A Very Brief History of Open Education

1840s: Distance Education eliminates time and place requirements

1970s: Open University of the United Kingdom eliminates most admissions requirements

1990s-2000s: Open content, then OpenCourseWare, open educational resources, and open textbooks eliminate registration requirements for access to course content

Examples: MIT OCW, Flat World Knowledge, OpenStax

2000s: Open Teaching, then MOOCs, eliminate registration requirements for access to teacher and peer interaction and feedback, as well as credentials

Examples: University of the People, Peer 2 Peer University, Change11, Udacity, Coursera, EdX

2010s: Open Badges eliminate technical and legal barriers to using credentials to gain employment or additional education

Examples: Badges displayed on my blog, badges awarded in my IPT692R class, Degreed, Learning Jar

How Many Licks Does It Take to Get To The Center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

How Many Layers Do You Have To Penetrate To Get a Job Via Formal Post-secondary Education?

Admission – fees and past academic success
Registration – tuition, fees, and course availability
Attendance – being present at a prescribed place and time
Verification – signature and fee for access to an official transcript

The historical trend of open education, and its future path forward, is the systematic removal of all barriers to educational opportunity.

Open Access and New Metrics

Academic publishing is horrifically, and arguably irreparably, broken
The Truckers Tale

Faculty are complicit because they keep signing copyright agreements
Administrations are complicit because they keep rewarding (or punishing) faculty for signing copyright agreements (or not)

Reporting the impact factor of a journal in which you publish is a PROXY for the actual impact of your article

Can you imagine a highly cited article appearing in a low IF journal? Can you imagine an article that never gets cited being published in a high IF journal? What is our tolerance for Type I and Type II error here? How concerned are we about over or underestimating the impact of our work?

Why settle for a PROXY measure of your impact when you can have a DIRECT measure (e.g., Google Scholar)?

Buy One, Get One – Pizza in Ohio, and the 98% / 2% Contribution

So What Happens Now?

Discussion

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers Inc has reached a deal with more than 70 percent of its creditors to cut $3.1 billion in debt as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding. The publisher said it plans to restructure through a pre-packaged, court-supervised Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The HMH bankruptcy is not just about decreases in education funding, of course. We must give some credit to Kaleidoscope, Open Course Library, the Utah Open Textbook Project, Flat World Knowledge, and others around the world for showing that freely available OER and open textbooks can completely replace breathtakingly overpriced publisher textbooks – and that students learn the same amount regardless. If you could get the same grade using a $175 commercial textbook or a free online (and $30 or less to print) textbook, which would you choose?

Why are we surprised this bankruptcy is happening? Anyone who’s been paying attention isn’t. The shake up in educational publishing we’ve long anticipated is beginning… and students will be the benefactors.

What I am addressing with remarks like “we should not depend on the expert” is the stance that ought to be taken by the learner with respect to the learning material extant on the web and elsewhere. And I mean this two two distinct but related ways:

- first, the learner should not accept the report of the expert uncritically…
- second, the learner should resist the characterization of certain sources, certain perspectives, and certain content types *as expert*…

What is significant, to my mind, is that by being able to adopt such a critical stance with respect to expertise, learners are not only much better able to vet for themselves the reliability and authenticity of a piece of expert advice, they also acquire the capacity to look beyond a smaller set of ‘trusted sources’.

So, a bit anticlimactically, our whole conversation seems to be a commentary on learners’ critical information facility and a warning about the dangers of blindly trusting experts. I agree, completely.

That said, this part of his response still bends my brain:

We should be like the educator whose primary interest is in teaching people to read, so they do not need to come to us at all, so there is not only no need for a hall and for fees to be paid, but no need for our particular expertise, because everyone can have it.

There’s a traveling-back-in-time-to-kill-your-own-grandfather quality to this thinking. It’s true that we can teach for the purpose of helping someone never need to depend on a teacher again. But can we say that we never needed teachers in the first place after a teacher helps them develop their expertise? And if it turns out that the person was benefited by their interactions with the teacher, wouldn’t the next generation of learners benefit similarly? I just don’t understand this desire to shut the doors on formal education as soon as we can. Is formal education evil somehow? I don’t think so.

