Cross-posted from the Open Education Group website. At #OpenEd14 John Hilton presented a summary of all the empirical research on the impact of OER adoption that we could find. The presentation was extremely well received, and John has turned it into a nice journal article which is currently under review at a journal which shall remain nameless (for the time being). By the time the article appears, however, it will almost certainly be out of date. As a service to the field, we’ve published an abstracted version of John’s article on the OEG website under the label The Review Project. We’ll keep this page up-to-date as we come across additional articles that actually take a solid empirical look at the impacts of OER adoption. Do you know of one we’ve missed? Head over to The Review Project and leave a reference in the comments.

Rereading Ben Bloom’s 1968 “Learning for Mastery” I am once again impressed and humbled by his ability to cut straight to the absolute core of the issue. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard these points made more clearly or more persuasively. Absolutely inspiring. If students are normally distributed with respect to aptitude for some subject (mathematics, science, literature, history, etc.) and all the students are provided with the same instruction (same in terms of amount of instruction, quality of instruction, and time available for learning), the end result will be a normal distribution on an appropriate measure of achievement. Furthermore the relationship between aptitude and achievement will be relatively high… ...

The Parable of the Restrictive Roads Once upon a time there was a pastoral country of beautiful fields and rolling hills. The simple people there enjoyed a relaxed pace of life, part of which included a good deal of walking. [caption id=“attachment_3763” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] CC BY photo by Marina del Castell[/caption] One day, a young lady announced a remarkable invention. She called it an automobile. The people had never seen anything like it, and everyone was immediately smitten with the speed and comfort of travel it provided. Trucks soon followed these first cars, as did motorcycles, and then four-wheelers. But before long, these remarkable inventions began to take their toll on the country’s beloved landscape. ...

I’m continuing to learn an incredible amount as I work with Lumen Learning, supporting institutions as they go through the process of replacing traditional textbooks with Open Educational Resources (OER), and as I simultaneously continue my work with the Open Education Group conducting empirical research on the effects of OER adoption by faculty. While I’m learning many things down “in the weeds” of implementation, at a higher level I’m understanding more deeply and appreciating more thoroughly how the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted educational materials is literally better for everyone involved. Adopting OER in place of traditional textbooks truly is: ...

Frances Bell has started a Google Doc collecting historical information about cMOOCs. I’m reposting my contributions to the doc (about my own cMOOCs) here on opencontent.org so I can find them again in the future if the Google Doc ever goes away. Year: 2007 Where: USU, INST 7150, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link Course Design: Students included both formal students earning credit at USU and students from around the world participating for free Students who completed the course and requested a Certificate of Completion received a certificate Course syllabus was presented in a wiki which students could (and did) edit Readings and videos were on the public web Each student maintained a blog where their writing and assignments were posted publicly A course OPML file was used to aggregate all student writing for easy reading in RSS Readers The course wiki included a master list of participants, including names, institution (if any), email address, and blog address Clusters of students created affinity-based sub-groups with mailing lists, etc. Year: 2009 Where: BYU, IPT 692R, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link ...

Humans are fundamentally social. There are a number of ways we might attempt to prove this claim. We might argue that the highest compliment someone can be paid is to be called a “true friend.” We might argue that the noblest of all emotions is love. We might argue that the single most important technological achievements in history are the creations of communications technologies such as speech, writing, printing, and the internet. Conversely, we might argue that society’s most severe nonlethal punishment is “solitary confinement.” ...

or, Of Small Deltas, Honeypots, and Brand Inversion What’s the difference between a MOOC and a “traditional” online course? It sounds like the setup for a bad joke, but trying to find a reasonable answer to this question is no joke. Take the following quote from an end of 2014 article about MOOCs as an example. We have seen strong development of the MOOC ecosystem this year. MOOC providers are finding better footing in developing their business models. They will likely tune them and bring in even more revenues. Universities are jumping on the online bandwagon and investing in online course development. They will be eager to leverage this content (via virtual and blended learning) in their own campuses and continuing education curricula. ...

tl;dr - We’ve published An Open Education Reader, a collection of readings on open education with commentary created by students in my graduate course Introduction to Open Education taught at Brigham Young University, Fall 2014. = = = = = Fall 2014 was the fifth time I’ve taught my graduate course Introduction to Open Education. I’ve taught it in many different ways in the past. In 2007 I taught it at USU as an open course with dozens of people from outside the university (and outside the US) reading along and completing assignments in order to earn a course certificate. Later at BYU I taught it as a Massively Multiplayer Online Game complete with character types, skills trees, guilds, quests, and experience points. Each experiment in teaching the course has been an opportunity for me to be more open in my practice and provide students with a different perspective on open education. ...

Part of an article on the P2P Foundation website today struck a chord with me with regard to the importance of being able to OWN things and not simply stream or lease access to them. It’s this kind of thinking that caused me to introduce a 5th R, Retain, this last year. In Owning is the New Sharing, Nathan Schneider writes: The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever. Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how. Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it. ...

I’ve stopped saying the word “disrupt” since people began exclaiming it in a kind of religious ecstasy. At some point in the last 18 months or so, “disruption” has completed its slide down the proverbial slippery slope and has stopped being a means and become an end in and of itself. Ends-means confusion is a terrible mistake, and never bodes well for the people who make it. I expect it bodes even worse for an entire field of endeavor (I’m looking at you, educational technology) that seems to have wholeheartedly bought into the switcheroo. ...