Politics

Here are the things that stood out to me most during the three day meeting. Sorry for the brain dump format. Moorseville, NC moved graduation rates 68% to 90% since the move to devices and all digital content Two professional development release days PER MONTH for faculty to skill up on digital and using data Small group differentiated instruction, almost no whole-class instruction Superintendent visits every classroom in the district multiple times each year, primarily to say thank you to the teachers. Funding model - $1 / day / student ($200/year) pays for devices and content. Average cost for online content was $35/student across all subjects. ...

I’ve been thinking about what’s next for OER… With the current set of MOOCs - which aren’t even open - grabbing attention away from the real movement, we need an exciting idea to get behind. Something that can inspire another decade of work across the nation and around the world. (When was the last time you heard about a new OpenCourseWare initiative launching in the US? When was the last time you personally thought of OCW as being really innovative?) We need something that can capture the imagination, something that can inspire both faculty and institutional leaders, something that will bring another 100 US post-secondary schools into the open education movement. Most of all, we need something that will significantly bless the lives of millions of students, providing them access to educational opportunities that can radically transform their lives for good. ...

Today the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published the UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration. Here are the recommendations, but be sure to read the full document for all the context: The World OER Congress held at UNESCO, Paris on 20-22 June 2012… Recommends that States, within their capacities and authority: a. Foster awareness and use of OER. Promote and use OER to widen access to education at all levels, both formal and non-formal, in a perspective of lifelong learning, thus contributing to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education. Improve both cost-efficiency and quality of teaching and learning outcomes through greater use of OER. ...

You can stream just about any kind of content on demand now. Rather than purchasing a single DVD or CD, companies like Netflix and Spotify have popularized a business model where customers pay a monthly fee and get on-demand access to a huge library of content. Now, everyone knows that the college textbook market is horrifically broken. But just how “there’s no way that can possibly be true” broken is it? Here’s a quick comparison between major media types that shows how INSANELY EXPENSIVE textbooks are. ...

I had a chance to learn more about Boundless last week. Extraordinarily interesting stuff. Boundless is definitely “an OER company.” A Boundless textbook is comprised of 95% or more pre-existing OER, with a very minimal amount of newly written material. Their development model appears to be as follows: take a popular textbook, analyze its structure and organization in order to create an outline, and fill that outline in with OER. The resulting textbook is an aggregation of OER. ...

Boundless’ authoring model appears to be based on “reverse engineering” publishers’ most popular textbooks. The big publishers’ court case comes down to a single question - is reverse engineering the same as creating a “derivative work?” The question is critical because the creation of derivative works is regulated by copyright. If the court finds that Boundless’ textbooks are derivative works of the publishers’ books, then Boundless has violated copyright law. If the court finds that Boundless’ reverse engineering is not the same as creating a derivative, then Boundless lives to fight another day. ...

I recently blogged about the Apple announcement and how it amounted to publishers ceding the “traditional” textbook market (whether print or digital) to OER makers. One way to interpret that concession is as a win for open education. And it is a win - temporarily. Another way to interpret the concession by publishers is to see it as electronics companies ending production of VCRs and doubling down on DVD players. In my previous post I asked, “If video-based, multimedia-rich, interactive textbooks are only worth $14.99 to the big publishers, what are relatively static, text-based books with a few photos worth to them?” Think about that for a minute. Sure, there are “traditional” OER textbooks available for free. But when you could have video, multimedia, simulations, and interactive assessments for $15, why would you take a traditional book (whether print or video) even if it is free? ...

Press is starting to kick in on the Utah State Office of Education’s open textbook announcement. Most of the stories are running the AP’s abbreviated version of the press release, including the Huffington Post, Businessweek, and a bunch of local outlets including KSL (NBC), the Daily Herald, KTVX (ABC), the Cache Valley Daily, and Ogden Standard-Examiner. The Sacramento Bee has some additional out of market coverage. KCPW has a podcast interview with Diana Suddreth. Sounds like TIffany Hall will be on the Channel 4 News at 6:00 tonight. ...

If my US-based friends haven’t started leaning on your elected representatives yet, it’s time. And it’s not time to encourage them to “stand their ground” - it’s time to encourage the to engage in principled compromise and get the job done that needs doing. Here’s the language I used; feel free to copy or adapt it if you like. Principled compromise is the foundation of progress in a multi-party system of governance. If you and the other leaders of our federal government continue to engage in protracted, immovable grandstanding on the debt ceiling, literally nothing will get accomplished beyond the long-term weakening of our already fragile economy. Pledges and other public statements by which you have backed yourself into a policy corner are not the concern of the American people. We really don’t care if there’s a path forward in which you can save face or not. We all feel like it’s absolutely unconscionable that this has dragged on this long. It’s time to quit grandstanding and engage in principled compromise to GET THE JOB DONE on raising the debt ceiling. ...

Most of us are familiar with the inspiring phrase attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. For years, while we worked on creating open access to educational resources, research articles, etc., the various commercial industries ignored us. Then in press releases and on conference panels they mocked open educational resources as “low quality” and not particularly useful. ...