The Salt Lake Tribune has published a great article on Utah’s transition to open textbooks. But perhaps the most enlightening part of the article isn’t in the article at all - it’s this comment: The books are open source, meaning that the person who wrote the book is doing it for the goodness of mankind and expects no compensation. I know that’s hard to believe, but I’m a teacher and have been working on some of the science books mentioned. Other than the State Office covering the price of my substitute for two days I haven’t been paid a thing (same for the other 20-30 teachers on the project). The books are now done and FREE for the world to use. The best part about these books is a year from now after using them in our classrooms we’ll get back together (USOE covering our subs) and fix the issues we have found and make them even better to again be posted for the world to use for FREE. ...

The Utah State Office of Education has posted their open science textbooks for grades 7 - 12 for the coming school year. Here are some of the highlights: Based on the CK-12 Foundation’s open science textbooks Customized specifically for Utah students by Utah teachers Each book’s Table of Contents is the Utah Science Core Standards Professionally designed Print copies available from Amazon’s CreateSpace for an average cost of $5 per book (for schools that need a print option) And here are the links to the free and open PDF versions of the books: ...

Stephen comments on the “Great Rebranding” of MOOCs: MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete…. There has been a great rebranding and co-option of the concept of the MOOC over the last couple of years. The near-instant response from the elites, almost unprecedented in my experience, is a recognition of the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs (which they would like very much to erase from history). ...

Last week I had the incredible opportunity to spend about three hours talking with Gary Lopez, founder of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (or MITE, pronounced “mighty”), who is one of my favorite people in the OER movement and someone for whom I have boundless respect. Just a day later I was fortunate to participate in another amazing conversation involving MITE’s Ahrash Bissell as well as several other members of the OER community. ...

Today Robison Wells, Marion Jensen (of USU OCW fame), and I are launching a new project called Massive Fiction. Massive Fiction is an effort to create and define a fictional world in three novellas, providing a good understanding of the new world, its characters, and its setting, after which several additional authors - including two NYT Bestsellers - will write story stubs that anyone can use as a place to start their own stories set in the new world. ...

The Perfect Storm Much of the education technology world - and many of the foundations and venture firms that provide the funding for it - are obsessed with adaptive learning. The Gates Foundation’s Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program RFP is the most recent evidence of this trend. The fascination largely stems from the fact that, because these systems are completely automated, they can scale. Scale matters to foundations because it means broader impacts for the work they fund. And, of course, scale matters to investors because it means more customers and, consequently better returns. ...

Excellent coverage by Ronald Mann over on the SCOTUS Blog of an even more excellent decision by the court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. While the whole analysis is worth a read, here is the good news in plain English: The Court at last seems to have reached a consensus on a seemingly intractable problem of copyright law: whether a U.S. copyright holder can prevent the importation of “gray-market” products manufactured for overseas markets…. ...

Last week I wrote about the many goals I have for the open education movement, and how a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation is enabling me to spend focused time pursuing them. While I tried to lay out a compelling vision of what I want to accomplish last week, I didn’t discuss the how. Clearly, accomplishing a set of goals of that scope and magnitude requires more energy and productive capacity than any one person could ever muster. ...

Sometimes it helps to look backwards and figure out where you’ve been to get a clearer picture of where you’re going. As today is the first official day of my Shuttleworth Fellowship, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Upon reflection, it feels like I have some really strong momentum behind my work in open education. But where is that momentum carrying me? How can I leverage it thoughtfully to be more useful? (This thinking fortuitously coincides with a recent article titled Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education to which I have included a paragraph response to below. Spolier alert: we see the world very differently.) ...

When David Noble first published his groundbreaking critique of online education in 1998, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, I thought to myself “he couldn’t be more wrong.” As it turns out he might not have been wrong - maybe Noble was simply so miraculously prescient that I couldn’t see what he saw. Fifteen - count them, fifteen - years later, Digital Diploma Mills reads as if it were researched and written about the current phenomenon called “MOOCs.” Entire paragraphs from the essay can be read unaltered and applied precisely to the state of things today: ...