Open-Content

Last week I wrote that we should stop saying “high quality” when discussing learning materials. Some have questioned whether or not that’s true. It is true, and here’s why. [caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“240”] Photo by Shira Golding, CC BY NC.[/caption] The problem with the phrase “high quality” as used by traditional publishers is that it puts process over outcome. If publishers were basketball players, they would say, “When I shoot free throws, I align my toes with the foul line and square my shoulders to the basket. I slow my breathing and count to 5. I dribble three times, exhale once more, and then shoot, making sure to keep my elbow in and fully extend my arm.” Honestly, who cares? What you really want to know about a basketball player is whether or not he makes his foul shots. You aren’t going to draft him based on his free throw shooting process - you’re going to draft him based on his free throw shooting percentage. If the player you’re vetting shoots underhanded but makes over 90% of his foul shots, you’re going to draft him. The same is true with a salesperson - you don’t care about her sales process, you care about the number of sales she closes. Or with a baseball player - you don’t care about his batting process, you care about his batting average. Or with a network engineer, you don’t care about her specific troubleshooting process, you care about whether your employees can reach the internet or not. ...

Recently the phrase “high quality” has come up several times in discussions of educational materials, and I’ve been surprised what a strong, negative reaction I’ve been having each time I heard the word. After some reflection I think the reason the phrase gets my goat is that “high quality” sounds like it’s dealing with a core issue, while actually dodging the core issue. The phrase is sneaky and deceptive. (Now I don’t mean that the people who were using it were trying to be deceptive; they weren’t. But the phrase itself tends to blind people.) And by “core issue” I mean this - the core issue in determining the quality of any educational resource is the degree to which it supports learning. But confusingly, that’s not what people mean when they say that a textbook or other educational resource is “high quality.” ...

For several years my colleagues and I have been conducting and reviewing empirical research on the impact on student outcomes when OER are adopted in place of commercial materials. Suffice it to say the research results are highly variable. Some studies of OER adoption show essentially no change in student outcomes. Many of these studies report small positive and negative changes in outcomes that, aggregated across several courses, fail to achieve statistical significance. Some studies including larger numbers of students find small changes in students outcomes that achieve statistical significance while failing to achieve practical significance. Based on these studies, we can say that sometimes OER save students significant amounts of money while obeying the “do no harm” rule in terms of student outcomes. Achieving the same outcomes for free, or for 95% less than students were previously paying, is a solid “win” for OER. ...

At this year’s SXSWEdu I gave a Future15 talk, a 15 minute talk given in a “TED style” format. These are the notes I wrote while preparing for the talk. The talk itself differed from these notes somewhat, including some improvisations, but this will give you a broad sense of the argument. What is a bubble? King, Smith, Williams and Van Boening (1993) define a bubble as “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values.” Krugman describes a bubble as a situation in which prices appear to be based on implausible or inconsistent views about the future (2013). (wikipedia) ...

On March 1 my Fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation ended and I officially became an alum of the program. It was an absolutely amazing experience! If you are passionate about using openness to overcome a social problem, you should stop every single thing you are doing right now and go learn about the Shuttleworth Fellowship program. A brief quote from the site: The Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship Program funding consists of two components for each Fellow – the fellowship grant and the co-investment project funding. ...

Cross-posted from the Open Education Group website. At #OpenEd14 John Hilton presented a summary of all the empirical research on the impact of OER adoption that we could find. The presentation was extremely well received, and John has turned it into a nice journal article which is currently under review at a journal which shall remain nameless (for the time being). By the time the article appears, however, it will almost certainly be out of date. As a service to the field, we’ve published an abstracted version of John’s article on the OEG website under the label The Review Project. We’ll keep this page up-to-date as we come across additional articles that actually take a solid empirical look at the impacts of OER adoption. Do you know of one we’ve missed? Head over to The Review Project and leave a reference in the comments.

Rereading Ben Bloom’s 1968 “Learning for Mastery” I am once again impressed and humbled by his ability to cut straight to the absolute core of the issue. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard these points made more clearly or more persuasively. Absolutely inspiring. If students are normally distributed with respect to aptitude for some subject (mathematics, science, literature, history, etc.) and all the students are provided with the same instruction (same in terms of amount of instruction, quality of instruction, and time available for learning), the end result will be a normal distribution on an appropriate measure of achievement. Furthermore the relationship between aptitude and achievement will be relatively high… ...

The Parable of the Restrictive Roads Once upon a time there was a pastoral country of beautiful fields and rolling hills. The simple people there enjoyed a relaxed pace of life, part of which included a good deal of walking. [caption id=“attachment_3763” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] CC BY photo by Marina del Castell[/caption] One day, a young lady announced a remarkable invention. She called it an automobile. The people had never seen anything like it, and everyone was immediately smitten with the speed and comfort of travel it provided. Trucks soon followed these first cars, as did motorcycles, and then four-wheelers. But before long, these remarkable inventions began to take their toll on the country’s beloved landscape. ...

I’m continuing to learn an incredible amount as I work with Lumen Learning, supporting institutions as they go through the process of replacing traditional textbooks with Open Educational Resources (OER), and as I simultaneously continue my work with the Open Education Group conducting empirical research on the effects of OER adoption by faculty. While I’m learning many things down “in the weeds” of implementation, at a higher level I’m understanding more deeply and appreciating more thoroughly how the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted educational materials is literally better for everyone involved. Adopting OER in place of traditional textbooks truly is: ...

Frances Bell has started a Google Doc collecting historical information about cMOOCs. I’m reposting my contributions to the doc (about my own cMOOCs) here on opencontent.org so I can find them again in the future if the Google Doc ever goes away. Year: 2007 Where: USU, INST 7150, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link Course Design: Students included both formal students earning credit at USU and students from around the world participating for free Students who completed the course and requested a Certificate of Completion received a certificate Course syllabus was presented in a wiki which students could (and did) edit Readings and videos were on the public web Each student maintained a blog where their writing and assignments were posted publicly A course OPML file was used to aggregate all student writing for easy reading in RSS Readers The course wiki included a master list of participants, including names, institution (if any), email address, and blog address Clusters of students created affinity-based sub-groups with mailing lists, etc. Year: 2009 Where: BYU, IPT 692R, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link ...