Ok, I came really close to understanding…

Dave Lindorff writes in the LA Times that growing numbers of students are discovering their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree by refusing to issue an official transcript. The schools won’t send the transcripts to potential employers or graduate admissions office if students are in default on student loans, or in many cases, even if they just fall one or two months behind. It’s no accident that they’re doing this. It turns out the federal government ‘encourages’ them to use this draconian tactic, saying that the policy ‘has resulted in numerous loan repayments.’ It is a strange position for colleges to take, writes Lindorff, since the schools themselves are not owed any money — student loan funds come from private banks or the federal government, and in the case of so-called Stafford loans, schools are not on the hook in any way. They are simply acting as collection agencies, and in fact may get paid for their efforts at collection. ‘It’s worse than indentured servitude,’ says NYU Professor Andrew Ross, who helped organize the Occupy Student Debt movement last fall. ‘With indentured servitude, you had to pay in order to work, but then at least you got to work. When universities withhold these transcripts, students who have been indentured by loans are being denied even the ability to work or to finish their education so they can repay their indenture.’

Absolutely appalling.

This whole problem space is one I am finding more and more interesting, particularly as it pertains to (1) openness and data ownership and (2) employment. I’ve been exploring these ideas in posts like Or Equivalent and The Jig Is Up and in the context of our recent HASTAC/Mozilla/MacArthur badges grant. I want to try to bring some of that together here.

We’ve all seen job listings that state something like, “BS in Marketing Required.” But employers don’t necessarily care whether or not you have a degree – they just want to know that you have the skills and knowledge to be successful in the job they’re advertising. Unfortunately, there’s not an economical, scalable way for employers to determine whether or not you have the specific skills they’re looking for. So “do you have a degree?” becomes the rough approximation of the question they really wish they could ask – “do you have the specific skills I need you to have?”

College transcripts hold a significantly greater amount of detail about what a student knows. The transcript is a complete list of all the courses a student has taken and how well they performed in each class. Checking the “I have a BS in Marketing” box tells a potential employer nothing about the electives a student took, the areas they specialized in, and their level of mastery in each area. The transcript provides a much clearer view of this information – regardless of whether or not a student even graduated or had to stop out of school early.

Unfortunately, requesting transcripts is both expensive and a hassle. Students have to sign paperwork verifying their identity every time they request an official transcript. Unofficial transcripts are less useful for making high stakes decisions. Additionally, students have to pay $10 – $20 for each copy of their transcript they request. Due to the cost and headache, individuals rarely provide a copy of their transcript to potential employers, and employers rarely ask for a copy.

Consequently I’ve become very interested in the idea of “jailbreaking the transcript.” By jailbreaking your transcript you could provide employers with a much more detailed view of who you are and what you can do. Even if you never graduated, you could demonstrate to employers that you have the specific skills and knowledge they’re looking for – without the hassle, red-tape, and fees of interacting with the registrar’s office every time you want to apply for a job. If you could jailbreak your transcript, you could actually own your own data and be able to manage and use it however you want. No student should ever be at the mercy of a school or anyone else with regard to accessing and using their own educational data.

I’m working on something in this space that I’m really excited about, and hope to be able to show that something very soon. Normally I would have waited to post until it was ready, but the LA Times article was just too frustrating to let pass by without comment.

The United States Distance Learning Association recently awarded OHSU a Gold Medal in the “BEST PRACTICES AWARDS FOR DISTANCE LEARNING PROGRAMMING” category and both Gold and Silver medals in the “BEST PRACTICES AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN DISTANCE LEARNING TEACHING” category.

Also, according to the Utah Best of State awards competition, OHSU is the best charter school in the state of Utah!

Congrats to everyone involved for making the Open High School of Utah the best it can be! Here’s to making it even better next year…

The current version of the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, Section 8, Subsection e, reads:

This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You.

This means that the extra “add-ons” organizations try to attach to CC licenses are, according to the license itself, prohibited and meaningless in the context of the license.

The most popular of these add-ons is one in which institutions define “Noncommercial Use.” The way these statements are included on websites next to the link to the CC license would lead you to believe that they are somehow incorporated into the license by reference. Not true, it turns out – in fact, the license explicitly prohibits a Licensor from trying to do that.

Now, why would CC want to prohibit people from providing local definitions of Noncommercial Use? Let’s take a look at two concrete examples of the prohibited add-ons. First up, the relevant language from MIT OCW’s add-on:

Materials may be used by individuals, institutions, governments, corporations, or other business whether for-profit or non-profit so long as the use itself is not a commercialization of the materials or a use that is directly intended to generate sales or profit.

Next up, the MITE add-on:

MITE understands that the Noncommercial (NC) restriction on this Creative Commons license precludes institutional use of the materials, including by governments, corporations, public entities, and businesses, whether for-profit or non-profit.

So here are two almost perfectly contradictory definitions of Noncommercial Use. I’m not passing judgement on which is better – for sake of my argument it doesn’t matter. The salient point is that the definitions contradict each other.

