Our good friend Cathy Casserly, former Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, as just been elected to the Creative Commons Board of Directors. While there were already people on the CC board who cared about OER, the addition of Cathy means that the Board now has one of the most articulate OER champions around in their ranks. This is great news! Congrats to Cathy, CC, and anyone who cares about OER! ...
First, Mike and Cathy left the Hewlett Foundation, where they had provided incredible vision and incubation support for early OER efforts. (While Hewlett is still running its OER program there didn’t seem to be many OER-related grants made in 2009.) Then, a few weeks ago, I blogged about the departure of Ira and Chris from the Mellon Foundation, caused by the RIT program being merged into another program, where they had also provided vision and support for open educational software. ...
Newly minted Dr. Justin Johansen’s dissertation study, The Impact Of Opencourseware On Paid Enrollment In Distance Learning Courses, is now available from BYU’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) archive. This dissertation is the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing opencourseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it. In other words, Justin’s study not only demonstrates that it is possible to publish opencourseware without requesting donations from users or foundations, it goes further and demonstrates that it is possible to make money publishing opencourseware. And if you can make money publishing opencourseware, you can continue publishing opencourseware for a very long time. This capacity is also known as sustainability. ...
The Salt Lake Tribune recently ran a front page feature on the Open High School of Utah that generated a number of comments online. (More recent OHSU coverage at eSchoolNews). Many of the comments about the online school ran along these lines: So much for peer relationships! Social growth is also a good idea - or was…. Re Taxpayer… these online courses lack the academic interaction between students that is so crucial to a great education ...
I love these longer, more thoughtful discussions… The Reverend contributes to the latest round of the conversation about “openness:” The larger question in my mind is that what is under girding this discussion is an even more insidious logic than a denatured sense of open, and that’s a sense of entitled leadership. Fact is, the push to make sense of open as a term and discuss it’s meaning, future shape, and ultimate value seems to be the most definitive step in forming an institutional structure of power around it. ...
I’m extremely grateful for George’s recent post, “Open isn’t so open anymore.” It’s thoughtful and thought-provoking. I won’t respond to the post sentence for sentence, but I do want to respond to some of the major points. Hopefully an interesting dialog will ensue (I believe this is George’s goal as well). I’m going to cut and paste pieces from throughout together in order to respond to similar thoughts in one place. ...
I received a communication from the Mellon Foundation today announcing that they’re “merging” the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) with their Scholarly Communications Program, and that Ira and Chris are both leaving the Mellon Foundation. I won’t attempt to second guess why the restructuring is happening. From the email: The Foundation is making a number of organizational changes designed to consolidate resources and concentrate them more effectively on the Foundation’s central objectives in support of its five core program areas: the liberal arts and humanistic scholarship in higher education, scholarly communications, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. As part of these changes, the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) will be merged into the Scholarly Communications program and cease to exist as a standalone grantmaking program of the Mellon Foundation, effective January 4, 2010. The Scholarly Communications program, which will be renamed so as to indicate, explicitly, that technology-based grantmaking is part of its mandate, will assume responsibility for managing existing RIT grants and the planning of future grant initiatives that emphasize the development of information technologies in support of the Foundation’s core focus. As this merger occurs, my colleagues, Ira Fuchs, who founded the RIT program at the Foundation in 2000, and Christopher Mackie, will both be leaving the Foundation. ...
Sometimes I’m wrong, and I don’t mind admitting when I am. The numbers in Ryan’s article in The Tech yesterday were not terribly representative of the way money has been working at MIT OCW recently. Consequently, the numbers I ran in yesterday’s post weren’t terribly reflective of the current reality, either. (In other words, yesterday’s numbers were wrong.) In that post I invited people to send me more current information if they had it. Both Ryan and Steve Carson of MIT OCW accepted the invitation and provided more updated financial data. (In his reply, Steve good-heartedly suggested that I’m poor at math. My math was correct based on the numbers in Ryan’s article; I think Steve meant that I should redo my calculations based on more recent numbers.) So here we go. ...
In an opinion piece for The Tech titled OpenCourseWare and the Future of Education, Ryan Normandin lays out MIT OCW’s funding breakdown. It’s the first time I’ve seen the numbers shared publicly. He begins by stating that MIT OCW’s budget is $4.1 million per year (though he notes that OCW cut $500,000 in costs for 2009), and then analyzes revenue by source: Since its creation, 22 percent of OCW’s expenditures have been covered by the Institute, 72 percent has been paid for through grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and 6 percent has been covered by donations, revenue, and other sources. ...
With apologies to Pasteur’s Quadrant, here’s another take on the Golden Ration of OER from earlier in the week. Mary made several points in the comments on that post about the interpretability of the measure. So, how about asking the same question visually? I think you could still measure the vertical axis in standard deviations and the horizontal as change in budget (with savings being positive and additional costs being negative). To be clear, we would not expect to see learning gains simply because a piece of content has an open license. We’d hope to establish (a) at a minimum, no impact on student learning and some cost savings, or (b) more hopefully a positive impact on student learning and cost savings. ...