When David Noble first published his groundbreaking critique of online education in 1998, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, I thought to myself “he couldn’t be more wrong.” As it turns out he might not have been wrong - maybe Noble was simply so miraculously prescient that I couldn’t see what he saw. Fifteen - count them, fifteen - years later, Digital Diploma Mills reads as if it were researched and written about the current phenomenon called “MOOCs.” Entire paragraphs from the essay can be read unaltered and applied precisely to the state of things today: ...

My unpaid leave from BYU started January 1. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder than I have during this past month. It’s been exhilarating and exhausting and exciting and challenging and I’m loving it. For anyone who’s interested, here’s an update on what I’ve been doing: Textbook Zero I spent two days early in January visiting with our partner community college working on the first Textbook Zero Associates degree program. This involved two full days of hands-on training with faculty, providing a very hands-on and high touch workshop experience focused on redesigning courses around OER. We started with learning outcomes, moved up through assessments, and finally looked at the open educational resources that will best support teachers in facilitating the specific types of learning they want to see happen with their students. This program, which is an Associates degree in business administration, will open this fall. The Textbook Zero approach (moving the entire degree off of textbooks and onto OER) knocks 30% off the cost of completing this degree. I am super excited about this. (And I have to say that, given the abuse the term “open” has taken recently, I’m going to take steps to make sure that the phrase “Textbook Zero” retains the meaning I meant for it to have when I coined it.) ...

Our latest article on open texts has been published! The Cost and Quality of Open Textbooks: Perceptions of Community College Faculty and Students (CC BY open access). Abstract: Proponents of open educational resources (OER) claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the college classroom. We investigated student and faculty perceptions of OER used in a community college context. Over 125 students and 11 faculty from seven colleges responded to an online questionnaire about the cost and quality of the open textbooks used in their classrooms. Results showed that the majority of students and faculty had a positive experience using the open textbooks, appreciated the lower costs, and perceived the texts as being of high quality. The potential implications for OER initiatives at the college level seem large. If primary instructional materials can in fact be made available to students at no or very low cost, without harming learning outcomes, there appears to be a significant opportunity for disruption and innovation in higher education. ...

Before I learned I would be able to take a sabbatical this year, I was scheduled to teach the 2013 edition of my Introduction to Openness in Education course at BYU during the winter term. Since I received the Shuttleworth Fellowship and am taking a sabbatical (more on this soon) I won’t be teaching the course at BYU this term - but because many people were interested in taking it informally again this year (I’ve been teaching it as a “MOOC” since 2007, before the term was coined), I will be offering a free, non-credit version in the new Canvas Network as a community service. ...

December 21, 2012 was supposed to be the day the world was going to end. Instead, it ended up being the day the Saylor Foundation saved a major portion of the educational Commons from disappearing. As described in a blog post this morning, Saylor.org now hosts free and open versions of Flat World Knowledge texts. Saylor has done a Herculean job, backing up and providing free and permanent access to Word and PDF formats of every Flat World Knowledge textbook - with ePub versions coming in Q1 2013. They’re also inviting anyone who has remixed FWK books to contribute links to their remixes for Saylor’s new Bookshelf. ...

There are some very exciting things happening in my life right now. 1. I’m extremely humbled and excited to have been awarded a Shuttleworth Fellowship. These Fellowships provide a year’s salary replacement, allowing each Fellow to focus completely on creating a particular kind of social change - without other distractions. In my application, I characterized the change I want to create this way: I want to push the field over the tipping point and create a world where OER are used pervasively throughout secondary schools, community colleges, and universities. In my vision of the world, OER supplant traditional textbooks for all high school, associates degree, and undergraduate general education courses. Organizations, faculty, and students at all three levels collaborate to create and improve an openly licensed content infrastructure that dramatically reduces the cost of education, increases student success, and supports rapid experimentation and innovation. ...

In fall of 2011, I took a new approach to the Project Management course I teach each year. I wanted my students to gain hands on experience managing a project, I wanted them to feel the pressure of hitting deliverables, I wanted them to feel the nausea of having things fall through, I wanted them to learn to navigate managing people, and most of all I wanted them to feel the joy of completing a piece of work that blesses people lives. So I asked my students to engage in a very large scale revise / remix project that would benefit them and many others. ...

More response to the interesting discussion happening on the (closed) oer-community list. Brian Lamb asks: Finally, can somebody tell me if an NC license forbids reuse by non-profit public education institutions that charge tuition? Seems like a fairly simple question, but I’ve heard authoritative responses that wholly contradict each other on that point. The extremely misguided thinking Brian is referring to (and not personally guilty of) goes, “If someone is charges tuition for a course that uses a NC textbook, that violates the terms of the license.” This line of thinking is completely wrong. Full stop. Here’s why. ...

Stop the presses. I’m going to agree with Stephen here. In a recent email to the (closed) oer-community mailing list, Stephen argued that perspective plays a significant role in this debate. He couldn’t be more correct. Just as there is not One True License, there is not One True Perspective on the free, nonfree, open, libre, etc., debate. A few examples: - Some people look at OER issues from the perspective of the content, and some see them from the perspective of the people who use the content. Content-p drives people to favor SA licenses, to insure that derivatives of the content always remain free. People-p drives people to reject SA, so that derivers always remain free to license their derivatives as they choose. Which is the One True Perspective? ...

Cable Green sent a frustrated email today to the Educause Openness Constituent Group. Here’s the key point: The Babson Survey Research Group has released a new report: Growing the Curriculum: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education. This sentence is of particular concern to me: “One concept very important to many in the OER field was rarely mentioned at all – licensing terms such as creative commons that permit free use or re-purposing by others.” ...