship focusing on EDI and Indigenization is now doing the same.
Yes, all of this work helps to save students money (more than $9 million overall at USask), but it also increases their engagement through experiential learning and by making strides to improve students’ sense of belonging.
When OER is used to increase the representation of learners from traditionally marginalized groups, students are more likely to feel like they belong. When OER is used to integrate Indigenous ways of knowing, we improve the chances that Indigenous students and instructors feel like they can learn and work there, and we take needed steps toward reconciliation.
When OER or open pedagogy are used to help learners feel like they can address some of the challeges the world is facing, particularly climate change, which is one of, if not the top, concern learners have these days, they are more engaged.
USask has a lot to celebrate in what I’m unofficially calling the USask Year of Open, and I’m excited, but I’m also troubled by what I’m seeing from many in the open community.
David Wiley, who for a long time, too long was looked at as the Dean of OER, is giving a talk at the University of Regina next month titled: Why Open Education will Become Generative AI Education. The description reads:
For over 25 years, the primary goal of the open education movement has been increasing access to educational opportunities. And from the beginning of the movement the primary tactic for accomplishing this goal has been creating and sharing OER. However, using generative AI is a demonstrably more powerful and effective way to increase access to educational opportunity. Consequently, if we are to remain true to our overall goal, we must begin shifting our focus from OER to generative AI.
This is in addition to the large number of sessions on the schedule for OpenEd 2024 in which presenters will discuss using GenAI to create OER.
Everything I’ve learned about open, everything I’ve ever believed about what the OER movement stands for is the antithesis of what GenAI is and does.
Open is about improving access to education and the lives of learners worldwide, not just for those in privileged countries or communities. GenAI is used to create papers and images for the privileged, harming many of the very people we’ve said open is trying to benefit.
While open aligns with several of the SDGs, GenAI is an environmental nightmare, from the energy needed to run the growing number of servers to the immense amount of freshwater needed to cool them (by the way, the same is true for cryptocurrency).
While open is being used to integrate EDI and Indigenization into curriculum, GenAI, programmed by those of dominant groups, often fails to represent or misrepresents members of marginalized communities. Maha Bali noted in her recent keynote at The Digital Pedagogy Institute that she had asked several GenAI tools to give her examples of terrorist attacks. Almost every single example gave Muslims as the perpetrators.
While open has always called for recognition of the work’s creators and contributors and gratitude for their willingness to share it openly, any such gratitude toward GenAI-created work that was taught on copyrighted works against the copyright holder’s permission will ring hollow.
Taking what isn’t yours to create something new without giving credit, having permission, or considering the impact on others isn’t innovation or acting in the spirit of open. At the least it’s theft, at the worst, It’s colonization.
During my comprehensive exam, a committee member asked me what the difference between OER and Napster was. At the time, that was easy to answer. Most OER was created by authors who willingly released their work with an open license. Napster was the sharing of music without the artist’s permission. If I were asked that question now, it would be a lot harder to answer.
How can something be the future of a moment that has held such promise for bringing positive change to the world, that will instead hasten the advancement of climate change, further disenfranchise the already disenfranchised, and allow us to simply force creators to give up their rights while saying to them, “it’s not really your’s anymore because a machine changed it?”
GenAI may be fun to play with and make some tasks easier, but the cost to the values of open, the planet, marginalized groups, and humanity as a whole are far too great. Those who truly care about the principles of open, the soul of open, need to speak up and say, “no, you don’t get to wash over or destroy the work we’ve done and the great work still to come within the open movement.” If those encouraging the use of GenAI for open or for GenAI to replace open want to play a new game, that’s fine. We can’t stop you, but get off our field.
Thanks for speaking up, Heather. I think AI can be used to create original OER that includes appropriate attribution, but we need to be careful and responsible.
What bothers me about the advertisement of David Wiley’s talk on AI on the CCOpenEd Platform is that Cable couldn’t say whether or not he thinks the talk is good for OER or not.
