Open-Content

It’s widely understood that while faculty select the textbooks their students use, faculty neither pay for nor use textbooks. The fact that faculty don’t have to pay for the books they select is reflected by the data in the recent Babson survey showing that less than 3% of faculty feel that cost is an important factor to consider when selecting instructional materials. The fact that faculty don’t use (or even read) the textbooks they assign students is reflected in the countless student comments on end of course review forms each year complaining that the content of faculty lectures are frequently unrelated to the content of assigned textbook readings. But - while faculty frequently don’t use the textbooks, they almost always use the materials that publishers give them (for free) when they adopt a textbook - test item banks, presentation slides, video clips, etc. ...

The Babson OER Survey is incredible. If you care at all about OER, you absolutely need to read it. Then go read what Phil has written at e-Literate and 20 Million Minds. Go ahead. I’ll wait. The popular media will no doubt focus on the awareness findings in the report. On the most liberal measure of awareness, 65.9% faculty are completely unaware of OER. On a stricter measure, 73.6% of faculty are completely unaware. Phil characterizes these awareness findings as bad news for OER advocates in his 20MM article. He’s right, but for a far deeper reasons than he suggests. These awareness findings are bad news for OER advocates because it means there is still a huge window for traditional publishers to organize a massive FUD campaign against OER. If publisher’s can control faculty members’ first exposure to OER and attempt to control the messaging around OER, there may still be a chance for publishers to turn the tide back against OER. And make no mistake, the report clearly shows that the tide has already turned in favor of OER among faculty who are aware of OER. To me, the biggest takeaway from the Babson survey is this question - who will introduce the remaining 66%-75% of this country’s faculty to OER? Haters or advocates? ...

During conversations this week at the semi-annual meeting of the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellows, I was struck by (what is for me) a new way of contextualizing and understanding “open” - as one of a long line of technological innovations that radically improve productivity. History is filled with technological innovations that have increased our “productivity,” making it significantly less expensive for us to engage in some activity than it had been prior to the innovation. I have often thought of open as being part of the family tree of information technology innovations that includes inventions like writing, the printing press, computers, and the internet. But my previous conceptualization of these inventions was limited to a general notion of “inventions that enable us do that we couldn’t before.” This framing does not explicitly consider their impact of open on our productivity in a market sense. It was the juxtaposition of a conversation about sustainability with Fellows Peter Bloom and Johnny West against Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society, which I recently finished reading, that really catalyzed this new perspective. ...

One of the many improvements in my life since I started running has been the number of books I’ve been able to read (trans: listen to). Some of my recent running reading has been swirling around in my head during the semi-annual meeting of Shuttleworth Foundation Fellows I’m currently attending in Malta. This meeting is always a fantastic opportunity to think, rethink, and reconceptualize “open.” No, I haven’t changed my mind about open. But I do think there is an additional way to think about open, another perspective that can add to our understanding of the construct, that I don’t hear people talking about. ...

It’s been another incredible week at Lumen - we have more exciting news to share! First, Lumen has been selected as one of seven winners of the Next Generation Courseware Challenge, a $20 million grant competition from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build exemplary, affordable digital course materials that improve student success among low-income and disadvantaged learners. This work includes a singularly awesome set of design, research, development, and content partners, together with an amazing consortium of schools that will co-design and test the resulting open, competency-based courses. (http://lumenlearning.com/ann-courseware-challenge/) ...

In his seminal essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond popularized the following quote he attributes to Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.” For 15 years the makers of learning management systems have been swimming upstream against this truth. They would benefit greatly by meditating on this principle, together with the more general Occam’s Razor and the more specific Zawinski’s Law. ...

Today President Obama announced that, in addition to the commitments already outlined in the US Open Government National Action Plan, the United States will take additional steps to make government more open, transparent, and accessible for all Americans. The announcement included the following commitments: Promote Open Education to Increase Awareness and Engagement Open education is the open sharing of digital learning materials, tools, and practices that ensures free access to and legal adoption of learning resources. There is a growing body of evidence that the use of open education resources improves the quality of teaching and learning, including by accelerating student comprehension and by fostering more opportunities for affordable cross-border and cross-cultural educational experiences. The United States is committed to open education and will: ...

The following is a pre-print of an essay set to appear in Bonk et al.’s forthcoming book MOOCs and Open Education around the World_. It may undergo some additional editing before publication. Unlike the rest of the content on opencontent.org, this article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license v4.0, as per my contract with Routledge. This essay remixes some material that was previously published on opencontent.org._ In this piece I briefly explore the damage done to the idea of “open” by MOOCs, advocate for a return to a strengthened idea of “open,” and describe an open education infrastructure on which the future of educational innovation depends. ...

I just learned that my colleague and friend Brent Lambert has passed on. As I’m reflecting on our relationship this morning, I want to share a few thoughts and feelings and stories. I met Brent when he entered the PhD program at USU. He came to us with a Masters degree (in CS), but no Bachelors. That always cracked me up about him - he was quirky like that. He loved making software and was extremely firm in his commitment to openness (and the other principles that guided his life). He had a passion for building things that would make the world a better place. Here’s an old blog post where I include his thinking on learning objects in a brief review of related thinking by folks like Wayne Hodgins, Stephen Downes, and Andy Gibbons. ...

Well, this has turned into a rather enjoyable conversation. To recap what has unfolded so far: It began with Jose Ferreira inviting me to appear on a panel at the Knewton Symposium, on the panel, I made the claim that in the near future 80 percent of general education courses would replace their commercial textbooks with OER, after the conference, Jose responded to my claim by telling publishers why I was wrong, I responded by explaining that the emergence of companies like Red Hat for OER would indeed make it happen, using the Learning Outcomes per Dollar metric as their principal tool of persuasion, and Michael Feldstein argued that it depends. Yesterday, Brian Jacobs of panOpen published an essay contributing to the conversation. While I agree that some in the field have yet to pick up on a few of the points he makes, I’m a little perplexed that he would choose to position these points as a response to writing by Michael, Jose, and me. By making these points in a response, he implies that we have yet to understand them. Take this bit for example: ...