tl;dr - If a resource is licensed in a way that grants you permission to engage in the 5R activities, and grants you those permissions for free, it’s an open educational resource (OER) - no matter where you find it or how it’s being used. I have an obsession with definitions. It’s been true for decades. It manifest first with learning objects in the late 1990s, and then with open content and open educational resources (aka, learning objects with an open license) in the early 2000s. Apparently I’ve been unable to move on. ...

One of the defining features of open educational resources is permission to engage in revise and remix activities with regard to OER. While those permissions make it possible for us to change and improve OER, they do nothing to tell us which OER to spend our time and energy improving - or how to improve them. In our work at Lumen, we put a lot of effort into creating scalable processes for empirically determining which OER aren’t sufficiently supporting student learning and then making targeted improvements to those OER. In fact, this is one of the main ways Lumen adds value to the open education community - making data-informed improvements to OER and releasing those improved OER back to the community under an open license. ...

In an article from a few years ago, Michael Feldstein describes courseware as the combination of (1) content, (2) platform, and (3) design (see the graphic at the bottom of the article.) In another article, he includes examples of “courseware” ranging from Cengage MindTap and Pearson CourseConnect to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and Lumen’s Waymaker. Much has happened in the courseware space since he wrote these articles, but Michael’s multi-part definition still provides a useful framework for thinking about how the idea of “open” pertains to the idea of “courseware”. We need help thinking about open in the context of courseware because the question, “Is [insert specific courseware offering] ‘open’?” is not a question we know how to answer today. And our inability to answer this question in a coherent way is causing some consternation among parts of the open education community right now. ...

It’s a real compliment to be compared to John Perry Barlow, even if it’s because someone is claiming you’re both wrong in the same way. Nate’s post this week compares statements by JPB and me, and finds them both too simplistic in their optimism. He writes: To me, both cyberspace and OER are tools that I think can be used to generate positive outcomes, but can also (very clearly I think) be used to generate outcomes I don’t support, like political polarization or business models that sell us back our experiences rather than proprietary content. While cyberspace and OER both have inherent structural characteristics, none of those characteristics guarantee any specific social outcome. To argue otherwise would require a kind of technological determinism, right? ...

In the spirit of iterating toward openness, I’ve recently had the opportunity to revisit some of my earlier thinking about how to measure the impact of OER-related work. Some of this seemed interesting enough that I thought I would share. I have previously written about metrics I call the educational golden ratio and the OER impact factor. These are ways of thinking about the learning-related return on investment students get from their purchases of learning materials. Here’s an example from the 2014 essay linked above: ...

I’m not the only one celebrating the 20th anniversary of open source and open content this year. Over the weekend Christine Peterson published an essay on opensource.com describing the emergence of the ideas behind “open source software” and how she coined the name twenty years ago. Her essay is nice companion to the one I recently posted about the emergence of the ideas behind “open content” and how I coined that name a few months later in 1998. ...

This essay is crossposted from the #OER18 website. 2018 marks the 20th anniversary of open content. I’ll be writing a range of essays this year reflecting on two decades of work toward opening the core intellectual infrastructure of education (textbooks and other educational materials, assessments, and outcomes / objectives / competency statements) in order to increase access to and improve the effectiveness of education. This post, written as part of my agreement to keynote #OER18 later this spring, provides some historical context for the emergence of open content. ...

2018 is an important year for me professionally. I don’t know why anniversaries divisible by 5 with no remainder feel more important than others, but for some reason they do. I’m going to do some writing this year in which I reflect on some of these anniversaries. For me, 2018 marks: 25 years since I made my first webpage. 20 years since I started grad school. 20 years since I started blogging. 20 years since I coined the term “open content”, created the first open source style license for content (as opposed to software), and started advocating for open education. Later this week I’ll publish a longer post looking back at the first five years of this work, together with some lessons learned, as part of the lead up to my keynote at #OER18. 15 years since I founded the OpenEd Conference. 10 years since the publication of the Cape Town Declaration, which a couple dozen of us authored. See the new CPT+10 recommendations, to which I also contributed. Perhaps the thing that has surprised me most since I started reflecting on professional anniversaries divisible by 5 this year is that it’s 20 years since I started blogging. That makes me feel old. ...

Today is one of those liminal days when you come to the end of something you’ve worked on for what feels like forever, and it magically transforms into the beginning of something new, and you can still see both sides of it. We began work on the Creative Commons Certificates two years ago. Collectively, we’ve spent hundreds of hours, sometimes working face to face but most often working remotely, designing and redesigning everything from the course outcomes to the structure of the course content to the assessment approach to the underlying technology. We talked about the certificate at conferences and gathered feedback. We offered one day versions of individual units from the course as face to face workshops and gathered feedback. We went back and refined the designs, content, and assessments again. And again. And again. ...

Stephen makes a great point in today’s OLDaily that I want to amplify and expand briefly here. Many of us believe that education is an incredibly powerful tool in the fight to increase equity, and this is a primary motivation for our participation in the open education movement. The shared core of the work we do in open education is increasing access to educational opportunity - with the long-term goal of making access to that opportunity truly universal - by licensing educational resources in ways that make them free and 5R-able. That is, by creating, sharing, and improving OER. ...