Category Archives: open-education

2017: RIP, OER?

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I recently blogged about the Apple announcement and how it amounted to publishers ceding the “traditional” textbook market (whether print or digital) to OER makers. One way to interpret that concession is as a win for open education. And it is a win – temporarily. Another way to interpret the concession by publishers is to see it as electronics companies ending production of VCRs and doubling down on DVD players.

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.

“Think Different” about the College Completion Problem

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Literally dozens of government entities, foundations, and other organizations are concerned about “the college completion problem.” The problem in a nutshell is that people go into significant debt to go to college, dropout for a variety of reasons (good and bad) without graduating, and are left with nothing to show for their trouble except the debt.

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.

Senior Fellow for Open Education

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I’m humbled and very excited to announce that, as of today, I am the Senior Fellow for Open Education at the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, also known as Digital Promise. I’ll post more detail on exactly what this means later this week. FAQ: No, I’m not leaving BYU; I’ll be acting in this role in addition to my responsibilities at BYU.

In the meantime, here’s the SL Tribune story and the text of the article from the McKay School News:

Dr. David Wiley, an associate professor in the Department of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University, today begins an appointment as Senior Fellow for Open Education with Digital Promise, a new national center created by Congress to research, develop, and scale up technologies that can transform the way teachers teach and students learn. Wiley will advise the center as it develops policy recommendations through a series of white papers and works to establish a broader Digital Promise Fellows program.

In addition to his own teaching and research, Wiley serves as Associate Director for Research in the Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling, housed in the BYU McKay School of Education, and as director of the open education research group. He has previously held visiting or fellowship positions at prestigious institutions including the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, the Open University of the UK, and the Open University of the Netherlands.

Digital Promise Executive Director Adam Frankel commented on Wiley’s appointment, “I’m incredibly excited about David’s appointment as a Digital Promise Senior Fellow for Open Education. David is one of America’s most innovative thinkers on the future of learning. His cutting-edge work is helping America find ways of cutting costs while delivering a world-class education to all our students. Harnessing the promise of technology to drive better results is David’s trademark, and it’s what Digital Promise is all about.”

Wiley has specific goals for his work, most of which will focus on the roles of federal and state education agencies in solving sector-wide problems in education. “I’ll be working to identify what these agencies can do to increase and accelerate the development and distribution of highly effective educational resources, particularly those with open licenses, thereby reducing costs.” Wiley added, “As a nation we have to think about education more expansively, including both formal and informal learning. Leveraging technology is one of the key ways to enable this enlarged thinking.”

McKay School Dean K. Richard Young remarked, “David’s commitment to the improvement of teaching and learning, coupled with his passion to insure access to knowledge for all, will benefit Digital Promise as well as continuing to benefit the McKay School of Education at BYU.” Wiley agrees, saying his work for Digital Promise will be closely related to what he has previously accomplished at the McKay School. “My research at BYU focuses on issues of affordability and effectiveness, through exploring open licenses and the new pedagogical and financial opportunities these licenses afford.”

Congress authorized Digital Promise, formally titled the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, in 2008. Digital Promise aims to support research about learning technologies similar to ways that the National Institutes of Health support health research and the Department of Energy supports energy research. Digital Promise is bringing schools, entrepreneurs, and researchers together to capture the learning opportunities of the 21st century.

For more information, please contact David Wiley at 801-8229211 or David_Wiley@byu.edu or Digital Promise Executive Director Adam Frankel at 202-833-7433 or adam@digitalpromise.org.