Category Archives: open content

The Big Publishers’ Strategy on Boundless

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Boundless’ authoring model appears to be based on “reverse engineering” publishers’ most popular textbooks. The big publishers’ court case comes down to a single question – is reverse engineering the same as creating a “derivative work?” The question is critical because the creation of derivative works is regulated by copyright. If the court finds that Boundless’ textbooks are derivative works of the publishers’ books, then Boundless has violated copyright law. If the court finds that Boundless’ reverse engineering is not the same as creating a derivative, then Boundless lives to fight another day.

I’m not a lawyer and can’t say whether reverse engineering is – legally speaking – derivative or not. I’m neither defending nor accusing Boundless of violating copyright law. But to some extent, the lawsuit isn’t the primary goal here for the publishers (though I’m sure they would think a win was nice). The textbook cartel’s broader strategy is crystal clear:

1. Realize that the vast majority of the public have never heard of OER.

2. Use their multi-million dollar marketing budget to make sure that “Boundless = OER” in the public mind.

3. Message their side of the lawsuit to drive public opinion against Boundless, who they will paint as scrupulous “pirates” of their “intellectual property.”

4. Connect the dots to shape public opinion toward the idea that “OER = cheap copiers without creativity and who lack basic respect for copyright.”

5. Whether or not they win this specific lawsuit, the publishers get their wish – the first exposure to “OER” for most Americans will be on the publishers’ terms, equated to theft, piracy, killing bunnies, and the end of civilization generally.

The more interesting issue is this: CC licenses are perpetual (see the 3. License Grant section of the BY-SA Legal Code.) Now that these textbooks are available online under a BY-SA license – which cannot be revoked – what will happen if a judge decides that these perpetually openly licensed materials violate copyright? Hmmmm.

Open Education Conference 2012 Updates

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I’m happy to announce the conference theme for #OpenEd12 – “Open Education: Beyond Content.” You can read more about the conference theme below, or skip straight to the Call for Papers and Call for Action.

Open Education has come of age. The tiny movement that began in the late 1990s as a desire to increase access to educational opportunity has blossomed into requirements in national grant programs, key strategies in state legislatures and offices of education, content sharing initiatives at hundreds of universities and high schools, and a wide range of innovation and entrepreneurship in both the commercial and nonprofit sectors.

We have largely succeeded in building out a vast, high quality content infrastructure atop which a new generation of educational innovations are being built. Open educational resources are increasing learning throughout the world and saving students, institutions, and governments money. Come join us as the Open Education 2012 Conference celebrates these successes.

For over a decade the focus of the open education community has been on open educational resources. As we celebrate the success of that work the Open Education 2012 Conference will also lay out a road map for the next decade where open education moves beyond content.

Join us in showcasing projects building the new generation of open education innovations including:

  • institutional and governmental policy and strategy
  • assessments – formative and summative, diagnostic and adaptive – required to help orient learners and those who support them
  • open study groups and other opportunities for social interaction
  • new pedagogies that leverage the reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute potential of OER
  • permeable institutions and processes that connect with community-based and informal education in the wider world
  • collaborations that refine and scale open education
  • models to financially sustain programs of openness
  • and other open inventions

In each of these areas – open policy, open assessment, open support, open teaching, and open business models, a small but growing number of successful initiatives exist. Open Education 2012 is your opportunity to learn from this work and help the field expand systematically into each of these areas of the learning ecosystem.

As open education expands out we’ve come to see our work as part of a broader context of openness – open data, open access, open government, open source, to name a few. At Open Education 2012 we’re looking to connect our thinking and build synergies with these parallel movements.

OpenEd12, the ninth annual Open Education Conference, will frame the conversation about the future of open education. Come be part of the discussion – we need your energy, brains, passion, and dedication!

Join us for the “annual reunion of the open education family,” spanning three stimulating days in Vancouver, BC, October 16-18.

Openness and the Future of Assessment

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I had the good fortune of being invited to speak at the ETS Future of Assessment internal conference today. The slides are available at slideshare, but here are the three main points from my talk today.

“Badges are not assessments.” OER provide a huge content infrastructure on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OER existed. The Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) provides a standard, interoperable system for issuing, managing, and displaying credentials on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OBI existed. However, no one is paying sufficient attention to the gap between learning anything anywhere (OER) and receiving a recognition (OBI) – this gap is called “assessment.” A badge is not an assessment anymore than a blue ribbon is a foot race. Someone has to pay attention to designing the assessments, experiences, and challenges people will complete in order to EARN badges. There is a huge opportunity for “open assessment infrastructure” in this chasm between OER and OBI.

“Assessment as status update.” People already invest significant effort updating Facebook statuses, tweeting, writing book and product reviews, blogging, uploading videos, etc. Given the opportunity, people will complete simple in-place assessments in order to let the world know what they’re learning from what they’re reading / watching. In addition to the existing “status update” motivations already driving people’s behavior, lots of organizations have a vested interest in seeing this body of data come into existence. Assessment will be ubiquitous in the very near future.

“Browser history as high stakes exam.” If an entity like ETS can establish predictive validity around different performance / behavior patterns and college completion or success, one can easily imagine submitting their usernames for Google Web History, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Blogs, Google Reader, YouTube, etc. IN PLACE OF taking a four hour high stakes exam like the ACT or GRE. Why make a high stakes decision based on a few hundred data points generated in one morning (when you could be sick, distracted, etc.) when you could get 1,000,000 data points generated over three years? Organizations that can figure out how to leverage big, messy data will win. While some will run the other direction screaming “privacy!,” many people will opt to take this non-test path into college. The precedent exists in our willingness to give all our financial data to companies like LifeLock or Mint to monitor against identity theft or recommend better products to us. When sufficient value is available, we are typically willing to pay with personal data.