The RIP in 2017 only happens if the field does nothing to produce diagnostic, adaptive OER that support student learning at least as well as the systems produced by big publishers.

Don’t write off OER yet – that is, unless you pan on laying back and doing nothing. I’m certainly committed to continue working for access to the highest quality educational materials for everyone. You should be, too.

In my previous post I asked, “If video-based, multimedia-rich, interactive textbooks are only worth $14.99 to the big publishers, what are relatively static, text-based books with a few photos worth to them?” Think about that for a minute. Sure, there are “traditional” OER textbooks available for free. But when you could have video, multimedia, simulations, and interactive assessments for $15, why would you take a traditional book (whether print or video) even if it is free?

Secretary Duncan’s Digital Learning Day challenge that the entire US move away from print to digital curriculum by 2017 may or may not be taken up by every K-12 and post secondary school in the country. But it will be taken up by many of them. How will our beloved OER (90% text, 9% still images, 1% video) compete against what the publishers are turning out then, especially if the prices stay in the teens?

It reminds me of the early days of the web. Back in the early 90s, anyone who could figure out the View Source command could make webpages. And we all did. But in the mid/late 90s when somebody figured out how to use Perl to make Apache talk to MYSQL, the web changed forever. Sure, folks were free to keep making the same old dull, non-interactive websites they always had. But no one did. Ask yourself: Of the websites that you use every day, how many of them have a database on the backend? Answer: Every single one, I bet. Overnight the whole web went the way of the programmer, and the expertise required to meaningfully participate (in the sense of Program or Be Programmed) rose dramatically.

The publishers want to make sure the same thing happens to content.

You have to admit that some of the things the publishers are working on are both cooler and better than almost everything that currently exists in the OER space. Can you name a single OER project that does assessment at all (and I don’t mean PDFs of quizzes)? Can you name one that does diagnostic assessment or handles mastery in any meaningful way? We’ve narrowed the entire field of OER down to CMU OLI, Khan Academy, and possibly Thrun’s new stuff. Now, can you think of one of these three that openly licenses their assessments and the engines they run them on? No.

Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen.

Because this stuff costs so much to do, if no one steps up to the funding plate the entire field is at serious risk. Much has been written about 2012 being “the year of OER.” Let’s hope it’s not the year OER peaks. We need brains, energy, and funding on the next gen OER/OAR problem NOW.

In the popular framing of the problem, the value of a college degree is your ability to convert it into employment. (This is not a rant about the extra-employment value of education. If those were the droids you’re looking for, you can go about your business. Move along.) I simply want to point out that the convertability of a degree into employment is an artificial construct. Degrees are the gateway to employment only because the companies doing the employing say they are. But the universe doesn’t have to work this way.

For example. Imagine a Job Description that reads “BS in Computer Science Required.” Now imagine that same job description reading “Basic experience in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Hadoop Required; Coursework Accepted.”

There are very practical reasons why employers ask for degrees rather than courses. One of these is the fundamentally broken state of the transcript. Many employers (understandably) won’t trust an unofficial transcript. However, employers also aren’t willing to pay $15 for every potential employee applying for a job so they can get an official transcript. Likewise, no job candidate is willing to pay $15 for every job they apply to so that potential employers can see an official transcript. So the transcript, which contains much finer grained data than “degree: yes/no”, and would actually be more useful to employers, is essentially useless as things currently stand. Hence companies’ reliance on the degree, and one of the reasons degree completion is the gateway to employment.

The typical approach to the college completion problem is trying to make sure everyone graduates. But one way to think different about solving the college completion problem would be to jailbreak the transcript so that any and all college experience could be evaluated and valued by employers. This would simultaneously let employers make better hiring decisions AND help people who have some college experience (whether or not they completed their degree) convert their college experience into appropriate employment. After all, if I really need a ML/AI/Hadoop person, what do I care if they had to drop out of school after 2.5 years as long as they have the coursework I need them to have?

I’m working with some friends on implementing this idea of jailbreaking the transcript and extending it (badges interleaved with courses on your meta-transcript, anyone?). More on this to come.

And this was great – in the Bloomberg editorial they discuss the problems with Apple’s recent announcement about textbooks on the iPad and why the State of Utah’s approach is more promising.

It’s fairly clear from the Jobs biography and the publishers’ behavior that the original plan was: (1) Apple would hire some rockstar PhDs who would write textbooks (2) Apple would own the textbooks, and (3) Apple would give away the books for free in order to sell more iPads.

This apparently kindled a great fear in the publishers, who consequently agreed to create video- and multimedia-rich, moderately interactive textbooks and sell them for only $14.99.

