Human Teachers and AI Teachers Would you be surprised if you pulled a random person off the street, shoved them into a classroom full of students, and then found that they weren’t a particularly effective teacher? Of course not. And why wouldn’t that be surprising? Because effective teaching requires a great deal of knowledge and skill, and the person you pulled off the street most likely had no relevant training. ...
This is the video recording of my recent talk, “Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education.” I previously published some of the content in written form as How Generative AI Affects Open Educational Resources and Why Generative AI Is More Effective at Increasing Access to Educational Opportunity than OER. https://youtu.be/WpcE7ihlUDo?feature=shared&t=224
This is the opening section of my September 19, 2024 presentation, Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education. I’m pre-posting some of the presentation content due to the very active conversation the announcement of the presentation has created. Last week I posted the middle section of the presentation, How Generative AI Affects Open Educational Resources, in which I described how we need to move beyond narrow thinking about how generative AI impacts our work with traditional OER and begin thinking more broadly about the power generative OER. ...
This is the middle section of my September 19, 2024 presentation, Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education. I’m pre-posting some of the presentation content due to the very active conversation the announcement of the presentation has created. Next week I hope to post the first section of the presentation, which outlines the reasons why people who care deeply about affordability, access, and improving outcomes should consider shifting their focus away from OER (as we have understood it for the last 25+ years) and toward generative AI. Or, using the language I introduce below, from “traditional OER” to “generative OER." ...
I recently attended one of the community meetings discussing whether or not a national open education strategy is needed in the US. There were two other meetings I did not attend, so I can’t speak to them. But here are my quick takeaways from the meeting I did attend: There was enthusiasm about the idea of a national open education strategy. There were very few expressions of doubt about the need for a strategy (beyond those I expressed). It felt like everyone who came to the meeting was already on board with creating a strategy before we began discussing its merits. No one knows what the purpose of such a strategy would be. There was no discussion of what the goal would be of creating a national open education strategy. There were several times during the meeting when attendees were asked to contribute their thoughts on a range of topics. Each time I asked some version of “what goal would this strategy be trying to achieve?” No one seemed interested in discussing the question, neither the session moderators nor the participants. I asked the question repeatedly because it’s impossible to create effective strategy without a clear goal that you’re trying to achieve with the strategy. I predict a national “open education” strategy would actually end up being something like a national zero textbook cost strategy. The sense I got is that reducing textbook costs isn’t enough anymore, the advocacy has moved on to eliminating them. For many years now what people call OER advocacy has actually been “zero textbook cost” advocacy. This is partly because policymakers don’t understand openness, but they do understand costs. Consequently, in order to get a grant program created in your department / institution / system / state / country you have to focus on the amount of money the program will save constituents. So for the last decade or so there has been a lot of energy devoted to either “OER programs with a laser focus on cost savings” or “zero textbook cost” programs. The US Department of Education’s Open Textbooks Pilot program is a great example. It “supports projects at eligible institutions of higher education that create new open textbooks and expand the use of open textbooks in courses that are part of a degree-granting program, particularly those with high enrollments. This pilot program emphasizes the development of projects that demonstrate the greatest potential to achieve the highest level of savings for students through sustainable, expanded use of open textbooks in high-enrollment courses or in programs that prepare individuals for in-demand fields” (emphasis added). Expect to see more of this language - probably switching from “highest level of savings” to “eliminating costs” - in any future strategy. The strategy may have little to nothing to do with openness. Because there are many ways to eliminate textbook costs or “achieve the highest level of savings for students_”_ without using OER (e.g., library resources, traditionally copyrighted resources online, etc.), a national “open education strategy” may not actually end up being about open education at all. The one place openness might make an appearance is in language like, “one way to eliminate textbook costs is to adopt OER.” But it seems likely that OER and openness would play a supporting role to the real star of the strategy, eliminating textbook costs. A national zero textbook cost strategy would be the beginning of the end for the OER movement as we know it. I’ve written before about how the adoption of “zero textbook cost” policies undercuts the sustainability models used by OpenStax and other large OER publishers, who sustain their efforts through sales of related products like homework systems and printed editions of their books. If some version of the zero textbook cost policies that exist at select institutions were to be implemented nationally, it would be a death knell for major OER producers and maintainers. OER advocates may see their national strategy work backfire much sooner. Many OER advocates are vocal critics of inclusive access and equitable access models, and the US Department of Education is poised to prohibit schools from automatically billing students for their course materials. However, inclusive access and equitable access aren’t the only models that automatically charge students a fee for their course materials. Many institutions charge students a fee associated with their OER courses as a way of funding the institutions’ OER efforts. For example, Kansas State University’s Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative course fee is a $10 fee that is payed by students in courses that use OER and other free, traditionally copyrighted resources. But this fee, and others like it that have helped sustain institutional OER efforts for many years, will likely be prohibited under the new rule. These are very plainly fees for course materials that are automatically billed to students. The main difference between these fees and inclusive access models being that with inclusive access its possible to opt out. (It’s almost like every time the OER community finds a sustainable model, the OER community turns around and undercuts it!) There was not a single mention of generative AI. I wrote at length a few weeks ago about how generative AI completely changes the future of OER, and specifically spelled out what that meant for a potential national strategy on open education. I purposefully didn’t raise the topic of generative AI in the meeting because I wanted to see if anyone else would raise it. Generative AI wasn’t mentioned a single time. Creating a national open education strategy in 2024 that didn’t account for generative AI would be like creating a national transportation strategy centered around horses and buggies. If zero textbook cost policies and prohibitions on models like inclusive access don’t kill the OER movement, a determination to ignore generative AI for the same cost-related reasons definitely will.
