Premium Free Range OER

Free Range Poultry and Shed, near Seisdon, Staffordshire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don't want Flat World Knowledge to corner the market in charging students for free textbooks. I am announcing here that CainCo EduProducts will also be offering premium free textbooks at a relatively fair and competitive cost. How can we put a price on free textbooks? We are taking a page from the poultry industry. And the definition of "free" is different here. My books will be "free" as in "free range" hence the premium price. Each textbook will be:

• Free range
• All natural
• Clearly labeled GMO free
• Fat free
• Low sodium
• Electronic versions made from only the best AMERICAN MADE electrons

Each lovingly crafted paper version of our textbooks will be made from sustainably harvested, hormone free trees and turned into pulp through non-traumatic, humane Ayurvedic massage process. 

How will our textbooks help students save money? To afford these textbooks, students will have to become experts at saving money. The lessons they learn from that they will carry with them the rest of their lives (a lot like their student loans). 

Related articles

• Flat World Knowledge Falls Flat (cain.blogspot.com)
• Pirate Times: Open Source Textbooks: Learning Was Meant to be Free (piratetimes.net)
• Flat World Knowledge to Drop Free Access to Textbooks (chronicle.com)
• Does 100% Natural Mean GMO-Free? Natural Regulators Side with Monsanto (toolwielder.wordpress.com)

Flat World Knowledge Falls Flat

For use to open - free- education resources. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am very disappointed in Flat World Knowledge's decision to end free access to students as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was always very suspect of this company from the beginning. I am getting sick of businesses saying that they are a part of the open source movement, OER, or for Open Text Books and then coming up with some lame excuse to go back to business as usual - lets make money on the backs of students in the name of "sustainability"! In the article they admit that they are not really committed to the open license.

We should call companies like FWK businesses then and not advocates or proponents of open education resources. The idea behind OER is that faculty would freely develop their textbooks for students to freely use. I am not against business but lets call it business and not OER. I am really not interested in the content reviewers from commercial publishers because they are not in the business of creating, vetting, and customizing for my students or my college in my community with its unique issues - they are interested in packaging their material for a mass market and getting some Phd's name on the box to make it acceptable to colleges who are not quite ready to take the plunge into OER. I almost wrote a book for FWK but I realized that my content would be at the mercy of the market. I knew that at any time they could change their business model and the students would be the ones to suffer. The business of businesses is business. The business of education should be education. There are great textbooks out there with Creative Commons licenses that students do not have to pay for. We have a moral obligation to make education accessible to as many students as possible. OERs and open textbooks are a way to do that. Freedom as in free to charge the students is not the kind of freedom that I am interested in.

And what does this mean for the Creative Commons license? If a text is really CC, shouldn't a student have access to that text under the same license as FWK?

Look at any of the articles below for an alternative model of commercial businesses managing academic content.

Related articles

• Flat World Knowledge to Drop Free Access to Textbooks (chronicle.com)
• OER Adopter Communities: the Sustainability Factor in Open Education (cain.blogspot.com)
• Open Academics at the University of Minnesota (cain.blogspot.com)
• British Columbia to Offer Students Free Textbooks Under Creative Commons Licenses (infojustice.org)

Keeping Open Education Resources Open

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What does the "open" in "open education resources" mean? What it should mean is free to reuse, remix and share. If your open education resources are locked up with a proprietary platform, they are no longer open. If they are converted into "supplements" for a "free" text, they are no longer open. This is the fear behind those who choose a license that says "not for commercial use." That does not make it less open because you are not free to lock down someone else's work and make a profit off of it.

The reason I release materials to the wild with an open license is so that other educators can use them and benefit from them; maybe even modify them (and hey, feel free send me a copy back). I want to contribute to the education community. My intention is not to enrich some business who will repackage and "improve" on my work by locking it down into a closed system and then charging for access. The claim that I am making my work less open because it is not free for commercial use is ridiculous! That is like saying animals are only free if they are also free to be in a zoo. And the only ones who really benefit from the corporate lock-down of OERs and open textbooks are the corporations.

