Open-Content

Humans are fundamentally social. There are a number of ways we might attempt to prove this claim. We might argue that the highest compliment someone can be paid is to be called a “true friend.” We might argue that the noblest of all emotions is love. We might argue that the single most important technological achievements in history are the creations of communications technologies such as speech, writing, printing, and the internet. Conversely, we might argue that society’s most severe nonlethal punishment is “solitary confinement.” ...

or, Of Small Deltas, Honeypots, and Brand Inversion What’s the difference between a MOOC and a “traditional” online course? It sounds like the setup for a bad joke, but trying to find a reasonable answer to this question is no joke. Take the following quote from an end of 2014 article about MOOCs as an example. We have seen strong development of the MOOC ecosystem this year. MOOC providers are finding better footing in developing their business models. They will likely tune them and bring in even more revenues. Universities are jumping on the online bandwagon and investing in online course development. They will be eager to leverage this content (via virtual and blended learning) in their own campuses and continuing education curricula. ...

tl;dr - We’ve published An Open Education Reader, a collection of readings on open education with commentary created by students in my graduate course Introduction to Open Education taught at Brigham Young University, Fall 2014. = = = = = Fall 2014 was the fifth time I’ve taught my graduate course Introduction to Open Education. I’ve taught it in many different ways in the past. In 2007 I taught it at USU as an open course with dozens of people from outside the university (and outside the US) reading along and completing assignments in order to earn a course certificate. Later at BYU I taught it as a Massively Multiplayer Online Game complete with character types, skills trees, guilds, quests, and experience points. Each experiment in teaching the course has been an opportunity for me to be more open in my practice and provide students with a different perspective on open education. ...

Part of an article on the P2P Foundation website today struck a chord with me with regard to the importance of being able to OWN things and not simply stream or lease access to them. It’s this kind of thinking that caused me to introduce a 5th R, Retain, this last year. In Owning is the New Sharing, Nathan Schneider writes: The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever. Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how. Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it. ...

I’ve stopped saying the word “disrupt” since people began exclaiming it in a kind of religious ecstasy. At some point in the last 18 months or so, “disruption” has completed its slide down the proverbial slippery slope and has stopped being a means and become an end in and of itself. Ends-means confusion is a terrible mistake, and never bodes well for the people who make it. I expect it bodes even worse for an entire field of endeavor (I’m looking at you, educational technology) that seems to have wholeheartedly bought into the switcheroo. ...

At it’s core, the question of open pedagogy is “what can I do in the context of open that I couldn’t do before?” This turns out to be terribly difficult, because of the ubiquity (even ambience?) of copyright in our lives. An educator asking the question “what can I do pedagogically if I don’t have to worry about copyright?” is a bit like an aerospace engineer asking, “what could I do in rocket design if I no longer had to worry about gravity?” or a politician asking “what could I do if I no longer had to worry about the party system?” or a researcher asking “what could I do if funding were no longer a constraint?” ...

Our recent article, The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes, is now available for open access under a CC BY license. Read the abstract below, or grab the free PDF of the full article. Given the increasing costs associated with commercial textbooks and decreasing financial support of public schools, it is important to better understand the impacts of open educational resources on student outcomes. The purpose of this quantitative study is to analyze whether the adoption of open science textbooks significantly affects science learning outcomes for secondary students in earth systems, chemistry, and physics. ...

As our recent article on The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes in Educational Researcher demonstrated (OA version coming soon), when used in the K-12 context OER have the potential to provide local control, save districts significant money, support students in building up a personal library of science books, and improve learning outcomes. What can be done to help other students and schools enjoy the benefits of using OER? ...

Supporting Capacity Building as OER Use Enters Mainstream For over two years now I’ve been working full-time with the incredible folks at Lumen Learning on supporting faculty adoption of open educational resources. (Time really does fly when you’re having fun!) As indicated in the subtitle of our #OpenEd14 presentation - “still bumbling our way toward greatness” - we’ve made plenty of mistakes and learned lots of lessons along the way, and there’s no reason why others should bumble down unproductive paths we’ve already traversed. ...

#OpenEd14, the 11th annual Open Education Conference, has given me the opportunity to do some additional thinking about the Open Education Infrastructure. Unfortunately, thinking about infrastructure inexorably leads to creating diagrams. Because I’m hosting the conference I don’t time to write an extensive commentary now. Let me just say that people often ask, “What would people do if an open education infrastructure existed?” The primary answer is engage in open pedagogy. OER and the other components of the open education infrastructure are means, not ends. The end goal of the infrastructure, of course, is supporting better teaching and learning. ...