According to Reuters: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers Inc has reached a deal with more than 70 percent of its creditors to cut $3.1 billion in debt as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding. The publisher said it plans to restructure through a pre-packaged, court-supervised Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The HMH bankruptcy is not just about decreases in education funding, of course. We must give some credit to Kaleidoscope, Open Course Library, the Utah Open Textbook Project, Flat World Knowledge, and others around the world for showing that freely available OER and open textbooks can completely replace breathtakingly overpriced publisher textbooks - and that students learn the same amount regardless. If you could get the same grade using a $175 commercial textbook or a free online (and $30 or less to print) textbook, which would you choose? ...

I’ve been greatly looking forward to Stephen’s explanation of his previous statement that his lifelong goal has been to work toward “reducing and eventually eliminating the learned dependence on the expert and the elite – not as a celebration of anti-intellectualism, but as a result of widespread and equitable access to expertise.” I questioned what that meant in an earlier blog post, and Stephen has now responded. I think I finally understand. Here are the salient points from the response: ...

An article on Slashdot yesterday reads: Dave Lindorff writes in the LA Times that growing numbers of students are discovering their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree by refusing to issue an official transcript. The schools won’t send the transcripts to potential employers or graduate admissions office if students are in default on student loans, or in many cases, even if they just fall one or two months behind. It’s no accident that they’re doing this. It turns out the federal government ’encourages’ them to use this draconian tactic, saying that the policy ‘has resulted in numerous loan repayments.’ It is a strange position for colleges to take, writes Lindorff, since the schools themselves are not owed any money — student loan funds come from private banks or the federal government, and in the case of so-called Stafford loans, schools are not on the hook in any way. They are simply acting as collection agencies, and in fact may get paid for their efforts at collection. ‘It’s worse than indentured servitude,’ says NYU Professor Andrew Ross, who helped organize the Occupy Student Debt movement last fall. ‘With indentured servitude, you had to pay in order to work, but then at least you got to work. When universities withhold these transcripts, students who have been indentured by loans are being denied even the ability to work or to finish their education so they can repay their indenture.’ ...

The Open High School of Utah just keeps raking in the awards: The United States Distance Learning Association recently awarded OHSU a Gold Medal in the “BEST PRACTICES AWARDS FOR DISTANCE LEARNING PROGRAMMING” category and both Gold and Silver medals in the “BEST PRACTICES AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN DISTANCE LEARNING TEACHING” category. Also, according to the Utah Best of State awards competition, OHSU is the best charter school in the state of Utah! ...

I’ve said a number of times that I wouldn’t engage in discussions about the NC clause in the future. However, during the comment period for the 4.0 licenses I have to give some feedback - not about the NC clause, but about another section of the license that is critically important to the functioning of the NC clause, vague and imperfect as it may be. The current version of the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, Section 8, Subsection e, reads: ...

Just when you think maybe they’re starting to get it: You can see the contradiction here, but that’s all you’ll be able to see…

Readers of my blog know how much respect I have for Stephen Downes. He’s a pillar of morality in our community, with a never-swerving dedication to his idea of what is right. I love him for it. It’s that love and respect that makes me me sit up and want desperately to understand when Stephen says something like, “I’ve spent a lifetime pursuing this objective.” He clarifies this lifetime of work as follows: ...

BadgeWidgetHack is a very basic, lightweight OBI-compliant badge displayer. The UI is not very sexy, but I figure that’s ok since you only have to use it once. After you walk through the wizard you receive some Javascript you can embed in your blog or elsewhere (see you can see it running at the bottom of the righthand sidebar on the front page of this blog, for example). The widget currently: ...

I had a chance to learn more about Boundless last week. Extraordinarily interesting stuff. Boundless is definitely “an OER company.” A Boundless textbook is comprised of 95% or more pre-existing OER, with a very minimal amount of newly written material. Their development model appears to be as follows: take a popular textbook, analyze its structure and organization in order to create an outline, and fill that outline in with OER. The resulting textbook is an aggregation of OER. ...

I’ve just started awarding the first badges from my graduate seminar, IPT 692R: Introduction to Open Education. You can see the first badges I’ve issued here (including some to people outside BYU): http://openeducation.us/badges-earned I’ve used a very lightweight mechanism for issuing badges through the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure that I want to share. I know there are more complex, “scalable” systems for doing this, but I wanted to demonstrate that there is nothing stopping a single faculty member who wants to do something innovative from awarding badges in a DIY sort of way. Here’s my process: ...