Open-Content

We’ve been sharing open educational resources for over 12 years now. There are literally 10s of 1000s of them out there, many of them structured as OCW (collections of course materials), some of them structured as complete open courses, some of them structured as complete open textbooks, and many of them not really structured at all. The “sharing ball” is rolling. There are more materials that need to be shared, but the eventual sharing of these materials has now become inevitable. ...

Former COSLers Joel Duffin and Justin Ball are continuing their work on tools that make OER more valuable and useful. The OER Recommender (now part of the Folksemantic project) is one of the premiere tools in their bag. If you’ve visited an OER that uses the recommendation service (see “Related Resources” on the right of my Blogs, Wikis, and New Media for Learning page at USU OCW), you know that with one line of javascript you can provide automated recommendations of related OERs to any site. It’s one of the coolest OER services around. ...

I’m just finishing Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget for a review for Ed Tech magazine, which I will also be publishing here. Over the weekend Lanier also penned a piece titled Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind? for the New York Times Magazine. A few comments on his NYTM piece. We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. What is wrong with this is not that students are any lazier now or learning less. (It is probably even true, I admit reluctantly, that in the presence of the ambient Internet, maybe it is not so important anymore to hold an archive of certain kinds of academic trivia in your head.) The problem is that students could come to conceive of themselves as relays in a transpersonal digital structure. Their job is then to copy and transfer data around, to be a source of statistics, whether to be processed by tests at school or by advertising schemes elsewhere. ...

As I read posts about the availability of new open textbooks in a variety of formats, I’m reminded that an open textbooks is much like an iceberg. The textbook itself is the tip that we see above the water. To be more specific, I should say that the student edition is the tip we all see above the water. A tiny fraction of the open textbooks (read: student editions) in the world have a corresponding teacher’s edition that includes problem solutions, lesson plans, teaching tips, and other information teachers and faculty have come to depend on. An even more minuscule number have additional supplementary material available like Powerpoint slides, review flash cards, etc. available. ...

The Open High School of Utah today announced the public opening of its OpenCourseWare collection of 9th grade curriculum materials. 10th grade materials will come to OHSU OCW during the summer of 2011, with 11th and 12th grade curriculum materials coming in the summer of 2012. The OHSU OCW collection is unique because a large portion of the materials shared in OHSU OCW are pre-existing OER, created by other institutions and aggregated by OHSU for use in supporting student learning. As opposed to most OCW collections, which are comprised almost entirely of materials created by the institution sharing the materials, the OHSU breaks ground by extensively reusing pre-existing OER within its formal curriculum and, consequently, it’s OCW. ...

Open education seems to be getting some traction here in Utah. In addition to our recently launched Utah Open Textbooks project targeting high school science, I was very pleased to see open education generally, and the Open High School of Utah model specifically, recommended prominently in the Utah Advisory Commission to Optimize State Government’s Report to Governor Herbert issued last week. The Utah Student Association Open Textbook Initiative gets a mention also, although I don’t believe it has a website yet. ...

Two weeks ago, Washington state representative Reuven Carlyle wrote a blog post about his vision for open education in the state of Washington, in which he referred at length to my recent Educause article, Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation. A thoughtful constituent of Carlyle’s, Professor Amy Kinsel, professor of History at Shoreline Community College, took the time to pen a thoughtful, critical response to his post and my ideas specifically. I’d like to respond to several of her points here. ...

Creative Commons published an interview today with the Open High School of Utah’s Director, DeLaina Tonks. DeLaina does an excellent job describing the school and talking about the impact of OER on education and learning. Congrats to OHSU on all their recent press and the great things happening there!

David Porter asks for research about the sustainability of open educational resources. Here is a list of our articles that appeared in peer-reviewed journals last year on the topic of sustainability of OER (with links to publicly available versions in the BYU Institutional Repository): A Sustainable Model for OpenCourseWare Development Johansen, Justin and Wiley, David http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2353 Keywords: OpenCourseWare; sustainability; open educational resources; development; cost Description/Abstract: The purposes of this study were to (a) determine the cost of converting BYU Independent Study’s e-learning courses into OpenCourseWare, (b) assess the impact of opening those courses on paid enrollment in the credit-bearing versions of the courses, and (c) use these data to judge whether or not an OpenCourseWare program could be financially self-sustaining over the long-term without grant monies or other subsidies. The findings strongly suggest that the BYU Independent Study model of publishing OpenCourseWare is financially self-sustaining, allowing the institution to provide a significant public good while generating new revenue and meeting its ongoing financial obligations. ...

I had the opportunity to attend an Open High School of Utah student orientation meeting this morning. There are loads of students, parents, and teachers here. And the energy in the room is great. The second year of this amazing experiment is beginning! And this year is going to be even better than last year… Also, as a teaser… we’ve received our unofficial Criterion-Referenced Test scores for last year (these are the end of year, state standardized tests). I can’t blog the specifics until they’re made official, but let’s just say that we’ve succeeded in showing that OER “do no harm.” What do you think - can a completely online, publicly-funded school that commits itself to the exclusive use of OER across its entire curriculum outperform the majority of schools in the state in its very first year of operation? =)