Open-Content

Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about open educational resources, but precious little has been written about how OER - or openness more generally - changes the practice of education. Substituting OER for expensive commercial resources definitely save money and increase access to core instructional materials. Increasing access to core instructional materials will necessarily make significant improvements in learning outcomes for students who otherwise wouldn’t have had access to the materials (e.g., couldn’t afford to purchase their textbooks). If the percentage of those students in a given population is large enough, their improvement in learning may even be detectable when comparing learning in the population before OER adoption with learning in the population after OER adoption. Saving significant amounts of money and doing no harm to learning outcomes (or even slightly improving learning outcomes) is clearly a win. However, there are much bigger victories to be won with openness. ...

As I travel the country (and the world) telling people about open educational resources, open textbooks, etc., I frequently receive questions about the quality of openly licensed instructional materials. I’ve answered this question enough that I thought it might be time to actually write something on the topic. A Tiny Thought Experiment Imagine you had a favorite textbook (hey - it’s a thought experiment). Now imagine receiving a letter informing you that the author has passed away and left you all the copyrights to the book. You immediately walk across the room and pull your copy off the shelf and open to the copyright page. You carefully cross out the words “All Rights Reserved” and replace them with the words “Some Rights Reserved - this book is licensed CC BY.” Have you changed the quality of the book in any way? No. Simply changing the text on the copyright page does not change the rest of the book in any way. ...

This month is the one year anniversary of Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded with Kim Thanos in October, 2012. It’s been an incredible first year, and we’ve learned a million lessons along the way - and we continue to learn more about what it takes to support OER adoption at scale every day. We’ve pulled together a summary of what’s happening with our post-secondary work for fall semester 2013 in a press release posted on the Lumen site, which begins: ...

Creative Commons has announced my appointment as CC Education Fellow. I’m honored, humbled, and excited to be formally affiliated with CC, and am looking forward to continuing to passionately (and hopefully, effectively) advocate for openness as a way to decrease the cost and increase the quality of education.

I expressed my frustration yesterday about the infuriatingly inaccurate name of the “Open” Education Alliance. Despite the obvious problems with the name, this new initiative demonstrates a critical move I described a 2011 post, Or Equivalent: The high-level vision of the project is this: Many job descriptions include a requirement like “BA or BS in EE/CS/CE or equivalent experience.” We want to create a collection of badges that a top employer, like Google, will publicly recognize as “equivalent experience.” This goes straight for the jugular, demonstrating that badges are a viable alternative to formal university education. ...

“Open” is a word with a wide range of meanings. The Oxford Dictionaries Online lists no fewer than 20 meanings. Consequently, we should not be surprised when we encounter the word used in a variety of ways. However, when “open” is used together with other words - as in the case of “open educational resources” - “open” can become part of a term of art and gain a very specific meaning within particular communities of use. ...

I’m grateful for your responses to my recent post Be Awesome Instead. In reading your comments, tweets, and other blog posts responding to the post, I was a bit concerned that some readers may have gotten the impression that I was saying it was ok to “Be Awesome Instead” of being open. That was absolutely not the point I was making. Being open - truly open - is absolutely critical for reasons I will describe below. The point I was trying to make in my post is that we should be awesome instead of being whiny; we should be contributors rather than naysayers. ...

I’ve been fairly quiet recently about Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded earlier this year with Kim Thanos. Lumen (for short) is where I’m spending my Shuttleworth Fellowship time, with the goal of drastically increasing the use of OER in formal educational settings in order to lower the cost and improve the quality of education. Today Lumen released its first six Open Course Frameworks. Open Course Frameworks are an idea I am very excited about, because they greatly simplify the process of adopting OER for the average teacher or institution. Open Course Frameworks are: ...

Cole Camplese, for whom I have great respect, recently wrote a wonderful essay about the negative response to MOOCs from many voices in the open ed space: Just a couple of years ago we were all trying so hard to get people to accept the idea that open access to learning was a great thing. Hell, some of the best conversations I’ve ever had in this field have centered around the ideals of openness, but now that the MOOC thing has happened the same people who built rallying calls for more open access to learning are now rejecting this movement. Why? Because it is driven by corporations trying to make money? Because it isn’t really open? Because the press isn’t giving a few people the credit they believe they deserve? ...

If you haven’t read Audrey Watters’ coverage of the Coursera / Chegg deal, I highly recommend it. The short version is, DRM’ed commercial content is making its way into MOOCs, and this stands to make all involved - including the professors - quite wealthy. While I completely and fully support recent calls to “reclaim open”, I think the term MOOC is irretrievably out of the barn. Consequently, perhaps the only way left to put an end to the openwashing of the big for-profit MOOC providers is to redefine the term MOOC in the popular mind. I propose that, whenever you hear the acronym MOOC, you think: ...