In 2012 the Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) put out a new report on usage and perceptions of open educational resources (OER) usage in higher education. Covered in this blog post, the 2012 report was really a combination of three separate surveys of academic leaders and faculty. In 2014 BSRG put out a new survey of […]
Open Educational Resources
Is Open Education a Movement?
Phil and I had a wonderful time co-keynoting the OpenEd 2015 conference. It was a hoot. Here is the spectacular graphic depiction of the keynote done by Tracy Kelly from BC Campus: And here is the post-keynote conversation that we had with the Virtually Connecting gang: There have also been some other interesting virtual conversations […]
A Weird but True Fact about Textbook Publishers and OER
As I was perusing David Kernohan’s notes on Larry Lessig’s keynote at the OpenEd conference, one statement leapt out at me: Could the department of labour require that new education content commissioned ($100m) be CC-BY? There was a clause (124) that suggested that the government should check that no commercial content should exist in these […]
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. The Babson Survey Research […]
OER and the Future of Knewton
Jose Ferriera, the CEO of Knewton, recently published a piece on edSurge arguing that scaling OER cannot “break the textbook industry” because, according to him, it has low production values, no instructional design, and is not enterprise grade. Unsurprisingly, David Wiley disagrees. I also disagree, but for somewhat different reasons than David’s.
Textbook Publishers and OERs
Not too long ago, The Chronicle ran an piece called “Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources.” The meat of the article was some quotes of textbook company executives on a panel at an SIIA conference speaking out against a provision in a United States Department of Labor grants program that requires course materials […]
You, Too, Can Sponsor an OER Revolution
The internets are buzzing with the news of the $2 billion grant program jointly offered by the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor. There was some initial hype (driven partly by a blog post on CreativeCommons.org) that the grant would go toward creating $2 billion of open educational resources. However, while the grant program does […]