Now, if video-based, multimedia-rich, interactive textbooks are only worth $14.99 to the big publishers, what are relatively static, text-based books with a few photos worth to them? Answer: The Apple event was the big publishers’ public announcement that they are ceding the traditional textbook market to OER creators and others. Oh, they’ll continue to try to sell the books, but only in the way that a basketball team down 35 points plays out the last three minutes of the game. OER creators have won the “race to the bottom” on the price of open textbooks. As we have shown in Utah, when you don’t have to pay an IP royalty high school-level open textbooks can be printed and shipped at ridiculously low cost – $5 per book last fall and $4 per book this coming fall. And given the statewide announcement in Utah yesterday, plus Reuven’s bill in Washington, etc., we can now “call it” in the same way that elections are called after sufficient trends are evident in the data: 2012 is the year big K-12 publishers gave up on traditional textbooks.

For a number of years, the big publishers have used the price-as-proxy-for-quality argument that says “you get what you pay for” to fight the insurgence of open textbooks. However, when they’re selling their own top-of-the-line multimedia books for under $15, they cut this argument out from under themselves.

But aren’t $15 publisher books a threat to open textbooks (if their primary benefit is low cost)? Not at all, for three reasons. First, the new iBooks system is apparently architected to require the school / district / state to purchase a new copy of each book for each child. $15 x the 7 year cycle on which we replace textbooks in Utah and the $15 book is actually significantly more expensive than (over 130% the price of) the $80 books our schools use now. Second, did I mention you need a $500 iPad to use the book on? Third, low cost is only one of many benefits of open textbooks.

The iBooks Author EULA also works in favor of open textbooks. If you want to sell your iBooks Author created book, the only channel you are allowed to sell it through is the iBookstore. Period. The slow rate of purchase of $500 iPads in budget-strapped schools, combined with the sales channel lock-in, combined with Apple capping prices at $14.99, combined with Apple taking a cut of your revenue when you sell through their store will be enough to make many commercial outfits think twice about distributing their books for the iPad at all. However, if you give your book away for free, say, under a CC license, then you can distribute it for free through the iBookstore and any other channels you wish. The iBooks Author EULA actually creates a very strange commercial-book-hostile / open-book-friendly environment.

Anyway, all this to say that the Apple announcement is great news for open textbook advocates. The publishers have validated our argument that very inexpensive books can still be high quality by pricing their own books under $15, but they have still managed to price themselves out of the market through their protectionism (forced repurchase every year) and lock-in on the $500 iPad platform. The whole thing is a capital w Win for open textbooks advocates and everyone else who cares about affordability.

The Utah State Office of Education announced that (1) it will be supporting the development of Utah-specific open textbooks for all secondary language arts, mathematics, and science courses, and (2) that the USOE recommends that all schools across the state consider these open textbooks for adoption in their secondary language arts, mathematics, and science courses for this fall (2012). The math and science books will be remixes of CK-12 materials (as per our existing pilot program), while the Language Arts books will be produced locally. The Hewlett Foundation is providing partial funding.

Yep.

This potentially impacts all 275,000 6th-12th graders in the state of Utah. The cost savings will be astronomical, but I don’t have exact figures yet. More on that in the days to come. My team and I will continue to research the impact on learning outcomes and the actual cost savings associated with the move, as we have with the pilot program the past two years.

The full text of the release is below. This is a historic day for Utah students, schools, and taxpayers. It’s also a historic day for open education. Congratulations to everyone involved.

= = = = =

January 25, 2012

For Immediate Release

Contact:
Sydnee Dickson, Teaching and Learning director
801-538-7739 :: sydnee.dickson@schools.utah.gov

Utah State Office of Education to Create Open Textbooks

SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah State of Office of Education (USOE) today announced it will develop and support open textbooks in the key curriculum areas of secondary language arts, science, and mathematics. USOE will encourage districts and schools throughout the state to consider adopting these textbooks for use beginning this fall.

Open textbooks are textbooks written and synthesized by experts, vetted by peers, and made available online for free access, downloading, and use by anyone. Open textbooks can also be printed through print-on-demand or other printing services for settings in which online use is impossible or impractical. In earlier pilot programs, open textbooks have been printed and provided to more than 3,800 Utah high school science students at a cost of about $5 per book, compared to an average cost of about $80 for a typical high school science textbook.

“Utah’s open textbooks are a great use of technology,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Larry K. Shumway. “Texts get into classrooms quickly and can be updated as needed rather than on a publishing schedule – something that’s particularly important in science. The open textbook also adds to Utah’s reputation as the most cost-efficient school system in the country. This is a fantastic way to get the latest textbooks into the hands of Utah’s nearly 600,000 public school students.”

“We’re thrilled that the State of Utah is encouraging school districts to consider adopting open textbooks,” said Barbara Chow, Education Programs director at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which helped fund the project. “At a time when education budgets are under increasing stress, digital technology in the form of open textbooks now offers the potential to save school systems millions of dollars.”

