Research

Diana Oblinger, the President of EDUCAUSE, today announced the Next Gen Learning Challenges program. Information about the program, including the involvement of the Gates and Hewlett Foundations, is included in Diane’s announcement letter below. I’m humbled to serve on the Advisory Panel for the program, and am deeply interested in the topics of the first set of challenges identified for grant-making: Challenge 1: Open Core Courseware Expand access to high-quality, openly licensed courseware for developmental and general education. Challenge 2: Web 2.0 Engagement Integrate interactive Web 2.0 approaches to stimulate deeper learning and ultimately improve college readiness and completion. Challenge 3: Blended Learning Expand the use of established, effective online and face-to-face learning models on a cost-effective basis. Challenge 4: Learning Analytics Foster the development and implementation of easily accessible learning analytics for those directly involved in student success. The announcement reads: ...

As many of you know, my empirical work at BYU has focused largely on issues of sustainability. I’ve blogged some of it before, but to wrap it up in one spot, here is a recap of what we’ve been up to. Justin Johansen and I did some interesting work on OCW sustainability, examining what happens when opportunities to enroll in for-credit courses are integrated into OCW. The results - over 2.5% of OCW visitors became paying for-credit customers of BYU Independent Study, generating enough revenue to more than pay for the cost of opening access to the courses. An article version of the dissertation, with a few months more data, is forthcoming in Educational Technology Research and Development. ...

Dr. John Hilton, who until just recently was a doctoral student of mine, has written a great dissertation on the impact giving away free ebooks has on sales of printed books. The findings may surprise you. Here’s a repost of the description from his blog: I’ve posted on my dissertation before. The full version is now available here. Here’s a little summary of what the dissertation is all about. What Deseret Book placed eight books online for free download. All of these were “backlist” titles. This study tracked what happened as a result of those books being available. ...

Since my department at BYU has committed itself to open access publishing I’ve been able to get serious about putting my published writing in the university’s institutional repository called ScholarsArchive. So far I have 12 pieces in the collection, which are guaranteed to stay at these URLs for “a very long time” since the library is curating the repository. I’m happy as a clam that these pieces have permanent homes and that these pieces are freely available for the general public. ...

Newly minted Dr. Justin Johansen’s dissertation study, The Impact Of Opencourseware On Paid Enrollment In Distance Learning Courses, is now available from BYU’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) archive. This dissertation is the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing opencourseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it. In other words, Justin’s study not only demonstrates that it is possible to publish opencourseware without requesting donations from users or foundations, it goes further and demonstrates that it is possible to make money publishing opencourseware. And if you can make money publishing opencourseware, you can continue publishing opencourseware for a very long time. This capacity is also known as sustainability. ...

I received a communication from the Mellon Foundation today announcing that they’re “merging” the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) with their Scholarly Communications Program, and that Ira and Chris are both leaving the Mellon Foundation. I won’t attempt to second guess why the restructuring is happening. From the email: The Foundation is making a number of organizational changes designed to consolidate resources and concentrate them more effectively on the Foundation’s central objectives in support of its five core program areas: the liberal arts and humanistic scholarship in higher education, scholarly communications, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. As part of these changes, the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) will be merged into the Scholarly Communications program and cease to exist as a standalone grantmaking program of the Mellon Foundation, effective January 4, 2010. The Scholarly Communications program, which will be renamed so as to indicate, explicitly, that technology-based grantmaking is part of its mandate, will assume responsibility for managing existing RIT grants and the planning of future grant initiatives that emphasize the development of information technologies in support of the Foundation’s core focus. As this merger occurs, my colleagues, Ira Fuchs, who founded the RIT program at the Foundation in 2000, and Christopher Mackie, will both be leaving the Foundation. ...

With apologies to Pasteur’s Quadrant, here’s another take on the Golden Ration of OER from earlier in the week. Mary made several points in the comments on that post about the interpretability of the measure. So, how about asking the same question visually? I think you could still measure the vertical axis in standard deviations and the horizontal as change in budget (with savings being positive and additional costs being negative). To be clear, we would not expect to see learning gains simply because a piece of content has an open license. We’d hope to establish (a) at a minimum, no impact on student learning and some cost savings, or (b) more hopefully a positive impact on student learning and cost savings. ...

I appreciate the usefulness of open educational resources in supporting informal learning as much as anyone. I also care very deeply about the adoption and use of open educational resources in formal education settings. The kinds of things I lay awake at night worrying about differ depending on which of the two I’m thinking about when I go to bed. The more people I talk to, the more convinced I am that OER has failed to establish a digestible value proposition for formal education. For better or worse, many people caught up in the day-to-day vortex of teaching, advising, mentoring, and grading don’t have the spare time to problematize publisher-school power relations, realize the virtue of local control of curriculum materials, or fully appreciate the transformative benefits of transparency. ...

The new, special issue of IRRODL on Openness and the Future of Higher Education is available now at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/issue/view/38. Here’s the introduction John Hilton and I wrote for the special issue: Once considered to be mostly hype, the idea of open education has spread to hundreds of universities across the globe – including many of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Open access to teaching and learning materials significantly empowers individuals who are not affiliated with formal educational programs and levels the playing field across competing institutions. These two occurrences – the empowering and leveling – portend significant changes in the structure and practice of higher education. The purpose of this special issue of IRRODL is to address various specific ways in which openness can affect the future of higher education. ...

I’ve written about this before, but here we go again… In educational research there is a long and storied history of people conducting studies along the lines of “is video-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “is text-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or ““is video-based instruction more effective than text-based instruction?,” etc. This pointless family of research has a name, the “No Significant Difference Phenomenon,” and even has it’s own website: http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/. From the website: ...