Open-Content

I’m making a list of free / inexpensive tools for gathering data in open education contexts. These are tools that I can install on the wikis, blogs, and other sites I maintain where I curate and structure content for my students. Unfortunately, my list is rather short… What tools are you using to gather data from your online courses that I’m missing? Google Analytics Userfly Tynt For example, is there something you use to track which outgoing links people are clicking on? A tool you use to associate repeat visits and activity with the same individual (anonymously)? What kind of data are you collecting from your OER? How are you using it to improve your students’ experience? To improve your teaching? Are they plugins for Wordpress or Mediawiki or some other platform? Are they “one line embeds” like the tools listed above? What tools do we need the most that don’t exist yet? ...

Stevan Harnad takes issue with my Pay Twice argument. Since we’re both on the same team here, surely he won’t mind a response to his response. David Wiley’s version of the double-payment objection is only partly correct. To the extent that both research funding and research library funding are paid by the tax-payer, there is indeed some double-paying — but the one who gets the free ride is the publisher, who gets to charge for access to material most of which was funded by the tax-payer. (But not so for peer review, which the publisher manages, though the reviewing is again actually being done for free by the peers. Nevertheless, an honest broker is needed to manage the peer review, or else it’s vanity press. The cost of managing peer review is much less than the cost of publishing, but it will be an invariant expense that needs to be paid no matter what.) ...

SEE THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST FOR A GREAT UPDATE! Khan Academy is a truly amazing educational website. It’s loaded with over 1,000 videos on a wide variety of topics in math, science, and finance. And while all the videos on the site were made by one guy working in his spare time (until just a few months ago), the KA site purportedly receives as much traffic as MIT OCW. ...

I’ve recently heard some conversation trying to sully or tarnish the idea of openness by associating it with socialism. (Of course, if there’s anything you don’t like in the US today the standard response is to label it “socialist,” despite the fact that many labelers can neither define nor spell the term properly.) However, from my perspective some of the most important forms of openness are simply about obeying one of the standard laws of capitalism: if I pay for a good or service, I am entitled to the good or service. Could the market (or society) survive if we didn’t obey this rule? ...

Stephen shared this video today on OLDaily. It’s a sad spoof of the impending collapse of the public school system in California. Hot for Teachers w/ Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green from Megan Fox I reblogged this video with the title “Stephen Gets His Wish” (with mostly humorous intent) based on his recent post, We Learn. In the post, Stephen describes the manner in which educational institutions are severely damaging children’s learning: ...

Some years ago I had the opportunity to address a class taught by my good friend Erik Duval. I spoke about blogging. One of his students, eager to show how technically competent he was, glibly pointed out that the “blogging software” that was just becoming popular (Movable Type as I recall) did not provide any new capabilities. He could already do everything MT did using emacs. Erik’s response ran along the lines of, “Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants. Everyone else will use MT to post their online writing assignments this semester, but you can do all of yours by hand.” After only a moment’s reflection, he realized he had won the battle but lost the war. ...

More than half the readers of my April fool’s post about me quitting my job at BYU and going to work for the three companies that are the antithesis of everything I believe actually believed the post. Let me walk you through the post with commentary. Despite today’s date, which will correctly make this post impossible to believe, it is with a mixture of excitement, sadness, and dishonesty that I announce that I am leaving BYU. ...

As many of you know, my empirical work at BYU has focused largely on issues of sustainability. I’ve blogged some of it before, but to wrap it up in one spot, here is a recap of what we’ve been up to. Justin Johansen and I did some interesting work on OCW sustainability, examining what happens when opportunities to enroll in for-credit courses are integrated into OCW. The results - over 2.5% of OCW visitors became paying for-credit customers of BYU Independent Study, generating enough revenue to more than pay for the cost of opening access to the courses. An article version of the dissertation, with a few months more data, is forthcoming in Educational Technology Research and Development. ...

Yesterday Michael tweeted: @opencontent Would be grateful for your input to this conversation: http://bit.ly/dzECrZ He’s referring to a thread of conversation around Anya’s new book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. In his initial post, Michael says, Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think the DIY U vision is a bad one. To the contrary, there are many aspects of it that are good, necessary, and overdue. I just don’t think it’s a complete vision. ...

As pointed out in a post on the Brookings Institution blog, large-scale federally-funded OER won’t be coming this year: Buried beneath the much-deserved hullaballoo over the passage of health care reform were big changes that the reconciliation bill makes to the federal student loan program… Less noticed, however, is a provision that was in the House-passed Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) this fall, but dropped from the final version that passed last night…. [W]ith Pell Grant spending up due to the poor state of the economy, and the pressure to keep the total cost of the bill down while achieving expanded health insurance coverage and deficit reduction, the AGI got left on the cutting-room floor. ...