Open-Content

[caption id=“attachment_6160” align=“aligncenter” width=“800”] Cropped photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash[/caption] I think Michael Feldstein is directionally correct in his analysis of what has been happening to “open education” for the past several years. Without wading into the labeling fray (are we a movement? a coalition? a community? a field? a discipline?) I’d like to add a bit of my own perspective. Where Michael sees three groups with different goals, I see four groups who are trying to use OER to solve closely related - but ultimately very different - problems: ...

After two amazing keynotes at #OpenEd19 this morning, I read the following statement to conference attendees: In 2003 I invited a small group of about forty people interested in open content and open courseware to Logan, Utah. Since then, this annual meeting has grown year after year to where we are today - 850 people interested in everything from open educational resources and open educational practices to sustainability and social justice. This annual conference has been a remarkable forum for the community to meet, share ideas, and foster collaborations, and the conference community is larger and more diverse than ever before. ...

For the first decade of the modern open education movement (1998 - 2007), the distinguishing feature of our work - the thing we cared most about and talked most about - was the open licensing we applied to educational materials. MIT OCW, CMU OLI, Rice’s Connexions, my group at USU, and others applied the new Creative Commons licenses to their materials to create open content. UNESCO later decided to refer to open content intended to support research, teaching, and learning as “open educational resources.” There were two kinds of educational materials in the world. They were relatively easy to tell apart from one another and advocacy was rather straight forward.As the movement grew and more people began advocating for the adoption of OER in place of traditionally copyrighted materials in classes, some advocates chose to make cost the primary focus of their advocacy. This choice rotated licensing into a secondary priority. Now with two criteria to attend to (cost and licensing), there were twice as many types of materials to think about, advocate for, and advocate against. In its simplest form, the four types of materials can be characterized as follows: ...

It’s a world of laughter A world of tears It’s a world of hopes And a world of fears There’s so much that we share That it’s time we’re aware It’s a long game after all. OER advocacy, like most work, is filled alternately with advances and setbacks. Speaking from firsthand experience, because I live in the “day to day” of the work it can be all too easy for whatever is happening in the moment to dominate my feelings, influence my mood, and generally make my life a rollercoaster of emotions. (Sound familiar?) ...

There’s much to learn from history. Sadly, as Audrey Watters has frequently noted, it might be impossible to find a field of endeavor outside educational technology where more of the participants are so utterly ignorant of its history. (I hope you’re aware of and looking forward to her upcoming book on Teaching Machines.) Even within learning design / instructional technology / educational technology graduate programs there’s a bit of a joke that every decade or so someone invents a new technology that causes the field to spontaneously forget everything it ever knew - because how could it possibly apply to the new medium? How could the things we learned about educational radio possibly inform our work with education television? Or teaching machines? Or correspondence courses (snail mail)? Or interactive video discs? Or computers? Or satellite-based video? Or the internet? Or smartphones? Or iPads? Or augmented reality? Or artificial intelligence? Or (insert whatever comes next)… ...

Open Up Resources posted a short article yesterday expressing their frustration that people are violating the terms of the CC BY license under which they make their work available. From the post: Our grant of the CC-BY License is conditioned upon the simple requirement that every copy shared with the public by a licensee includes on each physical page of any printed material, and every format page view of digital material, the attribution statement “Download for free at openupresources.org.” ...

The most recent issue of IRRODL included an article titled Effectiveness of OER Use in First-Year Higher Education Students’ Mathematical Course Performance: A Case Study, by Juan I. Venegas-Muggli and Werner Westermann. Quoting from the article: The main aims of this research were to examine the effect of OER use among higher education students and to analyze teacher and student views on OER use in order to better understand how these resources are used and valued. This was justified by the fact that there is a lack of empirical evidence to support expanding the use of OER. Moreover, recent societal demands to improve education quality in Chile have made this a relevant case study environment in which to examine the potentials of OER. ...

I spend most of my time doing fairly tactical thinking and working focused on moving OER adoption forward in the US higher education space. But from time to time I still step back and worry about field-level issues. For example, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the future of learning materials writ large. I made what was probably the clearest statement of my vision for the future of learning materials in my Shuttleworth Fellowship application several years ago: My long-term goal is to create a world where OER are used pervasively throughout primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. In this vision of the world, OER replace traditionally copyrighted, expensive textbooks for all primary, secondary, and post-secondary courses. Organizations, faculty, and students at all three levels collaborate to create and improve an openly licensed content infrastructure that dramatically increases student success, reduces the cost of education, and supports rapid experimentation and innovation in education. Now, make no mistake - OER is a means, not an end. My end goal isn’t to increase OER adoption. My end goal is to improve student learning, and that can be done in extraordinarily powerful ways when teachers and students are able to leverage the unique affordances of open educational resources. ...

I was a music major as an undergraduate. BFA, Music (vocal performance), Marshall University, 1997. One of my great loves is teaching music theory. I taught a little even as an undergrad, substituting when professors were away or guest teaching about indigenous Japanese music when we studied ethnomusicology. (When the time came to apply to graduate school, I still hadn’t decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. In addition to applying to the Instructional Psychology and Technology program at BYU, I also applied to the ethnomusicology programs at University of Tokyo and University of Hawaii.) One of these days, after I’ve retired, I’m going to write a radically restructured, OER-based freshman music theory course, based on research I did early in my career and what I’ve learned about good teaching since then. (Theory is generally taught as a weed out course to scare non-musicians out of the program, rather than as the solid grounding in the technical aspects of music that every musician needs to have.) ...

Over the last 24 hours there’s been a short Twitter thread about whether or not materials released under a CC license with the NC condition can be used in a college classroom safely. Hey #OER gurus, rec'd a question about #CreativeCommons BY-NC license & trepidation re using NC stuff specifically in publicly-funded colleges & universities. Safe to use, correct? Any info/links wd be loved! @thatpsychprof @opencontent @actualham @BCOpenText @eCampusOntario ?? — Stella Maris Bastone (@StellaBastone) February 15, 2019 The standard answer here, is “Of course! Using NC-licensed material in a college classroom is totally safe!” The problem is, that answer is wrong. ...