Students in my IPT 692R: Open Education Policy Seminar have finished the two policy backgrounders they worked on during our extremely compressed summer session. These reviews are written specifically for a BYU audience (with lots of references to BYU’s mission, institutional objectives, and appropriate scriptures), but I thought the information in these documents might be of interest to the broader open education community. So without further ado: Open Access Policy Backgrounder ...

Two exciting bits of news from the ongoing BYU Independent Study OCW trial. There’ll be loads more data / graphs / etc. in our presentation at Open Ed 2009 next week. First, things seem to be remarkably stable on the “conversion to paying customers” side of the study. Out of 9179 visitors to the OCW site, 270 have become paying customers of BYU IS (that’s 2.94%). This number is sticking right around 3%. ...

Early Bird Registration ends July 20th! This summer an impressive cross-section of innovative and passionate educators from around the world will be coming to Vancouver for the Sixth Annual Open Education Conference, *August 12-14th, at UBC’s downtown Robson Square campus*. If you have an interest in opening up your practice in terms of resources, pedagogy, or public outreach, this event represents an opportunity to learn with some of the most accomplished figures in the field in an informal and friendly environment. ...

I’m privileged to be guest blogging for the Chronicle of Higher Education during the month of July. My third post has just gone up, and it occurs to me I haven’t shared those fun bits here. Here are the links to my Chronicle posts to date: David Wiley: The Parable of the Inventor and the Trucker David Wiley: Digital Textbooks Call for New Business Models David Wiley: Open Teaching Multiplies the Benefit But Not the Effort ...

For a year now I’ve been running the McKay School of Education’s OCW pilot on WPMU. However, I’ve never blogged exactly how I’ve got it setup or how we’re using it. Last summer, in preparation for the pilot, I set up WPMU 2.7 with the following plugins installed across the site: - PageMash - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagemash/ Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus. ...

You are completely replaceable, a cog in the machine, a brick in the wall. There is nothing that meaningfully differentiates you from anyone else. Functionally, you are hot-swappable for any other person. All “individual differences” are meaningless. There is nothing special or unique about you. You are a clone. This is the message of “what works” style educational research. It tells us that, if you are a middle school student learning math, you are just like every other middle school student learning math. If you are a 2nd grader learning to read English, you are just like every other 2nd grader learning to read English as far as educational research knows or cares. Because well-designed and well-implemented randomized controlled trials discover methods that “work.” For everyone. Period. That’s the entire point of having a “trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education” - if we didn’t have methods that work universally, we wouldn’t be real scientists. Each individual student is just another tiny, indistinguishable, interchangeable part of the universe over which proven methods “work.” Personal relationships with students are oxymoronic because all students are the same, and besides, personal relationships don’t scale and are superficial to learning. If this is really the way we’re encouraging educators to think about students, is it really a wonder that they hate school and apparently aren’t learning as much as their peers around the world?

With two months of data in the door, the numbers keep getting better and better for our pilot at BYU Independent Study OCW. To date 7559 people have visited BYU IS OCW, and 232 of those people have enrolled in at least one course (they may have enrolled in more than one course, but we don’t have that data yet). That’s a conversion rate of just over 3%! Things continue to look very sustainable…

In Lorna’s review of the OER presentations at CETIS 2008, I read this bit about the new OLNet program: The OU and Carnegie Mellon University have now received additional funding from the Hewlett Foundation for OLNet - a network to support sharing methodologies and evidence on the effectiveness of OERs. This next wave is about impact, evidence and effectiveness. I realize that when blogging summaries of conference presentations you seldom quote the presenters with complete accuracy. So I mean neither disrespect for Lorna or Patrick, but something about this characterization of the “next wave” work rubbed me the wrong way. About once a year I have a student burst into my office and announce they have found their dissertation topic - comparing the effectiveness of OERs with traditionally copyrighted learning materials. I now have a well rehearsed shtick about how such a study would be the most pointless dissertation ever conducted (and if you read many dissertations, that’s really saying something!). Please join me in the following thought experiment: ...

GovTrack has the full text of the remarks made by senators as they introduce legislation. Here are Sen. Cornyn’s remarks as he introduced S. 1373, the Federal Research Public Access Act: Sen. John Cornyn [R-TX]: [Introducing S. 1373] Mr. President, I rise to introduce the Federal Research Public Access Act. I am very pleased to be joined again by my good friend and colleague, Senator JOE LIEBERMAN, who has remained dedicated to seeing this important legislation passed. This bipartisan bill is the same legislation we introduced in the 109th Congress. The purpose of this legislation is to ensure American taxpayers’ dollars are spent wisely, which is even more important now in this time of fiscal tension. ...

Utah State University OpenCourseWare is, I believe, the country’s second biggest OCW collection with over 80 courses (MIT OCW is, of course, the largest). USU OCW is consistently in the top five results when Googling for “Utah State University” (with or without quotes). And for four years, Marion Jensen has been the fearless leader of USU OCW. Recently, Marion provided what unfortunately appears to be his final project report: We average as many as 2,000 unique visitors to the site every day from all over the world. We have mirror sites up in Africa, China, and Indonesia (that we know of). Our site has been translated into several languages, and is the third most visited site on the usu.edu domain. Being the OCW director is something I’ve loved doing the last four years. ...