Boundless’ authoring model appears to be based on “reverse engineering” publishers’ most popular textbooks. The big publishers’ court case comes down to a single question - is reverse engineering the same as creating a “derivative work?” The question is critical because the creation of derivative works is regulated by copyright. If the court finds that Boundless’ textbooks are derivative works of the publishers’ books, then Boundless has violated copyright law. If the court finds that Boundless’ reverse engineering is not the same as creating a derivative, then Boundless lives to fight another day. ...

I’m happy to announce the conference theme for #OpenEd12 - “Open Education: Beyond Content.” You can read more about the conference theme below, or skip straight to the Call for Papers and Call for Action. Open Education has come of age. The tiny movement that began in the late 1990s as a desire to increase access to educational opportunity has blossomed into requirements in national grant programs, key strategies in state legislatures and offices of education, content sharing initiatives at hundreds of universities and high schools, and a wide range of innovation and entrepreneurship in both the commercial and nonprofit sectors. ...

I had the good fortune of being invited to speak at the ETS Future of Assessment internal conference today. The slides are available at slideshare, but here are the three main points from my talk today. “Badges are not assessments.” OER provide a huge content infrastructure on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OER existed. The Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) provides a standard, interoperable system for issuing, managing, and displaying credentials on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OBI existed. However, no one is paying sufficient attention to the gap between learning anything anywhere (OER) and receiving a recognition (OBI) - this gap is called “assessment.” A badge is not an assessment anymore than a blue ribbon is a foot race. Someone has to pay attention to designing the assessments, experiences, and challenges people will complete in order to EARN badges. There is a huge opportunity for “open assessment infrastructure” in this chasm between OER and OBI. ...

I finally finished my brief statement on learning analytics for the panel I’m participating on at LAK12. Since I had to write it, I’m publishing it here. Perhaps it will put you to sleep; perhaps it will inspire you; perhaps you’ll experience an unexplainable pining for the fjords. Either way, here it is. As part of his 2 sigma work, Bloom (1984) challenged educational researchers to devise practical methods – “methods that the average teacher or school faculty can learn in a brief period of time and use with little more cost or time than conventional instruction” – that would help learners reach their academic potential. My personal interest in learning analytics lies in its potential to answer extremely practical and socially responsive questions such as, “What is the most effective thing a teacher could do with her next 30 minutes?” and “What is the most effective experience a learner could choose next?” In my view, learning analytics as a term simply describes the extremely interdisciplinary endeavor of providing this pragmatic support for learning. ...

So today I turned 40. Not bad, all things considered. And what did I do for my birthday? Why, I finished up the artwork for the Intro to Openness in Education course badges and finished the technical work necessary to award the badges through the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure’s new Issuer API. I now have some shiny new badges ready to award to folks who complete the appropriate requirements. I think these more granular, learning outcomes-based badges (or LOBs, which I wrote about in more detail the other day) provide students with more immediately actionable credentials than three credits on a transcript do. It’s nice to be able to award both the badges and the credits to the formally enrolled students - it’s the best of both worlds for them. And I think the informal learners will appreciate the badges, even without the credits. ...

As interest in badges continues to increase, it occurs to me that in their passion for gameification, innovation, and outright reinvention, many in the field are overlooking the place where badges make the most sense of all - the formal higher education institution. There are at least two high-level reasons why higher education is the perfect place for badging. First, universities are under ever-weightier mandates from accrediting agencies to (1) specify specific learning outcomes for courses and (2) gather and utilize data about student performance on these individual outcomes. Currently there is quite a bit of conversation - more frantic the closer your department is to an accreditation visit - about how to meet these external mandates. There are pedagogical, policy, political, social, and technical aspects to this question (among others). ...

The New York Times today ran a story by Tamar Lewin about badges and the future of credentialing. Several quotes attributed to me were featured in the article. Unfortunately for me, I did not ask “Who needs a university anymore?” as the article states I did. Reporters just can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to sensationalizing things I say. Formal post-secondary institutions like universities currently serve about 120M people worldwide. The number of people qualified for and desiring a post-secondary experience is estimated to grow to 250M in the next 20 years. Clearly, we don’t need to be closing down universities and decreasing the capacity the system currently has - we need to be adding alternatives that scale in new and innovative ways in order to cope with the doubling of demand the system is about to experience. I went through these numbers with Ms. Lewin during our interview at some length. Where she gets the idea that I think we don’t need universities anymore is beyond me. ...

One of the philosophical underpinnings of MOOCs as practiced by Siemens, Downes, et al. has been the rejection of the idea of pre-defined learning outcomes. For example, the LAK12 syllabus reads in part: “You are NOT expected to read and watch everything. Even we, the facilitators, cannot do that. Instead, what you should do is PICK AND CHOOSE content that looks interesting to you and is appropriate for you. If it looks too complicated, don’t read it. If it looks boring, move on to the next item.” The learning outcomes will, consequently, “be different for each person.” ...

Why should we be open? Here’s answer #1, with more to come later this week.

In describing commercial publishers’ response to the open textbook bill in Washington state, Cable Green hits the nail on the head: Publishers are desperate to maintain the huge profit margins they make for essentially packaging the same content in new wrappers year after year. If their quality is indeed as superior as they claim, they shouldn’t have any trouble competing with open educational resources. This is the key point folks aren’t getting. No one outside the open education movement is impressed by books that are “open.” They don’t even know what it means, let alone care about it. What they’re excited by is a book that offers a better quality to price ratio than whatever they’re currently using. ...