I’m at AECT this week, the annual meeting of the professional association for academic educational technologists and instructional designers. This is my 15th year attending the conference, and (with the exception of the Open Education Conference) this is my favorite conference each year. These are “my people,” and so I was much more nervous than usual when invited to give a keynote address here. Ali Carr-Chellman, Tom Reeves, and I participated yesterday in “AECTx,” a keynote session in which we each gave 18 minute talks. Without coordinating ahead of time, each of our talks focused on using educational technology and educational research to solve large, societal problems. I was particualrly taken with the clarity of Tom’s formulation. Two slides near the end of his presentation admonished us that we need to: ...

Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about open educational resources, but precious little has been written about how OER - or openness more generally - changes the practice of education. Substituting OER for expensive commercial resources definitely save money and increase access to core instructional materials. Increasing access to core instructional materials will necessarily make significant improvements in learning outcomes for students who otherwise wouldn’t have had access to the materials (e.g., couldn’t afford to purchase their textbooks). If the percentage of those students in a given population is large enough, their improvement in learning may even be detectable when comparing learning in the population before OER adoption with learning in the population after OER adoption. Saving significant amounts of money and doing no harm to learning outcomes (or even slightly improving learning outcomes) is clearly a win. However, there are much bigger victories to be won with openness. ...

As I travel the country (and the world) telling people about open educational resources, open textbooks, etc., I frequently receive questions about the quality of openly licensed instructional materials. I’ve answered this question enough that I thought it might be time to actually write something on the topic. A Tiny Thought Experiment Imagine you had a favorite textbook (hey - it’s a thought experiment). Now imagine receiving a letter informing you that the author has passed away and left you all the copyrights to the book. You immediately walk across the room and pull your copy off the shelf and open to the copyright page. You carefully cross out the words “All Rights Reserved” and replace them with the words “Some Rights Reserved - this book is licensed CC BY.” Have you changed the quality of the book in any way? No. Simply changing the text on the copyright page does not change the rest of the book in any way. ...

This month is the one year anniversary of Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded with Kim Thanos in October, 2012. It’s been an incredible first year, and we’ve learned a million lessons along the way - and we continue to learn more about what it takes to support OER adoption at scale every day. We’ve pulled together a summary of what’s happening with our post-secondary work for fall semester 2013 in a press release posted on the Lumen site, which begins: ...

Creative Commons has announced my appointment as CC Education Fellow. I’m honored, humbled, and excited to be formally affiliated with CC, and am looking forward to continuing to passionately (and hopefully, effectively) advocate for openness as a way to decrease the cost and increase the quality of education.

I expressed my frustration yesterday about the infuriatingly inaccurate name of the “Open” Education Alliance. Despite the obvious problems with the name, this new initiative demonstrates a critical move I described a 2011 post, Or Equivalent: The high-level vision of the project is this: Many job descriptions include a requirement like “BA or BS in EE/CS/CE or equivalent experience.” We want to create a collection of badges that a top employer, like Google, will publicly recognize as “equivalent experience.” This goes straight for the jugular, demonstrating that badges are a viable alternative to formal university education. ...

“Open” is a word with a wide range of meanings. The Oxford Dictionaries Online lists no fewer than 20 meanings. Consequently, we should not be surprised when we encounter the word used in a variety of ways. However, when “open” is used together with other words - as in the case of “open educational resources” - “open” can become part of a term of art and gain a very specific meaning within particular communities of use. ...

Stephen provides an “I told you so” link to this post, A Troubling Result From Publishing Open Access Articles With CC-BY. He continues the claim he has been making for some time that these “problems” would not occur if authors published under a CC BY-NC-SA license instead of the CC BY license. A careful reading of the post he links to, however, shows that this is completely wrong. The problems described in the post are the result of two issues: ...

What’s the difference between OCWs and MOOCs? At the end of the day, it may be nothing more than managing expectations. Let’s take Physics for example. Here’s the MIT OCW Physics course from 1999. It includes videos, lecture notes and other readings, assignments and exams with solutions, and a recommendation that you buy a commercial textbook. There is a study group that learners can join. There does not appear to be any way to interact with the instructor. The course uses a very traditional pedagogy and is openly licensed. ...

I am, ostensibly, on vacation. But if I don’t get this thought out of my brain it will continue to torment my cross-country driving. What exactly is most unique / special about MOOCs? Let’s unpack the acronym back to front: - Courses. Well, we’ve had these for a few hundred years. At least. Many of these are not MOOCs. - Online courses. Well, we’ve had these for decades. At least. Many of these are not MOOCs. ...