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.

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!

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?

Some interesting notes about the OHSU collection:

• All material created by the OHSU is licensed CC BY.
• The OHSU takes a “reuse first, create last” approach. Consequently, their open courses are remixes of a wide range of materials made available under a range of open licenses.
• Of all the OER or OCW programs in the world, I think OHSU “walks the walk” with regard to reusing, revising, and remixing better than anyone else. They really do reuse at scale.
• The OHSU collection does not include any assessments.

The OHSU material, which does not have “Steven Spielberg production values,” is nonetheless very effective (though some of this is, admittedly, attributable to their awesome “strategic tutoring” teaching model). While the state of Utah makes its standardized test data available in a format designed to make comparisons extremely difficult and painful (you can only access data for one school at a time, and the data are presented as images making them impossible to scrape and process automatically), here is how OHSU stacked up in 2010-2011 against the 109 other Utah high schools the state has posted data for:

• Percentage of students proficient in Language Arts: 0.58 standard deviations above state average
• Percentage of students proficient in Math: 0.79 standard deviations above state average
• Percentage of students proficient in Science: 1.10 standard deviations above state average
• “Whole School Proficiency” metric: 0.84 standard deviations above state average

And keep in mind, that’s using a curriculum based on OER. So much for the naysayers who claim “you get what you pay for.” Just wait until continuous quality improvement effects start to kick in! They’re already ranked number 6 in the state in science after just two years in operation…

All in all, extremely exciting stuff being pulled off by DeLaina Tonks, Sarah Weston, and the rest of the incredible staff and teachers at OHSU. Congrats to everyone for all their hard work!

The most elegant defense of what I’ll call the input theory of OER is “We just publish by-products of of work, which is sustainable (we have to do the work anyway) and useful (after all, we’re using it).” I’m sympathetic to this view — the best view of the input theory lot. In a lot of disciplines, it’s pretty close to the truth. So let’s discuss why the input theory works in some applications, but tends to fail in education.

Those of us working in the learning analytics space are familiar with the concept of “data exhaust” from elsewhere:

One of the most powerful things I have learned over the past year is the immense amount of data that comes out of using a computer system, specifically some form an online web based experience. At Union Square Ventures, we refer to this as data exhaust, or sometimes called digital exhaust, because it is the excess valuable information that is left in the wake of using a service. The best services capture this information in an elegant and effortless way, without any barriers or friction.

This remains one of the core investment thesis ideas in my mind when I look at a company that lives on the web. In an inverse relationship to environmental exhaust where usually the more left behind the worse the system, the web works in just the opposite way. The more data left behind, that can be harvested, the better the underlying network…

The data retained from data exhaust can be use for many different things. The first and most obvious is to make your experience better. Your profile and activities give off information that can be used and processed with a system, making your experience better the next time you arrive. This presents a sparse data problem for new users and new systems, but once the data asset is in place you have more of an incentive to return.

As I read Mike’s blog post, it made me think that OER (the way many conceive of it – in the context of large institutional initiatives) are simply “classroom exhaust.” That is, the OER that large institutional initiatives tend to share are the ‘excess information left in the wake of teaching a class,’ like syllabi and lecture notes.

I’ve no big point to make in this blog post other than to connect these two memes of OER and data exhaust in the notion of classroom exhaust. I thought it was interesting, so I shared. But of course these aren’t the only kind of OER in the world, and while they’re certainly valuable, maybe they’re not the ones we should be focusing on…

Several years ago, my wife and I were driving through a small town in southeastern Ohio when we passed a pizza shop displaying a large sign reading “Buy One, Get One.” Though the BOGO meme was of course familiar as a marketing ploy, something about the sign itself or the mood in the car caused me to read it more literally, and I told Elaine, “If I buy one, I had by golly better get one!”

As I’ve reflected on that sign, I’ve come to realize that this more literal reading of “Buy One, Get One” (as opposed to the reading which includes the word “free” by implication – “Buy One, Get One Free”) is one of the core elements of capitalism. When we buy one, we expect to get one. The symmetry of the transaction is part of the fundamental social contract that allows markets to function. I say social contract because I don’t enter into a written contract when I buy a pizza, a computer, or a book. The overwhelming majority of the purchases we make throughout our lives are all governed by our common understanding of this commonsense behavior society expects of us.

