I suppose it’s time for end of year reflections. In many ways my year was dominated by three things - my family’s move from Utah to West Virginia, donating part of my liver to Cable, and closing down the annual Open Education Conference after fifteen years. Each of these took huge amounts of time and energy. Each took an incredibly large toll on me physically and emotionally. But these weren’t the only things I did this year. I also caught up on things others have apparently known about for quite a long time, but that were new to me. I thought I’d share some of these things so that, if you don’t know about them yet, you can find them more quickly than I did. ...

The tl;dr I recently wrote a brief essay about the wonderful new UNESCO OER Recommendation. That piece was based on the text of the most recent public draft (which I will call the “public draft” below), which many of us believed to be the document the 40th Congress unanimously approved. However, a number of extraordinarily significant changes were made to the document between the public draft of the document and the version of the document on which members voted (which I will call the “final version” below). For those of you who don’t want to read the full analysis below, here’s the key takeaway: ...

I’m leaving this post online solely for historical / archive purposes. See this updated post instead. There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). I want to highlight some of the parts of the Recommendation that caught my eye, reading both from a personal perspective as well as my Lumen perspective. First, and it will surprise no one that this is the first item on my list, is the definition. Regardless of what other individuals, institutions, or organizations may think or say, UNESCO is the creator of the term “open educational resources” and, as its creator, UNESCO’s definition of OER is the canonical definition. In the Recommendation which has now been unanimously adopted by UNESCO member states around the world, OER continue to be defined solely in terms of copyright status: ...

Preface Here’s a trivia question for you: which American organization has produced the largest number of open textbooks? Here’s a hint: they’ve produced more than double the number of books created by the next largest producer. Here’s another hint: they haven’t created a new open textbook since 2012. You may have thought the answer was the non-profit OpenStax, who have published over 40 open textbooks. But the correct answer is actually commercial publisher Flat World Knowledge, who published over 100 textbooks under Creative Commons licenses. Although they would eventually change their model to focus on traditionally copyrighted textbooks, FWK’s over 100 openly licensed textbooks can still be found archived around the web in places like the Open Textbook Library and on the Saylor Foundation’s website. The open textbooks created by this commercial publisher are still being used and even adapted, providing the foundations for books like Research Methods in Psychology - 2nd Canadian Edition, Introductory Chemistry - 1st Canadian Edition, Fundamentals of Business - Canadian Edition, and Writing for Success - 1st Canadian Edition, among others. ...

I read an article back in June (reference below) that prompted some memories and catalyzed some additional thoughts. In the mid-late aughts and early teens, when I was still serving as chair for doctoral students, I often had conversations like this: Student (bursting into my office): I have an exciting idea for my dissertation research! Me: Let’s hear it! Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! ...

[caption id=“attachment_6160” align=“aligncenter” width=“800”] Cropped photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash[/caption] I think Michael Feldstein is directionally correct in his analysis of what has been happening to “open education” for the past several years. Without wading into the labeling fray (are we a movement? a coalition? a community? a field? a discipline?) I’d like to add a bit of my own perspective. Where Michael sees three groups with different goals, I see four groups who are trying to use OER to solve closely related - but ultimately very different - problems: ...

After two amazing keynotes at #OpenEd19 this morning, I read the following statement to conference attendees: In 2003 I invited a small group of about forty people interested in open content and open courseware to Logan, Utah. Since then, this annual meeting has grown year after year to where we are today - 850 people interested in everything from open educational resources and open educational practices to sustainability and social justice. This annual conference has been a remarkable forum for the community to meet, share ideas, and foster collaborations, and the conference community is larger and more diverse than ever before. ...

For the first decade of the modern open education movement (1998 - 2007), the distinguishing feature of our work - the thing we cared most about and talked most about - was the open licensing we applied to educational materials. MIT OCW, CMU OLI, Rice’s Connexions, my group at USU, and others applied the new Creative Commons licenses to their materials to create open content. UNESCO later decided to refer to open content intended to support research, teaching, and learning as “open educational resources.” There were two kinds of educational materials in the world. They were relatively easy to tell apart from one another and advocacy was rather straight forward.As the movement grew and more people began advocating for the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted materials in classes, some advocates chose to make cost the primary focus of their advocacy. This choice rotated licensing into a secondary priority. Now with two criteria to attend to (cost and licensing), there were twice as many types of materials to think about, advocate for, and advocate against. In its simplest form, the four types of materials can be characterized as follows: ...

It’s a world of laughter A world of tears It’s a world of hopes And a world of fears There’s so much that we share That it’s time we’re aware It’s a long game after all. OER advocacy, like most work, is filled alternately with advances and setbacks. Speaking from firsthand experience, because I live in the “day to day” of the work it can be all too easy for whatever is happening in the moment to dominate my feelings, influence my mood, and generally make my life a rollercoaster of emotions. (Sound familiar?) ...

There’s much to learn from history. Sadly, as Audrey Watters has frequently noted, it might be impossible to find a field of endeavor outside educational technology where more of the participants are so utterly ignorant of its history. (I hope you’re aware of and looking forward to her upcoming book on Teaching Machines.) Even within learning design / instructional technology / educational technology graduate programs there’s a bit of a joke that every decade or so someone invents a new technology that causes the field to spontaneously forget everything it ever knew - because how could it possibly apply to the new medium? How could the things we learned about educational radio possibly inform our work with education television? Or teaching machines? Or correspondence courses (snail mail)? Or interactive video discs? Or computers? Or satellite-based video? Or the internet? Or smartphones? Or iPads? Or augmented reality? Or artificial intelligence? Or (insert whatever comes next)… ...