Open-Content

There’s an AP story about open textbooks making the rounds in a variety of outlets over the last few days (e.g., ABC News). The story includes some quotes from David Anderson, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers. It boggles my mind that someone whose industry faces an existential threat from open educational resources (OER) still doesn’t know what open means. How can you effectively fight the enemy you fundamentally fail to understand? In describing the industry’s response to OER, the article states: ...

Suppose a faculty member decides she wants to provide some positive reinforcement to students in her class next semester. She decides that each time a student scores 80% or higher on an exam, she’ll send them an email congratulating them and encouraging them to keep up the good work. Now, she has to decide how to send these messages. After a little thought, she decides she has four options: Review the gradebook each Saturday, find everyone who meets the criterion, and send them each an email. Prewrite a series of appropriate emails and store them in a text document. Review the gradebook each Saturday, find everyone who meets the criterion, and send each of them one of the prewritten messages. Prewrite a series of appropriate emails and store them in a text document. Write a script that parses the gradebook each Saturday and generates a list of people who meet the criterion. Send one of the prewritten messages to each person on the list generated by the script. Prewrite a series of appropriate emails and store them in a text document. Write a script that parses the gradebook each Saturday, generates a list of people who meet the criterion, and sends each of them one of the prewritten messages. As she considers these four options, our faculty member wants to ensure that students are actually receiving a message “from their teacher” and that students will interpret the messages as such. ...

Yesterday EdSurge published an opinion piece by Stephen Laster, the Chief Digital Officer at McGraw-Hill Education, titled The Future of Education Isn’t Free. It’s Open. The article makes a strong argument for the importance of interoperability among learning platforms, tools, and content. I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly endorse this message - interoperability of platforms, tools, and resources is absolutely critical to education becoming significantly more effective - and significantly less annoying - in the future. ...

Last week I read a really incredible paper published as OA in Nature titled, The global landscape of cognition: hierarchical aggregation as an organizational principle of human cortical networks and functions. In addition to breaking some terrific new methodological ground, the paper provides a first glimpse at what we might call a “Biological Bloom’s Taxonomy.” The elements in the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy are listed in an order that goes from simplest (e.g., remembering facts) to most difficult (e.g., creative synthesis). There are theoretical reasons to believe that the ordering of elements in the taxonomy is appropriate. However, there is room for argument about the ordering of elements in the taxonomy (not to mention its composition), as we saw when Anderson and Krathwohl published a revised version of the taxonomy in the early 2000s. ...

Martin’s post has inspired me to share the books I read in 2015, though I have not made the time to produce useless charts like he did. :) I must say that, after staying healthy, the biggest benefit of running is all the audio books I manage to read. Some things on my list are only in print (no audio), but they were super important to me to read. A few thoughts that occured to me as I made the list: I reread several books in preparation for reading new books that were released in a series this year. It will be no surprise to people who know me to see that Brandon Sanderson has his own category. I’m definitely tilting toward economics, and continue to be deeply interested in how to frame / describe / talk about “open” in the context of the discipline of economics. ...

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? ...

There is much that’s wrong with the educational technology (“edtech”) market. However, the title of an essay I read last week sums up the biggest problem as succinctly as possible: Caring Doesn’t Scale. This three-word sentence captures so much. First, it clearly communicates that “scale” has become a virtue. More importantly, it implies that old-fashioned virtues - things like caring about people - simply can’t compare in importance to modern values like scale. It would be an interesting thought exercise to re-examine the traditional seven virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity) and decide what each of their edtech replacements would be. However, I’m positive that in the updated version of the EdTech Bible, Corinthians 13:13 ends “the greatest of these is charity scale.” ...

Steve Greenlaw published a brief meditation on grading today. This is a topic I’ve wrestled with ever since taking my courses on assessment design and psychometrics as a graduate student. Allow me to suggest, tongue in cheek, that perhaps our course syllabi are in need of a Truth in Grading Disclosure. It could come right after the section about grading, like this: Grading Your course grade will be determined as follows: ...

I’ve written about Pearson’s efficacy work in the past, and Ray Henderson’s twitter post this morning has prompted me to ponder and write a bit more. Just-in: @Pearson has just pubd white paper on their #Revel platform, as CEO @johnfallon committed. Thoughts? http://t.co/2bEIrin8lp — Ray Henderson (@readmeray) October 14, 2015 Let me start by applauding Pearson for following through on their commitment to focus more on efficacy. As page 3 of the report states, this platform is “the first product at Pearson to have an efficacy framework built in from the very beginning,” and the report seems to have been enabled by this integration. This is a tremendous first step. However, I think there are a few very simple things Pearson could do to greatly improve future efficacy work. Inasmuch as Pearson have invited us to Advocate for Efficacy, that is what I want to do for the remainder of this post. ...

There is much to respond to in a comment left by David Anderson (Executive Director for Higher Education at the Association of American Publishers) on Nicole Allen’s recent HuffPo article College Textbooks: Do You Get What You Pay For, but I’ll focus on one claim. He writes, “While to an OER advocate faculty are mere pawns to their agenda, to publishers, faculty are critical partners in academic success.” The overwhelming majority of OER advocates are faculty, and they have become OER advocates for two reasons. One reason is the incredibly high prices of the textbooks and other materials produced by commercial publishers, and the deleterious effect on student outcomes created when students cannot afford their course materials. Publishers may eventually respond to this problem by dropping their prices to reasonable rates as he indicates they are beginning to do. ...