Open-Content

The tl;dr: Supporting effective OER adoption at scale has its problems. Many of these problems have openly licensed solutions. Sometimes it makes sense to deploy these solutions yourself; sometimes it makes more sense to work with a partner. Background and Some Problems To put it in a depressingly small nutshell, I spent the first decade or so of my career creating open licenses to make the sharing of OER legally possible, traveling the world talking to people about why they might want to place an open license on their educational materials and other creative works, experimenting with different open pedagogies in my own teaching, and conducting empirical research about the impacts of OER adoption on outcomes for students, faculty, and institutions. ...

Andrew Rickard has written a thoughtful essay on OER, open pedagogy, and commercial interests. In it, he reflects on several topics, including his honest misgivings about the recent OpenStax / Knewton partnership announcement. His doubts are not unique; I think there is a broad sense of uneasiness regarding the participation of commercial players in the open education space. And I think it’s a topic we should be talking about more. In the interest of transparency let me remind the reader that I co-founded and currently work at Lumen Learning, a for-profit entity that works in the open education space. And let me preface this post by saying that Adam posed a thoughtful question deserving a thoughtful response, but on reflection I see that below I’m responding more to my personal experiences and observations of the past several years than I am his specific post. Sorry, Adam. ...

Robin DeRosa has written an absolutely wonderful post about two of her experiences with open pedagogy. I am so grateful to her for doing so! Reading these stories filled my heart with glee and my soul with joy. And if that sounds hyperbolic, I assure you that I’m understating the effect her post had on me. I frequently tell the stories of Project Management for Instructional Designers and The Open Education Reader in talks I give, but I’ve never taken the time to write something as thorough as Robin’s account of her experiences. I kept finding myself silently shouting “Yes!!” as I read her post. “That’s exactly how I feel!” It’s amazing how moving it is to find you have a shared experience with someone, especially when that experience has affected you so powerfully. ...

During his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Obama called on Vice President Biden to lead a new, national “Moonshot” initiative to eliminate cancer as we know it. Today, the White House is announcing a new $1 billion initiative to jumpstart this work. (fact sheet) The country - the world, really - is fighting the war against cancer with both hands tied behind its back. This work is quintessentially cutting-edge science, and the lifeblood of work in any advanced scientific field is research. Cutting off access to research results - either the seminal (foundational) research or the very latest findings published earlier this morning - is a certain way to kill this kind of endeavor. When researchers, scientists, and others working on a project can’t find out was has already been tried, what has been proven to work, and what has already been shown to fail, they are doomed to spin frenetically in an eddy of frustrated impotence, forever. ...

Earlier this week I read an op-ed - sponsored by Pearson - titled “If OER is the answer, what is the question?” The article poses three questions and answers them. Below I share some thoughts prompted by the article. (The questions from the article are presented in bold; unattributed blockquotes are from the original article.) How do we deliver better learning experiences to more students? There are fantastic learning resources out there of all breeds bringing different types of value to the learning process. OER often shine in their variety and ability to deepen resources for niche topics. Where proprietary courseware (textbooks, etextbooks, or online courseware) stand apart is in pedagogical organization and the unique value of authorship. While it’s possible to build a complete course from OER, the finished product often lacks the scaffolding found in courseware authored by single author/editorial/product teams. That scaffolding connects concepts and practice together, guiding students through the content in a way that maximizes learning. ...

Terrible ideas and brilliant ones can be surprisingly difficult to tell apart. More often than not they tend to be terrible. So, from a purely statistical perspective, what you’re about to read is likely a horrible idea. That fact notwithstanding, in the great tradition of selfishly publishing less than half-baked ideas on my blog so that I can benefit from readers’ comments and feedback, I present the following little thought experiment for your enjoyment. ...

The tl;dr. In many contexts - like open content, open educational resources, open source software, open access, and open data - “open” means “free plus permissions.” But when modifying nouns that aren’t copyrightable - for example, in contexts like “open pedagogy” or “open educational practices” - open necessarily means something else. There are significant costs when we aren’t clear about what we mean by open in different contexts. A dozen or more years ago I was sitting in a meeting at MIT. There were fifteen or so people from around the world in the room and we were talking about open courseware. At some point the conversation turned to copyright and the incredible amount of time, effort, and resources it takes to review and clear all the material you want to share openly. A participant from China smiled broadly and said something along the lines of “That’s one of the great things about doing this work in China - you don’t have to worry about copyright! Nobody over there cares.” We all laughed appreciatively at his caricaturization of his own culture. As our laughter died down he added emphatically, over a flat stare, “I’m serious. We don’t even think about it.” Our laughter turned to awkward chuckling as we struggled to change the subject. ...

Mary and Amanda wrote a great post yesterday about BCCampus’ upcoming plans around open pedagogy. It reminded me that I meant to post the notes I developed for my workshop on open pedagogy at the Maricopa Community Colleges last week. Here’s my outline for the conversation we had there. (Yes, I know it’s outline-y and not completely fleshed out, but hopefully there’s enough here to be valuable.) I’m thinking quite hard about this topic these days. ...

I have a chapter about open educational resources that will be appearing in a book on trends and issues in instructional design and technology later this year. The chapter will be openly licensed and I’ll publish it here in full after it appears in the book. But Phil’s great post today about the price difference between digital and print textbook rentals has me wanting to post the chapter’s Summary of Key Principles. So here it is (with some links added to improve readability): ...

One of the reasons faculty can be slow to switch from commercial textbooks to OER is a perceived lack of open supplemental materials like powerpoint presentations, lab books, and test banks. There are certainly some disciplines in which this is a challenge (I’ll discuss how we’re changing that below). But let’s think for a moment about what that means: 1. A faculty member reviews a collection of OER (perhaps an open textbook) and feels like the collection would be an acceptable substitute for the commercial textbook they currently require students to purchase. ...