Politics

At some point over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) advocacy in US higher education became zero textbook costs (ZTC) advocacy. The two are intertwined now in a manner that would be difficult to disentangle even if you wanted to try. There are plenty of practical reasons why this might have happened. For example, politicians understand costs much better than they understand learning, which makes policy work and other political advocacy around eliminating textbook costs far easier than advocating for ways that “open” (whatever that word means) might be leveraged to improve student outcomes. But OER / ZTC advocates have had a fundamental problem simmering for many years now, and the recent advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 will quickly bring that simmer to a boil. ...

During his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Obama called on Vice President Biden to lead a new, national “Moonshot” initiative to eliminate cancer as we know it. Today, the White House is announcing a new $1 billion initiative to jumpstart this work. (fact sheet) The country - the world, really - is fighting the war against cancer with both hands tied behind its back. This work is quintessentially cutting-edge science, and the lifeblood of work in any advanced scientific field is research. Cutting off access to research results - either the seminal (foundational) research or the very latest findings published earlier this morning - is a certain way to kill this kind of endeavor. When researchers, scientists, and others working on a project can’t find out was has already been tried, what has been proven to work, and what has already been shown to fail, they are doomed to spin frenetically in an eddy of frustrated impotence, forever. ...

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? ...

This article was originally written by Steven Seidenberg and published on the site Intellectual Property Watch. IP Watch requires you to create an account to read their CC BY-NC-ND licensed articles. This annoyed me, so I am reposting the article here. The US Supreme Court yesterday let stand an important appellate court ruling on copyright law, giving a boost to artists who repurpose others’ works and to supporters of fair use rights. This decision, however, upset many copyright owners, who fear it will allow their works to be used without payment and without their consent. The Supreme Court didn’t decide the case on its merits. Instead, the court simply refused to review the Second Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision in Cariou v. Prince. ...

The Deseret News, a local Utah newspaper, today published a story titled Study: Majority of U.S. charter schools perform equal or worse than traditional schools, accompanied by the following infographic: What’s wrong with this story? While the information conveyed by the headline is, strictly speaking, an accurate reflection of the data, the DesNews is using the headline to seriously mislead the public. Let’s explore an alternate, accurate headline the DesNews could have run to see how they’re misinforming the public with this story. ...

The Utah State Office of Education has posted their open science textbooks for grades 7 - 12 for the coming school year. Here are some of the highlights: Based on the CK-12 Foundation’s open science textbooks Customized specifically for Utah students by Utah teachers Each book’s Table of Contents is the Utah Science Core Standards Professionally designed Print copies available from Amazon’s CreateSpace for an average cost of $5 per book (for schools that need a print option) And here are the links to the free and open PDF versions of the books: ...

Excellent coverage by Ronald Mann over on the SCOTUS Blog of an even more excellent decision by the court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. While the whole analysis is worth a read, here is the good news in plain English: The Court at last seems to have reached a consensus on a seemingly intractable problem of copyright law: whether a U.S. copyright holder can prevent the importation of “gray-market” products manufactured for overseas markets…. ...

When David Noble first published his groundbreaking critique of online education in 1998, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, I thought to myself “he couldn’t be more wrong.” As it turns out he might not have been wrong - maybe Noble was simply so miraculously prescient that I couldn’t see what he saw. Fifteen - count them, fifteen - years later, Digital Diploma Mills reads as if it were researched and written about the current phenomenon called “MOOCs.” Entire paragraphs from the essay can be read unaltered and applied precisely to the state of things today: ...

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? ...

I really, really want to encourage you to take this suggestion. Reading what you have written all over the internet, and listening to you at public hearings, it appears that you have a crystal clear idea of what should happen in schools to make them places that best support student learning and growth. In all seriousness and sincerity, I want to invite you to start a charter school that fully implements your instructional approaches and other philosophies. I encourage you to do this because you can only gain so much credibility from the sidelines. If you really want to drive ed reform in this state, start your own school and demonstrate how much more effective your way of doing things is. People are much more likely to listen to results than rhetoric. It’s easy for policy makers to ignore an armchair quarterback / critic with no academic credentials in education, but when your school’s CRT results top every other public school in the state, no one can ignore you any longer. And if charter schools aren’t your cup of tea, then start a private school. That process is even simpler. ...