Now change reference points. Rather than thinking of yourself as a consumer, think of yourself as a taxpayer. Think of all your money that the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and other tax-funded agencies provide through grants to individuals, universities, and other organizations. When you pay (through the Department of Education) for a brand-name university in New England to produce simulation-based educational games that can help almost anyone learn basic physics, do you ever get to play that game? No. When you pay (through the NSF) for a brand-name university on the West Coast to conduct research that results in a groundbreaking article that significantly reinterprets the way the world works, do you ever get to read the article? No.

This is not ok. You bought and paid for a computer game, but you never got to play it. You bought and paid for a research article, but you never got to read it. This violates the fundamental idea of a market – that if you buy one, you should get one. And yet, because “that’s the way it works,” hardly anyone complains. It should be patently obvious to anyone who believes in the basic principles of capitalism that when you and other members of your community pay for educational materials or research products, you should receive them once they’re finished. The same way you expect to be served a pizza you paid for once it’s done cooking.

How can 300 million people eat the same pizza, you ask? Fortunately, many of the materials produced by state and federal grants (like computer games and research articles) are digital and can be posted on a website for anyone and everyone to download, read or play, and share with their friends. However, under standard US copyright law, downloading and sharing are not allowed. This is why the products of state and federal grants should either be placed in the public domain or licensed with an open license. These licensing arrangements are the only means of giving all of us who paid for the work the opportunity to “eat the pizza” legally. Consequently, in the case of educational and research products whose creation is taxpayer-funded, the basic principles of capitalism demand that these products either be placed in the public domain or licensed with an open license.

So, in this specific portion of the OER space, openness is not socialism. In this specific case, openness is the only way to fix a fundamental disfunction in the market. In this case, openness is completely compatible with capitalism. In this case, openness is literal taxpayer BOGO.

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.

Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit will be dead by the end of calendar 2012.

Many assumed that I was really only talking about every OCW initiative except MIT’s. But I really did mean every OCW initiative. Today, the Chronicle’s article MIT Looks to Make Money Online reports:

But as MIT grapples with dwindling resources, generating revenue from distance education is clearly an idea under consideration by university officials. In December, a panel suggested the following possibilities in a major report:

• Creating an “extension studies” program for continuing education using a combination of on-campus courses, distance learning, and an enhanced OpenCourseWare Web site. Estimated revenue potential: $10-million.
• Creating select master’s-degree programs that would be taken primarily via online education. Estimated revenue potential: $30-million.
• Offering some undergraduate subjects for credit via e-learning. Estimated revenue potential: $60-million.

The end of 2012 is still a long way away… There’s plenty of time left to be right.

A Sustainable Model for OpenCourseWare Development
Johansen, Justin and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2353
Keywords: OpenCourseWare; sustainability; open educational resources; development; cost
Description/Abstract: The purposes of this study were to (a) determine the cost of converting BYU Independent Study’s e-learning courses into OpenCourseWare, (b) assess the impact of opening those courses on paid enrollment in the credit-bearing versions of the courses, and (c) use these data to judge whether or not an OpenCourseWare program could be financially self-sustaining over the long-term without grant monies or other subsidies. The findings strongly suggest that the BYU Independent Study model of publishing OpenCourseWare is financially self-sustaining, allowing the institution to provide a significant public good while generating new revenue and meeting its ongoing financial obligations.