Both these sites (MIT OCW and MITE) use the ShareAlike clause together with the NC clause. The SA clause includes the statement, “You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of this License.” This language forcibly relicenses materials remixed into a BY-NC-SA work under the same (BY-NC-SA in this case) license as the original work IF the work is to be distributed or publicly performed. For this reason, BY-NC-SA works (like MIT OCW) and BY-SA works (like Wikipedia) cannot be remixed – the SA clauses of the BY-NC-SA and the BY-SA license conflict, both trying to relicense the other under its own terms. (If this is confusing, please play my CC licensing remix game which will help you master the the underlying concepts.)

Consequently, if CC licenses were to allow local definitions of NC to be incorporated into a BY-NC-SA license by reference, we would frequently – but not always – find ourselves in a situation where two BY-NC-SA licensed materials could not be remixed because they would actually be licensed under different licenses due to the language of the add-on. To be more concrete, if add-ons were legal you could not remix MIT and MITE content because they would be licensed under two different licenses, even though on the surface they appear to be the same license. And you thought NC was confusing before!

In the current draft of the 4.0 licenses the Section 8 Subsection e language has been removed (see this handy comparison chart.) If something similar is not put back in its place in the proposed new Additional Terms section, CC will not have six licenses – it will have infinitely many licenses. Talk about license proliferation! Consequently, I believe the 4.0 licenses MUST INCLUDE language similar in function to the current Section 8 Subsection e.

Frankly, the whole situation is reminiscent of the entangled problems of immigration reform in the US. Since the Feds refuse to act on the issue, individual states are acting in ways that are not entirely harmonious (or necessarily sensible). Similarly, if CC continues to refuse to define the NC term, individual Licensors are each going to want to provide their own definition. However, under no circumstances should they be allowed to do that.

People sometimes wonder why I talk about 4R permissions, asking if “revise” and “remix” are really that different. Revise is something you do to the inside of a resource. Remix is combining two or more resources together into a new work. If MIT and MITE were allowed to define NC locally, remix with other BY-NC-SA works would cease to be permitted for their works, but revise would continue to be permitted. License incompatibilities are the primary reason why there are 4 Rs instead of just 3.

UPDATE: Diane just sent an email saying that language like that in Section 8 Subsection e will definitely be part of the 4.0 licenses, and pointing out that I just missed it in my review of the docs available on the wiki. This is excellent news. I hope that, going forward, we can do better education / outreach to the CC community to make sure that (1) Licensors know that they can’t “redefine” Noncommercial with little “clarifying” add-ons, and (2) users know they can safely ignore the Licensors who still choose to write these add-ons anyway.

You can see the contradiction here, but that’s all you’ll be able to see…

It’s that love and respect that makes me me sit up and want desperately to understand when Stephen says something like, “I’ve spent a lifetime pursuing this objective.” He clarifies this lifetime of work as follows:

But let’s be clear about exactly what this objective is. It isn’t about (as the OECD report was titled) “Giving Knowledge for Free“. That is, it isn’t about the wonderful rich people engaging in charitable work as some sort of civic duty (as though that somehow made they wealth OK). It’s about actually empowering people to develop and create their own learning, their own education. So not only do they not depend on us for learning, but also, their learning is not subject to our value-judgements and prejudices. We (those of working in MOOCs) have also been clear about the influences of people like Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire. And it’s not just about ‘flipping’ courses. It’s about reducing and eventually eliminating the learned dependence on the expert and the elite – not as a celebration of anti-intellectualism, but as a result of widespread and equitable access to expertise.

None of this happens by magic. There isn’t some ‘invisible hand’ creating a fair and equitable education marketplace. The system needs to be built with an understanding that personal empowerment and community networks are the goal and objective.

I’ve been confused by similar statements Stephen has made in the past, but perhaps a little too embarrassed by my inability to understand them (due to some lack of sophistication or nuance on my part) to admit it publicly. Or maybe I have and just don’t recall confessing previously.

I fully agree that we want to empower people. That seems to me to be the purpose of education. However, I don’t understand Stephen’s remarks regarding experts. My reading of the last sentence in the first paragraph is that we will eventually eliminate learners’ dependence on experts by making sure they have more equitable access to a larger group of experts: “It’s about reducing and eventually eliminating the learned dependence on the expert and the elite – not as a celebration of anti-intellectualism, but as a result of widespread and equitable access to expertise.” I’m confused.

