I’m not the only one celebrating the 20th anniversary of open source and open content this year. Over the weekend Christine Peterson published an essay on opensource.com describing the emergence of the ideas behind “open source software” and how she coined the name twenty years ago. Her essay is nice companion to the one I recently posted about the emergence of the ideas behind “open content” and how I coined that name a few months later in 1998. ...
This essay is crossposted from the #OER18 website. 2018 marks the 20th anniversary of open content. I’ll be writing a range of essays this year reflecting on two decades of work toward opening the core intellectual infrastructure of education (textbooks and other educational materials, assessments, and outcomes / objectives / competency statements) in order to increase access to and improve the effectiveness of education. This post, written as part of my agreement to keynote #OER18 later this spring, provides some historical context for the emergence of open content. ...
2018 is an important year for me professionally. I don’t know why anniversaries divisible by 5 with no remainder feel more important than others, but for some reason they do. I’m going to do some writing this year in which I reflect on some of these anniversaries. For me, 2018 marks: 25 years since I made my first webpage. 20 years since I started grad school. 20 years since I started blogging. 20 years since I coined the term “open content”, created the first open source style license for content (as opposed to software), and started advocating for open education. Later this week I’ll publish a longer post looking back at the first five years of this work, together with some lessons learned, as part of the lead up to my keynote at #OER18. 15 years since I founded the OpenEd Conference. 10 years since the publication of the Cape Town Declaration, which a couple dozen of us authored. See the new CPT+10 recommendations, to which I also contributed. Perhaps the thing that has surprised me most since I started reflecting on professional anniversaries divisible by 5 this year is that it’s 20 years since I started blogging. That makes me feel old. ...
Today is one of those liminal days when you come to the end of something you’ve worked on for what feels like forever, and it magically transforms into the beginning of something new, and you can still see both sides of it. We began work on the Creative Commons Certificates two years ago. Collectively, we’ve spent hundreds of hours, sometimes working face to face but most often working remotely, designing and redesigning everything from the course outcomes to the structure of the course content to the assessment approach to the underlying technology. We talked about the certificate at conferences and gathered feedback. We offered one day versions of individual units from the course as face to face workshops and gathered feedback. We went back and refined the designs, content, and assessments again. And again. And again. ...
Stephen makes a great point in today’s OLDaily that I want to amplify and expand briefly here. Many of us believe that education is an incredibly powerful tool in the fight to increase equity, and this is a primary motivation for our participation in the open education movement. The shared core of the work we do in open education is increasing access to educational opportunity - with the long-term goal of making access to that opportunity truly universal - by licensing educational resources in ways that make them free and 5R-able. That is, by creating, sharing, and improving OER. ...
Two months ago I invited people to respond to a survey regarding the Open Education Conference and how it can be improved. 2,237 people received the invitation by email, and more saw the invitation on Twitter and here on the blog. 139 people responded to the survey, meaning the response rate was (at most) 6.2%. 120 of those respondents chose to license their survey responses cc0 and you can grab their responses here to read, analyze, and blog about. ...
Though I deeply enjoy my infrequent, often protracted conversations with Stephen - and find them deeply useful for clarifying and advancing my own thinking - I believe this one has just about run its course. Stephen has posted Four Conclusions on OERs he has drawn from our conversation. This will be my final post as well, and I’ll make only a few concluding points. One of the things I’ve learned through this discussion is that some might benefit from the inclusion of a brief disclaimer somewhere on my writing. Something like this, perhaps: ...
In my recent post I asked us each to consider what “what is the real goal of our OER advocacy?” Stephen answers that his goal is access for all, and takes me to task for wanting more. In my post I wrote, My ultimate goal is this: I want to (1) radically improve the quality of education as judged by learners, and (2) radically improve access to education. And I want to do it worldwide… Personally, my goal is not to provide less expensive access to the same teaching and learning experience to more people – access and affordability have never been my end game. My goal is to facilitate radical improvements in education for everyone in the world. ...
My recent post about the cost trap and inclusive access prompted responses by Jim Groom and Stephen Downes. I’ll respond to Jim’s post first, as it provides an opportunity for some necessary clarification on my part. [Back in 2012 - 2013] I was impressed (like many others I’m sure) with how Wiley was able to frame the cost-savings argument around open textbooks to build broader interest for OERs. If you’re a longtime reader of Iterating Toward Openness, you’ve read my discussions of means and ends in this context a number of times. For example, in 2015 I wrote that “My ultimate goal is this: I want to (1) radically improve the quality of education as judged by learners, and (2) radically improve access to education. And I want to do it worldwide.” For reasons I have outlined countless times (relating to the pedagogical innovation only possible in the context of permission to engage in the 5R activities), I believe OER adoption is a critically important means to achieving this end. As Jim notes above, for some period of time talking about the cost savings associated with OER was an effective way to advocate for OER adoption, helping us get a step closer to the end goal. However, in the new context of inclusive access models, arguments about “reducing the cost of college” and providing students with “day one access” are increasingly ineffective at persuading faculty to adopt OER because publishers have completely co-opted these messages. Ask a publisher why inclusive access is good for students and the list of reasons they will provide sounds like it came straight off a 2013 OER advocacy slide. ...
Imagine that - somehow - you’ve never used the internet before. A good friend and long-time internet user finds this out and begins trying to describe to you how awesome the internet is. However, for some inexplicable reason, all of his arguments for why you should be on the internet focus on cost. While it is absolutely true that each of these services is cheaper than its pre-internet counterpart, cost is far and away the least interesting thing about any of them. Would these arguments actually inspire someone to want to use the internet? If you’re already familiar with the internet, the whole line of argument seems to miss the point. It omits the heart and soul of what makes the internet amazing. Who thinks about the internet this way? ...