Open-Content

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. ...

I know I’ve written about efficacy, student success per dollar, and related topics before, but my mind continues to be drawn back to the issue. I can’t adequately express how important I believe this conversation to be. Consider the following fictitious scenario: A pharmaceutical company is developing a drug to cure a rare form cancer. During the clinical trials the drug eliminates cancer in 35% of the patients in the treatment group. The drug is hailed as a breakthrough, promising a second chance to the million people worldwide with the cancer. The company takes the drug to market as a pill to be taken once daily for six months, with a six-month supply costing $100,000. Individuals and governments accuse the company of price gouging and insurance companies refuse to cover the exorbitant cost of the drug, but the company holds firm on the price. Of the million people who need the drug, 1700 are able to purchase it during the first year of availability. 35% of the 1700 purchasers - 595 people - beat their cancer. ...

For almost three years Lumen Learning has been helping faculty, departments, and entire degree programs adopt OER in place of expensive commercial textbooks. In addition to saving students enormous amounts of money we’ve helped improve the effectiveness of courses we’ve supported, as we’re demonstrating in publications in peer-reviewed journals co-authored both with faculty from our partner schools and other researchers. We’re making great friendships along the way. It’s been absolutely amazing. ...

Back in June I had the great privilege of speaking at the Mountain Heights Academy Convocation Ceremony. This is largely the talk I to gave, except a few paragraphs at the end I skipped over as I ran out of time. I’ve been speaking about this theme more and more recently, starting with my 2013 AECTx talk You Have Superpowers. I can’t talk about it often enough. MHA Convocation Address Abravanel Hall June 3, 2015 ...

This week a coalition of almost 100 organizations, including Lumen Learning, called on President Obama to take executive action to ensure that publicly funded educational resources are open educational resources. To my mind this is one of the most blindingly obvious policy changes needed in Washington - on par with other desperately needed changes like campaign finance reform. Rather than re-explain why this is true, I’ll reuse this brief video I made for Open Education Week several years ago. In the video I explain why all publicly funded educational resources should be openly licensed. The video uses research articles as its primary example, but the logic applies to videos, textbooks, curricula, simulations, and all other educational materials created with public funds. ...

Last week I enjoyed some quiet vacation time - sans wifi - on a lake in rural Tennessee with my family. This break gave me some time to think, worry, and write. I now have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of general education courses and some specific degree programs will transition entirely to OER in US higher ed. That horse is out of the barn. I spent most of my thinking time last week wondering about obstacles in the way of the ubiquitous adoption of OER in US higher education and how we might overcome them. This led me to connect two seemingly unrelated threads. ...

The following endorsement was neither requested nor compensated… I run dozens of websites - everything from opencontent.org to davidwiley.org to openedconference.org to the veritable reusability.org. Several of the websites I run are 15 or 20 years old. For over a decade now I’m been hosting all my websites at BlueHost. But a few weeks ago I decided to throw in with the awesomeness Tim and Jim are making over at Reclaim Hosting and move all my web hosting there. ...

With all the excitement in the air about big data, analytics, and adaptive instruction, it is easy to imagine a future of complete automation. In this future, algorithms will choose what we will learn next, which specific resources we will interact with in order to learn it, and the order in which we will experience these resources. All the guesswork will be taken out of the process - instruction will be “optimized” for each learner. ...

The Object of Study As we work to move entire degree programs from commercial textbooks to open educational resources, we must answer this critical question - can all commercial materials be replaced with open educational resources? The answer to this question is no, but perhaps not for the reason you suspect. The primary object of study in a college course is often a model, principle, theory, equation, causal relationship, or other idea. While one particular way of explaining an idea can be copyrighted, an idea itself cannot be copyrighted. This feature of copyright law means that, despite how anyone else chooses to leverage their copyright in an explanation of the second law of thermodynamics or the cause of the Civil War, you and I are forever free to create our own explanation of these and other ideas. When we exercise that right and explain an idea in our own words (and perhaps other media), we then hold the copyright to our explanations of those ideas. And as the copyright holders we are free to openly license our explanations, thereby creating OER alternatives to the All Rights Reserved explanations published and controlled by commercial publishers. ...

Wow, there’s been some great writing lately. I’ve been particularly reinvigorated by Brian Lamb, Mike Caulfield, and Bracken Mosbacker. And Audrey Watters’ ongoing work on the history of educational technology is vastly more important than anyone seems to realize. It should be absolutely mandatory reading for every student in a graduate program on educational technology or learning sciences, period. Audrey’s constant refrain that “no one seems to remember our history” was made for her again this week when McGraw-Hill and Microsoft announced a new project based around - I kid you not - learning objects. Reading this news created in me an irresistible urge to join Audrey in reminding the field of its not-at-all-distant and yet already-forgotten history regarding the Reusability Paradox. ...