Later this spring the Utah State Office of Education will invite all districts and charter schools across the state to attend informational meetings and professional development designed to help open textbook adoptions succeed.

The decision to pursue open textbooks at scale comes after two years of successful open textbook pilots led by David Wiley of Brigham Young University’s David O. McKay School of Education. Each pilot was conducted by the BYU-Public School Partnership in partnership with the Utah State Office of Education. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided funding. Mathematics and science textbooks will be based on books originally published by the CK12 Foundation, a not-for-profit organization based in California founded with the mission to produce free and open source K-12 materials aligned to state curriculum.

In new research soon to be published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Wiley and his colleagues found that Utah high school students learn the same amount of science in classes using the $5 open textbooks as they do in classes using the $80 traditional textbooks.

… Friedrich List, famous German political economist in the 19th century, who was actually borrowing from Andrew Hamilton, called it “kicking away the ladder.” First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away those procedures so that other people can’t do it….

This book is an adaptation of Project Management from Simple to Complex written by Russell Darnall and John Preston and generously published under an open license by Flat World Knowledge. The book you are now reading is a work in progress. If you are interested in contributing to this version of the book, please contact David Wiley at Brigham Young University.

So how did the REVISE / REMIX work? Students in IPT 682 took the text of the Flat World Knowledge book as their starting point. Then they:

• Tore out the examples in the book, which were previously about international business situations, and replaced them with instructional design examples,
• Tore out the photos from the book, which were previously (c) and used by permission, and replaced them with openly licensed and properly attributed photos (mainly from Flickr),
• Shot three video interviews with practicing instructional design project managers and cut these up into topical pieces which now appear inline at the beginning of each chapter, and
• Created interactive, mastery-check assessments (and the platform to deliver them!) and embedded these directly at the end of each section of the book. Small icons in the table of contents turn green when you’ve passed the mastery checks.

Big kudos to the IPT 682 students! This is awesome work they can be very proud of. Please consider adopting this book for your class and / or submitting improvements and corrections.

7x – The internet. Data can be routed from computer to computer. The cost of copying and distributing content begins its drop toward zero.

8x – Free software. The data that can be routed from computer to computer, including software source code, can be licensed in a way that guarantees users are free to tinker with and redistribute it.

9x – The web. The link is born (apologies to Nelson), and documents can be connected to one another.

9x – Courses go online. Syllabi and readings appear on faculty personal pages. Homework submission over email. The LMS will soon follow.

98 – Open source. Free software moves from the philosophical (software “should” be free) to the pragmatic (“things work better when source code is liberally licensed”). Several non-FSF approaches to sharing are brought under a common umbrella (Apache, BSD, etc.).

98 – Open content. Open licensing moves beyond software to all copyrightable works – photos, music, videos, and writings – including all forms of educational content. While the cost of copying and redistributing syllabi, readings, etc. has been approaching zero since the inception of the internet, there is now a legal way to leverage this technical capability.

0x – Blogs and wikis. Blogs democratize online publishing – anyone who can get to an internet-connected computer has a worldwide audience at no cost. Wikis drastically decrease the complexities involved in collaborative writing.

01 – Creative Commons – The rickety open content licenses are replaced by solid legal documents with better branding and a more capable, charismatic leader. The fledgling open content movement takes off.

02 – MIT OCW – MIT commits to publish much of the materials used in its classroom instruction as open content using a Creative Commons license.

04 – Open teaching (aka Wiley wiki model). Distribution of syllabi and readings via an open wiki, which the world (including students) can read and edit. Assignment submission by public blog posting, which the world (including other students) can read and comment on. Interaction and discussion between on-campus / registered students, off-campus / unregistered students, and faculty on public blogs and on the wiki.

07 – Unofficial Certificates. Open call for participation by the public in a university class operating on an open teaching model. Unofficial, non-credit-bearing certificates without the university brand are awarded to unregistered participants who complete course requirements. Formal students at other universities register for independent study credits at their home institution, and with the help of a cooperating faculty member convert their certificate into local credits they can apply toward graduation.

08 – MOOC – Open teaching scaled to thousands of students, with much greater flexibility given to learners.

10 – Badges – A standard approach / technology is proposed for credentialing informal learning achievements (like those earned by unregistered participants in an open teaching scenario). The validity of badges can be verified by third parties. (Note: nothing prevents badges from being awarded for formal learning experiences.)

11 – Stanford AI Class – Open teaching hits the public eye with 100,000 informal participants in an AI class offered by faculty at Stanford. Additional courses from Stanford are offered.

