Sustainability

For several months now I’ve been working with a great group of people on Degreed. Today we launched the public beta at the HASTAC/MacArthur grantees meeting (the Mozilla open badges functionality in Degreed is supported by a DML grant). So what does it do? Degreed eliminates the distinction between formal and informal learning by jailbreaking your college transcript and interweaving Mozilla open badges and other informal credentials together with your college courses. We help you categorize these formal and informal credentials in order to create a credential remix that allows you to showcase everything you know - not just what you learned in school. Unlike your college transcript, your Degreed profile continues to grow as you continue to learn throughout life. ...

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. ...

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. ...

According to Reuters: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers Inc has reached a deal with more than 70 percent of its creditors to cut $3.1 billion in debt as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding. The publisher said it plans to restructure through a pre-packaged, court-supervised Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The HMH bankruptcy is not just about decreases in education funding, of course. We must give some credit to Kaleidoscope, Open Course Library, the Utah Open Textbook Project, Flat World Knowledge, and others around the world for showing that freely available OER and open textbooks can completely replace breathtakingly overpriced publisher textbooks - and that students learn the same amount regardless. If you could get the same grade using a $175 commercial textbook or a free online (and $30 or less to print) textbook, which would you choose? ...

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? ...

A brief history of the impending transformation of post-secondary education, just to clarify where we are, followed by some commentary. Dates are approximate as I’m working from memory on an airplane. Perhaps later I’ll turn this into a proper piece of writing with supporting links, etc., if folks find it interesting. 7x - The internet. Data can be routed from computer to computer. The cost of copying and distributing content begins its drop toward zero. ...

My colleague and friend Gideon Burton (of silva rhetoricae fame among other things) and I have been discussing badges lately. To date the open education movement has focused almost exclusively on the production and sharing of content. Significant opportunities exist to reform or reinvent other, non-content portions of the education ecosystem with the support of open content. One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process. ...