April 17, 2020 - Slides presented at the 2020 eLearning Consortium of Colorado Virtual Conference: http://bit.ly/elccschedule Access the Live Slides Presentation: http://bit.ly/oerblockchain Session Abstract: "OER is a progressive product that signals the decentralization of education and academic publishing, and thus supports educators' academic freedom to create innovative teaching materials. Instead of using textbooks by traditional publishers, educators can author OERs that reflect their disciplinary training and teaching philosophy. This session will present a design future in which blockchain technology will enable educators to decentralize, author, track, and protect their copyright of OERs."

1. OER + Blockchain Technology
for Decentralization of
Academic Publishing
Sherry Jones | 2020 eLearning Consortium of Colorado

2. HELLO!
I am Sherry Jones
★ Philosophy + Games Studies SME Instructor, Rocky
Mountain College of Art + Design.
★ Steering Committee Board Member, International
Game Developers Association (IGDA) - Learning,
Games + Education.
★ Judge, Software Information Industry Association
(SIIA) CODiE Awards - Virtual Reality, Augmented
Reality, Games + Gamification in Education.
★ Officer, IEEE Computer, Information Theory +
Robotics Society.
★ Twitter @ autnes
★ Bio @ http://bit.ly/sherryjonesbio
★ Slides @ http://bit.ly/oerblockchain
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3. Purpose of Presentation
▰ Demonstrate Importance of OERs to student success.
▰ Samples of OER works.
▰ Problems with the future of OER use, publication, and
maintenance (beyond grants and other monetary
compensation).
▰ Proposal to use blockchain technology to secure OERs.
▰ Design future with blockchain technology to provide
incentives for faculty and students to continue to use,
publish, and maintain OERs.

4. 1.
My Research
Interests
OER, Blockchain Technology, Smart
Cities/Playable Cities, Ethics of Technology

5. My History with OERs
▰ OER Advocate - I have been authoring OER textbooks, courses, and
materials for the last 10 years.
▰ Passion for OERs - Frustration with wide range of quality in textbooks;
desire to share innovative works with colleagues; concerns about rising
textbook cost for students.
▰ All of my materials are published online, carry CC licenses that require
attribution (aimed for recognition, not compensation).
▰ The U.S. Dept. of Education invited me to participate in the 2019 + 2020
Summits on Education Blockchains, held in Washington D.C., to discuss
policies on using blockchain technology to create digital identities and
render educational data secure, accessible, and portable with
zero-knowledge proofs.

6. 2.
Samples of My OER
Materials
Multi-platform publications

7. rgMOOC: An OER Project (2013)
▰ OER Project - rgMOOC (2013), formally known as “Rhetoric and Composition: The
Persuasive Power of Video Games as Paratexts,” was a globally open access English
Composition II MOOC; the project was funded by the Colorado Immersive and
Game-Based Learning Initiative.
▰ OER Artifacts - All instructors and students made artifacts were published as OERs
and shared via Canvas LMS, web 2.0 etherpads, social media discussion forums,
digital portfolios, Twitter, Youtube, and LOR.
▰ OER Project Design Logic - 1) Enable instructors to share their materials with the
world; 2) Enable college and instructors/students maintain co-ownership over CC IP
of all artifacts; 3) Enable students to add their rgMOOC artifacts to personal online
portfolios.

8. rgMOOC OER Artifact:
Mightybell
● Asynchronous weekly discussions
with alternate reality game (ARG)
style Youtube videos were
published on the Mightybell.
● Using avatar names (to protect
privacy), students watched and
answered questions publicly on
Mightybell.
● All Mightybell discussions were
published as OERs.

9. rgMOOC OER
Artifact:
Twitter
● Synchronous weekly Q & As,
in the style of alternate
reality games (ARG) were
held on Twitter.
● Instructors, students, and
anyone on the web,
communicated via avatar
handles (to protect privacy).
● All Twitter prompts and
responses were open
access.

10. rgMOOC OER Artifact:
Titanpad
● A synchronous 2 hours
collaborative essay writing
competition was held on
Titanpad.
● 14-16 students per group
co-authored multiple Titanpad
essays.
● Students collectively published
their works as OERs with
rgMOOC attribution.

11. rgMOOC OER
Artifact:
Pathbrite
● All rgMOOC video tutorials
were published as OERs
on Pathbrite.
● Pathbrite served as the
library or the “secret vault”
of rgMOOC.

