Open-Content

There are only five (5) days left for the Open Education Conference early bird registration rate. Register by September 15 and save! http://openedconference.org/2012/register/

Here are the things that stood out to me most during the three day meeting. Sorry for the brain dump format. Moorseville, NC moved graduation rates 68% to 90% since the move to devices and all digital content Two professional development release days PER MONTH for faculty to skill up on digital and using data Small group differentiated instruction, almost no whole-class instruction Superintendent visits every classroom in the district multiple times each year, primarily to say thank you to the teachers. Funding model - $1 / day / student ($200/year) pays for devices and content. Average cost for online content was $35/student across all subjects. ...

Open education has been an odd duck for the past decade. The overwhelming majority of the activity in the space has been in OER. People and institutions have found ways to openly license educational materials, posted these on a website, and hung the “Mission Accomplished” banner on their aircraft carriers. It reminds me of the Voyager Golden Record, content shared by being blasted out into space in the hopes that someone will eventually find and use it. Once we successfully launched, our obligations were met. “Sure hope somebody locates and learns from that. If they do, maybe they’ll send an email to let us know.” ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLw7yBRqF4U

Our open online class on entrepreneurship in education, EdStartup 101, is starting this coming Monday! The most useful thing we did when we put the word out about the course was to invite interested people to fill out a simple form. We hoped this would give us an idea of what type of people were coming. A few weeks later, 850 people have indicated their intention to participate in the course. Fortunately for us, Google Forms has a handy feature that auto visualizes form responses. So, in case you’re interested, here are a few characteristics of the EdStartup 101 participants. ...

I’ve been thinking about what’s next for OER… With the current set of MOOCs - which aren’t even open - grabbing attention away from the real movement, we need an exciting idea to get behind. Something that can inspire another decade of work across the nation and around the world. (When was the last time you heard about a new OpenCourseWare initiative launching in the US? When was the last time you personally thought of OCW as being really innovative?) We need something that can capture the imagination, something that can inspire both faculty and institutional leaders, something that will bring another 100 US post-secondary schools into the open education movement. Most of all, we need something that will significantly bless the lives of millions of students, providing them access to educational opportunities that can radically transform their lives for good. ...

I’m super excited to share the news about Ed Startup 101 - a new open online course being offered this fall by a great team including Richard Culatta, Todd Manwaring, and myself. The course focuses on entrepreneurship in the educational context, and will be useful whether you’re taking the “quit your job, raise some money, start a company” route, or the “keep your job, write some grants, start a project” route, or if you’re interested in making a long-term impact on education in some other way. ...

I may be the biggest fan of Creative Commons anywhere. Sure, I’m biased because the licenses are built on the framework we established with the Open Publication License years before. And yes, the licenses have some well-rehearsed problems (e.g., the undefinable “Noncommercial,” the compatibility-killing “ShareAlike”, etc.). But despite these problems I firmly believe that the Creative Commons licenses are far and away the best open licenses for content in existence. ...

If you’ve ever hated fighting the white space Wordpress aggressively inserts all over the place, just insert this snippet of code at the top of your template file: <?php remove\_filter ('the\_content', 'wpautop'); ?> Shazaam! No more auto-inserted s!

Just ran across a great infographic in an article about college costs on the FWK blog - College Costs (Infographic: May Cause Anxiety). Something caught my eye part way down - do you notice anything interesting about three of the five least expensive colleges in the US?