• 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.

Justin Johansen and I did some interesting work on OCW sustainability, examining what happens when opportunities to enroll in for-credit courses are integrated into OCW. The results – over 2.5% of OCW visitors became paying for-credit customers of BYU Independent Study, generating enough revenue to more than pay for the cost of opening access to the courses. An article version of the dissertation, with a few months more data, is forthcoming in Educational Technology Research and Development.

John Hilton and I asked the question “What happens to printed book sales if digital versions are given away for free?” We then tracked 41 books for which we could identify the date when the free digital versions of the books were made available to determine whether the release of the free version affected print sales. This work appeared in the Journal of Electronic Publishing, and is described more extensively (with a link to the full text) at http://www.johnhiltoniii.org/the-short-term-influence-of-free-digital-versions-of-books-on-print-sales/. The results – three of the four categories of books had increased sales after the free books were distributed (and we think we know what happened with the fourth).

Next, John Hilton and I recently interviewed 10 authors (who were mostly academics) that have made their works available for free and got their take on the implications of sharing their books online. This article also includes a case study that measures sales of a book for the year before and after it was made available for free. An overview of the article, as well as a link to the full text, can be found at: http://www.johnhiltoniii.org/interviews-with-ten-authors-who-give-away-their-books/. The results – no authors perceived a drop in sales and most reported that giving away their ebook increased their reach / audience. This article appeared in Tech Trends.

Finally (for now), in a follow-up study that strengthened some weaknesses in the original, John Hilton completed his dissertation which also focused on giving away e-books. This study measured sales of 8 titles for 10 weeks before and after they were made available for free. Historical sales (from the year previous) as well as comparison books (that were not made available for free) are also examined. The study also includes download data for the books. An overview, as well as a link to the complete dissertation, can be found at: http://www.johnhiltoniii.org/free-e-books-dissertation-published/. The results – A 0.65 correlation between downloads and sales, meaning that books that were downloaded more often were also purchased in print more often.

John and I are currently working on an article based on the dissertation and a follow-up study suggested in the dissertation. We’re also looking for a medium to large size publisher who would be willing to do a replication of the dissertation research (with improvements for lessons learned, of course) at a larger scale. If you know of someone who might be game, let us know.

I’ve posted on my dissertation before. The full version is now available here. Here’s a little summary of what the dissertation is all about.

What

Deseret Book placed eight books online for free download. All of these were “backlist” titles. This study tracked what happened as a result of those books being available.

When

The books were placed online September 9, 2009. This study compares sales of these books the ten weeks before they were available for free with the ten weeks after.

Results

During the ten weeks of the study the books were downloaded 102,556 times. Collectively, the books sold 68 more copies in the ten weeks they were online for free versus the ten previous weeks. This was an increase in sales of 26%. Over the same period of time in 2008, sales of these same books decreased by 38%. Furthermore, a study of comparison titles that were not put online for free found that sales of comparison books decreased both in 2008 and 2009, as illustrated below.

	Featured Books	Comparison Books
2009	26%	-16%
2008	-38%	-6%

Thus the increase in sales of the eight featured books in 2009 seems attributable to their being available for free.

Other interesting findings include the following: Visits to the online product pages of the free books increased 1,085% during the study. Some weeks, hits to http://deseretbook.com/free represented almost 3% of total traffic to http://deseretbook.com. (note: the books are still available, but now require registration. They did not during the experimental period of the dissertation). During the ten weeks of the study more people entered http://deseretbook.com through http://deseretbook.com/free than any other page (except the home page). All this happened with very little advertising. Though the impact of this additional web traffic was not quantified, it seems that the value of increasing awareness of http://deseretbook.com could be significant.

There was a moderately strong correlation (r=.65) between downloads and Internet print sales (the more books that were downloaded, the more books were purchased online). Thus if more books had been available and downloaded the number of additional books sold would likely have increased.

Another interesting point is that the authors of the books made available seemed very pleased with the additional exposure their books received. One of the eight books studied was out of print. This book was downloaded 14,914 times and its product page received 834 hits. This may indicate a lingering interest in out-of-print books, and may validate a “long tail” approach to book sales.

Limitations

One limitation of the present study is the relatively small number of books studied, and that the sales of these books were relatively small. The study could also have been strengthened if it were of a longer duration.

One area that remains to be researched is the perspective of the authors whose books were downloaded. In informal conversations with the authors whose books were used in this study, they expressed positive feelings about their work being disseminated more widely. It may be that authors, particularly those with books that are not currently selling well, would desire the increased exposure to the work that free digital downloads might bring.

Although this study provides some interesting results, there are many other questions to be considered. One question that might arise is, “What would have happened if the e-books had been for sale for 99 cents each?” If 10% of the people who downloaded the books for free would have paid 99 cents for the e-books, that would have provided a nice profit for Deseret Book. While it is possible that some people would have paid 99 cents for the e-books, it seems likely that people would have been less inclined to e-mail friends and blog about a “99-cent” offer than a “free” offer.” Future studies are needed to determine how many downloads would occur if they were very inexpensive instead of free.

