15-20 public high school science teachers in Utah will replace their expensive, traditional textbooks with open textbooks from CK12.org for the 2010-2011 school year. Approximately 2,000 students will be impacted by the changes. Most will use printed versions of the books, while a few hundred students in one-to-one schools will use the online versions of the books on netbooks or iPads. Teachers will continue to supplement the CK12 books with additional resources and activities just as they have historically supplemented expensive, traditional textbooks.

Because expensive, traditional textbooks have to be passed from student to student over 4-7 years, students are typically prohibited from marking in the books in any way. By contrast, because the open textbooks are so inexpensive as to be considered consumables (from a budget perspective), students will be able to engage these books through active study processes like highlighting and annotating. These active study strategies may promote deeper learning for participating students. This difference provides a theoretically grounded reason for us to anticipate OER being more educationally effective than their expensive, traditional counterparts.

At the end of the school year, test scores of participating students on the state of Utah’s Criterion-Referenced Test (CRT) will be compared to the CRT scores of nonparticipants in comparable classrooms. We hypothesize modest gains in student performance for those participating in the study due to their ability to utilize active study strategies with the open textbooks.

Throughout the project we will carefully monitor costs associated with the use of the open textbooks for comparison purposes. At the end of the school year we will report on the comparative costs of using open textbooks in traditional public school science classrooms. We anticipate curriculum cost savings of approximately 50%.

OER have not yet had the impact they are capable of making. By empirically demonstrating that OER can simultaneously promote deeper student learning and save districts and schools significant financial resources, we hope to catalyze significant a uptake of OER in public schools.

• Challenge 1: Open Core Courseware
  Expand access to high-quality, openly licensed courseware for developmental and general education.
• Challenge 2: Web 2.0 Engagement
  Integrate interactive Web 2.0 approaches to stimulate deeper learning and ultimately improve college readiness and completion.
• Challenge 3: Blended Learning
  Expand the use of established, effective online and face-to-face learning models on a cost-effective basis.
• Challenge 4: Learning Analytics
  Foster the development and implementation of easily accessible learning analytics for those directly involved in student success.

The announcement reads:

I would like to introduce you to a new program designed to improve college readiness and completion. The Next Gen Learning Challenges will provide grants, build evidence of what works, and develop an active community committed to helping young adults prepare for college and complete their postsecondary education. You will find more information at http://www.nextgenlearning.com.

The program seeks to identify and scale technology-enabled approaches that dramatically improve college readiness and completion, particularly for low-income young adults. The partners for this initiative are the Gates Foundation, the League for Innovation in the Community College, the International Association of K-12 Online Learning, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The rationale for the program is compelling. Only half of high school graduates leave school prepared to succeed in college. For those who do enroll in postsecondary education, a little over half of them will actually earn a degree. Positions requiring postsecondary education or training will make up 64 percent of all job openings by 2018. Today it is virtually impossible to reach the middle class, and stay there, with only a high school diploma. By age 30, fewer than half of all Americans have earned a college degree. America must improve college readiness and completion—our society and our economy depend on it. Technology can be a key tool for making learning more flexible, engaging, and affordable?important elements in helping today’s high school and college students achieve academic success.

The next several weeks are a “Request for Comments” period during which the community is invited to share knowledge and comment to help refine the initial phase of the program. I invite you to:

- visit the Next Gen Learning Challenges website (www.nextgenlearning.com) to learn about college readiness and completion in the United States
- contribute research, resources, and perspectives on the Next Gen Learning Challenges
- engage in discussion forums targeting key questions

I hope you will join the conversation.

The most naïve kind of hype around open educational resources (OER) says that OER are more effective pedagogically than proprietary educational resources (PER). Can we justify this claim?

First, it is critically important that we understand that “effectiveness” is not characteristic of an educational resource. Without a proper conception of the origin of “effectiveness” we cannot ask meaningful questions about the comparative effectiveness of OER and PER – because we will not know where to look.