12. Current Location of My OER Materials
▰ Slideshare @autnes
▰ Pathbrite @autnes
▰ Youtube @autnes
▰ Eternal Polymath (Personal Site)
▰ MERLOT (OER repository)

13. 3.
OER Problems
Lessons Learned

14. Problems with rgMOOC OERs
▰ OERs on LOR are not open access (OA) - OERs published within the
college LOR system were hidden from public view (not OA according to
grant requirement).
▰ OERs published on the web lacked permanence (OERs were shared on
multiple platforms that can disappear or change).
▰ Creative Commons IP was not always recognized; those who
borrowed rgMOOC materials did not provide proper CC attribution.
▰ Problem with documenting IP of collaborated OERs created by over
700 participants. Who owns the material?

15. Problems with OER Use, Creation, and
Maintenance
▰ For some, there is little incentive (other than temporary grants) to use
or create OERs. Once the grants run dry, OERs can disappear.
▰ Currently, institutions do not recognize OERs for tenure, since OERs do
not satisfy institutions’ research requirements.
▰ Updating and maintaining OERs is more difficult than producing OERs.
Content can age and databases can disappear.

16. Problems with OER IP and Authorship
▰ Extensive publications of OERs do not ensure IP recognition. e.g.
Discovered that some of my OER materials were used, copied, remixed,
or sold without attribution.
▰ Enforcing CC licenses is difficult. Creative Commons does not have the
technology to track online materials that carry CC licenses.
▰ Authorship of OERs is problematic. Do the faculty have sole ownership
over authored OERs, or do their institutions? Do faculty and institutions
share 50/50 authorship rights? What if a faculty teaches at multiple
institutions? Can students publish OERs? Do the students own IP of their
own projects, dissertations, etc. to publish their works with CC licenses?

17. 4.
OER + Blockchain
Technology
A Proposal and Utopic Vision for OERs

18. Proposal: Use Blockchain to Record and Maintain
OER IP (1 of 3)
▰ What is Blockchain? Blockchain is a
decentralized public ledger technology that
powers Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
The technology can be used to created
distributed databases.
▰ What does Blockchain do? Aka as a
“trustless layer,” blockchain saves
information in a “block” that is added to
the end of a chain of records. A copy of a
blockchain is saved on each node of a
network. Nodes verify and keep records
permanent. Image Source: 101 Blockchains

19. Proposal: Use Blockchain to Record and Maintain
OER IP (2 of 3)
▰ Decentralize educational data using blockchain. The technology supports
the“decentralization” of information, meaning that information is not stored in a
central database, but co-maintained by all nodes in the network. Eliminating
chances of fraud and cybersecurity threats.
▰ Blockchain can track OERs and IPs for both universities and educators/students.
▰ Institutions may recognize OERs as evidence of scholarship via tracking. By
being able to track the number of uses or remixes of OER materials, institutions
may consider the tracking data as evidence of “teaching impact,” which may
become part of tenure recognition or teaching scholarship recognition
▰ Faculty and students can self-publish OERs (co-own OER IPs with institutions).

20. Proposal: Use Blockchain to Record and Maintain
OER IP (3 of 3)
▰ Blockchain In Education? The U.S. Department of Education is currently
promoting institutions to develop blockchain based solutions to save all
institutional records, including transcripts, competencies, essays, etc.
▰ Blockchain Supports IP? - Melanie Swan, founder of Institute for Blockchain
Studies and affiliate scholar of IEET, predicts that “blockchain could replace or
supplement all existing IP management systems” (Swan, 2015, VII, Blockchain:
Blueprint for a New Economy).
▰ Blockchain for OERs? Since blockchain will help maintain OER permanence and
traceability, it eliminate the need to save OERs on centralized databases, such as
LOR.

21. Blockchain
Technology in
Banking
Illustrated
Image Source: Forbes (2015)

22. 5.
A Design Future For OER +
Blockchain Technology
Incentives for faculty to continue OER use and publications

23. A Design Future: What OER Data Points Should
Blockchain Track on Internet 2.0? (1 of 4)
Incentives for faculty to continue to use, create, and
maintain OERs if blockchain tracks granular data:
▰ Authors + supporting institutions, contact
information (if available).
▰ Author’s education, accomplishments, scholarly
influences (for ethos building).
▰ Originary + modified publication dates.
▰ # of views, downloads, shares, and embeds.
▰ # of remixed versions.
▰ Users who used, modified, or remixed (proof of
disciplinary importance).
▰ Location of users (proof of global outreach).
▰ Evaluations of OER materials.
▰ Evaluations of the Evaluators of OER materials.

