There was some interest in my post yesterday about what I called “generative textbooks,” but based on people’s comments I don’t know that I explained the idea very clearly. The idea of a “generative textbook” is that, instead of containing instructional content, it provides the learner with a series of prompts they can use to elicit information from a large language model like ChatGPT. Here’s a brief example to clarify what I mean. ...
There’s much to learn from history. Sadly, as Audrey Watters has frequently noted, it might be impossible to find a field of endeavor outside educational technology where more of the participants are so utterly ignorant of its history. (I hope you’re aware of and looking forward to her upcoming book on Teaching Machines.) Even within learning design / instructional technology / educational technology graduate programs there’s a bit of a joke that every decade or so someone invents a new technology that causes the field to spontaneously forget everything it ever knew - because how could it possibly apply to the new medium? How could the things we learned about educational radio possibly inform our work with education television? Or teaching machines? Or correspondence courses (snail mail)? Or interactive video discs? Or computers? Or satellite-based video? Or the internet? Or smartphones? Or iPads? Or augmented reality? Or artificial intelligence? Or (insert whatever comes next)… ...
At the OpenEd Conference in 2013, Nicole Allen and I challenged the OER community to save students one billion dollars. Five years later, SPARC have collected a significant amount of data in order to answer the question of whether or not we have achieved that goal. You can read more about the data collection methodology and their ongoing work on this question here. SPARC have made the data available under the CC0 dedication and you can download them here. ...
There’s a great conversation - a debate, almost - occurring right now about two indisputable facts: The College Board recommends that students budget around $1200 per year for textbooks and supplies. Surveys of students indicate that they spend around $600 per year on textbooks. How can there be a debate about facts which no one disputes? The debate is around which fact is appropriate to cite under which circumstances. See excellent contributions to the discussion by Phil Hill, Mike Caulfield, Bracken Mosbacker, Phil Hill (again), and Mike Caulfield (again). ...
(Cross-posted from the Open Education Group blog) I’m very excited to announce the launch of the OER Adoption Impact Explorer. This interactive tool lets users adjust a range of Institutional Settings to match their local context and estimate what the impact of adopting OER would be on their students and campus. Users can also tinker with a group of Research-based Settings to make the estimates more conservative or more aggressive. The goal of the Explorer is to provide OER advocates with rigorously modeled, data-based arguments that they can use in conversations with a wide range of stakeholders (faculty, administration, students, policy makers, etc.). ...
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? ...
[caption id=“attachment_3244” align=“alignright” width=“300”] via MIke Caulfield[/caption] I recently received the excellent news that I will receive another year of support as a Shuttleworth Fellow. These fellowships are extremely generous and I’m incredibly grateful for the foundation’s vote of confidence in the work I’m doing supporting widespread OER adoption through Lumen Learning. As many of you know, Shuttleworth Fellows also have the opportunity to pitch the Foundation for project funding. The foundation has also chosen to support our project proposal this year, and I’m extremely excited to start sharing the idea we’re working on with the community. ...
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. ...