Notes for my talk at the University of Oregon

A Very Brief History of Open Education

1840s: Distance Education eliminates time and place requirements

1970s: Open University of the United Kingdom eliminates most admissions requirements

1990s-2000s: Open content, then OpenCourseWare, open educational resources, and open textbooks eliminate registration requirements for access to course content

Examples: MIT OCW, Flat World Knowledge, OpenStax

2000s: Open Teaching, then MOOCs, eliminate registration requirements for access to teacher and peer interaction and feedback, as well as credentials

Examples: University of the People, Peer 2 Peer University, Change11, Udacity, Coursera, EdX

2010s: Open Badges eliminate technical and legal barriers to using credentials to gain employment or additional education

Examples: Badges displayed on my blog, badges awarded in my IPT692R class, Degreed, Learning Jar

How Many Licks Does It Take to Get To The Center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

How Many Layers Do You Have To Penetrate To Get a Job Via Formal Post-secondary Education?

Admission – fees and past academic success
Registration – tuition, fees, and course availability
Attendance – being present at a prescribed place and time
Verification – signature and fee for access to an official transcript

The historical trend of open education, and its future path forward, is the systematic removal of all barriers to educational opportunity.

Open Access and New Metrics

Academic publishing is horrifically, and arguably irreparably, broken
The Truckers Tale

Faculty are complicit because they keep signing copyright agreements
Administrations are complicit because they keep rewarding (or punishing) faculty for signing copyright agreements (or not)

Reporting the impact factor of a journal in which you publish is a PROXY for the actual impact of your article

Can you imagine a highly cited article appearing in a low IF journal? Can you imagine an article that never gets cited being published in a high IF journal? What is our tolerance for Type I and Type II error here? How concerned are we about over or underestimating the impact of our work?

Why settle for a PROXY measure of your impact when you can have a DIRECT measure (e.g., Google Scholar)?

Buy One, Get One – Pizza in Ohio, and the 98% / 2% Contribution

So What Happens Now?

Discussion

I’ve been greatly looking forward to Stephen’s explanation of his previous statement that his lifelong goal has been to work toward “reducing and eventually eliminating the learned dependence on the expert and the elite – not as a celebration of anti-intellectualism, but as a result of widespread and equitable access to expertise.” I questioned what that meant in an earlier blog post, and Stephen has now responded. I think I finally understand. Here are the salient points from the response:

What I am addressing with remarks like “we should not depend on the expert” is the stance that ought to be taken by the learner with respect to the learning material extant on the web and elsewhere. And I mean this two two distinct but related ways:

- first, the learner should not accept the report of the expert uncritically…
- second, the learner should resist the characterization of certain sources, certain perspectives, and certain content types *as expert*…

What is significant, to my mind, is that by being able to adopt such a critical stance with respect to expertise, learners are not only much better able to vet for themselves the reliability and authenticity of a piece of expert advice, they also acquire the capacity to look beyond a smaller set of ‘trusted sources’.

So, a bit anticlimactically, our whole conversation seems to be a commentary on learners’ critical information facility and a warning about the dangers of blindly trusting experts. I agree, completely.

That said, this part of his response still bends my brain:

We should be like the educator whose primary interest is in teaching people to read, so they do not need to come to us at all, so there is not only no need for a hall and for fees to be paid, but no need for our particular expertise, because everyone can have it.

There’s a traveling-back-in-time-to-kill-your-own-grandfather quality to this thinking. It’s true that we can teach for the purpose of helping someone never need to depend on a teacher again. But can we say that we never needed teachers in the first place after a teacher helps them develop their expertise? And if it turns out that the person was benefited by their interactions with the teacher, wouldn’t the next generation of learners benefit similarly? I just don’t understand this desire to shut the doors on formal education as soon as we can. Is formal education evil somehow? I don’t think so.

Ok, I came really close to understanding…