With all the excitement in the air about big data, analytics, and adaptive instruction, it is easy to imagine a future of complete automation. In this future, algorithms will choose what we will learn next, which specific resources we will interact with in order to learn it, and the order in which we will experience these resources. All the guesswork will be taken out of the process - instruction will be “optimized” for each learner. ...

The Object of Study As we work to move entire degree programs from commercial textbooks to open educational resources, we must answer this critical question - can all commercial materials be replaced with open educational resources? The answer to this question is no, but perhaps not for the reason you suspect. The primary object of study in a college course is often a model, principle, theory, equation, causal relationship, or other idea. While one particular way of explaining an idea can be copyrighted, an idea itself cannot be copyrighted. This feature of copyright law means that, despite how anyone else chooses to leverage their copyright in an explanation of the second law of thermodynamics or the cause of the Civil War, you and I are forever free to create our own explanation of these and other ideas. When we exercise that right and explain an idea in our own words (and perhaps other media), we then hold the copyright to our explanations of those ideas. And as the copyright holders we are free to openly license our explanations, thereby creating OER alternatives to the All Rights Reserved explanations published and controlled by commercial publishers. ...

Wow, there’s been some great writing lately. I’ve been particularly reinvigorated by Brian Lamb, Mike Caulfield, and Bracken Mosbacker. And Audrey Watters’ ongoing work on the history of educational technology is vastly more important than anyone seems to realize. It should be absolutely mandatory reading for every student in a graduate program on educational technology or learning sciences, period. Audrey’s constant refrain that “no one seems to remember our history” was made for her again this week when McGraw-Hill and Microsoft announced a new project based around - I kid you not - learning objects. Reading this news created in me an irresistible urge to join Audrey in reminding the field of its not-at-all-distant and yet already-forgotten history regarding the Reusability Paradox. ...

Some readers are misinterpreting my critique of the phrase “high quality” as it’s used with regard to textbooks and other educational resources. Let me reiterate my points and then provide a new example that hopefully sheds more light on what I’m criticizing and what I’m not. My problems with the phrase “high quality” are two-fold: (1) how the phrase gets equated with a single authoring process to the exclusion of all other authoring processes, and (2) how that usage distracts us from the efficacy conversation. ...

Last week I wrote that we should stop saying “high quality” when discussing learning materials. Some have questioned whether or not that’s true. It is true, and here’s why. [caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“240”] Photo by Shira Golding, CC BY NC.[/caption] The problem with the phrase “high quality” as used by traditional publishers is that it puts process over outcome. If publishers were basketball players, they would say, “When I shoot free throws, I align my toes with the foul line and square my shoulders to the basket. I slow my breathing and count to 5. I dribble three times, exhale once more, and then shoot, making sure to keep my elbow in and fully extend my arm.” Honestly, who cares? What you really want to know about a basketball player is whether or not he makes his foul shots. You aren’t going to draft him based on his free throw shooting process - you’re going to draft him based on his free throw shooting percentage. If the player you’re vetting shoots underhanded but makes over 90% of his foul shots, you’re going to draft him. The same is true with a salesperson - you don’t care about her sales process, you care about the number of sales she closes. Or with a baseball player - you don’t care about his batting process, you care about his batting average. Or with a network engineer, you don’t care about her specific troubleshooting process, you care about whether your employees can reach the internet or not. ...

Recently the phrase “high quality” has come up several times in discussions of educational materials, and I’ve been surprised what a strong, negative reaction I’ve been having each time I heard the word. After some reflection I think the reason the phrase gets my goat is that “high quality” sounds like it’s dealing with a core issue, while actually dodging the core issue. The phrase is sneaky and deceptive. (Now I don’t mean that the people who were using it were trying to be deceptive; they weren’t. But the phrase itself tends to blind people.) And by “core issue” I mean this - the core issue in determining the quality of any educational resource is the degree to which it supports learning. But confusingly, that’s not what people mean when they say that a textbook or other educational resource is “high quality.” ...

For several years my colleagues and I have been conducting and reviewing empirical research on the impact on student outcomes when OER are adopted in place of commercial materials. Suffice it to say the research results are highly variable. Some studies of OER adoption show essentially no change in student outcomes. Many of these studies report small positive and negative changes in outcomes that, aggregated across several courses, fail to achieve statistical significance. Some studies including larger numbers of students find small changes in students outcomes that achieve statistical significance while failing to achieve practical significance. Based on these studies, we can say that sometimes OER save students significant amounts of money while obeying the “do no harm” rule in terms of student outcomes. Achieving the same outcomes for free, or for 95% less than students were previously paying, is a solid “win” for OER. ...

At this year’s SXSWEdu I gave a Future15 talk, a 15 minute talk given in a “TED style” format. These are the notes I wrote while preparing for the talk. The talk itself differed from these notes somewhat, including some improvisations, but this will give you a broad sense of the argument. What is a bubble? King, Smith, Williams and Van Boening (1993) define a bubble as “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values.” Krugman describes a bubble as a situation in which prices appear to be based on implausible or inconsistent views about the future (2013). (wikipedia) ...

On March 1 my Fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation ended and I officially became an alum of the program. It was an absolutely amazing experience! If you are passionate about using openness to overcome a social problem, you should stop every single thing you are doing right now and go learn about the Shuttleworth Fellowship program. A brief quote from the site: The Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship Program funding consists of two components for each Fellow – the fellowship grant and the co-investment project funding. ...

(Cross-posted from the Open Education Group blog) I’m very excited to announce the launch of the OER Adoption Impact Explorer. This interactive tool lets users adjust a range of Institutional Settings to match their local context and estimate what the impact of adopting OER would be on their students and campus. Users can also tinker with a group of Research-based Settings to make the estimates more conservative or more aggressive. The goal of the Explorer is to provide OER advocates with rigorously modeled, data-based arguments that they can use in conversations with a wide range of stakeholders (faculty, administration, students, policy makers, etc.). ...