Open-Content

Utah State University OpenCourseWare is, I believe, the country’s second biggest OCW collection with over 80 courses (MIT OCW is, of course, the largest). USU OCW is consistently in the top five results when Googling for “Utah State University” (with or without quotes). And for four years, Marion Jensen has been the fearless leader of USU OCW. Recently, Marion provided what unfortunately appears to be his final project report: We average as many as 2,000 unique visitors to the site every day from all over the world. We have mirror sites up in Africa, China, and Indonesia (that we know of). Our site has been translated into several languages, and is the third most visited site on the usu.edu domain. Being the OCW director is something I’ve loved doing the last four years. ...

We’ve been using WPMU to power our OCW project in the David O. McKay School of Education for a year now. It’s been extremely straightforward and simple to run - every course has its own blog on the WPMU instance. Tons of plugins, drop dead simple migration… I love it. However, as we ramp up to include more participants this year I’ve started wondering about the URL structure of having multiple departments participate. What I would love to do is still assign one blog per course, but be able to organize these under “subdirectories” as follows: ...

The hype continues to build around Chris Anderson’s upcoming book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Malcolm Gladwell’s review “Priced to Sell: Is free the future?” in the New Yorker rubbed me the wrong way. Apparently, it rubbed Seth Godin the wrong way, too. In his response, Malcolm is Wrong, he speaks plainly so that no one can misunderstand: [Malcolm’s] first argument that makes no sense is, “should we want free to be the future?” ...

Check out the full text of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 on GovTrack. If enacted, this would give the public (us!) free public access to the results of the research we’ve paid to have conducted through NIH, NSF, the Departments of Education, Agriculture, Labor, Energy, and more. Passage of this bill will fully tip the scales of knowledge creation to the side of almost unrestricted innovation. As we all know, technology is seldom the impediment - policy generally is. Passage of S.1373 would finally allow the Internet to deliver its full potential for transforming the creation and dissemination of knowledge. ...

In my science fiction tale of the future of the open education movement, the OpenCourseWars, I predict a time when the federal government creates a funding pool to support the creation of open courses to which the public would have free access: In the most unbelievable part of the history of openness in education (for me as a native West Virginian, anyway), West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd announced that his current term in office would be his last. (I think he was like 108 at this point.) His final piece of legislation would be a third Morrill Act that would support the land grant institutions in creating OCW-like projects to provide increased access to educational opportunity to the general public. The so-called “Byrd Bill” passed, creating a small pot of dedicated monies for public schools to draw on in order to support their OCW initiatives. ...

Richard Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. An article published in the Journal of Legal Studies identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of all time, and the New York Times called him one of the most respected judges in the United States. In a blog post titled The Future of Newspapers, Posner opines that the best solution to the newspaper industry’s problem may be expanding the scope of copyright law: ...

Open Education News and Open Access News are running stories about a new OA mandate from the Institute of Education Sciences: Recipients of awards are expected to publish or otherwise make publicly available the results of the work supported through this program. Institute-funded investigators should submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from research supported in whole or in part by the Institute to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) upon acceptance for publication. An author’s final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article. The Institute will make the manuscript available to the public through ERIC no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this requirement. ...

We’ve announced the availability of three scholarships for this year’s conference, based on the generous support of scholarship sponsors. If you’d like to come to Open Ed 2009 but can’t afford to, come apply for a scholarship!

We’ve just released the list of organizations sponsoring this year’s Open Education conference. You can see the full list at http://openedconference.org/sponsors. Without the support of this group of generous and visionary organizations, the conference simply wouldn’t happen. Many, many thanks to this year’s sponsors!

Just a quick update on the BYU Independent Study OCW. A few weeks ago I gave the following initial status report: So far the results are very positive – 85 of the 3500 people who visited the OCW site last month registered for for-credit courses. In other words, 2.4% of people who visited the OCW site during its first month became paying customers of BYU IS. The latest data say that we have now had 5529 visitors to BYU IS OCW and that 136 of those visitors have enrolled in credit-bearing courses. In other words, 2.5% of the people who have visited the OCW site have become paying customers. Remarkably stable, eh? ...