Just heard from my friend Bobbi Kurshan, the Executive Director of Curriki, that she will be leaving that post on March 1st. I wish her well.
Curriki will be looking for a new ED shortly and will very much continue to stay active in the OER space (much like Hewlett has continued to do after Mike, Cathy, and Phoenix left).
So, unless I’m missing someone, the list of OER leaders who have moved on in the last few years now includes:
Mike, Cathy, and Phoenix, from the Hewlett Foundation
Ira and Chris, from the Mellon Foundation
Ahrash, from CC Learn
Bobbi, from Curriki
Anne, from MIT OCW
And I suppose I should add myself, from COSL. Perhaps it’s not a big deal to see folks moving on, but it seems somehow significant to me. Inasmuch as the field continues to live and thrive through these leadership changes, we demonstrate that open education is not a radical separatist group led by a few charismatic individuals. Instead we demonstrate that open education is stable, steady, on-going effort to increase access to appropriate, high-quality educational opportunity to everyone worldwide.
Since my department at BYU has committed itself to open access publishing I’ve been able to get serious about putting my published writing in the university’s institutional repository called ScholarsArchive. So far I have 12 pieces in the collection, which are guaranteed to stay at these URLs for “a very long time” since the library is curating the repository. I’m happy as a clam that these pieces have permanent homes and that these pieces are freely available for the general public.
If you haven’t seen the published writing I’ve been doing (much of it with students) in the last few years, the majority of it is gathered on the David Wiley page in BYU’s ScholarsArchive. The articles include:
- Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
- Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network
- The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources
- The Open High School of Utah: Openness, Disaggregation, and the Future of Schools
- Psychologism and American Instructional Technology
- Open Source, Openness, and Higher Education
- Open Educational Resources: Enabling universal education
- Overcoming the Limitations of Learning Objects
- Collecting, Organizing, and Managing Resources for Teaching Educational Games the Wiki Way
- The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Christian Higher Education
- A Unified Design Framework for Learning Objects and Educational Discourse
- Using Weblogs in Scholarship and Teaching
(PS. The system the library is using does not currently produce RSS feeds, so I’ve hacked together a Yahoo Pipe to produce a barebones RSS feed. The feed simply gives the names of all the articles on the site with a link to the main page. Hopefully a future update will make it easier to syndicate this information here and elsewhere.)
Our good friend Cathy Casserly, former Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, as just been elected to the Creative Commons Board of Directors. While there were already people on the CC board who cared about OER, the addition of Cathy means that the Board now has one of the most articulate OER champions around in their ranks. This is great news! Congrats to Cathy, CC, and anyone who cares about OER!
Coverage at:
First, Mike and Cathy left the Hewlett Foundation, where they had provided incredible vision and incubation support for early OER efforts. (While Hewlett is still running its OER program there didn’t seem to be many OER-related grants made in 2009.) Then, a few weeks ago, I blogged about the departure of Ira and Chris from the Mellon Foundation, caused by the RIT program being merged into another program, where they had also provided vision and support for open educational software.
Today, we read of another “merger” of programs – and top leadership exit – at Creative Commons:
We’ve decided that we can best support the open education and OER communities by focusing our resources and support where we are strongest and provide the most unique value… Such changes mean that some of the activities and, sadly, personnel cannot be integrated successfully with the new structure… In this current transition, Ahrash Bissell, the Executive Director of CC Learn, has left the organization.
Has left – past tense. Apparently, surpassing their year end public fundraising goal (with $533,898) wasn’t enough resource to keep ccLearn going.
I know some well-known ed tech bloggers will comment “good riddance,” claiming that organizations are inherently evil anyway, and that the space is better off without them “investing in” and “supporting” the work of open education (which is best done by a lone individual living off-grid on a rural Appalachian subsistence farm). But does no one else see an “interesting” pattern here?
More on the OER Transition
I’m happy to point to this comment by Vic Vuchic from the Hewlett Foundation on a previous post I wrote about what seems to be happening with OER. It’s a great perspective (that he is uniquely qualified to provide) that warmed my heart a bit. Some highlights:
So from Vic’s point of view, the field of OER is in transition, and definitely for the better! This is a great perspective that I’m happy to hear.
Vic also writes, “Just to put a a stop to the rumors, Hewlett is not shutting down OER, and it is very much a part of what the education program is doing moving forward.” I re-read my previous post and I don’t think I implied anywhere that Hewlett was shutting down its OER program – just that funding seems to have slowed down. Vic indicates that Hewlett’s and other foundations’s endowments are down 40%, so that makes sense.
Vic’s perspective of what’s happening as the field transitions is good news for everyone who cares about OER.