Two exciting bits of news from the ongoing BYU Independent Study OCW trial. There’ll be loads more data / graphs / etc. in our presentation at Open Ed 2009 next week. First, things seem to be remarkably stable on the “conversion to paying customers” side of the study. Out of 9179 visitors to the OCW site, 270 have become paying customers of BYU IS (that’s 2.94%). This number is sticking right around 3%. ...
You are completely replaceable, a cog in the machine, a brick in the wall. There is nothing that meaningfully differentiates you from anyone else. Functionally, you are hot-swappable for any other person. All “individual differences” are meaningless. There is nothing special or unique about you. You are a clone. This is the message of “what works” style educational research. It tells us that, if you are a middle school student learning math, you are just like every other middle school student learning math. If you are a 2nd grader learning to read English, you are just like every other 2nd grader learning to read English as far as educational research knows or cares. Because well-designed and well-implemented randomized controlled trials discover methods that “work.” For everyone. Period. That’s the entire point of having a “trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education” - if we didn’t have methods that work universally, we wouldn’t be real scientists. Each individual student is just another tiny, indistinguishable, interchangeable part of the universe over which proven methods “work.” Personal relationships with students are oxymoronic because all students are the same, and besides, personal relationships don’t scale and are superficial to learning. If this is really the way we’re encouraging educators to think about students, is it really a wonder that they hate school and apparently aren’t learning as much as their peers around the world?
In Lorna’s review of the OER presentations at CETIS 2008, I read this bit about the new OLNet program: The OU and Carnegie Mellon University have now received additional funding from the Hewlett Foundation for OLNet - a network to support sharing methodologies and evidence on the effectiveness of OERs. This next wave is about impact, evidence and effectiveness. I realize that when blogging summaries of conference presentations you seldom quote the presenters with complete accuracy. So I mean neither disrespect for Lorna or Patrick, but something about this characterization of the “next wave” work rubbed me the wrong way. About once a year I have a student burst into my office and announce they have found their dissertation topic - comparing the effectiveness of OERs with traditionally copyrighted learning materials. I now have a well rehearsed shtick about how such a study would be the most pointless dissertation ever conducted (and if you read many dissertations, that’s really saying something!). Please join me in the following thought experiment: ...
BYU Independent Study (BYU IS) has launched its opencourseware pilot - http://ocw.byu.edu! University Courses Public Speaking (TMA 150) Personal Finance (BUSM 418) Cooking in the Home (SFL 110) High School Courses United States Government and Citizenship (GOVT 45) World Geography: The Forces That Shape Our World (GEOG 41) Earth Science, Part 1 (EARTH 41) The pilot includes three university-level courses and three high school-level courses (BYU IS offers 250 university-level courses online for credit and another 250 high school-level courses online for credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are content-complete - that is, they are the full courses as delivered online without the need of additional textbooks or other materials (only graded assessments have been removed). ...
I recently reported the results of Sean Duncan’s dissertation, which calls into question the actual rates of reuse of open educational resources. A number of people have expressed concern or disbelief with his results. As a highlight, if you missed the earlier post, the study looked at rates of use, reuse, and adaptation within the Connexions collection, and found that of 5,221 modules published on the site only 3,519 of these were ever reused in a collection or adapted in any manner elsewhere on the site, and that only 15 modules were used, reused, or adapted more than five times. ...
A student of mine, now DOCTOR Sean Duncan (congrats again!) has posted his excellent dissertation studying reuse of OERs online under a CC-BY license. This was one of the most enjoyable dissertations I have ever chaired. I’ll cover highlights below, but I encourage you to check out the full text of Patterns of Learning Object Reuse in the Connexions Repository for yourself. The study examined patterns and amount of reuse within the Connexions OER repository at Rice. CNX seemed like a great choice for examining reuse because the system is built specifically to support both adapting individual modules and remixing individual modules into courses / collections. Importantly, through system metadata that CNX also makes openly available, all these relationships can be explored programatically in a straightforward way. So CNX is in many ways a best-case scenario for studying reuse, adaptation, and remixing. ...
There’s an excellent article over on Wired right now with interesting implications for our field. The End of Theory reads in part: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all… ...
When a former PhD student goes on to do absolutely amazing things, your initial instinct can be to try to take some of the credit for their success… :) However, not even I have a big enough ego to think I deserve any nods for Andy Van Schaack’s amazing new company, LiveScribe. Absolutely insane things are coming from these folks… Be sure to check out the sneak peeks at what their technology can do. ...
A new report out from IMS called Learning Technology Satisfaction & Trends presents data from a survey of US higher education institutions. According to the report, “31% of the respondents were executive administrators. 7% were deans or academic program or department leaders. 50% were information technology or instructional support staff. 11% were faculty.” Several interesting things in this report: First, the two top-rated sources of digital content, including all commercial and other sources, were Google Search and Wikipedia. MIT OCW places fourth. McGraw Hill and all the other proprietary content publishers are “clustered in another tier below the leaders” in terms of user satisfaction (p. 40). As a content management platform, Wikipedia beats out WebCT, Blackboard, and DSpace by an average of almost a full point (on a five point scale). “The strong usage and showing of Wikis indicates that the Web 2.0 phenomenon – use of more collaboration and collaborative authoring – is blazing a path in higher education” (p. 38). On the course management side, Moodle beats out WebCT and Blackboard by a full half point with a third place finish. Apparently eCollege and Angel users are extremely loyal. Sakai isn’t even on the map. From the Top Findings section (p. 8): “Google Search, Apple iPod, and Wikipedia placed in the top ten list for satisfaction, indicating that non-education specific technologies are being perceived, by those ithat incorporate them, as adding value to the educational experience.” That is, their satisfaction scores were so high as to be in the top ten of all products reviewed across all categories. Overall an interesting skim…
Everyone, I’m currently working on a literature review of “everything related to learning objects.” The normal sources (Eric, Education Fulltext, Digital Dissertations, etc.) have turned up around 250 articles, but these sources list nothing from many of you. The databases tend to be largely constrained - rather unfortunately - to peer-reviewed works. Having been through much of the material, I know that many of the things written by you on your blogs is of better quality! Problem is, I’m having a hard time finding all your stuff. Would you please take a minute to leave the top 3 - 5 things you’ve written about learning objects in a comment (with url)? This will help insure both that (1) your work makes it into the literature review, and (2) that the “grey literature” published online without formal peer review makes a good showing in the review. ...