In addition to reporting original research, the literature review for this study includes the following new data on sustainability:

“The OpenLearn Initiative at Open University in the United Kingdom (OUUK) was the best comparable program to use when considering the impact opening courses could have on BYU IS. The OUUK has approximately 200,000 course enrollments and 130,000 students each year, similar in scale to BYU IS. In two years of offering course samples, 7,800 enrollments have come from people who used the “enroll now” button in the OUUK’s course samples to convert to a fully paid enrollment (A. Lane, personal communication, December 5, 2008). This means that approximately 1.95% of the OUUK’s enrollment over the past two years has come through conversions from free OCW users into paid course enrollments. Approximately 33% of those conversions were people who were new to the OUUK system, meaning that approximately 0.64% of OUUK’s entire enrollment for a given year were new users that converted to paid enrollment from a free course sample. That equates to an average of approximately 1,280 new paying students converted through course samples each year. Similarly, the Open University of the Netherlands reported that 18% of OCW users were “inspired to purchase an academic course” based on their interactions with OUNL OCW (Eshuis, 2009). The University of California-Irvine (UCI) also launched an OCW offering in November 2006 with a “click to enroll” feature. They report that their OCW site has consistently generated more site traffic and more sales leads than any other form of advertising (K. Tam, personal communication, June 4, 2009).”

A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story
Hilton, John and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2330
Keywords textbooks; open source; flat world; college
Description/Abstract: Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. E–books have been proposed as one potential solution; open source textbooks have also been explored. A company called Flat World Knowledge produces and gives away open source textbooks in a way they believe to be financially sustainable. This article reports an initial study of the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open source textbook model.

Free: Why Authors are Giving Books Away on the Internet
Hilton, John and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2154
Keywords: open educational resources; online technology; digital publishing
Description/Abstract: With increasing frequency, authors in academic and non-academic fields are releasing their books for free digital distribution. Anecdotal evidence suggests that exposure to both authors and books increases when books are available as free downloads, and that print sales are not negatively affected. For this study we interviewed ten authors to determine their perceptions of the effect free digital distribution has on the impact and sales of their work. In addition, we examined the sales data of two books over a two year period of time, in which one book was freely available for the second year. All of the individuals we surveyed felt free digital downloads increased the distribution and impact of their book. None of the authors felt that print sales were negatively affected. Data from our book sale comparison suggest that in the case we studied, free digital distribution did not negatively affect sales.

John Hilton’s dissertation also made strides in the area of sustainability:

“Freely Ye Have Received, Freely Give” (Matthew 10:8): How Giving Away Religious Digital Books Influences The Print Sales of Those Books
Hilton, John
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd3433.pdf
Keywords: open educational resources, e-books, open access, open culture, free books, free e-books
Abstract: Lack of access prevents many from benefiting from educational resources. Digital technologies now enable educational resources, such as books, to be openly available to those with access to the Internet. This study examined the financial viability of a religious publisher’s putting free digital versions of eight of its books on the Internet. The total cost of putting these books online was $940.00. Over a 10-week period these books were downloaded 102,256 times and print sales of these books increased 26%. Comparisons with historical book sales and sales of comparable titles suggest a positive but modest connection between this increase and the online availability of the free books. This dissertation may be downloaded for free at http://etd.byu.edu.

As for OER impact, I’ll quote a few paragraphs from a book chapter I just finished drafting.

From Sharing to Adopting

The first decade of work in open educational resources involved laying the groundwork of copyright licensing and demonstration projects. Before anything else could be done, it had to be legally possible to share teaching and learning materials, and we had to demonstrate that sharing these materials would not put universities out of business. While this infrastructure work has largely succeeded (e.g., Creative Commons licenses have been both widely adopted and upheld in court), infrastructure is typically deployed in order to be used – not just for the sake of deployment. Consequently, emphasis in the field of open educational resources is beginning to move from sharing OER to adopting OER. Like the first decade of work in OER, this first involves helping adoptions happen, and then demonstrating that they do no harm educationally.

Flat World Knowledge (FWK) was not the first organization to produce Creative Commons-licensed textbooks, but they seem to be the first to take widespread adoption of their materials seriously. As a for-profit publisher, FWK provides their complete textbooks online for free under a CC license and sells copies of their textbooks in other formats (e.g., paperback, audiobook, etc.). By employing a full-time sales team and working in harmony with the traditional university textbook adoption process, FWK has gotten their open textbooks in front of tens of thousands of students. According to a FWK press release:

This Fall [2009] semester, 38,000 college students at 350 colleges are enrolled to utilize Flat World textbooks, up from only 1,000 in Spring 2009 at 30 colleges. The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82% cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class. “We’ll save college students and their families nearly $3 million in textbook expenses this semester,” said Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder. “We’re on track to expand to 50,000 students in Spring 2010 and 120,000 students in Fall 2010. By the conclusion of 2010, Flat World will have conservatively saved 200,000 students over $15 million.”