The Creative Commons license warning that an OER is not part of a "free culture" is an unnecessary distraction. FreedomDefined. org is not helping:
"Licenses which only allow non-commercial use are not considered Free Culture licenses. This is because in practice there are many ways that Cultural works can be used and reused which would be considered commercial. Another problem is that there is no generally agreed definition of where the border line is between Commercial and Non Commercial uses with very many cases falling in the undefined area in between. In practice Share Alike or Copyleft clauses provide a restriction on commercial profits since any reuse making excessive profits will soon stimulate a bunch of copycats which will bring prices down while encouraging even wider distribution of the works - which is the objective of the free culture licenses." 
That phrase "which will bring down prices" is the funny bit here. My goal is not to keep down the prices of my work but to remove the cost barrier altogether from my work! I want it free as in free of cost to any student, now and in the future.

The claim that OERs will not benefit from corporate modification and promotion is really missing the point. That is not the only way that OERs are adapted, developed, and distributed. OERs belong to the community of teachers and learners. They should remain there. The real work being done in the OER community is by communities of educators

So why do school districts go after corporate materials that are almost, but not quite entirely, unlike open? Because they are still clinging to the old paradigm that says that if it didn't get "vetted" by a corporate press, it lacks quality, legitimacy, the imprimatur and nihil obstat of a "reputable" press. We need to redefine this legitimacy. The corporate presses have not done education any favors: the price of education is outstripping the cost of inflation and healthcare. Each semester, publishers come up with new and interesting ways to justify their $280 dollar textbooks. And the sad truth is that the instructors know these subjects better than the project managers at corporate education publishing houses. The books are not more accurate because they went through their vetting process (see OER: The Myth of Textbook Reliability). Every open textbook that I have encountered that was created in-house or by a community of scholars has been hands down superior in every way to a corporate textbook because it addresses the needs of the teachers who created it and the students who are using it, it is lower in price and more accessible.

There are new models emerging for the development and implementation of OERs and open textbooks.   There are a number of models suggested by Stephen Downes in his article "Models for Sustainable Open Education Resources" that I feel have yet to be fully explored. There is also the implementation model suggested by the Kaleidoscope Project that begins with a community of scholars working on shared student learning outcomes and assessments and only then do they adopt OERs or open textbooks. In other words, open textbooks are an opportunity to have education content driven by the SLOs of the local schools, not by commercial interests.

Fretting over whether or not an OER is free to be exploited by a corporation is a huge step backward and a great disservice to the students.

Related articles

• What Do We Mean By "Open"? (hackeducation.com)
• Implementing OERs and Open Textbooks (cain.blogspot.com)
• OER Use, Reuse and Remixing (hackeducation.com)
• Danny Piccirillo: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (thesilentnumber.me)

Help Shape Creative Commons 4.0

Image by jorgeandresem via FlickrThis just in from the ubiquitous Cable Green:

Creative Commons has officially opened the public discussion process for version 4.0 of the CC license suite. Please see the announcement below, and join the discussion by subscribing to the CC license discussion list (link in blog post, below).

As we all know, the core part of any OER definition is the educational resource is either openly licensed or is in the public domain... so anyone can: reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. This is your chance to affect the licenses we all use to share OER.

One of the many reasons CC is considering versioning the licenses at this time is to address how can we improve the attribution requirements to ease citation in open educational resources (OER).
What would you like to see changed?

Starting now through February we are holding a requirements gathering period, an important (if not the most important) time to contribute ideas for improving the license suite. We hope you'll join the discussion and share your ideas for how we can improve the licenses for use with public sector information and data. And please do help us spread the word.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/30676

Related articles

• Creative Commons at an International Seminar and Expert Meeting in Moscow (creativecommons.org)
• Public discussion for Creative Commons 4.0 begins (h-online.com)
• Former Creative Commons CEO on the battles faced by CC licensing (arstechnica.com)
• 9th birthday of the CC license suite! (creativecommons.org)

Open Content Licensing for Educators Workshop

Image via CrunchBaseThis in from Cable Green: Creative Commons, the OER Foundation and Ako Aotearoa announce an international professional development opportunity for all educators.

