Open-Content

Congrats to the UMass for their pilot OER program which is saving students over 7x the university’s investment in the very first year. Eight faculty members were awarded a total of 10 grants, $1,000 per course, to adopt a new curricular resource strategy using easily identified digital resources. Under the program, faculty developed a variety of alternatives, from creating an online open access lab manual to utilizing e-books and streaming media available through the Libraries’ numerous databases. In support of this initiative, librarians developed a comprehensive subject guide to open educational resources. ...

Steve Carson has a terrific proposal on his blog this week: What would happen in the US, I wonder, if US News & WR suddenly began considering transparency and knowledge dissemination as embodied in OCW/OER projects as a part of its formula? I’m sure they are lobbied all the time for changes to the formula, but I think there is a pretty good case to be made here… Any thoughts on how to start the campaign? ...

I frequently describe openness and analytics as chocolate and peanut butter - both are tasty individually, but together their synergy is truly remarkable. Until recently we only had one example - CMU’s OLI - where this synergy was really running at full steam: openness providing permission to make improvements to curriculum and analytics providing empirical evidence about what changes are needed. (Note that neither the permission nor the evidence alone are nearly as powerful as the two together.) CMU OLI also leverages openness to increase the number of students using their material, which in turn generates more data, which in turn enables more powerful analytics, which in turn leads to better material, etc. CMU OLI’s openly available research shows the progress they’re making on using openness and analytics to improve student learning. ...

For Winter 2012 I’m scheduled to teach a graduate current issues seminar here at BYU. Rather than teach the same Introduction to Open Education I’ve taught in the past, I’m going to expand out and teach “Introduction to Openness in Education.” While I’m going to include much more than just OER, I am going to restrict the topics covered to things directly applicable to education. This broader set of topics is what, to me, really constitutes Open Education. However, because people have somehow managed to conflate Open Education with OER, I’m going to try this new title. ...

Here’s a quick wordcloud of the OpenEd11 tweets together with a text file containing links to all the individual tweets. Do something interesting with them! And don’t forget to watch the full video of the #opened11 keynotes and concurrent sessions at http://openedconference.org/2011/.

As part of my work on the NGLC-funded Kaleidoscope Project I’ve been thinking about practical learning analytics. Why “practical”? My goal with practical learning analytics is to provide access to data in ways that an average teacher, with no special training, can leverage in order to help her students succeed. This is, of course, an extremely tall order. As I began to mull over some common conventions that teachers could interpret without training (e.g., time flows left to right, scores move higher and lower) I realized that there’s already a tool available that provides visualizations like this - the Google Motion Chart Gadget. ...

Anna asks about the “Key Challenges for the OER Movement.” While the field earlier faced different challenges, here in late 2011 I believe there is one primary challenge the movement faces in the coming decade, and it is almost never discussed. 1. The Complete and Utter Lack of Assessment in the OER Space. Humans are famously terrible at judging whether they’re “getting it” or not during learning. One of the primary reasons the CMU OLI courses are (and have been shown to be) so incredibly effective in supporting learning is because they include frequent formative assessments that help learners check their own understanding. These assessments provide immediate feedback, allowing informal learners to determine with greater confidence whether or not they’re “getting it.” ...

Stephen writes: “You can help people find their way around a city, or you can tell them where to go - and if you don’t appreciate the difference between those, then you won’t appreciate the difference between what we’re doing and what Wiley wants us to think we’re doing.” I think everyone understands the difference Stephen is highlighting. What I think he is missing is that people generally seek out someone to ask directions of when they want to go somewhere specific. Have you ever seen someone pull over, flag down a pedestrian, and ask, “can you tell me how to get around the city?” More often than not people seek out help when they have a specific need. And when you need to know where the hospital is, or where the theater is, or where the airport is, you don’t want a two hour treatise on the virtues of the city and how to get around it. ...

I really appreciated Karen’s recent post Trying to grok the lack of structure in peer learning. I’m reading A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. I’m particularly interested in the part on peer learning and learning collectives. This passage struck me: [O]ne might be tempted to ask how we might harness the power of these peer-to-peer collectives to meet some learning objective. But that would be falling into the same old twentieth-century trap. Any effort to define or direct collectives would destroy the very thing that is unique and innovative about them. ...

I’ve yet to publish anything from my time spent in the UK as an OLNet Fellow. The following bit of writing is one of the outputs from that period, and is informed significantly by conversations with the brilliant and welcome folks at the OU, as well as past online exchanges with many of you. On OER - Beyond Definitions Despite the attempts at single sentence definitions so common in the published literature, “open educational resources” is a highly context-mediated construct. However, because philanthropic and public funding agencies commonly require grant outputs to be open educational resources, the ability to quickly and clearly categorize a variety of creative works as “open educational resources” or “not open educational resources” has become critical. ...