e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Open Educational Resources

  • The Future of Open Textbooks

    In general, I have been an OER skeptic—not because I think OER is unimportant, but because getting the sustainability model right is really hard. But there is one notable exception to my gloomy outlook; one bright spot that I believe really will transform education. That’s Washington State’s Open Course Library project, under the leadership of Cable Green.

    Some excerpts from a Seattle Times article about the program:

    Here’s an idea that would take a big bite out of the cost of a two-year college degree:

    Gather state community-college faculty members who teach “English Composition I.” Use state and federal grant money to pay them to assemble a top-notch textbook on the subject. Sell a digital version of the book for $30. Ditch the $100 textbook from commercial publishers….

    They could lower the cost of a two-year degree, with some studies showing students spend up to $1,000 a year on textbooks….

    The state’s community and technical colleges are leading the way with an ambitious new initiative: They’re assembling previously published “open-source” textbooks and course materials for the 81 most popular classes at state two-year colleges — including for such mainstays as “General Psychology” and “Introduction to Chemistry.”

    “The power of this is that we’re going to go from a couple hundred dollars per year [for each textbook] to $10 or $20,” said state Rep. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, who sponsored legislation that set aside $750,000 for the initiative. It’s a robust level of funding, experts say.

    “The return on our investment is going to be extraordinary,” Carlyle said.

    The open-source textbook drive is part of a larger state effort, called the Open Course Library, to assemble all curriculum materials — including the course syllabus, videos, lecture notes and exams — for the 81 most popular courses, said Cable Green, director of elearning and open education for the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC).

    The board is working with a consortium of international colleges and universities to find and assemble the materials — for example, taking pieces from freely available textbooks to create a book suited for a Washington state course. In Washington, about 90 community- and technical-college faculty and staff are involved….

    The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has matched the Legislature’s contribution with $750,000 in foundation money….

    The textbooks and curriculum materials are being developed this fall and winter for the first 43 classes with the highest enrollment in the state’s two-year colleges, including English Composition I and II, General Psychology, Introduction to Sociology and Introduction to Chemistry. By fall 2012, textbooks and curriculum materials will be completed for all 81 of the most popular classes….

    This could be hugely transformative. With the number of institutions participating and the number of courses created, this should hit escape velocity for sustainability fairly easily. It could be picked up by community colleges throughout the country fairly rapidly. And that’s just the start.

  • Great OER Presentation in Eastern Mass Next Week

    My good friends and fellow SUNY escapees Steven Zucker and Beth Harris will be giving a talk about their amazing art history open educational resources website smARThistory on Friday, October 1st at UMassOnline. There are several reasons why this talk is worth attending. First, smARThistory is simply one of the best OER collections I know of, both in terms of the quality of the individual OERs and in terms of the extensive scaffolding on the site to help both teachers and students weave the content together into coherent and personalized curricula. Second, Steven and Beth are both great, highly entertaining presenters. And third, there probably will be food.

    Register here.

  • New LMS Entrant: NIXTY

    You may have already heard a bit about NIXTY, since they have managed to make a significant media splash in the last few weeks. There have been a number of interesting analyses, both pro and con. I’d like to highlight a few aspects that haven’t gotten much coverage.

    For starters, here’s a screencast that NIXTY CEO Glen Moriarty was kind enough to make for me:

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  • Why OER Advocates Should Be Happy About the iPad

    I got some comments on my Blackboard iPad post specifically regarding the push toward native—and therefore proprietary—apps and away from standards-based web apps. This concern is just one example of a constellation of complaints about how Apple is too closed. I understand those complaints and am not going to argue with them here. But whether you love Apple or hate them, whether you will buy an iPad or not, I think it’s clearly the case that the iPad’s success will increase adoption of Open Educational Resources.

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  • Thoughts On Anya Kamenetz and the Open Education Movement

    Many thanks to Cable Green for linking to this interview with Anya Kamenetz:

    Kamenetz’s recent article in Inside Higher Ed has also been getting a lot of attention, as has her blog, as she promotes her new book DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. I have my copy on order and look forward to reading it. Kamenetz is obviously bright and seems to have synthesized a number of important trends in a fresh way. She is impressive.

