It seems like many people struggle to understand how the Open Badge Infrastructure works. Here’s an analogy that I’ve recently found helpful. Say your friend buys you an Amazon or iTunes gift card for your birthday. When your friend buys the gift card, they are required to provide your email address, both so that (1) the store knows where to send the gift card and (2) the store can verify you’re you when you come to claim the gift card. After your friend completes the purchase, you receive an email containing a special code. To redeem the gift card, you go to a website, verify your identity, and enter the code. After you enter the code, a certain amount of credit appears in your account, which you can spend however you like. ...

Just ran across a great infographic in an article about college costs on the FWK blog - College Costs (Infographic: May Cause Anxiety). Something caught my eye part way down - do you notice anything interesting about three of the five least expensive colleges in the US?

Our new article is out in IRRODL! Abstract below; read the whole article here: A Preliminary Examination of the Cost Savings and Learning Impacts of Using Open Textbooks in Middle and High School Science Classes. Proponents of open educational resources claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the classroom. Over a period of two years, we worked with 20 middle and high school science teachers (collectively teaching approximately 3,900 students) who adopted open textbooks to understand the process and determine the overall cost of such an adoption. The teachers deployed open textbooks in multiple ways. Some of these methods cost more than traditional textbooks; however, we did identify and implement a successful model of open textbook adoption that reduces costs by over 50% compared to the cost of adopting traditional textbooks. In addition, we examined the standardized test scores of students using the open textbooks and found no apparent differences in the results of students who used open textbooks compared with previous years when the same teachers’ students used traditional textbooks. However, given the limited sample of participating teachers, further investigation is needed.

Today the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published the UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration. Here are the recommendations, but be sure to read the full document for all the context: The World OER Congress held at UNESCO, Paris on 20-22 June 2012… Recommends that States, within their capacities and authority: a. Foster awareness and use of OER. Promote and use OER to widen access to education at all levels, both formal and non-formal, in a perspective of lifelong learning, thus contributing to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education. Improve both cost-efficiency and quality of teaching and learning outcomes through greater use of OER. ...

Jim Groom recently posted this great list of suggestions for students and teachers from John Cage. Jim says, I am posting it here for posterity, it very much describes the way in which we have tried to approach ds106, and I think I will be writing this into any and all future syllabi I create from here on out. 12 years into my experience as a professor working with graduate students, I can say this list is dead on. I wish all my students would adopt the recommendations on this list. And I recommit myself to “Pull everything out of my students.” ...

Wayne honored me with an invitation to introduce Session 2 of Wikieducator’s Open Content Licensing for Educators workshop. Session 2 is titled, What constitutes an open educational resource? Wayne asked for something informal - and as you’ll see below that’s what he got! Reposting here for your mutual enjoyment…

With apologies to psychometricians who may read, let me set some vernacular context for additional thoughts (prompted originally by Dan Hickey’s, and then Alex Halavais’, writing) regarding my own thinking on badges and assessment. It is beyond argument that we cannot crack open a learner’s head, insert a magnifying glass, and make direct, error-free observations of what the learner “knows.” Since we can’t actually take a “direct” measure of what someone knows, we collect evidence that allows us to increase or decrease our beliefs about the likelihood that they know, or are able to do, something. ...

I believe we need to be very careful in the way we talk about badges. Badges are not assessments. A badge is something you receive after you successfully complete an assessment. The actual assessment could take the form of generic multiple-choice questions, a performance assessment, a portfolio evaluation, a construct-aligned bundle of context-dependent items, or whatever. If the person successfully completes this assessment, then they receive the credential. Badges are not assessments; badges are credentials - badges are things we award to people who pass assessments. ...

Audrey has a nice piece today on problems with the term MOOC. I’ve always passionately hated the MOOC acronym, mostly because of one of the words behind it. There was never anything massive about what we were doing until the Stanford AI class came along. Nothing that has come out of the original group (Wiley, Couros, Downes, Siemens, Cormier, et al.) has approached anything justifying the term “massive.” And given the size of the MMPORGs like World of Warcraft the term was borrowed from, the Stanford AI course may not even qualify. The M in MOOC has never been justified, and the whole term is aspirational in a way that only highlights the lack of broad impact our work is actually having. ...

The Why Open Education Matters video competition closed today. Here’s our submission, which we got in just under the gun. I wrote the script and did the voice recording and editing. Degreed sponsored the animation, which was done by Mike Moon and produced by Haugen Creative. (Degreed is a new company I’ve co-founded with David Blake building on the ideas in my post The Trouble with Transcripts and David’s post Jailbreaking the Degree. If we win the competition, the award money will help get the company off the ground. Wish us luck!) ...