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.

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.

On OER – Beyond Definitions

Despite the attempts at single sentence definitions so common in the published literature, “open educational resources” is a highly context-mediated construct. However, because philanthropic and public funding agencies commonly require grant outputs to be open educational resources, the ability to quickly and clearly categorize a variety of creative works as “open educational resources” or “not open educational resources” has become critical.

Many funding agencies and programs that require OER simply require grantees to apply a Creative Commons license to their grant outputs (e.g., the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the U. S. Department of Labor, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, etc.) in order to meet the “open educational resources” requirement.

From a grant or contract compliance standpoint, the operational definition of open educational resources is often collapsed to:

Open educational resource, (n). Any artifact that is either (1) licensed under an open copyright license or (2) in the public domain.

An “open copyright license” is an irrevocable copyright license which grants the following permissions to everyone at no cost: permission to reuse the artifact (e.g., publicly display or perform), permission to copy and redistribute the artifact (e.g., share), permission to revise the artifact (e.g., translate or localize), and permission to remix the artifact with other artifacts (e.g., mashup or collage). This grant of permissions may come with restrictions. For example, a license may restrict these permissions to (1) those who agree to attribute the author of the OER when exercising the permissions, (2) those who agree to relicense any derivative works based on the OER under precisely the same license, or (3) those who agree to exercise the granted permissions in only noncommercial ways. The Creative Commons BY, BY-SA, and BY-NC-SA licenses are examples of open licenses.

“In the public domain” means that, while the nature of the artifact qualifies it for copyright protection, the artifact is not subject to copyright restrictions.

A benefit of defining an “open educational resource” in terms of copyright status is that the definition implies that all OER belong to the universe of copyrightable things. This explicitly precludes ideas, concepts, methods, people, places, events, and other non-copyrightable entities from being OER. (This helps us avoid some of the nonsense that went on with “learning object” definitions.)

For many high-level purposes this definition may be sufficient. However, there is a significant amount of nuance hiding beneath this quick-and-dirty definition. While adopting a blunt definition of OER may be common practice, understanding the underlying nuance would likely be valuable. One way of exploring this additional meaning is asking, “What would the ideal OER look like?”

The Ideal OER

Considering what the “ideal” open educational resource would look like might give OER producers (whether lone or collaborative, student or teacher, etc.) a clearer view of what their OER designs should aspire to. However, the notion of an “ideal” open educational resource begs the question “ideal in what way?” Ideal for helping every person in the world attain all the education they desire? Ideal for insuring that taxpayers realize the maximum benefit possible from publicly funded programs? Ideal for maximizing PR and good will for your institution? Ideal for destroying the commercial educational publishing industry? There are likely as many reasons for sharing OER as there are individuals and institutions engaged in sharing. Consequently, every community, individual, or institution’s ideal OER will be different, and it is important that we pause and acknowledge this.

Below, I work from the position that “an ideal OER would help every person in the world attain all the education they desire.” In this specific context, I believe the ideal OER would have three characteristics. It would:

1. Be always, immediately, and freely accessible by every person in the world
2. Grant the user the legal permissions necessary to engage in each and every possible usage of the resource with no restrictions whatsoever
3. Effectively support the educational goals of the user

Let’s discuss each of these characteristics in detail.

The access ideal is not realizable in practice. There is no single technology or method, or combination of technologies or methods, that can always provide each and every person in the world with immediate, free access to any resource.

The notion of access, and whether or not a specific OER is accessible, is highly context-dependent. This context dependence makes the inclusion of “accessible” as a criterion in a definition of OER unsavory if the purpose of the definition is to help people sort resources into OER / not-OER categories. However, as an ideal that OERs should absolutely strive for, it’s worth understanding the complexities involved. But let’s explore it the other way, and assume for a moment that “is accessible” in included in the basic definition of OER. What happens?

If a digital artifact released under a CC BY license is posted on a public website it would qualify as an open educational resource for everyone with internet access. However, if a teacher downloaded a copy of the OER and placed it inside a learning management system it would suddenly cease to be an open educational resource – even though the resource hadn’t changed. Likewise, a printed book released under a CC BY license and housed in a public library would be an open educational resource. However, if this exact same book were moved to a high school library that requires an ID prior to admission, it would cease to be an open educational resource.

