2022 saw some significant advancements in artificial intelligence. My threshold for “significant” here being that the advances moved out of labs and arXiv.org preprints and into tools that many people were using and talking about. Lots of people thought text-to-image tools like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney were fun. But Large Language Models (LLMs), and particularly the recent demo of ChatGPT, seem to have put the fear of God into everyone from middle school English teachers to the CEO of Google. The potential partnership between OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) and Microsoft may even present the first substantive challenge to Google’s search monopoly we’ve ever seen - and that’s saying something. While most of the dialog around AI and education seems to be focused on assessment, I think the implications for instructional designers are critically important, too. And, because you’ve got to play the hits, let’s look at what their impact will be on OER as well. ...

I missed this when it was first published, but a few months ago Ithaka S+R shared the results of their Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2021. The survey went out to 145,099 randomly selected faculty members across the US and over 5% of invitees responded. I was particularly interested in the survey’s findings about the state of open educational resources in US higher education. Below, I’ll share these results, the authors’ interpretations of the results, and some of my own thoughts about the results. (The images and quotes from the survey are (C) Ithaka S+R, 2022 and are licensed CC BY-NC.) ...

Treadmills are iconic pieces of exercise equipment for the wrong reason. They’re famous primarily for sitting unused in basements and spare bedrooms all across the country. These treadmills go unused despite having some pretty sophisticated features, including embedded video trainers who talk to you during your workout, realistic imagery of running routes, automated speed and incline adjustment to match the imagery you’re seeing, and even a “cruise control for your heart” that monitors your heart’s beats per minute and adjusts the difficulty of your run in real-time to keep you in your target heart-rate zone throughout your workout. However, all the amazing features in the world can’t improve your fitness level if you never get on the treadmill and use them, which apparently many owners don’t. ...

[caption id=“attachment_7070” align=“alignright” width=“167”] https://cheezburger.com/8016802816.[/caption] Do you know the #nailedit meme? In its most common form: Someone sees a recipe or craft online. They try to recreate it. Things go terribly, comically wrong. They graciously post the results online, allowing us all to take joy in the degree to which they absolutely #nailedit. Part of what makes these memes great is that they’re so relatable. Everyone has been there - faithfully (we believe) following a recipe or other set of instructions (looking at you, Ikea), only to have things go horribly wrong. It really can be difficult to get the desired results even when you’re following a step-by-step recipe with illustrations. ...

I’ve been writing this article 30 minutes here and 60 minutes there for several months (Wordpress tells me I saved the first bits in March). I’ve probably deleted more than is left over. It’s time to click Publish and move on. This article started out with my being bothered by the fact that ‘OER adoption reliably saves students money but does not reliably improve their outcomes.’ For many years OER advocates have told faculty, “When you adopt OER your students save money and get the same or better outcomes!” That claim is fine enough if your primary purpose is saving students money (which feels like the direction that OER and ZTC degree advocates have been moving for some time now, and explains why I don’t feel like I’m part of that community any more). But if your primary purpose is improving student outcomes, the shrugging “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t” uncertainty is utterly unacceptable. So I’ve been thinking more than I’d care to admit about the relationship between OER and improving student outcomes. This thinking, with all the benefit that hindsight affords, doesn’t always reflect well on some of my earlier research. But that’s no reason not to share it. ...

A few thoughts about why improving student learning in the US higher ed context is so hard to do. (These ideas may apply elsewhere, but I’m thinking specifically about US higher ed.) 1. Improving student learning requires changing student behavior - changing the things students do in order to learn. Students learn by doing - by playing, interacting, manipulating, reading, watching, listening, reflecting, arguing, summarizing, etc. Faculty can promote student learning only by influencing what students do. Faculty exercise this influence in two ways: through the specific activities they assign students to do, and through the ways they support them as they engage in those activities. ...

I’ve been interested in sustainability models for OER for decades. (Longtime readers may recall that the research group I founded at Utah State University in 2003, the Open Sustainable Learning Opportunities group, became The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning in 2005, which I directed until I moved to BYU.) And for just as long, I’ve believed that there are useful lessons for us to learn on this topic from open source software - OER’s far more popular and influential sibling. The empirical work on the sustainability of open source software (e.g., Schweik and English, 2012) is significantly further along than anything in OER, and there have been many more interesting experiments in open source sustainability than in OER. ...

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with doctoral students as they search for “the question” that will guide their graduate studies and, eventually, their dissertation work. While the question can often be expressed in a single sentence, its power to shape a student’s graduate experience and frame their dissertation work is undeniable. Properly asked, the question implies which electives to take, determines what literature is in and out of scope, and even suggests a research method for the dissertation. The question, clearly articulated, is an incredibly powerful tool for focusing and aligning work toward a meaningful answer. ...

Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between an informational resource and an educational resource. I’ve had the sense that an educational resource is an informational resource with a little something extra and have enjoyed coming back to this thought again and again over the last several weeks, trying to reduce this “something extra” to its simplest form. Keeping the discussion informal, it seems that an informational resource is simply a compilation or collection of information - ideas, facts, processes, procedures, &c. I think of an encyclopedia as being the quintessential information resource - comprehensive, accurate, and well-organized. If you accept that definition (for sake of this argument), what would need to be added to an informational resource to make it an educational resource? ...

It was a striking moment of cognitive dissonance for me. I was at a conference and saw David Wiley - well known as a scholar and professor - sitting behind a booth in the trade show. And I realized there’s a perspective where the transition from academic to entrepreneur is an advancement in career. I will probably never understand this way of thinking, but in the Land of Opportunity south of the Canadian border, apparently it holds true. (Stephen Downes) ...