Category Archives: sustainability

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.

The Jig is Up

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A brief history of the impending transformation of post-secondary education, just to clarify where we are, followed by some commentary. Dates are approximate as I’m working from memory on an airplane. Perhaps later I’ll turn this into a proper piece of writing with supporting links, etc., if folks find it interesting.

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!

“Or Equivalent”

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My colleague and friend Gideon Burton (of silva rhetoricae fame among other things) and I have been discussing badges lately. To date the open education movement has focused almost exclusively on the production and sharing of content. Significant opportunities exist to reform or reinvent other, non-content portions of the education ecosystem with the support of open content.

One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process.

There will doubtless be thousands of badges dedicated to pseudo-academic, hobby-like learning (stargazing, pie making, amateur radio). However, because the gold standard for learning credentials is acceptability by employers, any meaningful badges demonstration project will have to operate in this space. And of course, open content has an important role to play in supporting the widespread adoption of badges as officially accepted credentials.

We are considering a badge demonstration project comprised of three stages. The high-level vision of the project is this: Many job descriptions include a requirement like “BA or BS in EE/CS/CE or equivalent experience.” We want to create a collection of badges that a top employer, like Google, will publicly recognize as “equivalent experience.” This goes straight for the jugular, demonstrating that badges are a viable alternative to formal university education. The timeline below uses Google as an example, but we would be happy to work with any high-profile employer. We haven’t yet reached out to Google or any other employer. Let me repeat, WE’RE NOT CURRENTLY WORKING WITH GOOGLE, THEY’RE JUST INCLUDED BELOW AS AN EXAMPLE.

I’m posting what we’re thinking to get your overall feedback and see if you can suggest any big name employers who might be willing to partner with us.

Stage One – Planning Stage

• Work with Google HR and other Google employees to identify a core set of competencies that would qualify a person to work at Google (e.g., many network engineering positions include the “or equivalent” language).

• Create one or more badges corresponding to each of the competencies identified through conversations with Google.

• Establish and fund an advisory board of recognized experts in the selected area and forward-thinking psychometricians to help create and validate performance assessments and grading rubrics aligned with each badge.

• Review the badges, competencies, performance assessments, and grading rubrics with the team at Google. Secure a commitment from Google to hold this collection of badges as “equivalent” to a BS for purposes of hiring.

• Go / no go decision for moving on to stage two.

Stage Two – Pilot Period

• Hire and train a pool of qualified graders who are capable of quickly and accurately marking the performance assessments. Train these individuals (and refine rubrics as necessary) until achieving acceptable levels of inter-rater reliability in grading of the performance assessments is achieved.

• Stand up the necessary technical infrastructure for awarding badges to successful applicants (in partnership with Mozilla?).

• Launch a website with:
- The official statement from Google regarding their willingness to review applicants submitting these badges as credentials
- The complete list of badges, related competencies, performance assessments, and grading rubrics (all openly licensed)
- Names and affiliations of advisers and partners
- A clear / simple process for submitting performance assessments
- An initial list of OER (e.g., OLI courses) and Q/A services (e.g., StackOverflow.com or OpenStudy) which will help individuals develop the skills necessary to obtain the badges

- Provide a mechanism (wiki?) for allowing users to contribute links to new OER and online communities aligned to specific badges
- Scholarship the first X individuals who apply for badges (very minimal nuisance fee (e.g., $5) to the individual to have their assessment graded)

• Evaluate the success of stage two (e.g., number of applicants, success rates in achieving badges, sanity check costs for providing the assessment service, evaluate the success of applicants in Google’s application process).

• Go / no go decision for moving to stage three.

Stage Three – Implementation

• Establish a sustainable financial model for charging as-small-as-possible fees for marking assessments and awarding badges. Begin exploring crowd-sourced, non-game-able models for marking assessments in order to bring costs down further.

• Expand pool of partner employers (e.g., Microsoft, Apple) and explore the option of having employees of partners mark the assessments. This insures quality on their side and eliminates cost on ours.

• Establish advertising partnerships with colleges offering relevant online courses for students who need extra help earning badges (perhaps an adapted WGU model?) to support core infrastructure over the long term

• Combine these and other business models to generate enough revenue so that (1) the marking service can be free in addition to all the badge related materials being openly licensed and (2) employers will respect and recognize the badges resulting from the process.

The bolded items above really represent one version (and certainly not the only one) of the complete package – open content, open learning support, and open badges that help you demonstrate competence to an employer.

Anyway, thoughts? Feedback? Ideas about who would want to partner?