Dan,
I don’t think that anything created using GenAI can include appropriate attribution. We can’t ignore the source of the information that was used for training the AI. Companies took what wasn’t theirs to take, repackaged it, and now are either selling or giving it away. I also don’t think we can ignore the larger cost of using GenAI (environment, bias, disenfranchisement, etc.).
Bravo Heather.
This is a much needed conversation that is overdue. Looking forward to seeing what unfolds prior to, during, and after David Wiley’s upcoming preso at University of Regina.
You have lit the lamp.
Really like this concise post from you, Heather. It articulates several concerns I’ve had about specific definitions of “open” that are accelerating with seemingly reckless abandon in the AI hype cycle.
I also think it would be fair to ask if Wiley has business interests (or entanglements) with AI-based products, services, companies, or otherwise. I wouldn’t be surprised it there were.
Heather, here’s the type of OER results we’ve been working on using GenAI, specifically, Google Translate, ChatGPT, and a few others:
1. Translate this text (a children’s book in English) into isiXhosa. The result attributes the OER book that was used for the translation via Google Translate.
2. Give me 10 multiple-choice questions and answers about place value aligned to Ghanaian 4th-grade education standards. These are added to an openly licensed Moodle course with an attribution note saying. ‘these problems were generated using GhatGPT and checked for accuracy by ________.’ The resulting OER and others similar are incredibly valuable to Ghanaian teachers and students.
3. We are currently working on a more specialized translation AI tool that is learning Dagbani so that P-3 English literacy resources can be translated into Dagbani, the first language of about 6 million people. Less than a handful of books are printed every year in Dagbani.
Heather, thank you for this post, and for energizing the conversation.
You educated me today. Thank you.
Dan,
Those do sound like uses of GenAI that wouldn’t rely on the use of work that doesn’t already have an open licence, which is good. But how do we balance using GenAI to do something good, with the high costs of using it?
Billy,
I understand where you’re coming from about David’s interests, but this isn’t just about David so I don’t want to get stuck there.
I’ve been to one whole session in life about generative AI and we all generated stories with I forget how many words, “with puns.” . It became *very* apparent to some people there that oh, cats and food were “comfortable” topics for AI. Boy-oh, did it bias towards Very Mainstream Things. Now, the “food invades Venus” prompt got amusing results, especially General Tso’s army… but erm, yea, stereotypes???
I also noticed that … the bias wasn’t so apparent to everybody (ok, more when we pointed it out).
Hello Heather,
Your post expressed many of my concerns about OER and GenAI and how some in the open movement and CC, are unwittingly positioning this marriage between GenAi and OER as inevitable. The result, imho, is an OER movement that benefits the global north.
Dan also makes an important point. Where LLM’s have a sufficiently large text corpus in a vernacular language that is not well captured in educational books, Ai can be used as a mechanism to translate open books from English to isiXhosa (with the assistance of Ai) and a human can verify quality and add a cc license. So once again we are faced with the case of the affordances of technology. Will we use technology uncritically, and let big tech enclose the textbooks production process. Yes, this may address the needs of dominant language speakers. And contribute to the general “enshitification” of the internet, environmental degradation etc while also addressing a real need for textbooks. Or do we look at multiplicity of languages and cultures in the majority world, where many are in need of vernacular language educational materials, so that they can learn to make meaning from text in their own “mother tongue”. The latter (with all due respect to all the efforts of people in the open movement) is a priority and this is where I think we should placing our combined efforts.
Much appreciation, Heather for a critical stand. I’ve been interested in David’s idea of considering how GenAI might make for OER that is less of a fixed entity but feel wary of what honestly looks like adding a new R for Ripping up a few of the other Rs.
This U of R webinar promises to be interesting, and with your stance look at this action here on the prairies! Plus you got Downsed 😉
Alan,
If I got Downsed, I’m probably doing something right. 😉
That reply about Stephen Downes is unwarranted. He rightly challenged your assumptions and arguments. I think it would be fair to respond.