Long-time readers will be familiar with “learning objects” and the “reusability paradox.” If you’ve been working in educational technology since the 1990s, you might want to skip the first section below. Or you may find it a sentimental walk down memory lane. Learning objects and the reusability paradox A learning object is “any digital resource that can be reused to support learning” (Wiley, 2000), and the goal of the learning objects movement was to design learning materials that were sufficiently small and self-contained as to be easily reused across many different learning contexts. Remember the joy of digging into a bin of Legos, pulling out random pieces and assembling them into whatever your heart fancied? This was the promise of learning objects, which were compared to Legos in almost every conference presentation and journal article on the topic. ...

I submitted the following comment today on the Department of Education’s proposed rule “Open Textbook Pilot Program.” The deadline to submit a comment is April 30, so read the rule and get your comments in soon. It may surprise readers to find me arguing against requirements of openness in some of my comments. But in the spirit of “pragmatism before zeal,” I argue in my comments specifically against three unintended consequences of open requirements as they pertain to LMSs, efficacy research, and assessment security / adoptability. It is true that, if the Department acts on my first two comments below, there are aspects of the work that might otherwise have been open that will not end up being open. However, if the Department does act on these comments, the parts of the work that are open will be more widely adopted, will result in more students saving more money, and, most importantly, will result in more students learning more. ...

It’s well established in the educational research literature that explicitly connecting new information to prior knowledge improves learning. So, let’s do that for what may be the single most important point that can be made as we rush madly to move all classes online - professional development of faculty is critical to student success anytime, but especially in online teaching and learning contexts. Here’s a simple explanation that will help most institutional leaders and faculty make the connection. I call it the Musician’s Rule: ...

This week on the blog I’m serializing a talk I gave for CSU Channel Islands last week as part of their Open Education Week festivities. My talk was titled, The State of Open: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. In the first installment on Monday, I explained how a fundamental failure to understand copyright makes the definition of OER in the new UNESCO recommendation nonsensical. In the second installment yesterday, I described how it appears that many in the OER community have taken their eye off the ball of student learning. In this third installment I’ll talk about the impact of what I call “ZTC thinking” on the long-term sustainability of OER. ...

This week on the blog I’m serializing a talk I gave for CSU Channel Islands last week as part of their Open Education Week festivities. My talk was titled, The State of Open: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I posted the first installment yesterday, explaining how a fundamental failure to understand copyright makes the definition of OER in the new UNESCO recommendation nonsensical. In this second installment, I want to describe how it appears that many in the OER community have taken their eye off the ball. ...

This week on the blog I’m serializing a talk I gave for CSU Channel Islands last week as part of their Open Education Week festivities. My talk was titled, The State of Open: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. In this first bite-sized installment I’m going to address the major flaw in the OER definition provided as part of the recent UNESCO OER Recommendation. I’ve written about this in general terms before, but with more time to ponder I now have a much clearer - and simpler - understanding of the problem. ...

Last October Doc Searls gave the Ostrom Memorial Lecture for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. In his lecture he carries on what I believe to be an incredibly unfortunate tradition. I’ll call it, “the dance of the not commons.” It’s an incredibly simple dance. Step one (right foot): state that something (e.g., the internet, knowledge, OER) is a commons. Step two (left foot): immediately enumerate the many ways that the thing you just called a commons is totally, completely, orthogonally different from a commons. Here’s the core of the dance, with my color commentary in parentheses. ...

Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. When I use the phrase “reducing friction” in this context, I mean taking things that are needlessly difficult and making them much easier. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridiculously easy for students, faculty, and others to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of OER. In this post, I want to talk about making it ridiculously easy for faculty to adopt OER. ...

I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those points of friction. I’ve been writing about continuous improvement in the context of OER for a few years now. To date, I’ve written about and worked on reducing the friction involved in a relatively centralized model for continuous improvement of OER - a “top down” approach, if you will: ...

Despite my best efforts, I spent much of the recent holiday break thinking about the eviscerated definition of OER in the final version of the UNESCO OER Recommendation. As I fretted about the holes in the final language and the size of the various trucks you could drive through them, I also reflected on the 5Rs. I revisited them with a critical eye and tried to read them adversarially. If I were to try to drive a truck - or roll a matchbox car - through the 5Rs, how would I do that? ...