What: Open content licensing for educators workshop (#OCL4Ed)
Where: Online
When: 23 -27 January 2012
Cost: Free
Registration: Open (register today)
Facilitators:

• Cable Green, Director Global Learning, Creative Commons
• Jane Hornibrook , Public Lead, Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand
• Wayne Mackintosh, Director, OER Foundation.

Open content licensing for educators (#OCL4Ed) is a free online workshop designed for educators who want to learn more about open education resources, copyright, and creative commons licenses.
Image via WikipediaThe course materials were developed as a collaborative project by volunteers from the OER Foundation, WikiEducator, the OpenCourseWare Consortium and Creative Commons with funding support from UNESCO. The course will provide prerequisite knowledge required by educators to legally remix open education materials and help institutions to take informed decisions about open content licenses.

Visit: http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators/About

Please spread the word through your networks. Give the gift of knowledge and invite a friend to join you.
Download and share this poster with your colleagues.

We look forward to meeting you during the workshop and extend our thanks to Ako Aotearoa, New Zealand's National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence for sponsoring this professional development opportunity.

Related articles

• 10 Different Creative Commons Projects That You Should Definitely Pay Attention To (makeuseof.com)
• Sharing For Art and Profit: Creative Commons Celebrates 'The Power of Open' (shareable.net)
• Open Education Gets A Boost From The U.S. Department of Labor (shareable.net)

Open Ed Conf. Keynotes: Cable Green & Philipp Schmidt

Image via CrunchBaseThe Obviousness of Open Policy


Speakers: Cable Green
The Internet, increasingly affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources provide the foundation for a world in which a quality education can be a basic human right. Yet before we break the "iron triangle" of access, cost and quality with new models, we need to educate policy makers about the obviousness of open policy: public access to publicly funded resources.

Speaker/Artist(s) Info
Director of Global Learning, Creative Commons

Notes:
"If we had a food machine that could feed everyone in the world and the marginal cost is zero, and it won't hurt farmers, should we turn it on?"

His dream - everyone in the world can get the education they desire. If there are is a need to educate 263 million students - we could never build enough traditional schools to educate those who need it.

If we are not sharing, we are not teaching. David Wiley

There is a huge community of open source organizations.

Problem: Most of the policy makers do not understand 20th cent. technology and tools (open licensing, mobile tech, the affordances of the internet). They do not understand the tools collectively - they are able to collectively create OERs.

Rivalrous vs. Non- Rivalalrous resources - NR is digital and open licenses.

Publicly funded resources should be available to the public who paid for them.

If the world spent 5% of the GDP on edu that would equal 3 billion dollars.

How do you sustain OERs? If OER is the default of our normal work, then we do not need to invest new money. The policy is simple to explain: if work is in public domain it goes to the public; if it is licensed, the license should be open.

"We should get what we pay for."
Cooperate & share = we all win
Affordability
Self Interest

If we had open policies what could we do? Billions is given out to ed institutes for research but there are few requirements to share that research with an open license.

English Comp - 55k enrollments x $100 text = 5.5 million dollars a year to the state of Washington. Does this make sense? The open text saves millions. The money comes from fed and state financial aide.
WA will pay 2 mil for an open textbook, spend 100,000 to update it every year and still come out ahead. And then they will openly license it and still offer it for free.

Brazilians have to search for open texts before investing in commercial texts.

Efficient use of public funds to increase student success and access to quality educational materials
Everything else including all existing business models are not sacred.

If we had a food machine, we have a moral obligation to turn them off.

"The opposite of open is not closed; the opposite of open is broken."

The Impossible Open Education Future

Speaker: Philipp Schmidt  (bokap.net)
Executive Director and Co-Founder, Peer 2 Peer University

He is a Shuttleworth Fellow

"The Capetown Declaration twist"

Started Peer-to-Peer University in 2008 - Vijay Kumar said "You are starting from the wrong point - imagine that there was no university - what would it look like?"