While statements about how many courses an OCW project shares can be impressive, statements like Frank’s that demonstrate a concrete, positive benefit on learners begin to indicate the real power of open educational resources.

Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, a collection of complete, online courses licensed as open educational resources, has gone well beyond showing that OER do no harm. In a study authored by Lovett, Meyer, and Thille (2008), OLI demonstrated that OER can be used both to decrease the amount of time necessary to learn statistics and improve student learning:

During the Fall 2005 and Spring 2006 studies, we collected empirical data about the instructional effectiveness of the OLI-Statistics course in stand-alone mode, as compared to traditional instruction. In both of these studies, in-class exam scores showed no significant difference between students in the stand-alone OLI-Statistics course and students in the traditional instructor-led course. In contrast, during the Spring 2007 study, we explored an accelerated learning hypothesis, namely, that learners using the OLI course in hybrid mode will learn the same amount of material in a significantly shorter period of time with equal learning gains, as compared to students in traditional instruction. In this study, results showed that OLI-Statistics students learned a full semester’s worth of material in half as much time and performed as well or better than students learning from traditional instruction over a full semester.

The Open High School of Utah was the first accredited school in the world to commit itself to using open educational resources exclusively across its entire curriculum. OHSU opened for 9th grade in 2009-2010 (with additional grades opening in subsequent years), and demonstrated conclusively in its first year that OER can support learning effectively in a high school context. In the three core areas measured by the state’s ninth grade Criterion Referenced Tests (i.e., English 9, Algebra I, and Earth Systems Science), the percentage of OHSU students achieving proficiency was well above state averages.

I’ll also mention our new Utah Open Textbooks project, which just launched a few weeks ago – the demonstration of impact from that project will be substantial.

Now, more work can be done, but to say that there hasn’t been any forward progress in the last year is disappointing. I think we’re making very reasonable progress, but that may just be my cheery optimism coming through. =)

Montgomery County Public Schools’ shortsighted decision to sell its nationally recognized and taxpayer-funded curriculum to an education publishing company (Re: Global firm to pay Montgomery, Md., schools
millions for elementary curriculum; June 9, 2010) will only further exacerbate the education budget crises in the region and throughout the nation.

As a veteran educator, I am well aware of the significant and growing budgetary challenges districts like Montgomery are facing. Unfortunately, the huge collection of curriculum materials whose creation by MCPS was funded with taxpayer dollars now belongs to a commercial publisher. Now, when education budgets are tightest, other schools will spend additional taxpayer dollars to purchase materials originally produced with public funds. To call this “wasteful” would be an understatement. Why should the public pay over and over again for access to curriculum materials whose development they already paid to support? The current economic climate is not the time for school districts to engage in selfish educational isolationism. The county has missed a huge opportunity to explore a genuinely new way of doing things – sharing.

Instead of selling its content, the county should have followed the lead of others and made its curriculum resources freely available for use by other states, districts and individual teachers. Right now, the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is actively working to expand teacher and student access to high-quality, up-to-date, engaging, and customizable content and curriculum far more quickly, cost-effectively, and efficiently than today. Instead of holding world-class curriculum and other content hostage for the highest bidder, OER provides all educators with access to a much larger pool of resources that are freely available for sharing, adaptation and customization.

Far from a utopian dream, OER is a ready solution already being used by schools and universities throughout the nation and world. For example, at the Open High School of Utah, which I founded and on whose board I serve, the entire curriculum is comprised of OER. This provides teachers with a tremendous amount of freedom to customize the content so it best meets the needs of our students, and enables the resources to be shared with anyone, free of charge.

As Superintendent Weast suggests, Montgomery County Schools and others need to find new ways of doing things. A return to the basic principle of sharing would be our best way forward.