e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Phil Hill

  • WCET14 Student Panel: What do students think of online education?

    Yesterday at the WCET14 conference in Portland I had the opportunity along with Pat James to moderate a student panel. ((Pat is the executive director of the California Community College Online Education Initiative (OEI) – see her blog here for program updates.)) I have been trying to encourage conference organizers to include more opportunities to let students speak for themselves – becoming real people with real stories rather than nameless aggregations of assumptions. WCET stepped up with this session. And my new favorite tweet ((I’m not above #shameless.)):

    As I called out in my introduction, we talk about students, we characterize students, we listen to others talk about students, but we don’t do a good job in edtech talking with students.  There is no way that a student panel can be representative of all students, even for a single program or campus ((As can be seen from this monochromatic panel, which might make sense for Portland demographics but not from a nationwide perspective.)). We’re not looking for statistical answers, but we can hear stories and gain understanding.

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  • In Which I (Partially) Disagree with Richard Stallman on Kuali’s AGPL Usage

    Since Michael is making this ‘follow-up blog post’ week, I guess I should jump in.

    In my latest post on Kuali and the usage of the AGPL license, the key argument is that this license choice is key to understanding the Kuali 2.0 strategy – protecting KualiCo as a new for-profit entity in their future work to develop multi-tenant cloud hosting code.

    What I have found interesting is that in most of my conversations with Kuali community people ,even for those who are disillusioned, they seem to think the KualiCo creation makes some sense. The real frustration and pushback has been on how decisions are made, how decisions have been communicated, and how the AGPL license choice will affect the community.

    In the comments, Richard Stallman chimed in.

    As the author of the GNU General Public License and the GNU Affero General Public License, and the inventor of copyleft, I would like to clear up a possible misunderstanding that could come from the following sentence:

    “Any school or Kuali vendor, however, that develops its own multi-tenant cloud-hosting code would have to relicense and share this code publicly as open source.”

    First of all, thinking about “open source” will give you the wrong idea about the reasons why the GNU AGPL and the GNU GPL work as they do. To see the logic, you should think of them as free software licenses; more specifically, as free software licenses with copyleft. (more…)

  • APLU Panel: Effects of digital education trends on teaching faculty

    Last week I spoke on a panel at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) annual conference. Below are the slides and abridged notes on the talk.

    It is useful to look across many of the technology-drive trends affecting higher education and ask what that tells about faculty of the future. Distance education (DE) of course is not new, and the first DE course came out in the mid 1800s in a course from London on shorthand. These distance, or often correspondence, course have expanded over time, but with the rise of the Internet online education (today’s version of DE) has been accelerating over the past 20 years to become quite common in our higher education system.

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  • Kuali, Ariah and Apereo: Emerging ed tech debate on open source license types

    With the annual Kuali conference – Kuali Days – starting today in Indianapolis, the big topic should be the August decision to move from a community source to a professional open source model, moving key development to a commercial entity, the newly-formed KualiCo. Now there will be two new announcements for the community to discuss, both centering on a esoteric license choice that could have far-reaching implications. Both the announcement of the Ariah Group as a new organization to support Kuali products and the statement from the Apereo Foundation center on the difference between Apache-style and AGPL licenses.

    AGPL and Vendor Protection

    Kuali previously licensed its open source code as Educational Community License (ECL), a derivative of the standard Apache license that is designed to be permissive in terms of allowing organizations to contribute modified open source code while mixing with code with different licenses – including proprietary. This license is ‘permissive’ in the sense that the derived, remixed code may be licensed in different manners. It is generally thought that this license type gives the most flexibility for developing a community of contributors.

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  • Michael’s Keynote at Sakai Virtual Conference

    Michael is giving the keynote address at tomorrow’s (Friday, Nov 7) Sakai Virtual Conference #SakaiVC14. The virtual conference is only $50 registration, with more information and registration link here. The schedule at a glance is available as PDF here.

    Michael’s keynote is at 10:00am EDT, titled “Re-Imagining Educational Content for a Digital World”. At 4:30pm, there will be a Q&A session based on the keynote.

  • Flipped Classrooms: Annotated list of resources

    I was recently asked by a colleague if I knew of a useful article or two on flipped classrooms – what they are, what they aren’t, and when did they start. I was not looking for any simple advocacy or rejection posts, but explainers that can allow other people to understand the subject and make up their own mind on the value of flipping.

    While I had a few in mind, I put out a bleg on Google+ and got some great responses from Laura Gibbs, George Station, and Bryan Alexander. Once mentioned, Robert Talbert and Michelle Pacansky-Brock jumped into the conversation with additional material. It seemed like a useful exercise to compile the results and share a list here at e-Literate. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but a top level of the articles that I have found useful.

    There are other useful article out there, but this list is a good starting place for balanced, non-hyped descriptions of the flipped classroom concept. ((I did not include any directly commercial sites or articles in the list above. Michelle’s book was included as the introduction is freely available.)) Let me know in the comments if there are others to include in this list.

  • Significant Milestone: First national study of OER adoption

    For years we have heard anecdotes and case studies about OER adoption based on one (or a handful) of institutions. There are many items we think we know, but we have lacked hard data on the adoption process to back up these assumptions that have significant policy and ed tech market implications.

    OtC Cover PageThe Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) – the same one that administers the annual Survey of Online Learning – has released a survey of faculty titled “Opening the Curriculum” on the decision process and criteria for choosing teaching resources with an emphasis on Open Educational Resources (OER). While their funding from the Hewlett Foundation and from Pearson ((Disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting – see this post for more details.)) is for the current survey only, there are proposals to continue the Faculty OER surveys annually to get the same type of longitudinal study that they provide for online learning.

    While there will be other posts (including my own) that will cover the immediate findings of this survey, I think it would be worthwhile to first provide context on why this is a significant milestone. Most of the following background and author findings is based on my interview with Dr. Jeff Seaman, one of the two lead researchers and authors of the report (the other is Dr. I. Elaine Allen).

    Background

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