A quick search via Google shows that Stephen Downes is mentioned over 500 times on the pages of Iterating Toward Openness. What would I do without him to disagree and argue with? I would certainly be intellectually impoverished. As I’ve said before, everyone needs a Stephen in their life. Anyway, here’s another page to add to the pile… In commenting on the recent announcement about the partnership between Follett and Lumen, Stephen asks: ...
In 2012 Kim Thanos and I founded Lumen Learning because, through our Gates-funded work on the Kaleidoscope Project, we had seen first-hand how hard it was for faculty to replace publisher materials with OER. The 2000s were an inspiring decade as institutions and individuals created and published a huge amount of openly licensed educational materials (e.g., MIT OCW, Wikipedia, Khan Academy), but in 2010 it was difficult to find a faculty member who had made the switch. It seemed like lots of people wanted to publish and share their own OER, but no one wanted to use anyone else’s. ...
[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“640”] This image from the BBC is not subject to opencontent.org’s Creative Commons license.[/caption] And now for something completely different… I’m taking a pause from talking directly about open for a moment to share some resources I’ve recently found that have made my data life much more efficient and enjoyable. But don’t worry - there’s still a connection to open. I spend a lot of my time working in the data generated by use of Lumen’s open courseware. In addition to regular meetings with partner schools where we share insights both surprising and mundane, this work also supports our continuous improvement efforts to make our open courseware objectively more effective term after term. As I’ve said many times: ...
UPDATE: For my latest thinking on open pedagogy, see the post When Opens Collide. The post below will remain here for archival purposes. I feel like words should mean something. Especially the word “open.” Specifically, I’m deeply concerned about the way many have begun using “open” in the context of “open pedagogy,” because I can’t tell what it means. For many years we have seen openwashing among companies working in the education space, in which they either knowingly or accidentally attempt to equate “open” with something other than a free grant of the 5R permissions. If left unchecked, these attempts would dilute and weaken the meaning of open and, consequently, the community rallies against them. ...
In a recent interview, Pearson CEO John Fallon said: “Education like every other sector and sphere of life is going through this digital transformation. There is going to be a big winner in the transformation in education. We are absolutely determined to make Pearson that winner.” This is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve ever read of the fundamentally wrongheaded view of the traditional publishers. The only way to survive “this digital transformation” is to be absolutely determined to make learners the big winners. Only the organizations that make this commitment a core value will remain standing when all is said and done.
Dumping out some thoughts here so I can return to them when I have more time. There’s been some fabulous writing over the last month or so about whether or not open licensing is important to open pedagogy, beginning with Clint Lalonde’s Does Open Pedagogy Require OER? (read the comments, too). Reading this has prompted me to do some additional thinking which is helping me clarify what I mean by “open pedagogy.” I realize there are people who use the term “open pedagogy” in different ways than I do, and even some who are actively advocating for it to be defined in different ways (e.g., Hegarty, 2015). That’s fine. My goal here is to bring greater clarity to my own thinking. ...
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Fireflies and Star Trails No. 1 by Mike Lewinski, CC BY[/caption] I love everything Rajiv is saying in his recent, excellent essay Pragmatism vs. Idealism and the Identity Crisis of OER Advocacy and I’m really looking forward to the discussion we’ll have when he presents this paper early next month. This is a critically important topic and I think he has identified all the right dots, even if I would connect them slightly differently. ...
Five years ago, in an essay called 2017: RIP OER?, I pondered whether this year would be the end of OER. The bulk of my concern was expressed in these two paragraphs: Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR [open assessment resources] that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen. ...
Cengage recently announced a new offering called MindTap ACE that includes OER and is now available in pilot. I haven’t had access to review the offering yet, but you can see some screenshots in the video linked above. The video clearly shows Cengage content listed for each topic, followed by some OER. Michael Hansen, Cengage CEO, is quoted in the press release as saying: “far too often, the debate is an either/or of achievement versus price, when the reality is that OER can complement proprietary content. MindTap ACE addresses this challenge by including OER alongside Cengage’s best-in-class content. The result is an affordable option that ensures students still benefit from a meaningful learning experience.” ...
E-literate recently ran a story about the emergence of a genuine science of learning. Keith Devlin follows many who came before him in making an analogy to medicine. Generally speaking, I don’t like comparisons of education to medicine. I think they’re problematic for a range of reasons I’ve written about in the past. But in the context of this article, the biggest problem with the comparison has to do with the role of data. ...