Open-Education

This month is the one year anniversary of Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded with Kim Thanos in October, 2012. It’s been an incredible first year, and we’ve learned a million lessons along the way - and we continue to learn more about what it takes to support OER adoption at scale every day. We’ve pulled together a summary of what’s happening with our post-secondary work for fall semester 2013 in a press release posted on the Lumen site, which begins: ...

What’s the difference between OCWs and MOOCs? At the end of the day, it may be nothing more than managing expectations. Let’s take Physics for example. Here’s the MIT OCW Physics course from 1999. It includes videos, lecture notes and other readings, assignments and exams with solutions, and a recommendation that you buy a commercial textbook. There is a study group that learners can join. There does not appear to be any way to interact with the instructor. The course uses a very traditional pedagogy and is openly licensed. ...

I’m grateful for your responses to my recent post Be Awesome Instead. In reading your comments, tweets, and other blog posts responding to the post, I was a bit concerned that some readers may have gotten the impression that I was saying it was ok to “Be Awesome Instead” of being open. That was absolutely not the point I was making. Being open - truly open - is absolutely critical for reasons I will describe below. The point I was trying to make in my post is that we should be awesome instead of being whiny; we should be contributors rather than naysayers. ...

I’ve been fairly quiet recently about Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded earlier this year with Kim Thanos. Lumen (for short) is where I’m spending my Shuttleworth Fellowship time, with the goal of drastically increasing the use of OER in formal educational settings in order to lower the cost and improve the quality of education. Today Lumen released its first six Open Course Frameworks. Open Course Frameworks are an idea I am very excited about, because they greatly simplify the process of adopting OER for the average teacher or institution. Open Course Frameworks are: ...

Cole Camplese, for whom I have great respect, recently wrote a wonderful essay about the negative response to MOOCs from many voices in the open ed space: Just a couple of years ago we were all trying so hard to get people to accept the idea that open access to learning was a great thing. Hell, some of the best conversations I’ve ever had in this field have centered around the ideals of openness, but now that the MOOC thing has happened the same people who built rallying calls for more open access to learning are now rejecting this movement. Why? Because it is driven by corporations trying to make money? Because it isn’t really open? Because the press isn’t giving a few people the credit they believe they deserve? ...

Today Robison Wells, Marion Jensen (of USU OCW fame), and I are launching a new project called Massive Fiction. Massive Fiction is an effort to create and define a fictional world in three novellas, providing a good understanding of the new world, its characters, and its setting, after which several additional authors - including two NYT Bestsellers - will write story stubs that anyone can use as a place to start their own stories set in the new world. ...

Last week I wrote about the many goals I have for the open education movement, and how a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation is enabling me to spend focused time pursuing them. While I tried to lay out a compelling vision of what I want to accomplish last week, I didn’t discuss the how. Clearly, accomplishing a set of goals of that scope and magnitude requires more energy and productive capacity than any one person could ever muster. ...

Sometimes it helps to look backwards and figure out where you’ve been to get a clearer picture of where you’re going. As today is the first official day of my Shuttleworth Fellowship, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Upon reflection, it feels like I have some really strong momentum behind my work in open education. But where is that momentum carrying me? How can I leverage it thoughtfully to be more useful? (This thinking fortuitously coincides with a recent article titled Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education to which I have included a paragraph response to below. Spolier alert: we see the world very differently.) ...

Stop the presses. I’m going to agree with Stephen here. In a recent email to the (closed) oer-community mailing list, Stephen argued that perspective plays a significant role in this debate. He couldn’t be more correct. Just as there is not One True License, there is not One True Perspective on the free, nonfree, open, libre, etc., debate. A few examples: - Some people look at OER issues from the perspective of the content, and some see them from the perspective of the people who use the content. Content-p drives people to favor SA licenses, to insure that derivatives of the content always remain free. People-p drives people to reject SA, so that derivers always remain free to license their derivatives as they choose. Which is the One True Perspective? ...

Literally dozens of government entities, foundations, and other organizations are concerned about “the college completion problem.” The problem in a nutshell is that people go into significant debt to go to college, dropout for a variety of reasons (good and bad) without graduating, and are left with nothing to show for their trouble except the debt. In the popular framing of the problem, the value of a college degree is your ability to convert it into employment. (This is not a rant about the extra-employment value of education. If those were the droids you’re looking for, you can go about your business. Move along.) I simply want to point out that the convertability of a degree into employment is an artificial construct. Degrees are the gateway to employment only because the companies doing the employing say they are. But the universe doesn’t have to work this way. ...