They launched the first courses in 2009.

Anyone can join, OER, light interface, badge system. Their site is a light weight connector rather than an LMS. "School of Open" is being cooked up right now.

His frustration: Asking too much and expecting too little at the same time.

• OER cost savings are a big deal.
• Open is not a quick fix for all challenges in broken system. 
• Brihanna needs an affordable student loan (in most places in the world, she would not have to work so hard)
• Disruption comes from the fringes - make open research institutes 
• Open education is global - we are not paying attention to what is happening in dev world
• Open needs to keep the spirit of a lab
• Open - participation, making, tinkering, experimenting, social, serendipity

Brothers Wright: If we had studied flight we would have never done it because we would have learned that it was impossible. 

Imagine the Impossible Open Education School of the Future

 In P2PU - they tend to use cohorts rather than MOOCs

A strong social bond of cohorts

Great facilitators are hard to scale

Alternatives? A learning expedition - following the markers of others up the side of the mountain. You can hire a guide. There model is "challenges." There is a badge system and a "Request a Mentor" button. There is also a "Become a Mentor" button. 

Learning = making things with others

What makes a good challenge? These can make good portfolio pieces

Goal: enable community to contribute "challenges"

How to: What makes a good challenge?

Testing challenges in other domains

Assessment: Every time you do an assessment apart from the activity you introduce inaccuracies.

Why not use gaming as assessment - assessment needs a "Press R to Try Again."

You fail a test - when you lose a game, you try again.

1st Step - Collect Data

2nd Step -  Showcase and share portfolios

3rd Step -  Listen to the community

"Framework and Design of Social Learning"

Related articles

• Open Educational Resources to be discussed at conference in Namibia next week (appablog.wordpress.com)
• Commonwealth of Learning adopts CC BY-SA as part of new OER policy (creativecommons.org)

Openness and Learning Analytics

Image by nep via FlickrSpeakers: John Rinderle Norman Bier
Revise/Remix can build a 1000 points of OER light. Can these lights converge to fire authentic learning analytics & share-alike data models?

Conventional wisdom in the OER community maintains that one of the more important features of the open education approach is the malleability and customizability of materials, allowing freely available component resources to be remixed, adapted and modified to suit specific institutional directives, student needs or faculty interests. These features are important enough that the ability to revise and remix content is a core part of the commonly accepted 4R framework that defines open content. While the ability to tailor OER to meet changing or specific needs is one compelling part of the open model, the infinity variety that this encourages creates serious obstacles for another expected benefit of openness: using learning analytics to drive adaptive teaching and learning, support iterative improvement, and demonstrate effectiveness.

The ability to deliver meaningful learning analytics has been one promise of the open education approach. A use-driven design process for OER depends on the resources being used by a large number of students with varied background knowledge, relevant skills and future goals—a student population that open and well-used resources should be able to provide. Such a process can use such interaction data to iteratively improve courses in a meaningful and empirical way. Beyond improvement analytics, this same data can be used mid-stream to improve the effectiveness of learners and instructors.

Despite this promise, the OER community has not been able to create or take advantage of widespread, generally applicable learning analytics tools. While some organizations have had success in developing analytics platforms and approaches, such successes have tended to focus on specific resources, often developed with data collection in mind and not always falling at the “most open” end of the open content continuum. One barrier to more widespread analytic tools has been the variety of OER afforded by remixing and revising.

This presentation will explore the benefits and trade-offs to be made between adaptability and analytics. In the course of this exploration, we will argue that the benefits to be had from an approach that places a higher priority on analytics may outweigh those to be gained from endless variety in the OER space. Similarly, we will discuss some approaches to better harness open education’s promised ability to drive learning analytics, with greater and lesser compromises to the adaptability of OER. We will propose open communities of use and evaluation coalesced around individual OERs using learning analytics to improve the resource through coordinated revision and remix. Open education has embraced share alike licenses for materials. The next logical step is the open exchange of learning data and evidence of effectiveness, to “share alike and share data”. We will also suggest approaches to integrating disparate analytics-enabled OER into common platforms and the development of OER to published standards for learning analytic data.

