It’s been seven years since I introduced the 4Rs framework for thinking about the bundle of permissions that define an open educational resource, or OER. The framework of permitted activities - reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute - has gained some traction in the field, and I’m happy that people have found it useful. The 4Rs play a critical role in my own thinking about OER, and my operational definition of OER now includes two main criteria: (1) free and unfettered access to the resource, and (2) whatever copyright permissions are necessary for users to engage in the 4R activities. But while the framework has served the field well - and has shaped my own thinking, too - I believe the time has come to expand it. ...

Long before an upstart Harry headed to Hogwarts, Sparrowhawk went to the School of Roke in Ursula K. Leguin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. As part of his schooling, Sparrowhawk: was sent with seven other boys across Roke Island to the farthest north-most cape, where stands the Isolate Tower. There by himself lived the Master Namer, who was called by a name that had no meaning in any language, Kurremkarmerruk. No farm or dwelling lay within miles of the tower. Grim it stood above the northern cliffs, grey were the clouds over the seas of winter, endless the lists and ranks and rounds of names that the Namer’s eight pupils must learn. Amongst them in the tower’s high room Kurremkarmerruk sat on the high seat, writing down lists of names that must be learned before the ink faded at midnight leaving the parchment blank again. ...

Occasionally an initial concern for institutions considering a major OER initiative is, “What will happen to the revenue the college has traditionally received from the bookstore?” In 2011, NACS (the National Association of College Stores) released this infographic showing where the money students spend on textbooks goes (click the image to link to the original): According to NACS, the average college bookstore’s pre-tax income on textbooks is 3.7% of the price of the book. In other words, when a student spends $150 on a biology textbook, the college “makes” $5.55. ...

I’m SUPER excited today to announce a new partnership between OpenStax College, which makes great open textbooks, and Lumen Learning, which provides a wide range of services to institutions that want help adopting OER successfully and sustainably. For all the details, check the full announcement. Lumen also released a new video today that explains what we do and why we do it, and also includes perspectives from several of our partner institutions about how they’re using OER and what it’s like to work with Lumen. ...

I recently needed to quickly create a map of higher education institutions Lumen is working with, and consequently needed LAT and LONG info for dozens of schools. Rather than do that all by hand, I created this little recipe for automatically retrieving coordinates given a school’s name using the Google Maps API and Google Spreadsheets. Here’s a demonstration of the recipe using a list of all the higher education institutions where I’ve taught: ...

Exactly a year ago today I published a post about some exciting changes in my professional life. I had just applied for a 12-month unpaid leave of absence from BYU. My goal was to spend the time away focused on supporting and scaling the adoption of open educational resources (OER) in formal education. Specifically, I wanted to help institutions that serve at-risk students - like community colleges - use OER to eliminate textbook costs and improve student success. Kim Thanos and I had formed Lumen Learning in October for exactly this purpose. Then I got the incredible news that I’d received a Shuttleworth Fellowship. And then my leave was approved. Thus began a year of awesomeness. ...

Great news for Tidewater Community College, one of Lumen Learning’s first partner schools: Tidewater Community College’s textbook-free degree in business, which was launched as a pilot program with the Fall 2013 semester, is a finalist for a national Bellwether Award, given annually by the Community College Futures Assembly. Among more than 400 applicants in three categories, TCC was selected as one of 10 finalists in the “instructional programs and services” category. All finalists will present their programs Jan. 27 at the Community College Futures Assembly in Orlando, Fla., and winners will be announced the next day at the group’s annual meeting. ...

This week I’m participating in a conversation about badges over on the Department of Education’s LINCS website. I believe badges are potentially a key piece of infrastructure necessary to support truly open, distributed learning, but I’m frequently disappointed by the level of thoughtfulness of the discourse around badges. There’s much to learn about badges by looking to the history of other technologies, as I’ve tried to point out in my answers to the first two question prompts. ...

This article was originally written by Steven Seidenberg and published on the site Intellectual Property Watch. IP Watch requires you to create an account to read their CC BY-NC-ND licensed articles. This annoyed me, so I am reposting the article here. The US Supreme Court yesterday let stand an important appellate court ruling on copyright law, giving a boost to artists who repurpose others’ works and to supporters of fair use rights. This decision, however, upset many copyright owners, who fear it will allow their works to be used without payment and without their consent. The Supreme Court didn’t decide the case on its merits. Instead, the court simply refused to review the Second Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision in Cariou v. Prince. ...

I’m currently in Edinburgh at the semi-annual Shuttleworth Foundation Gathering. One of the other Fellows, Dan Whaley, is working on a killer open source annotation and highlighting tool called Hypothesis. You should absolutely check it out. I’ve enabled Hypothesis on my blog now (via the companion Wordpress plugin!). If you want to make comments on specific words or phrases in my posts (instead of making a comment on the entire post), just highlight a word or phrase and then click on the pen icon that pops up. I’ll be keen to see what - if anything - you do with this new capability. Please annotate posts on their permalink pages rather than annotating them on the front page. ...