11 – MIT MITx – MIT announces that in 2012 it will launch an open teaching initiative under the MITx brand (TEDx, anyone?), but will charge an “affordable” fee for the end-of-course credential. The media goes crazy for this “revolutionary, no-admission-requirement approach,” apparently unaware of the dozens of open universities throughout the world. MITx announces it will open source the MITx platform, apparently unaware that competitors will use its open content and its open platform to initiate a race-to-the-bottom price war for its alternative credentials. (And no, the NC clause will not help them here.)

So here we find ourselves on the brink of 2012. Add (1) the current state of affairs described above with (2) the “Or Equivalent” language on every employer’s job description I have written about previously, and you get (3) imminent revolution in post-secondary education. Let me spell it out in case you’re having trouble putting the pieces together.

Say I’m Google, and I need to hire an engineer. My job ad requirement says “BS in Computer Science or equivalent.” I get two applicants. The first has a BS in Computer Science from XYZ State College. The second has certificates of successful completion for open courses in data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning from Stanford and MITx. Do you think I’ll seriously consider candidate two? You bet I will.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the tyranny of the degree. When big name employers accept another credential in place of a Bachelors, the jig is up for higher ed.

And it will absolutely happen during 2012. Before the year ends we’ll read stories of people who don’t have a degree landing very respectable jobs partially on the strength of these a la carte, informal credentials earned in an open teaching model. Now, this is not another typical “any day now something really cool is going to happen” empty ed tech prediction. This is an absolute, guaranteed certainty. The seed is in the ground, the sun will keep shining, the rain will keep falling, and there will absolutely be a harvest by year end. (I can’t help but point out here that back in 2009 I predicted that MIT would create a for-pay, online offering around its open content by 2012).

What are the potential impacts on the higher ed sector over the next five to seven years? A few modest ones come immediately to mind:

- As soon as employers start publicly accepting these alternative credentials, there will be a market for additional providers. A market means entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs mean innovation. Some of the innovation will benefit students in new, unimagined ways. Some of the “innovation” will find new ways to pillage and plunder from students while providing almost no benefit.

- Employment possibilities based on individual course credentials rather than entire degrees means a decline in traditional university enrollments. Why go into four years’ worth of student loan debt when I can get the eight courses I need for a job in 18 months? People in and out of the university system in 18 months instead of 48 means an instant doubling of higher education capacity in the US. Obama may hit his post-secondary goal for 2020 after all.

- The new employment value of “a la carte aggregation” means a significant decline in general education enrollments. When universities can’t bully students into taking gen ed courses by threatening to withhold their degrees, what will they do? General education will have to be sold to students on its merits rather than placed as roadblocks on the way to the courses they really want. Don’t get me wrong – this is not a screed against general education – I believe there’s significant value in general education. But universities are going to have to sell it to each and every student, individually.

- The drop in general education enrollments will destroy what’s left of the traditional higher ed textbook market, which subsists on volume sales of ridiculously over-priced books into high enrolling gen ed courses. (That is, the drop in enrollments will destroy the market if increasing pressure from openly licensed alternatives hasn’t already done it).

- The drop in general education enrollments will also impact the size of the job market for adjunct faculty.

- These declines in overall enrollments generally and in general education courses specifically will impact higher education’s funding model. However, if the decline in students from the population higher ed currently serves can be made up with new students from previously unserved populations, many people could benefit and funding could remain moderately stable. The transition in marketing, student acquisition, and appropriately serving this new group will not be straightforward.

- And while it goes without saying, a few universities will respond to the new climate by innovating internally (e.g., Stanford and MITx). Most will try to pretend that nothing of importance is actually happening, and that because they are “special” the new rules wouldn’t apply to them even if something was happening. A few won’t realize what is happening until it’s too late and will be caught completely off guard.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this analysis is the degree to which the fate of higher education will be dictated by the whims of industry. If higher education could somehow convince employers to boycott alternative credentials, none of the above would happen. However, because employers want more fine-grained information about candidates (what does a degree in “marketing” mean, anyway?) and students want to spend less time and money on school, this transformation (or one very similar to it) is inevitable.

Golly but it’s an exciting time to be alive!

To many people, Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing doesn’t enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless. Let’s go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It’s also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what’s queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless. There’s no “sharing” at all. Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing. There’s something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it’s just a feed in some social application that’s constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It’s just another form of spam, particularly if I’m also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends.

Another article mentioned in the post, In Defense of Friction, includes the great line “social networking sites are good for relationships so tenuous they couldn’t really bear any friction at all.”

Both articles also make the point that when online trust systems become completely frictionless and consequently automated, they destroy the need for “trust” at all. It’s not really “trust” if I know I can trust you, right?

I’ve said many times that the main goal of open licenses is to make engaging in the 4Rs (reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) around content frictionless. Good food for thought in these articles for me and others who share the belief that the primary purpose of open licenses should be to reduce or eliminate friction.