Note, however, that a student with access to the high school library and enrolled in the class using the LMS still has access to these materials, so those copies of the resources simultaneously are OER to her while they are not an OER for others. In fact, regardless of its design and license, every resource that qualifies as an OER for someone disqualifies from the perspective of someone else. Pushing this thinking to its logical conclusion, none of the artifacts from the previous examples are an OER to a man living on a desert island without internet connectivity, because he has access to neither the web nor the library.

Thus we see that the inclusion of “access” in a basic definition significantly would significantly confuse the matter of categorizing resources in a general-purpose manner, because the access question must always be answered by an individual. However, as an ideal worth striving toward, understanding the issues involved in increasing (or accidentally decreasing) access is critical.

The licensing ideal is realizable. Placing a resource in the public domain realizes the permissions ideal. Open licenses approximate the ideal by providing free 4R permissions to users of OER together with requirements that may or may not be overly onerous, depending on the restrictions chosen and the individual’s context.

The efficacy ideal is not realizable in practice. Intuitively we would want the ideal OER to support the educational goals of every user, and some definitions limit OER to “high-quality” materials. However quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. A resource considered very high quality by an English speaking undergraduate might be very low quality for an English speaking primary school student or a Spanish speaking undergraduate. Requiring an OER to be “high quality” creates a situation in which every openly licensed artifact in the world is simultaneously an OER to someone and not an OER to someone else. While everyone wants the OER they use to be high quality for them, it is meaningless to talk about OER being “high quality” without simultaneous reference to the user. Consequently, while efficacy is an ideal we should strive for, efficacy itself cannot be included in a definition.

Some definitions limit OER to materials useful for teaching, learning, and research (e.g., Hylen (2006) or Atkins, Brown, and Hammond (2007)). These limitations, while seemingly reasonable, exclude nothing in practice. What photograph could not be made to serve a teaching, learning, or research purpose? What sound recording could not be made to serve a teaching, learning, or research purpose? What video could not be made to serve a teaching, learning, or research purpose? &c. In addition to excluding nothing, the “useful for teaching, learning, and research” restriction makes little sense in the context of the growing importance of informal learning.

Some definitions limit OER to “digital” or “web-based” materials. More narrowly, some definitions limit OER to materials that are made available in open file formats. Both these restrictions exclude the possibility of non-digital (e.g., printed) OER, which are an extremely important subset of OER (e.g., for use in disconnected parts of the world). While providing OERs in an editable, digital format provides important benefits to many users, it prohibits others from using OER. Consequently, while the digital issue should be carefully considered, a digital requirement for OER does not make sense.

Perhaps the key takeaway from this entire discussion is that much of what makes an OER ideal is context specific – ideal to whom, for what purpose, to be accessed in what way, to be used in what fashion, etc. The only ideal attribute realizable in practice, across all individuals in all contexts, is the licensing ideal. I believe this is why when-push-comes-to-shove definitions of OER (like those included in grant requirements) rely solely on the licensing requirement as their categorization scheme. And that’s probably a good thing. Beyond public domain dedications or open licensing, OER producers (whether self-organizing communities, individuals, or institutions) need to be free to make their own decisions along the axes of access, efficacy, digital, etc. in order to best achieve the aspirations that prompted them to develop OER in the first place.

Today Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the solicitation for grant applications under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT). Over the course of 4 years, the program will invest $2 billion “to provide community colleges and other eligible institutions of higher education with funds to expand and improve their ability to deliver education and career training programs.” The program supports President Obama’s goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 by helping to increase the number of workers who attain degrees, certificates and other industry recognized credentials. The first round of funding will be $500 million over the next year. Applications to the solicitation are now open, and will be due April 21, 2011.

The full program announcement (PDF) requires that resources created using grant funds be released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license:

In order to further the goal of career training and education and encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant (“Grant”), the Grantee will be required to license to the public (not including the Federal Government) all work created with the support of the grant (“Work”) under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (“License”). This License allows subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the copyrighted work and requires such users to attribute the work in the manner specified by the Grantee. Notice of the License shall be affixed to the Work. For more information on this License, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.

