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.). ...

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 By the time the article appears, however, it will almost certainly be out of date.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. ...