At OpenEd18 I gave a presentation titled “Questioning the OER Orthodoxy: Is the Commons the Right Metaphor for our Work?” I’ve been meaning to translate some of that thinking into writing, and a prompt in my inbox this morning finally has me moving. In the presentation I made the point that metaphors are extraordinarily powerful. The metaphors we choose to employ literally determine what we will see, consider, and understand - as well as what we will not. A powerful metaphor draws our attention to salient features that we would likely have missed otherwise, increasing our ability to make progress. However, the wrong metaphor can have exactly the opposite effect, blinding us to salient features and keeping us focused on frivolous similarities that lead nowhere. ...

The Wordpress REST API is awesome. For a project I was working on this week I needed to be able to publish pages to Wordpress via the API from R. Needless to say, there aren’t a ton of resources available online about how to do this (read: none). After fighting a losing battle between httr’s implementation of OAuth and the Wordpress implementation of OAuth in Jetpack, I decided to try using JSON Web Tokens for authentication. That finally got things moving. ...

Is open a means to an end, or is open its own end? This is a question worth thinking long and hard about. I’ve done some writing as I’ve been thinking about it, so I figured I may as well post it. Think about the phrase “open education.” This phrase denotes something very different when you believe open is a means than it does when you believe open is the end. ...

UPDATE: It’s been brought to my attention that some readers of my blog read this post as a criticism of Creative Commons and its licenses. Nothing could be further from the truth. The title of the post was not “The Creative Commons licenses are inadequate.” The title was “Things you may misunderstand about the licenses” and my goal in writing the post was to educate members of the community about some of the finer points of the licenses. ...

Recently I’ve been doing both more thinking and more roll-up-your-sleeves working on continuous improvement of OER. Below I’m cross-posting two short pieces on this topic I recently published on Lumen’s site (here and here). Improvement in post secondary education will require converting teaching from a solo sport to a community-based research activity. (Herbert A. Simon, 1986) The faculty Lumen work with carry an enormous workload. Some have research, grant writing, and publication responsibilities in addition to teaching their courses. Some teach five or six courses per semester. Some have committee assignments and additional service responsibilities. Some drive across town several times per day as they try to string adjunct appointments at three institutions together into a career that pays the rent. All of our faculty have expertise in their discipline. Few have formal training in teaching or learning. ...

As a general rule, I don’t believe that colleges and universities understand why students are willing to go tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to attend them. My experience has been that individual faculty are even less likely to understand these reasons than the leaders of their institutions. Faculty want college to be a journey of self-discovery and self-improvement for students that catalyzes a lifelong love of learning and blossoms into genuine curiosity about the world around us; a time in which students develop critical thinking, civic-mindedness, and other attitudes, values, and skills that will help them develop into truly wonderful human beings. ...

Matt Crosslin has posted a thoughtful response to our RISE article from last year. An open implementation of RISE was recently published in the Journal of Open Source Software. Since Matt took the time to engage so thoughtfully, I wanted to respond in kind. (Also, it’s a breath of fresh air to write a little about instructional design… it’s good to get back to your roots.) [T]he bigger concern with the way grades are addressed in the RISE framework is that they are plotting assessment scores instead of individual item scores. ...

Yesterday, Phil Hill wrote about OpenStax’s new method for calculating the savings students see when their faculty adopt OER. https://mfeldstein.com/welcome-change-openstax-using-more-accurate-data-on-student-textbook-expenditures/ His article highlights these paragraphs from Rice University’s recent press release: Our community is creating a movement that will make a big impact on college affordability. The success of open textbooks like OpenStax have ignited competition in the textbook market, and textbook prices are actually falling for the first time in 50 years. ...

You may have heard me say some of this before. By definition, open educational resources (OER) are licensed in a manner that gives you permission to change, update, and improve them. However, that permission gives you no insight into what needs to be improved. Learning analytics, on the other hand, can provide great insight into where course materials - including OER - are not effectively supporting student learning. However, that insight does not grant you the permission necessary to make improvements to ineffective course materials. ...

I’ve read some really interesting books this year. As new ideas are supposed to do, several of these have significantly impacted my thinking. The books that are affecting me the most professionally are those that are giving me language and frameworks for making progress on ideas that have been stagnating in the back of my mind for a while. Some of the “slow hunches” I’ve been pursuing run contrary to popular belief, including questions like: ...