A similar lesson is taught by item response theory (IRT). IRT teaches us that an assessment item does not have a “difficulty” independent of the individual who is attempting to answer the item. While an assessment item may be “hard” for a novice to answer correctly, the same item will be “easy” for an expert. Consequently, we cannot talk about the difficulty of an item without talking about the expertise of the person attempting the item. “Difficulty” is a property of an item-individual pair.

Likewise, “effectiveness” is a property of a resource-individual pair. A resource that perfectly meets the needs of one individual may be completely inappropriate for a second individual. Consequently, we cannot talk about the effectiveness of an OER or PER without talking about the person using the resource.

One important difference between educational resources and assessment items is that while there is typically only one way to “use” an assessment item, there are many ways to “use” an educational resource. Pedagogically, the most important difference between an OER and a PER is the additional ways an OER can be used that are prohibited with a PER. When a resource-individual pair has access to an expanded repertoire of uses, we have a rational foundation for believing that increased learning may occur.

For example, a pilot project in Utah high schools is deploying printed copies of OER science textbooks in place of traditional PER textbooks. Before we can ask if students will learn more from the OER textbooks we should have a theoretically responsible, pedagogically-founded (i.e., new-type-of-use-founded) rationale for the question. For example:

PER science textbooks cost at least $80 each. Because they are so expensive, these textbooks have a four-year service period and must be protected so they can be used by different students. Consequently, students are generally prohibited from writing notes, underlining, highlighting, or otherwise annotating their textbooks. Printed OER science textbooks cost about $10. Because they are so inexpensive, a new OER textbook can be purchased each year for each student. When a big-ticket item ($80) becomes a consumable ($10), students can be allowed to write notes, underline, highlight, and otherwise annotate their textbooks. When students can use their textbooks in this new way, engaging in more active study strategies, we have a theoretically responsible, pedagogically-founded reason to believe that students using the OER will learn more than students using the PER.

In this session, we will discuss new uses enabled by OER that give us theoretically responsible, pedagogically-founded reasons for believing that OER can be more effective educationally than PER.

Buried beneath the much-deserved hullaballoo over the passage of health care reform were big changes that the reconciliation bill makes to the federal student loan program… Less noticed, however, is a provision that was in the House-passed Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) this fall, but dropped from the final version that passed last night…. [W]ith Pell Grant spending up due to the poor state of the economy, and the pressure to keep the total cost of the bill down while achieving expanded health insurance coverage and deficit reduction, the AGI got left on the cutting-room floor.

The American Graduation Initiative (AGI) was the Obama-backed initiative that included $50M/yr for open online courses for the next ten years (i.e., $500M for OER). These courses would have provided critical content infrastructure for innovative education experiments, and we needed them desperately.

Shucks. Maybe next year.

To support technological innovation in learning, President Obama has proposed investing $500 million over ten years in an Online Skills Initiative designed to produce free and open online courses that contribute to post-secondary success, Duncan said. These courses can be used by students, schools, and self-directed learners, and they also will be freely available to commercial publishers.

“Our commitment to open educational resources includes a commitment to you: That they will be fully open, including open to commercial producers of learning materials who want to add value to these resources and sell enhanced, proprietary versions,” he told the publishers.

“We see this step as both an investment in our students and an opportunity for your industry.”

This open courseware initiative “will create new demand from colleges and universities for online courses,” Duncan said. “It will open a new market for supplementary materials—one that you are uniquely positioned to fill. Our online skills program will create new opportunities for you as publishers and software developers—and will deliver the best possible education for students in the 21st century.”

While it doesn’t make an explicit statement, we now know an answer to a question many have been asking – “How will AGI-funded OER be licensed?” We now know that the resources created under the AGI funding will either be licensed CC BY or placed in the public domain. We know this because no CC licenses with SA or NC clauses live up to the promises made in the above statements. And the GFDL has been relegated to the realm of the OPL.

I am surprised by this announcement – but pleasantly so. As I’ve stated before in discussing open access to federally funded research, I believe that resources produced with taxpayer dollars belong to the taxpayers. Since corporations pay taxes, they deserve both access to research they help fund (e.g., through NIH and NSF funding) and to the OERs whose production they help fund (through AGI funding). And if other taxpayers can reuse, redistribute, revise, and remix OERs, they should be able to as well.

