Open-Content

I’ve just started awarding the first badges from my graduate seminar, IPT 692R: Introduction to Open Education. You can see the first badges I’ve issued here (including some to people outside BYU): http://openeducation.us/badges-earned I’ve used a very lightweight mechanism for issuing badges through the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure that I want to share. I know there are more complex, “scalable” systems for doing this, but I wanted to demonstrate that there is nothing stopping a single faculty member who wants to do something innovative from awarding badges in a DIY sort of way. Here’s my process: ...

Boundless’ authoring model appears to be based on “reverse engineering” publishers’ most popular textbooks. The big publishers’ court case comes down to a single question - is reverse engineering the same as creating a “derivative work?” The question is critical because the creation of derivative works is regulated by copyright. If the court finds that Boundless’ textbooks are derivative works of the publishers’ books, then Boundless has violated copyright law. If the court finds that Boundless’ reverse engineering is not the same as creating a derivative, then Boundless lives to fight another day. ...

I’m happy to announce the conference theme for #OpenEd12 - “Open Education: Beyond Content.” You can read more about the conference theme below, or skip straight to the Call for Papers and Call for Action. Open Education has come of age. The tiny movement that began in the late 1990s as a desire to increase access to educational opportunity has blossomed into requirements in national grant programs, key strategies in state legislatures and offices of education, content sharing initiatives at hundreds of universities and high schools, and a wide range of innovation and entrepreneurship in both the commercial and nonprofit sectors. ...

I had the good fortune of being invited to speak at the ETS Future of Assessment internal conference today. The slides are available at slideshare, but here are the three main points from my talk today. “Badges are not assessments.” OER provide a huge content infrastructure on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OER existed. The Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) provides a standard, interoperable system for issuing, managing, and displaying credentials on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OBI existed. However, no one is paying sufficient attention to the gap between learning anything anywhere (OER) and receiving a recognition (OBI) - this gap is called “assessment.” A badge is not an assessment anymore than a blue ribbon is a foot race. Someone has to pay attention to designing the assessments, experiences, and challenges people will complete in order to EARN badges. There is a huge opportunity for “open assessment infrastructure” in this chasm between OER and OBI. ...

So today I turned 40. Not bad, all things considered. And what did I do for my birthday? Why, I finished up the artwork for the Intro to Openness in Education course badges and finished the technical work necessary to award the badges through the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure’s new Issuer API. I now have some shiny new badges ready to award to folks who complete the appropriate requirements. I think these more granular, learning outcomes-based badges (or LOBs, which I wrote about in more detail the other day) provide students with more immediately actionable credentials than three credits on a transcript do. It’s nice to be able to award both the badges and the credits to the formally enrolled students - it’s the best of both worlds for them. And I think the informal learners will appreciate the badges, even without the credits. ...

The New York Times today ran a story by Tamar Lewin about badges and the future of credentialing. Several quotes attributed to me were featured in the article. Unfortunately for me, I did not ask “Who needs a university anymore?” as the article states I did. Reporters just can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to sensationalizing things I say. Formal post-secondary institutions like universities currently serve about 120M people worldwide. The number of people qualified for and desiring a post-secondary experience is estimated to grow to 250M in the next 20 years. Clearly, we don’t need to be closing down universities and decreasing the capacity the system currently has - we need to be adding alternatives that scale in new and innovative ways in order to cope with the doubling of demand the system is about to experience. I went through these numbers with Ms. Lewin during our interview at some length. Where she gets the idea that I think we don’t need universities anymore is beyond me. ...

Why should we be open? Here’s answer #1, with more to come later this week.

In describing commercial publishers’ response to the open textbook bill in Washington state, Cable Green hits the nail on the head: Publishers are desperate to maintain the huge profit margins they make for essentially packaging the same content in new wrappers year after year. If their quality is indeed as superior as they claim, they shouldn’t have any trouble competing with open educational resources. This is the key point folks aren’t getting. No one outside the open education movement is impressed by books that are “open.” They don’t even know what it means, let alone care about it. What they’re excited by is a book that offers a better quality to price ratio than whatever they’re currently using. ...

“You know you’ve had a good day when you testify about how OER will help more students learn; and the Committee Chair so strongly supports the idea that the American Association of Publishers and Elsevier opt not to testify.” Hopefully Utah won’t be the only state this year making a major K-12 OER announcement!

Literally dozens of government entities, foundations, and other organizations are concerned about “the college completion problem.” The problem in a nutshell is that people go into significant debt to go to college, dropout for a variety of reasons (good and bad) without graduating, and are left with nothing to show for their trouble except the debt. In the popular framing of the problem, the value of a college degree is your ability to convert it into employment. (This is not a rant about the extra-employment value of education. If those were the droids you’re looking for, you can go about your business. Move along.) I simply want to point out that the convertability of a degree into employment is an artificial construct. Degrees are the gateway to employment only because the companies doing the employing say they are. But the universe doesn’t have to work this way. ...