Open-Content

This is another post in my series of posts showing gratitude and appreciation for members of the open education community. Today I’m going to focus onBCcampus OpenEd. It’s difficult to fully wrap one’s mind around all the things they do. Their cornerstone project is amazing BC Open Textbooks Collection. They do unique and valuable work in the Trades and OER. They publish an Open Education Accessibility Toolkit as well as other student and faculty advocacy toolkits. They publish numerous Guides, including guides to OER adaption, using Pressbooks, self-publishing, print-on-demand, and OER authoring. They run mailing lists, award mini-grants, and coordinate a Faculty Fellows Program. They regularly recognize the great work happening in their community with the Excellence in Open Education Award. They provide support for Zed Cred initiatives. They organize the annual Festival of Learning. ...

This is another post in my series of posts showing gratitude and appreciation for members of the open education community. Today I’m going to focus on OpenStax. From their website: OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to improve student access to education. Our first openly licensed college textbook was published in 2012, and our library since scaled to more than 20 books for college and AP courses used by hundreds of thousands of students. Our adaptive learning technology, designed to improve learning outcomes through personalized educational paths, is being piloted in college courses across the country. Through our partnerships with philanthropic foundations and our alliance with other educational resource companies, OpenStax is breaking down the most common barriers to learning and empowering students and instructors to succeed. ...

I recently wrote about the CARE Framework. At the very beginning of that post I warned that while it began as a response to the framework, it wandered into quite a bit of other territory. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not my clearest piece of writing. I’m a firm believer in the release early, release often approach, and this release may have been too early. Based on readers’ feedback I see that I probably should have broken that post into three pieces - one dealing explicitly with the framework, a second dealing with the issue of free-riding in open education, and a third dealing with broader concerns about the open education community. I’ll correct that mistake here by keeping this post focused on the framework and hopefully being clearer than I was able to be the first time around. I’ll take up the other issues from my earlier post in separate follow ups. ...

Stephen shared some thoughts this morning on a recent post of mine. I want to clarify the underlying source of our primary disagreement. Stephen writes: Wiley’s second point is like saying ‘we can’t destroy it, no matter how we use it, because it’s non rivilrous [sic]’. But openness can be destroyed; I have discussed the phenomenon of ‘conversion’ in the past, and it is this (and not some unthinking prejeduce) that causes me to distrust commercial publishers and other bad actors. ...

After reader feedback made it clear that this post was unclear, I am updating it. Please see https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5528. The original text is below for archival purposes. NOTE: I began this post with the intention of writing about the framework. Some of it has managed to be, in fact, focused on the framework. However, it also includes several other thoughts that were prompted by my study of the framework, but that aren’t direct responses to the framework per se_. Apologies in advance for a post that meanders even more than usual._ The CARE Framework was released earlier this week by Lisa Petrides, Doug Levin, and Eddie Watson. It’s an important contribution to important conversations and is worth taking time to read carefully and respond to thoughtfully. As I hope will become evident as you scroll down, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and responding because I think the framework has a lot of potential. We all owe Lisa, Doug, and Eddie for a great piece of work. I will state right up front that it is entirely possible that in my reading of the framework I have misinterpreted the authors’ intentions or meanings. If I have done so, I apologize in advance and sincerely hope they will correct me. ...

tl;dr - If a resource is licensed in a way that grants you permission to engage in the 5R activities, and grants you those permissions for free, it’s an open educational resource (OER) - no matter where you find it or how it’s being used. I have an obsession with definitions. It’s been true for decades. It manifest first with learning objects in the late 1990s, and then with open content and open educational resources (aka, learning objects with an open license) in the early 2000s. Apparently I’ve been unable to move on. ...

One of the defining features of open educational resources is permission to engage in revise and remix activities with regard to OER. While those permissions make it possible for us to change and improve OER, they do nothing to tell us which OER to spend our time and energy improving - or how to improve them. In our work at Lumen, we put a lot of effort into creating scalable processes for empirically determining which OER aren’t sufficiently supporting student learning and then making targeted improvements to those OER. In fact, this is one of the main ways Lumen adds value to the open education community - making data-informed improvements to OER and releasing those improved OER back to the community under an open license. ...

In an article from a few years ago, Michael Feldstein describes courseware as the combination of (1) content, (2) platform, and (3) design (see the graphic at the bottom of the article.) In another article, he includes examples of “courseware” ranging from Cengage MindTap and Pearson CourseConnect to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and Lumen’s Waymaker. Much has happened in the courseware space since he wrote these articles, but Michael’s multi-part definition still provides a useful framework for thinking about how the idea of “open” pertains to the idea of “courseware”. We need help thinking about open in the context of courseware because the question, “Is [insert specific courseware offering] ‘open’?” is not a question we know how to answer today. And our inability to answer this question in a coherent way is causing some consternation among parts of the open education community right now. ...

It’s a real compliment to be compared to John Perry Barlow, even if it’s because someone is claiming you’re both wrong in the same way. Nate’s post this week compares statements by JPB and me, and finds them both too simplistic in their optimism. He writes: To me, both cyberspace and OER are tools that I think can be used to generate positive outcomes, but can also (very clearly I think) be used to generate outcomes I don’t support, like political polarization or business models that sell us back our experiences rather than proprietary content. While cyberspace and OER both have inherent structural characteristics, none of those characteristics guarantee any specific social outcome. To argue otherwise would require a kind of technological determinism, right? ...

In the spirit of iterating toward openness, I’ve recently had the opportunity to revisit some of my earlier thinking about how to measure the impact of OER-related work. Some of this seemed interesting enough that I thought I would share. I have previously written about metrics I call the educational golden ratio and the OER impact factor. These are ways of thinking about the learning-related return on investment students get from their purchases of learning materials. Here’s an example from the 2014 essay linked above: ...