You should read this post by Cable Green before proceeding below. In 2001, MIT President Charles Vest’s annual report was titled Disturbing the Educational Universe: Universities in the Digital Age — Dinosaurs or Prometheans?. It is an absolutely seminal piece of writing in open education that is, sadly, underappreciated today. To most people, Prometheus is famous for stealing fire from the gods and gifting it to humanity, and this is the theme Dr. Vest follows in his address. However, when I hear the name Prometheus, my mind always turns immediately to his punishment. This is perhaps the only thing I remember from the weeks our high school English teacher spent dragging us yawning and snoring through Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. For his punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock. And every day, day after day, an eagle came to tear out and eat his liver - which then regenerated overnight. How did the ancient Greeks know that livers regenerate? I always thought that was so cool… ...

Open Up Resources posted a short article yesterday expressing their frustration that people are violating the terms of the CC BY license under which they make their work available. From the post: Our grant of the CC-BY License is conditioned upon the simple requirement that every copy shared with the public by a licensee includes on each physical page of any printed material, and every format page view of digital material, the attribution statement “Download for free at openupresources.org.” ...

The most recent issue of IRRODL included an article titled Effectiveness of OER Use in First-Year Higher Education Students’ Mathematical Course Performance: A Case Study, by Juan I. Venegas-Muggli and Werner Westermann. Quoting from the article: The main aims of this research were to examine the effect of OER use among higher education students and to analyze teacher and student views on OER use in order to better understand how these resources are used and valued. This was justified by the fact that there is a lack of empirical evidence to support expanding the use of OER. Moreover, recent societal demands to improve education quality in Chile have made this a relevant case study environment in which to examine the potentials of OER. ...

I spend most of my time doing fairly tactical thinking and working focused on moving OER adoption forward in the US higher education space. But from time to time I still step back and worry about field-level issues. For example, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the future of learning materials writ large. I made what was probably the clearest statement of my vision for the future of learning materials in my Shuttleworth Fellowship application several years ago: My long-term goal is to create a world where OER are used pervasively throughout primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. In this vision of the world, OER replace traditionally copyrighted, expensive textbooks for all primary, secondary, and post-secondary courses. Organizations, faculty, and students at all three levels collaborate to create and improve an openly licensed content infrastructure that dramatically increases student success, reduces the cost of education, and supports rapid experimentation and innovation in education. Now, make no mistake - OER is a means, not an end. My end goal isn’t to increase OER adoption. My end goal is to improve student learning, and that can be done in extraordinarily powerful ways when teachers and students are able to leverage the unique affordances of open educational resources. ...

I was a music major as an undergraduate. BFA, Music (vocal performance), Marshall University, 1997. One of my great loves is teaching music theory. I taught a little even as an undergrad, substituting when professors were away or guest teaching about indigenous Japanese music when we studied ethnomusicology. (When the time came to apply to graduate school, I still hadn’t decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. In addition to applying to the Instructional Psychology and Technology program at BYU, I also applied to the ethnomusicology programs at University of Tokyo and University of Hawaii.) One of these days, after I’ve retired, I’m going to write a radically restructured, OER-based freshman music theory course, based on research I did early in my career and what I’ve learned about good teaching since then. (Theory is generally taught as a weed out course to scare non-musicians out of the program, rather than as the solid grounding in the technical aspects of music that every musician needs to have.) ...

Over the last 24 hours there’s been a short Twitter thread about whether or not materials released under a CC license with the NC condition can be used in a college classroom safely. Hey #OER gurus, rec'd a question about #CreativeCommons BY-NC license & trepidation re using NC stuff specifically in publicly-funded colleges & universities. Safe to use, correct? Any info/links wd be loved! @thatpsychprof @opencontent @actualham @BCOpenText @eCampusOntario ?? — Stella Maris Bastone (@StellaBastone) February 15, 2019 The standard answer here, is “Of course! Using NC-licensed material in a college classroom is totally safe!” The problem is, that answer is wrong. ...

This post is rather long. For the tl;dr, read the final two paragraphs. Football as played in America is not the same sport as the football they play in the rest of the world. Actually, that is an oversimplification, as a wide range of very different games are called “football” around the world. (See Wikipedia for a list of its most common variations.) While these games share a common name, they are wildly different beyond some superficial similarities (they are all games played by teams of players who, to a greater or lesser degree, kick a ball in order to score points). Quite literally, the “fundamental rules of the game” are different. ...

Maha has written a brief but powerful post about how people’s contributions can go unacknowledged. Even though it paints me in a fairly poor light, I recommend that you read it. Among other things, the post discusses her role in my decision to abandon the phrase “open pedagogy” and adopt the phrase “OER-enabled pedagogy.” And as I will explain below, it is totally and completely accurate to say that Maha played an important role in that decision. ...

At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. Five years later, SPARC have collected a significant amount of data in order to answer the question of whether or not we have achieved that goal. You can read more about the data collection methodology and their ongoing work on this question here. SPARC have made the data available under the CC0 dedication and you can download them here. ...

At OpenEd18 I gave a presentation titled “Questioning the OER Orthodoxy: Is the Commons the Right Metaphor for our Work?” I’ve been meaning to translate some of that thinking into writing, and a prompt in my inbox this morning finally has me moving. In the presentation I made the point that metaphors are extraordinarily powerful. The metaphors we choose to employ literally determine what we will see, consider, and understand - as well as what we will not. A powerful metaphor draws our attention to salient features that we would likely have missed otherwise, increasing our ability to make progress. However, the wrong metaphor can have exactly the opposite effect, blinding us to salient features and keeping us focused on frivolous similarities that lead nowhere. ...