“You know you’ve had a good day when you testify about how OER will help more students learn; and the Committee Chair so strongly supports the idea that the American Association of Publishers and Elsevier opt not to testify.” Hopefully Utah won’t be the only state this year making a major K-12 OER announcement!

Literally dozens of government entities, foundations, and other organizations are concerned about “the college completion problem.” The problem in a nutshell is that people go into significant debt to go to college, dropout for a variety of reasons (good and bad) without graduating, and are left with nothing to show for their trouble except the debt. In the popular framing of the problem, the value of a college degree is your ability to convert it into employment. (This is not a rant about the extra-employment value of education. If those were the droids you’re looking for, you can go about your business. Move along.) I simply want to point out that the convertability of a degree into employment is an artificial construct. Degrees are the gateway to employment only because the companies doing the employing say they are. But the universe doesn’t have to work this way. ...

I recently blogged about the Apple announcement and how it amounted to publishers ceding the “traditional” textbook market (whether print or digital) to OER makers. One way to interpret that concession is as a win for open education. And it is a win - temporarily. Another way to interpret the concession by publishers is to see it as electronics companies ending production of VCRs and doubling down on DVD players. In my previous post I asked, “If video-based, multimedia-rich, interactive textbooks are only worth $14.99 to the big publishers, what are relatively static, text-based books with a few photos worth to them?” Think about that for a minute. Sure, there are “traditional” OER textbooks available for free. But when you could have video, multimedia, simulations, and interactive assessments for $15, why would you take a traditional book (whether print or video) even if it is free? ...

Some have interpreted my post earlier today to mean that the RIP for OER in 2017 is inevitable. THAT’S EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I’M SAYING. The purpose of my post was to get people thinking about what is coming while there’s still time for us to do something about it. The RIP in 2017 only happens if the field does nothing to produce diagnostic, adaptive OER that support student learning at least as well as the systems produced by big publishers. ...

Press is starting to kick in on the Utah State Office of Education’s open textbook announcement. Most of the stories are running the AP’s abbreviated version of the press release, including the Huffington Post, Businessweek, and a bunch of local outlets including KSL (NBC), the Daily Herald, KTVX (ABC), the Cache Valley Daily, and Ogden Standard-Examiner. The Sacramento Bee has some additional out of market coverage. KCPW has a podcast interview with Diana Suddreth. Sounds like TIffany Hall will be on the Channel 4 News at 6:00 tonight. ...

Last week Apple made a rather significant iPad / iBooks / textbooks announcement. Several people have asked whether it is a net win or net loss for advocates of open textbooks specifically and affordability generally. From my perspective, the announcement is an outright win for advocates of affordability and open textbooks. Here’s why. It’s fairly clear from the Jobs biography and the publishers’ behavior that the original plan was: (1) Apple would hire some rockstar PhDs who would write textbooks (2) Apple would own the textbooks, and (3) Apple would give away the books for free in order to sell more iPads. ...

Something very exciting happened today. The Utah State Office of Education announced that (1) it will be supporting the development of Utah-specific open textbooks for all secondary language arts, mathematics, and science courses, and (2) that the USOE recommends that all schools across the state consider these open textbooks for adoption in their secondary language arts, mathematics, and science courses for this fall (2012). The math and science books will be remixes of CK-12 materials (as per our existing pilot program), while the Language Arts books will be produced locally. The Hewlett Foundation is providing partial funding. ...

I’m humbled and very excited to announce that, as of today, I am the Senior Fellow for Open Education at the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, also known as Digital Promise. I’ll post more detail on exactly what this means later this week. FAQ: No, I’m not leaving BYU; I’ll be acting in this role in addition to my responsibilities at BYU. In the meantime, here’s the SL Tribune story and the text of the article from the McKay School News: ...

Chomsky absolutely nails the explanation of why “Buy One, Get One” does not generally exist with regard to public access to publicly-funded innovation, and gives us another awesome metaphor-weapon in the battle against bad IP policy. … Friedrich List, famous German political economist in the 19th century, who was actually borrowing from Andrew Hamilton, called it “kicking away the ladder.” First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away those procedures so that other people can’t do it…. ...

What did you do for finals week this year? Students in our IPT 682: Project Management class put the finishing touches on their new online textbook, Project Management for Instructional Designers. This is the first large scale, multi-person REVISE / REMIX project I’ve had the pleasure of working on. From the Introduction: This book is an adaptation of Project Management from Simple to Complex written by Russell Darnall and John Preston and generously published under an open license by Flat World Knowledge. The book you are now reading is a work in progress. If you are interested in contributing to this version of the book, please contact David Wiley at Brigham Young University. ...