If we take as a very loose definition of expert “someone who has more exper-ience than you do,” it is hard to imagine any form of learning that does not involve an expert – except pure, unguided, trial-and-error discovery learning. Without reference to any person – or any artifact created by a person – of more experience than ourselves, all learning would be maximally inefficient. We would each be left to rediscover the entirety of physics from scratch. And the entirety of music theory. And the entirety of every other field, without a conversation or a textbook or a Wikipedia article to guide us.

I can’t believe that this is what Stephen is advocating for. I believe one of the core purposes of education is to help learning be more efficient than blind groping in the dark, and I believe Stephen does, too. Which is part of what confuses me so terribly.

Stephen also mentions the “elite” in connection with experts. Are these people elite because they have expertise, and because expertise is such a rare commodity? I fully support creating more equitable access to a larger group of experts. And I agree that the way to make this happen is to democratize expertise, not by debasing our definition or lowering our standards of what makes an expert, but by helping more people rise to that level of achievement. However, I don’t see how I would decrease people’s dependence on, say, water, by insuring more equitable access to a larger pool of water. Pollenating expertise far and wide doesn’t make it any less critically important to learners, it only makes it easier for learners to get access to what remains critically important to them.

Stephen writes, “It’s about actually empowering people to develop and create their own learning, their own education. So not only do they not depend on us for learning, but also, their learning is not subject to our value-judgements and prejudices.”

This seems like a turtles-all-the-way-down argument. If learners are to benefit from any expertise at all, they will inescapably be subjected to the value-judgements and prejudices of those whose expertise they lean on while developing their own. Simply removing an economics teacher from the front of the classroom does not spare learners exposure to the biases and prejudices of John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, or Adam Smith work when they read works by these authors. How are we ever to gain access to expertise while avoiding the values that drove those experts to develop their own expertise?

He concludes, “The system needs to be built with an understanding that personal empowerment and community networks are the goal and objective.”

Personal empowerment is the goal and objective. Community networks are one means to that end. We should be careful not to confuse ends with means.

I find myself desperately wanting to understand Stephen’s characterization of his life’s work, but unable to. Stephen, or someone else, help please?

The UI is not very sexy, but I figure that’s ok since you only have to use it once.

After you walk through the wizard you receive some Javascript you can embed in your blog or elsewhere (see you can see it running at the bottom of the righthand sidebar on the front page of this blog, for example).

The widget currently:

- shows up to the first four badges in the group you selected,
- badge images link to the hosted assertion, and
- badge names linking to the badge descriptions.

For BWH to work, you need to (1) have badges in your Mozilla badge backpack, (2) created at least one group and added some badges to it, and (3) marked that group as Public.

I’m sure you’ll manage to break it, and I would love any feedback or ideas for improvements!

Grab the source and play with your own version at https://github.com/kalendar/BadgeWidgetHack.

Boundless is definitely “an OER company.” A Boundless textbook is comprised of 95% or more pre-existing OER, with a very minimal amount of newly written material. Their development model appears to be as follows: take a popular textbook, analyze its structure and organization in order to create an outline, and fill that outline in with OER. The resulting textbook is an aggregation of OER.

So in order for Boundless to be found in violation of copyright law, a judge will have to say: “you took openly licensed materials, which the court recognizes as both legal themselves and explicitly and legally permitting you to revise and remix them, and you remixed them in an illegal order.” That’s what this case comes down to – is it possible to take individual OER, none of which infringes on anyone’s copyright, and exercise the rights legally permitted in each OER according to their licenses, and still violate copyright? Is it possible to exercise your legal rights in OER illegally?

If the court does rule in favor of the publishers, which given recent pro-business, anti-society behavior we have every reason to believe it will, this sets up a terrific opportunity for publishers. If the plaintiffs win, and if I were a Pearson, the very next thing I would do is immediately publish 100 versions of introductory biology covering every meaningful high-level arrangement of ideas. This locks out other publishers as well as OER providers. Then I would sue every cute little OER-sharer out of existence, whether or not their OER came first. Because I can. Then I would start suing other publishers, and I wouldn’t stop suing people until I ruled the world!!! Mua-ha-ha-ha!!!!!!!

Oh. Sorry.

Anyway, for Boundless to lose the courts are going to have to make another incredibly pro-business, anti-society statement on the scale of Eldred v Ashcroft. The question is – how long are we going to accept this kind of behavior from our legislatures, whose laws enable the courts’ bad behavior?

On the other end of the spectrum, if OER could score a major win in the courts and in public opinion, it would be a huge win for teaching and learning everywhere and a huge blow to the publishing cartel. I wouldn’t bet the farm, but I’m going to remain hopeful.