24. A Design Future: What OER Data Points Should
Blockchain Track on Internet 2.0? (2 of 4)
Design Future Implications:
▰ OERs can be important to a students’
educational portfolio or self-sovereign identity
wallet. e.g. Employers can examine which open
textbooks a student has studied to understand
the student’s disciplinary influences.
▰ OERs can also document an author’s/faculty’s
scholarly influences that can influence the
quality of their OER publications. E.g. Faculty is
trained in rhetoric studies, and writes English
Composition textbooks with a rhetoric focus.
▰ OERs can build an author’s/faculty’s credibility,
especially if the OER is used by notable
institutions and professors.

25. A Design Future: What OER Data Points Should
Blockchain Track on Internet 2.0? (3 of )
Design Future Implications:
▰ The number of times an OER book has been
viewed, adopted, modified, shared, embedded,
or remixed can speak to the quality of the OER,
and thus, builds the author’s reputation.
▰ The user’s own credibility can also help
determine the OER author’s reputation.
▰ OERs can prove the scale of a faculty’s global
outreach (based on user location), which in turn
builds the faculty’s institution’s reputation.
▰ OERs can be evaluated not only by those in the
faculty’s institutions, but by academics
worldwide. This is a grounds-up approach to
creating quality OERs with mass evaluations.

26. A Design Future: What OER Data Points Should
Blockchain Track on Internet 2.0? (4 of 4)
▰ Bonus: We can also tokenize a student’s physical project, such as a science
experiment, and save the token on the blockchain. We can save both virtual and
physical data on the blockchain, using virtual tokens to represent real world
objects. Tokenized project can be shared with employers.
▰ e.g. How Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Prada Can Use Blockchain Technology (2020).
▰ e.g. Mattereum for digitizing all physical goods.

27. Further Readings on Blockchain and Education
(2020). Blockchain in Education. Office of Educational Technology.
Jones, Sherry (2018). A Solution to OER Publication Resistance: Using Blockchain Technology to Protect Scholar Copyright (2018).
The International Journal of Open Educational Resources
Cavanagh, Sean (2016, March 17). Can K-12 Schools Take Advantage of Blockchain Tech? Government Technology.
Levin, Doug (2016, March 10). 10 Things to Know about the Future of Blockchain in Education. EdTech Strategies.
McGonigal, Jane (2016, March 9). How to Think and Learn Like a Futurist. SXSW 2016. Keynote Presentation.
Melendez, Steven (2015, December 23). MIT’s New Blockchain Project Enigma Wants to Let You Share Your Data On Your Terms.
Fast Company.
Mok, Kimberly (2015, December). How One School is Using Bitcoin Blockchain to Authenticate Degrees. The New Stack.
Ravisankar, Vivek (2015, November 1). Blockchain and the Decentralization of CS Education. Forbes.
(2016, February 22). Sony Global Education Develops Technology Using Blockchain for Open Sharing of Academic Proficiency and
Progress Records. Sony Global Education.
Swan, Melanie (2015). Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy. 1st Ed. O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Watters, Audrey (2016, February 25). Blockchain for Education: A Research Project. Hack Education.

28. THANKS!
I am Sherry Jones
★ Philosophy + Games Studies SME Instructor, Rocky
Mountain College of Art + Design.
★ Steering Committee Board Member, International
Game Developers Association (IGDA) - Learning,
Games + Education.
★ Judge, Software Information Industry Association
(SIIA) CODiE Awards - Virtual Reality, Augmented
Reality, Games + Gamification in Education.
★ Officer, IEEE Computer, Information Theory +
Robotics Society.
★ Twitter @ autnes
★ Bio @ http://bit.ly/sherryjonesbio
★ Slides @ http://bit.ly/oerblockchain
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29. CREDITS
Special thanks to all the people who made and
released these awesome resources for free:
▰ Presentation template by SlidesCarnival
▰ Photographs by Unsplash
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