As part of my work on the NGLC-funded Kaleidoscope Project I’ve been thinking about practical learning analytics. Why “practical”? My goal with practical learning analytics is to provide access to data in ways that an average teacher, with no special training, can leverage in order to help her students succeed. This is, of course, an extremely tall order. As I began to mull over some common conventions that teachers could interpret without training (e.g., time flows left to right, scores move higher and lower) I realized that there’s already a tool available that provides visualizations like this - the Google Motion Chart Gadget. ...

Anna asks about the “Key Challenges for the OER Movement.” While the field earlier faced different challenges, here in late 2011 I believe there is one primary challenge the movement faces in the coming decade, and it is almost never discussed. 1. The Complete and Utter Lack of Assessment in the OER Space. Humans are famously terrible at judging whether they’re “getting it” or not during learning. One of the primary reasons the CMU OLI courses are (and have been shown to be) so incredibly effective in supporting learning is because they include frequent formative assessments that help learners check their own understanding. These assessments provide immediate feedback, allowing informal learners to determine with greater confidence whether or not they’re “getting it.” ...

Stephen writes: “You can help people find their way around a city, or you can tell them where to go - and if you don’t appreciate the difference between those, then you won’t appreciate the difference between what we’re doing and what Wiley wants us to think we’re doing.” I think everyone understands the difference Stephen is highlighting. What I think he is missing is that people generally seek out someone to ask directions of when they want to go somewhere specific. Have you ever seen someone pull over, flag down a pedestrian, and ask, “can you tell me how to get around the city?” More often than not people seek out help when they have a specific need. And when you need to know where the hospital is, or where the theater is, or where the airport is, you don’t want a two hour treatise on the virtues of the city and how to get around it. ...

I really appreciated Karen’s recent post Trying to grok the lack of structure in peer learning. I’m reading A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. I’m particularly interested in the part on peer learning and learning collectives. This passage struck me: [O]ne might be tempted to ask how we might harness the power of these peer-to-peer collectives to meet some learning objective. But that would be falling into the same old twentieth-century trap. Any effort to define or direct collectives would destroy the very thing that is unique and innovative about them. ...

I’ve yet to publish anything from my time spent in the UK as an OLNet Fellow. The following bit of writing is one of the outputs from that period, and is informed significantly by conversations with the brilliant and welcome folks at the OU, as well as past online exchanges with many of you. On OER - Beyond Definitions Despite the attempts at single sentence definitions so common in the published literature, “open educational resources” is a highly context-mediated construct. However, because philanthropic and public funding agencies commonly require grant outputs to be open educational resources, the ability to quickly and clearly categorize a variety of creative works as “open educational resources” or “not open educational resources” has become critical. ...

In my capacity as Associate Director of CITES I’m leading two seminars on open access next week at BYU. They’ll be held Thursday 10/6 from 11-12 (as part of the MSE-wide faculty meeting) and Friday 10/21 from 12-1 (with lunch provided) in the TEC lab in the McKay Building. If you’re nearby we’d love to see you there. Session Title: “Anxious to make their service and scholarship available”: Increasing the Impact of MSE Scholarship ...

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I have a long standing interest in self-organization in informal online learning communities (e.g., the 2002 paper on Online Self-Organizing Social Systems, the 2003 paper OSOSS - Crisis / Response, the 2004 paper Sociability and Scalability in Online Learning Environments, etc.). This is an area which I continue to watch with interest. So I was extremely interested in this new article, Transport Layer Identification of P2P Super nodes: ...

My colleague and friend Gideon Burton (of silva rhetoricae fame among other things) and I have been discussing badges lately. To date the open education movement has focused almost exclusively on the production and sharing of content. Significant opportunities exist to reform or reinvent other, non-content portions of the education ecosystem with the support of open content. One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process. ...

There is some really excellent OER work going on in Utah. The two year total for our open science textbooks project is almost 4000 students. The Open High School of Utah has all the content online (and in Moodle format) for their complete 9th and 10th grade curriculum. And now a two district collaboration (Jordan-Granite Consortium) has CC licensed the collection of resources they are providing to teachers as they transition to the Common Core State Standards in mathematics: ...

The Open High School of Utah has released a new batch of openly licensed curriculum on the Open High School of Utah Opencourseware site. They now offer 20 fully online courses’ worth of content, constituting a complete 9th and 10th grade curriculum. The catalog now includes: Language Arts English 9 (A) English 9 (B) English 10 (A) English 10 (B) English Composition Mathematics Algebra A (A) Algebra A (B) Algebra B (A) Algebra B (B) Algebra 1 (A) Algebra 1 (B) Geometry (A) Geometry (B) Algebra 2 (A) Algebra 2 (B) Science Earth Systems (A) Earth Systems (B) Biology (A) Biology (B) Social Studies Current Issues Geography World Civilizations (A) World Civilizations (B) Electives Digital Photography Music Appreciation Graphic Design Health Fitness for Life Computer Technology Advanced Computer Technology Some interesting notes about the OHSU collection: ...