Open-Content

If you can remember the web of 30 years ago(!), you can remember a time when all it took to make a website was a little knowledge of HTML and a tilde account on the university VAXcluster (e.g., /~wiley6/). While it’s still possible to make a simple website today with just HTML, making modern websites requires a dizzying array of technical skills, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript frameworks, databases and SQL, cloud devops, and others. While these websites require far more technical expertise to build, they are also far more feature-rich and functional then their ancestors of 30 years ago. (Imagine trying to code each of the millions of pages on Wikipedia.org or Amazon.com completely by hand with notepad!) ...

At some point over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) advocacy in US higher education became zero textbook costs (ZTC) advocacy. The two are intertwined now in a manner that would be difficult to disentangle even if you wanted to try. There are plenty of practical reasons why this might have happened. For example, politicians understand costs much better than they understand learning, which makes policy work and other political advocacy around eliminating textbook costs far easier than advocating for ways that “open” (whatever that word means) might be leveraged to improve student outcomes. But OER / ZTC advocates have had a fundamental problem simmering for many years now, and the recent advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 will quickly bring that simmer to a boil. ...

2022 saw some significant advancements in artificial intelligence. My threshold for “significant” here being that the advances moved out of labs and arXiv.org preprints and into tools that many people were using and talking about. Lots of people thought text-to-image tools like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney were fun. But Large Language Models (LLMs), and particularly the recent demo of ChatGPT, seem to have put the fear of God into everyone from middle school English teachers to the CEO of Google. The potential partnership between OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) and Microsoft may even present the first substantive challenge to Google’s search monopoly we’ve ever seen - and that’s saying something. While most of the dialog around AI and education seems to be focused on assessment, I think the implications for instructional designers are critically important, too. And, because you’ve got to play the hits, let’s look at what their impact will be on OER as well. ...

I missed this when it was first published, but a few months ago Ithaka S+R shared the results of their Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2021. The survey went out to 145,099 randomly selected faculty members across the US and over 5% of invitees responded. I was particularly interested in the survey’s findings about the state of open educational resources in US higher education. Below, I’ll share these results, the authors’ interpretations of the results, and some of my own thoughts about the results. (The images and quotes from the survey are (C) Ithaka S+R, 2022 and are licensed CC BY-NC.) ...

I’ve been writing this article 30 minutes here and 60 minutes there for several months (Wordpress tells me I saved the first bits in March). I’ve probably deleted more than is left over. It’s time to click Publish and move on. This article started out with my being bothered by the fact that ‘OER adoption reliably saves students money but does not reliably improve their outcomes.’ For many years OER advocates have told faculty, “When you adopt OER your students save money and get the same or better outcomes!” That claim is fine enough if your primary purpose is saving students money (which feels like the direction that OER and ZTC degree advocates have been moving for some time now, and explains why I don’t feel like I’m part of that community any more). But if your primary purpose is improving student outcomes, the shrugging “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t” uncertainty is utterly unacceptable. So I’ve been thinking more than I’d care to admit about the relationship between OER and improving student outcomes. This thinking, with all the benefit that hindsight affords, doesn’t always reflect well on some of my earlier research. But that’s no reason not to share it. ...

I was recently invited to participate in a Three Days of Focus conversation including the reusability paradox on the OE Global platform. The conversation opens for public participation this Wednesday. This is my initial contribution to the conversation. Thanks to Alan and others for the invitation to participate in this conversation. If you didn’t make it all the way through my 2002 article linked above (and I wouldn’t blame you!), the Reusability Paradox can be stated in its simplest form as follows: ...

I absolutely love people who make the Herculean effort necessary to view well-known things from a distinctly different point of view. One person making that effort is Chiara Marletto. I was introduced to her work a few years and reminded of it again this week by the wonderful interview with her in Quanta Magazine. (I was ecstatic to learn that she has published a book about her work - The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey through the Land of Counterfactuals - which is already loaded up in my Audible.) ...

There’s a really terrific conversation happening on the cc-openedu listserv. It started out as a question about OER, but has moved on to a conversation about the purposes of open more generally. Dr. Chuck contributed over the weekend, and his contribution provides a great opportunity for me to respond with the first substantive post since I changed the name of the blog. All the pull quotes in this post are from Dr. Chuck. He writes: ...

Curt Bonk and I recently published a Preface for a special issue of ETR&D on Systematic Reviews of Research on Learning Environments and Technologies. It is largely a collection of personal stories and reflections about the arc of learning technologies over the last 30 years. However, we close with some advice which I believe to be profoundly important for everyone working in and around the learning technologies field, include open advocates. ...

Dashboards in educational contexts are usually comprised of visualizations of educational data. For example, dashboards inside the LMS are often comprised of line charts, bar graphs, and pie charts of data like logins and quiz scores. The primary goal of educational dashboard design is, ostensibly, for them to be “actionable.” In other words, a teacher, student, or administrator should be able to take an action after spending time interpreting a dashboard. For that to be possible, three questions must be answered in the affirmative. ...