Forecasting

There’s been a lot of discussion about open textbooks, efficacy research, and student cost savings in the wake of this year’s #OpenEd15. The general theme of the conversation has been a concern that a focus on open textbooks confuses the means of open education with the end of open education. I’m compiling a Storify of examples of this really engaging writing - you should definitely take the time to read through it. I’m not responding directly to many of the points made in those posts here, but will in later follow-up posts. The overall criticism about ends / means confusion may or may not be true - it depends entirely on what you think the end or goal of open education should be. This is a conversation we almost never have in the field of open education. What is our long-term goal? What are we actually trying to accomplish? What kind of change are we trying to create in the world? The recently published OER strategy document, as informative as it is, reads more like a list of issues and opportunities than what Michael Feldstein describes as “rungs on a ladder of ambition.” Answering these questions leads to additional, more proximate concerns, like what specific steps do we need to take to get from here to there? In his #OpenEd15 keynote, Michael pushed our thinking with some additional questions, like “Who are we willing to let win?” As I have reflected on the post-conference conversation, and these larger questions about goals and purpose, I’ve decided to share some of my current best answers to these questions. (Disclaimer: my answers are guaranteed to evolve over time.) Your answers will almost certainly be different than mine - and that’s a good thing. I’m not sharing my answers as a way of claiming that they reflect the One True Answer. I’m sharing them in the hope that they will prompt you to think more deeply about your own answers. I find that nothing helps me clarify my thinking quite like reading others’ thinking I disagree with. As we all take the opportunity to ask and answer these important questions for ourselves, and to do that thinking publicly, out loud, who knows what might happen? ...

When David Noble first published his groundbreaking critique of online education in 1998, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, I thought to myself “he couldn’t be more wrong.” As it turns out he might not have been wrong - maybe Noble was simply so miraculously prescient that I couldn’t see what he saw. Fifteen - count them, fifteen - years later, Digital Diploma Mills reads as if it were researched and written about the current phenomenon called “MOOCs.” Entire paragraphs from the essay can be read unaltered and applied precisely to the state of things today: ...

I’ve been thinking about what’s next for OER… With the current set of MOOCs - which aren’t even open - grabbing attention away from the real movement, we need an exciting idea to get behind. Something that can inspire another decade of work across the nation and around the world. (When was the last time you heard about a new OpenCourseWare initiative launching in the US? When was the last time you personally thought of OCW as being really innovative?) We need something that can capture the imagination, something that can inspire both faculty and institutional leaders, something that will bring another 100 US post-secondary schools into the open education movement. Most of all, we need something that will significantly bless the lives of millions of students, providing them access to educational opportunities that can radically transform their lives for good. ...

According to Reuters: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers Inc has reached a deal with more than 70 percent of its creditors to cut $3.1 billion in debt as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding. The publisher said it plans to restructure through a pre-packaged, court-supervised Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The HMH bankruptcy is not just about decreases in education funding, of course. We must give some credit to Kaleidoscope, Open Course Library, the Utah Open Textbook Project, Flat World Knowledge, and others around the world for showing that freely available OER and open textbooks can completely replace breathtakingly overpriced publisher textbooks - and that students learn the same amount regardless. If you could get the same grade using a $175 commercial textbook or a free online (and $30 or less to print) textbook, which would you choose? ...

This morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a survey of more than 1,000 university presidents conducted for the Chronicle by the by the Pew Research Center. What’s on university presidents’ minds? “We’re staring fundamental change in the face,” said Stephen R. Portch, a former chancellor of the University System of Georgia. “Our system is bankrupt, and we’ve got to have a new model.” “We should be worried,” said Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York system. “We are in a flat world. We are going to have to evolve.” ...

The hype continues to build around Chris Anderson’s upcoming book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Malcolm Gladwell’s review “Priced to Sell: Is free the future?” in the New Yorker rubbed me the wrong way. Apparently, it rubbed Seth Godin the wrong way, too. In his response, Malcolm is Wrong, he speaks plainly so that no one can misunderstand: [Malcolm’s] first argument that makes no sense is, “should we want free to be the future?” ...

There’s an excellent article over on Wired right now with interesting implications for our field. The End of Theory reads in part: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all… ...