Open Course Frameworks: Lowering the Barriers to OER Adoption

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I’ve been fairly quiet recently about Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded earlier this year with Kim Thanos. Lumen (for short) is where I’m spending my Shuttleworth Fellowship time, with the goal of drastically increasing the use of OER in formal educational settings in order to lower the cost and improve the quality of education.

Today Lumen released its first six Open Course Frameworks. Open Course Frameworks are an idea I am very excited about, because they greatly simplify the process of adopting OER for the average teacher or institution. Open Course Frameworks are:

  • curated collections of OER,
  • mapped to learning outcomes,
  • openly licensed with detailed attribution,
  • organized in a way that looks and feels like an online course,
  • published on open source platforms, and
  • compatible with Lumen’s ImprovOER continuous quality improvement service (which we are publicly showing for the first time at InstructureCon in a few weeks).

In keeping with Lumen’s focus on supporting the most at-risk students, our first set of Open Course Frameworks is a developmental education sequence, comprised of:

The first four courses are published in the open source Canvas platform by Instructure. The math courses are available in the open source MyOpenMath platform. Both platforms make it easy for you to make your own copy of a course that you can extensively customize (or not) and then teach for free. And of course, because the courses are openly licensed you can pull the materials out and teach them elsewhere, too.

Recent surveys have shown that faculty and administration believe that open educational resources can save students money and potentially improve student success. But the same surveys show that the biggest barriers to OER adoption are the time and effort it takes faculty to find resources, vet them for quality, and align them with course outcomes. OCFs solve these problems.

Lumen is adamant that these Open Course Frameworks are now and always will be freely available. We do not – and will not ever – charge for access to these materials. Lumen acts as stewards over the OCFs as a service to the education community, in much the same way an open source software project works. In fact, the OCFs we published today were developed collaboratively with faculty members from the nine different institutions participating in the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. We will be releasing updated versions of the OCFs over time as additional faculty use and help improve them. And these six are just the beginning – we will release 25 more OCFs over the coming year, with the next five coming in July.

I’d love your feedback on this idea and your help spreading the word….

Be Awesome Instead

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Cole Camplese, for whom I have great respect, recently wrote a wonderful essay about the negative response to MOOCs from many voices in the open ed space:

Just a couple of years ago we were all trying so hard to get people to accept the idea that open access to learning was a great thing. Hell, some of the best conversations I’ve ever had in this field have centered around the ideals of openness, but now that the MOOC thing has happened the same people who built rallying calls for more open access to learning are now rejecting this movement. Why? Because it is driven by corporations trying to make money? Because it isn’t really open? Because the press isn’t giving a few people the credit they believe they deserve?

I’ve had a few great conversations with Cole in the past, and as I read his piece my planet-sized ego quietly suggested that I was one of the people Cole is disappointed in. And it’s true that I went through a brief phase of disappointment that I was written out of the history of MOOCs. But I feel like I successfully got over that years ago – before the so-called xMOOCs ever hit the scene.

I try very hard to apply the motto “There’s no limit to the amount of good you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit” when I can think clearly enough to do so. Would I rather spend my time making a difference in the world, or making sure people understood my role in the early history of MOOCs? It’s a stupid, embarrassingly self-aggrandizing question to even have to ask. That humbled me for a while.

And then, just as I was overcoming these petty feelings of being ignored, the xMOOCs emerged. At this point, I moved into my “righteous indignation” phase. No, MOOCs are not open – not in the same sense that I’ve been fighting to help people understand that word for the last 15 years. With the xMOOCs, almost literally over night, the primary effort of my professional career seemed to be undercut. The term “open” entered the popular mind meaning something very different, something severely watered down from the meaning I (and others, but this post is about me) had been working so diligently to establish. My feelings were hurt yet again.

The immaturity of those feelings was thrown back in my face by Cole’s post. For the last 48 hours, the question that has haunted me has been:

Why do those who used to push forward now push back?

And I find that I must ask myself the terrible question again. Would I rather spend my time making a difference in the world, or spending my time railing against MOOCs because they aren’t really “open”? And I find myself humbled again. And the little voice inside me says, “suck it up, Wiley. Yes, MOOCs have overrun the popular imagination. Yes, they are founded upon a severely impoverished definition of ‘open.’ So what are you going to do about it? Complain? Really? How about spending your time figuring out how to leverage MOOCs to move the ‘open’ agenda forward, rather than spending your time whining about how MOOCs have derailed it?”

So, I ask, how can the popularity of MOOCs be used to move the open agenda forward?

Whether you referring to me or not, Cole, I owe you a sincere thank you for this terrific piece of writing. As my kids say, “some people just need a high five, in the head, with a folding chair.” Your essay was the chair to the head for me. Time to follow Neil Patrick Harris’ excellent advice:


Time to be awesome instead.

I’ll share some thoughts on how the popularity of MOOCs can be used to move the open agenda forward later this evening.

MOOCs and Regifting

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Jim Groom briefly but insightfully runs the numbers on the Georgia Tech / Udacity deal:

Apart from all sorts of misgivings about Georgia Tech’s MOOCish Master’s program in Computer Science, I want to take a moment to do the math. You charge $7000 a year tuition with the idea you’ll have a 2-year cohort of 10,000 students. If you add that up, you get $140 million. That’s massive, especially when you’re only hiring eight new faculty to educate those 10,000 students. Follow the money, this is no joke, the profits are huge even after you split 40% of the kitty with Udacity.

Those are some truly staggering numbers. And just as easy as that, MOOCs are simply the “new” elearning – purportedly less expensive than on-campus instruction, purportedly just as effective, and with the promise of thousands of new students flocking in from around the world driving unimaginable levels of new revenue.

It’s like a national regifting of the 1990s hype around elearning with a giant MOOC-colored bow on top.