    A couple of things struck me as I watched this interview. First, this seems to be evidence of a possible game changer for the more radical end of the open education movement. I have tended to be very skeptical of theories that higher education will become profoundly more self- and peer driven and will eventually break its bonds with traditional institutions and formal certification. The university is an incredibly stable and change-resistant institution. It has lasted over a thousand years without much evolution in its basic structure. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one big one is that it has tended to reinforce class differences. Late Twentieth-century efforts to make college accessible to everyone notwithstanding, higher education has generally been a strong marker of class status throughout its history. College has been seen as a way to get ahead or, much more frequently, stay ahead. But when you have bright, articulate, talented young professionals—including the child of two college professors, no less—saying that formal higher education may not be the best path to a fulfilling career, it is a sign that, finally, the institution of the university may be under serious threat. Middle class tuition-paying students who grow up to become middle class endowment donating alumni are the economic lifeblood of the university. If they begin to skip college in larger numbers, it would probably force some big changes.

    On the other hand, it’s worth thinking about who might get left out of this potential revolution. Folks in the field of educational technology tend to romanticize the notion that the university shall wither away (to borrow a phrase). But ed tech is full of autodidacts, much more so than the general population. I think we tend to assume too often that all people learn the way that we do. (Note that I am not accusing Kamenetz herself of this tendency; I haven’t seen any evidence of it in the bits of her work that I have seen so far.) If you talk to typical community college professors in the United States, they will tell you that their classrooms are not filled only with the idealized digital natives about whom we gush in admiration, wonder, and possibly envy. They see many students who have not been taught how to read, think critically, or even follow directions. Increasing numbers of them are autism spectrum, mentally challenged, or mentally ill. I’m talking about people who tend to subsist on the fringes of the economy. Many are marginally employable in good times and unemployable during serious economic downturns like the one that we are in now. In times like this, they return to the same education system that they dropped out of in the first place because it wasn’t able to meet their needs,  hoping desperately that it will make them employable again (which is one reason why your friends teaching in community colleges may look more stressed than ever this year). These students are not autodidacts, they are in the most dire need of a good education of anyone in our society, and it is not clear to me that the blossoming of open education for their more fortunate peers will do anything for them other than suck the much needed funds out of an already badly underfunded education system.

    Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think the DIY U vision is a bad one. To the contrary, there are many aspects of it that are good, necessary, and overdue. I just don’t think it’s a complete vision. If we are not careful, open education may actually end up reinforcing economic divides, all while we pat ourselves on the back for giving away “free education.” We are failing to educate millions of our citizens in this country, and billions around the world. It’s easy for those of us in the open education movement to see our work in opposition to proprietary technology companies, proprietary textbook companies, and the gatekeepers in the university system. But it’s not the “evil” LMS companies, or the “evil” textbook companies, or the “evil” administrators and bureaucrats that are failing these students. It is all of us. Education is an affirmative responsibility. We need to make educational resources freely available to those who need them, but we also need to do much more than that.

  • ITOE: Comparing Two OpenCourseWare Styles

    It’s week three, and the course continues to elide the distinction between open education and open educational resources. That’s a shame because there’s a real opportunity to explore the differences in goals in the current assignment:

    Carefully review five (5) random courses from MIT OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/) and five (5) random courses from CMU OLI (http://www.cmu.edu/oli/). Write a post on the different ideals of quality expressed in the differing course designs; describe how you feel the different designs reflect on the different universities.

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  • ITOE: Motivations for Open Education

    Well, it’s only the second week of class, and I’m already turning an assignment in late. (It was due yesterday.) I can’t even argue (plausibly, anyway) that the dog ate my blog post. So much for iron self-discipline.

    At any rate, here is this week’s assignment:

    Carefully review at least 20 pages describing motivations for the open education movement. Write a substantive post with references on the motivations of the movement.

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