Open-Education

Frances Bell has started a Google Doc collecting historical information about cMOOCs. I’m reposting my contributions to the doc (about my own cMOOCs) here on opencontent.org so I can find them again in the future if the Google Doc ever goes away. Year: 2007 Where: USU, INST 7150, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link Course Design: Students included both formal students earning credit at USU and students from around the world participating for free Students who completed the course and requested a Certificate of Completion received a certificate Course syllabus was presented in a wiki which students could (and did) edit Readings and videos were on the public web Each student maintained a blog where their writing and assignments were posted publicly A course OPML file was used to aggregate all student writing for easy reading in RSS Readers The course wiki included a master list of participants, including names, institution (if any), email address, and blog address Clusters of students created affinity-based sub-groups with mailing lists, etc. Year: 2009 Where: BYU, IPT 692R, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link ...

The following is a pre-print of an essay set to appear in Bonk et al.’s forthcoming book MOOCs and Open Education around the World_. It may undergo some additional editing before publication. Unlike the rest of the content on opencontent.org, this article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license v4.0, as per my contract with Routledge. This essay remixes some material that was previously published on opencontent.org._ In this piece I briefly explore the damage done to the idea of “open” by MOOCs, advocate for a return to a strengthened idea of “open,” and describe an open education infrastructure on which the future of educational innovation depends. ...

Well, this has turned into a rather enjoyable conversation. To recap what has unfolded so far: It began with Jose Ferreira inviting me to appear on a panel at the Knewton Symposium, on the panel, I made the claim that in the near future 80 percent of general education courses would replace their commercial textbooks with OER, after the conference, Jose responded to my claim by telling publishers why I was wrong, I responded by explaining that the emergence of companies like Red Hat for OER would indeed make it happen, using the Learning Outcomes per Dollar metric as their principal tool of persuasion, and Michael Feldstein argued that it depends. Yesterday, Brian Jacobs of panOpen published an essay contributing to the conversation. While I agree that some in the field have yet to pick up on a few of the points he makes, I’m a little perplexed that he would choose to position these points as a response to writing by Michael, Jose, and me. By making these points in a response, he implies that we have yet to understand them. Take this bit for example: ...

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to participate on a panel about OER at the Knewton Education Symposium. Earlier this week, Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira blogged about ‘OER and the Future of Publishing’ for EdSurge, briefly mentioning the panel. I was surprised by his post, which goes out of its way to reassure publishers that OER will not break the textbook industry. Much of the article is spent criticizing the low production values, lack of instructional design, and missing support that often characterize OER. The article argues that there is a potential role for publishers to play in each of these service categories, leveraging OER to lower their costs and improve their products. But it’s been over 15 years since the first openly licensed educational materials were published, and major publishers have yet to publish a single textbook based on pre-existing OER. Why? ...

There have been a number of responses to my decision to introduce a 5th R - “Retain” - to my 4Rs framework. Bill, Darren, and Mike have responded, among others. Some parts of the responses lead me to believe that I wasn’t entirely clear in my initial statement, so let me try to clear a few things up. The original 4Rs were not an attempt to create a new group of permissions that open content licenses needed to support. Many open content licenses, from the CC to the GFDL to the OPL, already granted the rights to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute long before I created the 4Rs framework. I created the 4Rs framework specifically for the purpose of helping people understand and remember the key rights that open content licenses grant them. ...

It’s been seven years since I introduced the 4Rs framework for thinking about the bundle of permissions that define an open educational resource, or OER. The framework of permitted activities - reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute - has gained some traction in the field, and I’m happy that people have found it useful. The 4Rs play a critical role in my own thinking about OER, and my operational definition of OER now includes two main criteria: (1) free and unfettered access to the resource, and (2) whatever copyright permissions are necessary for users to engage in the 4R activities. But while the framework has served the field well - and has shaped my own thinking, too - I believe the time has come to expand it. ...

Long before an upstart Harry headed to Hogwarts, Sparrowhawk went to the School of Roke in Ursula K. Leguin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. As part of his schooling, Sparrowhawk: was sent with seven other boys across Roke Island to the farthest north-most cape, where stands the Isolate Tower. There by himself lived the Master Namer, who was called by a name that had no meaning in any language, Kurremkarmerruk. No farm or dwelling lay within miles of the tower. Grim it stood above the northern cliffs, grey were the clouds over the seas of winter, endless the lists and ranks and rounds of names that the Namer’s eight pupils must learn. Amongst them in the tower’s high room Kurremkarmerruk sat on the high seat, writing down lists of names that must be learned before the ink faded at midnight leaving the parchment blank again. ...

I’m at AECT this week, the annual meeting of the professional association for academic educational technologists and instructional designers. This is my 15th year attending the conference, and (with the exception of the Open Education Conference) this is my favorite conference each year. These are “my people,” and so I was much more nervous than usual when invited to give a keynote address here. Ali Carr-Chellman, Tom Reeves, and I participated yesterday in “AECTx,” a keynote session in which we each gave 18 minute talks. Without coordinating ahead of time, each of our talks focused on using educational technology and educational research to solve large, societal problems. I was particualrly taken with the clarity of Tom’s formulation. Two slides near the end of his presentation admonished us that we need to: ...

Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about open educational resources, but precious little has been written about how OER - or openness more generally - changes the practice of education. Substituting OER for expensive commercial resources definitely save money and increase access to core instructional materials. Increasing access to core instructional materials will necessarily make significant improvements in learning outcomes for students who otherwise wouldn’t have had access to the materials (e.g., couldn’t afford to purchase their textbooks). If the percentage of those students in a given population is large enough, their improvement in learning may even be detectable when comparing learning in the population before OER adoption with learning in the population after OER adoption. Saving significant amounts of money and doing no harm to learning outcomes (or even slightly improving learning outcomes) is clearly a win. However, there are much bigger victories to be won with openness. ...

As I travel the country (and the world) telling people about open educational resources, open textbooks, etc., I frequently receive questions about the quality of openly licensed instructional materials. I’ve answered this question enough that I thought it might be time to actually write something on the topic. A Tiny Thought Experiment Imagine you had a favorite textbook (hey - it’s a thought experiment). Now imagine receiving a letter informing you that the author has passed away and left you all the copyrights to the book. You immediately walk across the room and pull your copy off the shelf and open to the copyright page. You carefully cross out the words “All Rights Reserved” and replace them with the words “Some Rights Reserved - this book is licensed CC BY.” Have you changed the quality of the book in any way? No. Simply changing the text on the copyright page does not change the rest of the book in any way. ...