The primary reason the AGI program (Online Skills Initiative) interests me is that it represents a desperately needed national investment in a new kind of infrastructure. For many years now I have argued that content is infrastructure:

I believe we must view the vast body of open educational resources as “content infrastructure.” By “content infrastructure” I mean that instead of thinking about open educational resources as being the educational opportunity we are trying to share with people (the end of our work), we should think about them as the basic resources necessary for doing our job (a means to the end of our work). A vast collection of open educational resources is, of course, the first milestone in our work, not the end of our work….

Content is infrastructure, and as the OCWs and Connexions continue to come online, the next great wave of work for those of us interested in bringing educational opportunity to the developing world will focus on building instructional design capacity so that this content infrastructure can be successfully leveraged and utilized locally.

OER should be available for everyone to leverage and use in creating and providing the most innovative educational services imaginable, just as other infrastructure like roads, power, and water are available to entrepreneurs. Because OER differ from other infrastructure projects by being nonrivalrous, access to this infrastructure can be truly free and open to all.

Call it “Infrastructure 2.0″ or “Knowledge Economy Infrastructure” or any other kind of buzzword you can come up with, if you like. The point is that a broad, openly licensed pool of OERs ar desperately needed to spur innovation in the education space. As Linus said in one of my all time favorite quotes:

And don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.

Our education system is currently running an exceptionally small number of experiments, not engaging in massively parallel anything. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of schools and universities across the country, but as a group they don’t really differ from each other significantly. This is why there is so little true innovation in education – when everyone is doing (largely) the same thing, no one is innovating!

We’ll only have massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle when institutions are providing their students with significantly different experiences. By providing a large collection of OER, the government significantly decreases the cost and risk of running one of these experiments, thereby encouraging innovation. (Of course, there are some policy changes they could make that would also decrease the risks / make it possible to run an institution on a truly different model, as well.)

Anyway, I believe it’s great news about the AGI-funded courses. Since the Obama administration has shown a preference for CC BY in the past, I would guess that’s what we’ll see, and that’s great news.

Coverage at:

• Welcoming Cathy Casserly to the Creative Commons board of directors
• Open Education Resources Get a Big Boost: Cathy Casserly Joins Creative Commons Board

Hewlett made over $16 million in grants last year that were 100% OER focused… In 2009 alone, foundations such as Gates, Lumina, MacArthur and many others pumped over $10 million of investments into OER focused projects. VCs made a couple of forays into OER… And a number of governments made their first investments in OER. In all 2009 was a record year both in the amount and diversity of OER funding, which is amazing considering most other things in the world collapse financially.

So from Vic’s point of view, the field of OER is in transition, and definitely for the better! This is a great perspective that I’m happy to hear.

Vic also writes, “Just to put a a stop to the rumors, Hewlett is not shutting down OER, and it is very much a part of what the education program is doing moving forward.” I re-read my previous post and I don’t think I implied anywhere that Hewlett was shutting down its OER program – just that funding seems to have slowed down. Vic indicates that Hewlett’s and other foundations’s endowments are down 40%, so that makes sense.

Vic’s perspective of what’s happening as the field transitions is good news for everyone who cares about OER.

I think you could still measure the vertical axis in standard deviations and the horizontal as change in budget (with savings being positive and additional costs being negative). To be clear, we would not expect to see learning gains simply because a piece of content has an open license. We’d hope to establish (a) at a minimum, no impact on student learning and some cost savings, or (b) more hopefully a positive impact on student learning and cost savings.

If you end up in any quadrant other than the one with the cloud, you or your project may be in serious trouble…

Me: Would you be willing to share the lesson plans and other materials you create with others for them to reuse?

Teacher: Sure!

Me: Great! The best way to do that is by applying this Creative Commons license to your work.

Teacher: A copyright license?

Me: Right. So that others know for certain that they’re allowed to reuse, revise, and redistribute your work.

Teacher: I don’t think I can make copyright assignments. I’m happy to share informally, but when it comes to formal sharing, I don’t know who actually holds the copyright in the materials I create for use in my class. Sorry.

