Open-Content

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Fireflies and Star Trails No. 1 by Mike Lewinski, CC BY[/caption] I love everything Rajiv is saying in his recent, excellent essay Pragmatism vs. Idealism and the Identity Crisis of OER Advocacy and I’m really looking forward to the discussion we’ll have when he presents this paper early next month. This is a critically important topic and I think he has identified all the right dots, even if I would connect them slightly differently. ...

Five years ago, in an essay called 2017: RIP OER?, I pondered whether this year would be the end of OER. The bulk of my concern was expressed in these two paragraphs: Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR [open assessment resources] that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen. ...

Cengage recently announced a new offering called MindTap ACE that includes OER and is now available in pilot. I haven’t had access to review the offering yet, but you can see some screenshots in the video linked above. The video clearly shows Cengage content listed for each topic, followed by some OER. Michael Hansen, Cengage CEO, is quoted in the press release as saying: “far too often, the debate is an either/or of achievement versus price, when the reality is that OER can complement proprietary content. MindTap ACE addresses this challenge by including OER alongside Cengage’s best-in-class content. The result is an affordable option that ensures students still benefit from a meaningful learning experience.” ...

E-literate recently ran a story about the emergence of a genuine science of learning. Keith Devlin follows many who came before him in making an analogy to medicine. Generally speaking, I don’t like comparisons of education to medicine. I think they’re problematic for a range of reasons I’ve written about in the past. But in the context of this article, the biggest problem with the comparison has to do with the role of data. ...

Last year Bob Reiser invited me to contribute a chapter to the fourth edition of Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology, to be published by Pearson_._ I agreed on the conditions that I would retain copyright in the chapter and that it would appear in the book under a Creative Commons license. Pearson agreed. Now that the book is appearing in print, I’m publishing the full-text chapter here so that there will be an easier-to-access open access version of the chapter available online. If you’re interested, the full citation is: Wiley, D. (2017). The Evolving Economics of Educational Materials and Open Educational Resources: Toward Closer Alignment with the Core Values of Education. In R. A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (4th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson Education. ...

A quick response to some of the conversation prompted by my recent post Advocating for CC BY. I work very hard to be a strong and effective advocate for openness generally and for CC BY specifically. My advocacy always occurs in the context of the following beliefs: In every case, people should choose the Creative Commons license that will best help them to accomplish their goals. Their choice of license is a critically important decision and shouldn’t be made without some understanding of the consequences. Many people, when first exposed to the CC licenses, simply assume that choosing a license with the NC condition will best help them accomplish their goals. After people learn more about the licenses and the open education community, they often choose a more open license (one without the NC condition). We should have supportive conversations with people as early as possible in their process of choosing a license in order to deepen their understanding of the licenses and the community, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will choose a more open license. (My previous post was a primer on how to have this conversation.) Some people will still choose to use a license with the NC condition. When we are confident that they clearly understand the impacts of the choice they are making, we should ramp down our advocacy for greater openness and respect their decision. To some extent, I’m following Thaler and Sunstein here - trying “to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.” Nudge does a nice job of explaining this perspective, which (1) completely respects the chooser’s agency and (2) tries to support the chooser in making the decision that they would judge to be the best. ...

Several months ago I received an invitation to contribute a brief Foreword to a book Patrick Blessinger and TJ Bliss were editing. Open Education: International Perspectives in Higher Education is now available in print and online under a CC BY license. I’m excited to share the Foreword with you now that the book has been published. These few paragraphs sum up my feelings about openness, perhaps better than anything else I have written. ...

There is a growing consensus among those who work in open education - including organizations like BC Campus, Creative Commons, the Hewlett Foundation, Lumen Learning, OpenStax, the Open Textbook Network, Rebus, and others - that the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) License is our preferred license. We each use this license with the OER that we create and advocate for others to do the same. The BY license best reflects our values of eliminating friction, maximizing interoperability, and promoting unanticipated and innovative uses of OER. ...

Stephen Downes points to some older but interesting posts by Lisa Petrides and Bill Fitzgerald about the role of commercial actors in the open space. It’s a topic that I’ve been thinking about recently, particularly with yesterday’s revelation that Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation. For someone who was online during the 90s, this is completely unimaginable. I had to read the full announcement to convince myself it was true. What the heck is going on? ...

I’ve received lots of feedback since I published the problem with cost framing, some online and some in person at #OpenEd16. My main takeaway from that feedback is that, as ever, I continue to struggle to express myself clearly in writing. Let me try again, make some additional points along the way, and assign some additional blame to myself. Perhaps if I criticize myself rather than “the field” the criticism will be easier for people to hear and accept. ...