Cathy Casserly, incoming CEO of Creative Commons, said, “This exciting program signifies a massive leap forward in the sharing of education and training materials. Resources licensed under CC BY can be freely used, remixed, translated, and built upon, and will enable collaboration between states, organizations, and businesses to create high quality OER. This announcement also communicates a commitment to international sharing and cooperation, as the materials will be available to audiences worldwide via the CC license.”

Beth Noveck, professor of law and former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of the White House Open Government Initiative, said, “The decision to make the work product of $2 billion in federally funded grants free for others to reuse represents a historic step forward for open education. The Departments of Labor and Education are to be congratulated for adopting more open grantmaking practices to ensure that taxpayer money funds the widest possible distribution of this important job-training courseware.”

Congratulations to The Department of Labor, The Department of Education, and others involved in crafting this important, innovative program. Creative Commons is committed to leveraging this opportunity to create a multiplier effect for public dollars to be used on open, reuseable quality content.

Officer, Information Communications Technologies

A critical element of QFI’s developmental approach is to apply the best & most appropriate technologies to enhance our programs, e.g. OER, hybrid language translation, mobile APPs, etc. In addition, QFI has brought together several thought leaders in technology to form a Technology Program Advisory Group (TPAG). The organization seeks to acquire the internal staff capacity to analyze with honesty and intellectual rigor the effective application of ICT to its programs.

Position Summary

Type: Full-time
Reports to: Director of Programs
Start Date: December 2010
Location: Washington, D.C. / with possible move to NYC in Summer 2012
(with domestic and international travel)

Responsibilities

- Serves as primary developer of QFI’s overall ICT strategy as it relates to our programs and communications among program participants
- Advises the Executive Director and Programs staff on the judicious and appropriate use of ICT to support the foundation’s program areas
- Coordinates with all QFI departments in identifying their ICT objectives and provides the necessary advice and support required to achieve these
- Interacts regularly with the TPAG
- Oversees the award of an annual technology prize
- Assists the Communications Manager with improving our website
- Helps with the preparation and vetting of project proposals, training documents, etc.
- Represents QFI at meetings, conferences & symposia
- Develops the annual ICT budget
- Keeps abreast of developments in the ICT field

Required Qualifications

- Minimum of 5 years ICT management experience
- Analytical, approachable and flexible professional with outstanding interpersonal skills
- Strong verbal and written communications skills
- Ability to work as part of a team, but with minimal oversight
- Commitment to high standards and to acting as a positive force in creating an engaging and supportive service-oriented environment
- Experience working in an environment with diverse culture and organizational needs
- Clear understanding of current technology platforms and devices, issues and trends
- Proven ability to translate educational needs into technical solutions
- Experience in Web design and content management systems
- Ability to deliver on short- and long-term objectives with measured results

Preferred Qualifications

- Knowledge of the Middle East (familiarity with other regions a plus)
- Other non-technical professional experience in relevant fields (education, healthcare, etc.) is highly valued
- A network of contacts in the technology community
- Arabic language
- Master’s degree or equivalent

The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) invites applications from qualified individuals for the position of Open Education Project Manager.

http://www.sbctc.ctc.edu/general/hr/OpenEducationProjectManager.doc

SBCTC is seeking a visionary “Open Education Project Manager” to join the SBCTC team. This critical, full-time position will provide active leadership and expertise in managing open education projects. This position is preferably based in Washington State (State Board has office locations in Bellevue, Olympia and Spokane), though qualified out-of-state candidates will be considered and are strongly encouraged to apply. This position is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which will last two years with the possibility of funding extensions thereafter.

The annual compensation for this full-time position is $60,000. Washington State has a generous benefit package (health, dental and life insurance, retirement, and an optional deferred compensation program). This recruitment will be ongoing until the position is filled. First screening of applications will begin on Monday, September 20, 2010. To ensure consideration, return your completed materials by 5 p.m. Friday, September 17, 2010.

For more information about this position and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, see the attached recruitment announcement, visit http://www.sbctc.ctc.edu, or contact SBCTC’s Human Resource Office at (360) 704-4301.

As more and more job titles end up with “open education” in them, people are eventually going to want degrees with “open education” in them, too. Wonder which university will get that done first?