Another aspect that should be considered is how much the popularity of electronic book devices (such as the Kindle or iPad) will change people’s proclivities to read digital books. Perhaps most important, if publishers made all or most of their books available for free digital consumption, would that have an overall negative effect on sales? In other words, in the present study the seven books saw increased sales, likely due to the special attention they received from being downloaded 102,556 times. If all books were available for free online would they see this same sales benefit? Obviously not.

So, much more to think about and explore! Hopefully this dissertation will be a part of an ongoing conversation. They said nobody ever reads dissertations … prove them wrong … go read it!

If you haven’t seen the published writing I’ve been doing (much of it with students) in the last few years, the majority of it is gathered on the David Wiley page in BYU’s ScholarsArchive. The articles include:

• Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
• Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network
• The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources
• The Open High School of Utah: Openness, Disaggregation, and the Future of Schools
• Psychologism and American Instructional Technology
• Open Source, Openness, and Higher Education
• Open Educational Resources: Enabling universal education
• Overcoming the Limitations of Learning Objects
• Collecting, Organizing, and Managing Resources for Teaching Educational Games the Wiki Way
• The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Christian Higher Education
• A Unified Design Framework for Learning Objects and Educational Discourse
• Using Weblogs in Scholarship and Teaching

(PS. The system the library is using does not currently produce RSS feeds, so I’ve hacked together a Yahoo Pipe to produce a barebones RSS feed. The feed simply gives the names of all the articles on the site with a link to the main page. Hopefully a future update will make it easier to syndicate this information here and elsewhere.)

This dissertation is the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing opencourseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it. In other words, Justin’s study not only demonstrates that it is possible to publish opencourseware without requesting donations from users or foundations, it goes further and demonstrates that it is possible to make money publishing opencourseware. And if you can make money publishing opencourseware, you can continue publishing opencourseware for a very long time. This capacity is also known as sustainability.

Congratulations to Dr. Johansen!

P.S. John Hilton will be defending his dissertation, which applies a similar methodology to examine the impact of giving away free e-books on the sales of printed books, February 11!

The Foundation is making a number of organizational changes designed to consolidate resources and concentrate them more effectively on the Foundation’s central objectives in support of its five core program areas: the liberal arts and humanistic scholarship in higher education, scholarly communications, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. As part of these changes, the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) will be merged into the Scholarly Communications program and cease to exist as a standalone grantmaking program of the Mellon Foundation, effective January 4, 2010. The Scholarly Communications program, which will be renamed so as to indicate, explicitly, that technology-based grantmaking is part of its mandate, will assume responsibility for managing existing RIT grants and the planning of future grant initiatives that emphasize the development of information technologies in support of the Foundation’s core focus. As this merger occurs, my colleagues, Ira Fuchs, who founded the RIT program at the Foundation in 2000, and Christopher Mackie, will both be leaving the Foundation.

The RIT Program at Mellon has been a major funder of open source / open education projects we know and care about, like Zotero, Sakai, Kuali, and Folksemantic. When Hewlett funded content development in open education, Mellon funded software development for open education. Their combined efforts have had a huge, positive impact on the field. With Mike and Cathy both leaving Hewlett last year, and now Ira and Chris leaving Mellon, the field really feels like it’s in transition…

A hearty “God bless” to Ira and Chris as they set out on new adventures.

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…

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?

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.

In educational research there is a long and storied history of people conducting studies along the lines of “is video-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “is text-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “”is video-based instruction more effective than text-based instruction?,” etc. This pointless family of research has a name, the “No Significant Difference Phenomenon,” and even has it’s own website: http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/. From the website:

This website has been designed to serve as a companion piece to Thomas L. Russell’s book, “The No Significant Difference Phenomenon” (2001, IDECC, fifth edition). Mr. Russell’s book is a fully indexed, comprehensive research bibliography of 355 research reports, summaries and papers that document no significant differences (NSD) in student outcomes between alternate modes of education delivery…. The primary purpose of the NSD website is to expand on the offerings from the book by providing access to appropriate studies published or discovered after the release of the book.

Hundreds of “horse race” studies comparing alternate modes of education delivery show us that nothing interesting happens in these studies. Indeed, careful forethought will demonstrate that we should expect to find nothing interesting in these kinds of studies. And yet eager graduate students and younger faculty continue to conduct them.

Unfortunately, I’m hearing more and more people talk about a new generation of media comparison studies – “License Comparison Studies.” These absolutely pointless studies would ask questions like “do CC BY-NC-SA licensed materials teach more effectively than traditionally copyrighted and licensed materials?” or “do CC BY-SA licensed materials teach more effectively than CC By-NC-SA materials?” Again, careful forethought will demonstrate that we should expect to find nothing interesting in these kinds of studies. Please, if you’re in a position to discourage these kinds of studies, save all of us the trouble and embarrassment by steering your students and colleagues in another direction.