There’s a really terrific conversation happening on the cc-openedu listserv. It started out as a question about OER, but has moved on to a conversation about the purposes of open more generally. Dr. Chuck contributed over the weekend, and his contribution provides a great opportunity for me to respond with the first substantive post since I changed the name of the blog. All the pull quotes in this post are from Dr. Chuck. He writes: ...
There’s been a lot of discussion about open textbooks, efficacy research, and student cost savings in the wake of this year’s #OpenEd15. The general theme of the conversation has been a concern that a focus on open textbooks confuses the means of open education with the end of open education. I’m compiling a Storify of examples of this really engaging writing - you should definitely take the time to read through it. I’m not responding directly to many of the points made in those posts here, but will in later follow-up posts. The overall criticism about ends / means confusion may or may not be true - it depends entirely on what you think the end or goal of open education should be. This is a conversation we almost never have in the field of open education. What is our long-term goal? What are we actually trying to accomplish? What kind of change are we trying to create in the world? The recently published OER strategy document, as informative as it is, reads more like a list of issues and opportunities than what Michael Feldstein describes as “rungs on a ladder of ambition.” Answering these questions leads to additional, more proximate concerns, like what specific steps do we need to take to get from here to there? In his #OpenEd15 keynote, Michael pushed our thinking with some additional questions, like “Who are we willing to let win?” As I have reflected on the post-conference conversation, and these larger questions about goals and purpose, I’ve decided to share some of my current best answers to these questions. (Disclaimer: my answers are guaranteed to evolve over time.) Your answers will almost certainly be different than mine - and that’s a good thing. I’m not sharing my answers as a way of claiming that they reflect the One True Answer. I’m sharing them in the hope that they will prompt you to think more deeply about your own answers. I find that nothing helps me clarify my thinking quite like reading others’ thinking I disagree with. As we all take the opportunity to ask and answer these important questions for ourselves, and to do that thinking publicly, out loud, who knows what might happen? ...
There’s a great conversation - a debate, almost - occurring right now about two indisputable facts: The College Board recommends that students budget around $1200 per year for textbooks and supplies. Surveys of students indicate that they spend around $600 per year on textbooks. How can there be a debate about facts which no one disputes? The debate is around which fact is appropriate to cite under which circumstances. See excellent contributions to the discussion by Phil Hill, Mike Caulfield, Bracken Mosbacker, Phil Hill (again), and Mike Caulfield (again). ...
For almost three years Lumen Learning has been helping faculty, departments, and entire degree programs adopt OER in place of expensive commercial textbooks. In addition to saving students enormous amounts of money we’ve helped improve the effectiveness of courses we’ve supported, as we’re demonstrating in publications in peer-reviewed journals co-authored both with faculty from our partner schools and other researchers. We’re making great friendships along the way. It’s been absolutely amazing. ...
The Parable of the Restrictive Roads Once upon a time there was a pastoral country of beautiful fields and rolling hills. The simple people there enjoyed a relaxed pace of life, part of which included a good deal of walking. [caption id=“attachment_3763” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] CC BY photo by Marina del Castell[/caption] One day, a young lady announced a remarkable invention. She called it an automobile. The people had never seen anything like it, and everyone was immediately smitten with the speed and comfort of travel it provided. Trucks soon followed these first cars, as did motorcycles, and then four-wheelers. But before long, these remarkable inventions began to take their toll on the country’s beloved landscape. ...