Once considered to be mostly hype, the idea of open education has spread to hundreds of universities across the globe – including many of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Open access to teaching and learning materials significantly empowers individuals who are not affiliated with formal educational programs and levels the playing field across competing institutions. These two occurrences – the empowering and leveling – portend significant changes in the structure and practice of higher education. The purpose of this special issue of IRRODL is to address various specific ways in which openness can affect the future of higher education.

In the opening article, Wiley and Hilton overview societal changes that decrease the alignment of higher education institutions with the supersystem in which they exist. Their paper argues that increasing institutional openness is a prerequisite to other critical changes required to keep higher education relevant in a quickly changing world.

The next two articles address potential barriers to the expanded use of OER and discuss how to address these barriers. Morgan and Carey explore how academic literacy in English can be a barrier to the use of many open educational resources. Their paper examines ways in which open courses can provide significant benefits to students of English as an Other Language. Lane identifies how technology and cultural barriers can impede the effective use of open educational resources. He proposes that the mediated use of open educational resources can help to reduce the diverse social and cultural digital divides within education.

Next, Baker, Thierstein, Fletcher, Kaur, and Emmons address how openness could impact the high prices of textbooks. They report how Rice University’s Connexions and the Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) have developed a proof-of-concept free and open textbook, and they identify lessons learned about open textbook use by students and faculty.

Two key issues relating to openness and higher education are credentialing and sustainability. Schmidt, Geith, Håklev, and Thierstein address the significant issue of the role higher education plays in providing credentials and certifications for learning. They discuss how social web technologies offer opportunities for learning, which build these skills and allow new ways to assess them. They make the case that a peer-based method of open assessment and recognition is a feasible option for accreditation purposes.

For openness to affect higher education, it needs to be sustainable. Friesen presents the results of an informal survey of active and inactive collections of online educational resources, emphasizing data related to collection longevity and the project attributes associated with it. He shows how OER initiatives are in danger of running aground of the same sustainability challenges that have claimed numerous learning object collection or repository projects in the past.

The last two articles address how learners interact with OER. Many OER are available, including open courses. Fini examines one such course, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (2008), facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. He looks at the the technological dimensions of the course and its impact on the participants. Ultimately, for openness to impact higher education, learners need to be willing to use OER on a large-scale basis. How do everyday learners view open courses? In the final article, Arendt and Shelton examine how residents of the state of Utah (in the United States) view the incentives and disincentives for the use of open educational resources.

Overall, this special issue presents an excellent discussion of open education issues ranging from useful descriptions of successful projects to empirical data about user attitudes to thoughtful criticisms of present work. These criticisms are particularly valuable because so much of the extant literature about open education is almost uniformly positive in tone. We hope this special issue will help to begin a more balanced discourse about the benefits and very real challenges of open education.

The bill creates a competitive grant program supporting the creation of open textbooks, and most importantly requires applicants to submit:

(C) a plan for distribution and adoption of the open textbook to ensure the widest possible adoption of the open textbook in postsecondary courses, including, where applicable, a marketing plan or a plan to partner with for-profit or nonprofit organizations to assist in marketing and distribution; and

(D) a plan for tracking and reporting formal adoptions of the open textbook within postsecondary institutions, including an estimate of the number of students impacted by the adoptions.

This is terrifically exciting to me, as it will bring a real sense of urgency of impact into the discourse, and provide the OER community with good data and metrics to talk with confidence about the amount of money students are saving thanks to open textbooks.

The most interesting part of the bill is Section 5. on LICENSING MATERIALS WITH A FEDERAL CONNECTION:

In General- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, educational materials such as curricula and textbooks created through grants distributed by Federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, for use in elementary, secondary, or postsecondary courses shall be licensed under an open license.

This language provides nothing short of an NIH-style mandate on all publicly funded curriculum, and does not appear to be limited to the textbooks whose creation is funded by the bill. This is huge! It’s like FRPAA for educational materials!

Those of us who consulted on the drafts during the spring / summer were waiting to see how Durbin would choose to deal with the licensing issue, and the bill takes a middle road, requiring textbooks funded under the program to also use an “open license,” which the bill defines as “an irrevocable intellectual property license that grants the public the right to access, customize, and distribute a copyrighted material.” No specific license (or family of licenses) is mentioned or required.

This is a great day for the open education movement! If you have a representative on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, contact them to make sure they support this legislation!