After hearing this a few times I dug into the Utah Administrative Rules to answer the question of who owns the work teachers produce for their own use in their own classrooms. The answer? The issue was not addressed anywhere in the UAR. A call to the State Superintendent’s office and some research by their staff confirmed that there was no explicit statement about who owned the teachers’ work. Consequently, no one knew who could share what with whom.

So, last summer I testified at a meeting of the Interim Education Committee and had a longer conversation with our State Superintendent and one of his staff asking for a new Administrative Rule, explicitly stating that teachers can in fact share their work under open licenses. State Superintendent Larry Shumway then grabbed a hold of the idea and worked on making it happen.

The result is the shiny new Rule R277-111: Sharing of Curriculum Materials by Public School Educators, which includes the following language:

The purpose of this rule is to provide information and assurance to public school educators about sharing materials created or developed by educators primarily for use in their own classes or assignments. The intent of this rule is to allow or encourage educators to use valuable time and resources to improve instruction and instructional practices with assistance from appropriate materials developed by other educators….

Utah educators may share materials under a Creative Commons License and shall be personally responsible for understanding and satisfying the requirements of a Creative Commons License…

The presumption of this rule is that materials may be shared. The presumption is that Utah educators need not seek permission from their employers to share personally-developed materials.

I haven’t done an in-depth review of state policies, but I believe that Utah is one of the first (if not the very first) to formally adopt language (a) saying that teachers are allowed or encouraged to share their educational materials or (b) actually mentioning Creative Commons by name. Many thanks to Superintendent Shumway and his staff for making this happen!

The more people I talk to, the more convinced I am that OER has failed to establish a digestible value proposition for formal education. For better or worse, many people caught up in the day-to-day vortex of teaching, advising, mentoring, and grading don’t have the spare time to problematize publisher-school power relations, realize the virtue of local control of curriculum materials, or fully appreciate the transformative benefits of transparency.

We need to refine our messaging if we mean to impact formal education – particularly in K-12 where so many curricular decisions are made “above” the individual teacher. Perhaps our messaging can take a cue from the intersection of the current, outcomes-obsessed political climate and the slashing of school budgets in response to global economic realities. Perhaps we should begin discussing a “golden ratio” of open educational resources that compares (1) (differences in outcomes) with (2) (differences in cost) when a OER are used instead of traditional, proprietary educational materials.

(1) I’ve written at some length about why we should anticipate the delta in learning outcomes to be near zero when comparable open educational resources and proprietary educational curriculum are measured against one another. When teachers actively take advantage of the local control provided by OER licensing and engage in substantive adaptation / localization exercises, we can reasonably hypothesize an improvement in student performance. Either way, I believe we can anticipate the “differences in outcome” factor to be zero or positive. The appropriate unit for this factor is probably a standard deviation.

(2) Differences in cost need to be accounted for completely. Time spent reviewing traditional textbooks and other curriculum materials should be compared to time spent finding OER. The costs of purchasing or licensing traditional materials, distributing at beginning of term, collecting at end of term, and storing / managing between terms should be compared to the costs of storing, standards aligning, etc. open educational resources. Costs of keeping OER up-to-date should be compared with textbook replacement costs or annual licensing fees for online curriculum. Et cetera. The appropriate unit for this factor is probably percentage change in the organization’s curriculum spend.

That gives us a golden ratio of OER that looks something like:

change in performance (as standard deviation) : change in money spent on curriculum (as percentage)

Now, it is terribly important to note that a great finding like [+0.2 : -7%] is only applicable to the specific open educational resources studied – THE FINDING DOES NOT EXTEND TO ALL OER. However, if we could demonstrate either (a) stable performance and money saved, or (b) performance gains and money saved, several times across different grade levels and subject matters, then we would have an argument that formal education would have a very difficult time ignoring. If we can’t show one of these two outcomes, we should seriously reconsider our work in the field.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, I don’t think I know of any OCW or OER projects looking seriously at either of these factors (though the recent CMU OLI paper in JIME is obviously headed in the right direction). If you know of any, please drop a comment below.

What do you think? Should OER have to “put up or shut up”? If so, what metrics would you use besides learning gains and cost?