Open-Content

Stephen comments on the “Great Rebranding” of MOOCs: MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete…. There has been a great rebranding and co-option of the concept of the MOOC over the last couple of years. The near-instant response from the elites, almost unprecedented in my experience, is a recognition of the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs (which they would like very much to erase from history). ...

Last week I had the incredible opportunity to spend about three hours talking with Gary Lopez, founder of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (or MITE, pronounced “mighty”), who is one of my favorite people in the OER movement and someone for whom I have boundless respect. Just a day later I was fortunate to participate in another amazing conversation involving MITE’s Ahrash Bissell as well as several other members of the OER community. ...

The Perfect Storm Much of the education technology world - and many of the foundations and venture firms that provide the funding for it - are obsessed with adaptive learning. The Gates Foundation’s Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program RFP is the most recent evidence of this trend. The fascination largely stems from the fact that, because these systems are completely automated, they can scale. Scale matters to foundations because it means broader impacts for the work they fund. And, of course, scale matters to investors because it means more customers and, consequently better returns. ...

Last week I wrote about the many goals I have for the open education movement, and how a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation is enabling me to spend focused time pursuing them. While I tried to lay out a compelling vision of what I want to accomplish last week, I didn’t discuss the how. Clearly, accomplishing a set of goals of that scope and magnitude requires more energy and productive capacity than any one person could ever muster. ...

When David Noble first published his groundbreaking critique of online education in 1998, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, I thought to myself “he couldn’t be more wrong.” As it turns out he might not have been wrong - maybe Noble was simply so miraculously prescient that I couldn’t see what he saw. Fifteen - count them, fifteen - years later, Digital Diploma Mills reads as if it were researched and written about the current phenomenon called “MOOCs.” Entire paragraphs from the essay can be read unaltered and applied precisely to the state of things today: ...

My unpaid leave from BYU started January 1. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder than I have during this past month. It’s been exhilarating and exhausting and exciting and challenging and I’m loving it. For anyone who’s interested, here’s an update on what I’ve been doing: Textbook Zero I spent two days early in January visiting with our partner community college working on the first Textbook Zero Associates degree program. This involved two full days of hands-on training with faculty, providing a very hands-on and high touch workshop experience focused on redesigning courses around OER. We started with learning outcomes, moved up through assessments, and finally looked at the open educational resources that will best support teachers in facilitating the specific types of learning they want to see happen with their students. This program, which is an Associates degree in business administration, will open this fall. The Textbook Zero approach (moving the entire degree off of textbooks and onto OER) knocks 30% off the cost of completing this degree. I am super excited about this. (And I have to say that, given the abuse the term “open” has taken recently, I’m going to take steps to make sure that the phrase “Textbook Zero” retains the meaning I meant for it to have when I coined it.) ...

Our latest article on open texts has been published! The Cost and Quality of Open Textbooks: Perceptions of Community College Faculty and Students (CC BY open access). Abstract: Proponents of open educational resources (OER) claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the college classroom. We investigated student and faculty perceptions of OER used in a community college context. Over 125 students and 11 faculty from seven colleges responded to an online questionnaire about the cost and quality of the open textbooks used in their classrooms. Results showed that the majority of students and faculty had a positive experience using the open textbooks, appreciated the lower costs, and perceived the texts as being of high quality. The potential implications for OER initiatives at the college level seem large. If primary instructional materials can in fact be made available to students at no or very low cost, without harming learning outcomes, there appears to be a significant opportunity for disruption and innovation in higher education. ...

Before I learned I would be able to take a sabbatical this year, I was scheduled to teach the 2013 edition of my Introduction to Openness in Education course at BYU during the winter term. Since I received the Shuttleworth Fellowship and am taking a sabbatical (more on this soon) I won’t be teaching the course at BYU this term - but because many people were interested in taking it informally again this year (I’ve been teaching it as a “MOOC” since 2007, before the term was coined), I will be offering a free, non-credit version in the new Canvas Network as a community service. ...

December 21, 2012 was supposed to be the day the world was going to end. Instead, it ended up being the day the Saylor Foundation saved a major portion of the educational Commons from disappearing. As described in a blog post this morning, Saylor.org now hosts free and open versions of Flat World Knowledge texts. Saylor has done a Herculean job, backing up and providing free and permanent access to Word and PDF formats of every Flat World Knowledge textbook - with ePub versions coming in Q1 2013. They’re also inviting anyone who has remixed FWK books to contribute links to their remixes for Saylor’s new Bookshelf. ...

There are some very exciting things happening in my life right now. 1. I’m extremely humbled and excited to have been awarded a Shuttleworth Fellowship. These Fellowships provide a year’s salary replacement, allowing each Fellow to focus completely on creating a particular kind of social change - without other distractions. In my application, I characterized the change I want to create this way: I want to push the field over the tipping point and create a world where OER are used pervasively throughout secondary schools, community colleges, and universities. In my vision of the world, OER supplant traditional textbooks for all high school, associates degree, and undergraduate general education courses. Organizations, faculty, and students at all three levels collaborate to create and improve an openly licensed content infrastructure that dramatically reduces the cost of education, increases student success, and supports rapid experimentation and innovation. ...