Notes:
Open Learning Initiative:
Produce and improve scientifically-based courses and course materials which enact instruction and support instructors

Outcomes:
Shared understanding of challenges, tensions, and possibilities in learning analytics
Describe community-based analytics plans

Driving feedback loops. We have a huge opportunity to use assessment data around OERs. There are enormous amounts of data available.  "Infinite points of light" around all the OER repositories and initiatives.

Infinite proliferation

The 4 Rs

1. Reuse
2. Redistribute
3. Revising
4. Remix

Not recreate but to evaluate - recreate is a barrier to reuse.

What drives change in these settings?

• Data 
• Intuition
• Market demand
• Instructor preferences - change happens because an instructor gets bored with material, but with no real idea if the changes are improving the course.

Effectiveness: An OER is effective when it demonstrably supports students in meeting articulated, measurable learning outcomes in a given set of contexts. 

They are also looking at new forms of assessment for gathering data.

Rory McGreal asked whether or not there was a clearer way to talk about what is demonstrable. There are a lot of variables in the initial statement.

Why have we not been doing this?

• It's hard
• Costly
• Individual faculty need support
• It can be threatening to educators
• Disparate systems for collecting data

What do we mean by "learning analytics"?
Proxies vs. authentic assessment and evaluation

Analytics Definition
Data collection > reporting > Decision making > Intervention > Action
Collecting data is not enough. We also need to make sense of it in ways that are actionable.

Types of analytics
Education/classroom management
Learning outcomes

We need common, agreed upon standards, a core collection, and a space for exploration.

Problems include privacy and technical issues.

Tools that already exist:
DataShop, Evidence Hub, Learning registry, and communities of evidence

Community College Open Learning Initiative

And build new things:
We need better mechanisms to share data.
We need a community-based approach.

Learning Intelligence Systems
What would be giving up? This approach forces us to allow our minds to be charged by evidence.

Next Steps?
Innovate
Standardize
Scale

• Commitment to assessment and evaluation
• Community definition of analytics enabled OER
• Common approach to data
• Shared and private analytics platforms

Related articles

• Taking OER beyond the OER Community (downes.ca)
• How data and analytics can improve education (radar.oreilly.com)

The Open Course Library: Bridging the gap between the LMS and OCW

Speakers: Tom Caswell & Connie Broughton

We will share the Open Course Library project, including technical & professional development challenges faced as we developed phase 1.

The goal of the Open Course Library is for faculty to design digital, openly licensed materials for 81 high enrolling courses in Washington State community and technical colleges. During the development of the first 42 Open Course Library courses, faculty designed, piloted, and then revised their courses using the our system wide ANGEL LMS. We chose to use ANGEL as our primary development platform for because most of our faculty course designers were already familiar with that LMS. Using ANGEL also made sense because all faculty were required to pilot their OCL course, so initial development, piloting, and revisions could all be made with the same system.

In this presentation we will explain the workflow and roles of the Open Course Library staff. We will share some of the challenges we faced developing OER in an LMS. While new systems such as Canvas are removing many of the technical barriers to open sharing from an LMS, other challenges remain. Considerations for open content sharing include professional development for copyright and Creative Commons licensing, instructional design, and web accessibility.

Notes: 
They had to make the case for open education.
Why is "open" important in education?

• Efficiency: You can build on content that is already created
• Affordability
• Quality: We tend to do our best work when we know our peers can see it.
• Self-Interest: Increased faculty exposure, reputations, and opportunities

They built 80 top courses and created an open course library all built on open education resources and open textbooks. The state of WA has 75% adjunct teachers in the community and technical college system. This is a quick way for faculty to get course materials together quickly. They didn't slam the door on commercial publishers but limited the textbook costs to $30. This approach is different from an "open courseware site." The open course library workflow is more of a straightline workflow - teachers who built the courses are also the ones who have taught them. 

The courses will be available on Connexioins.

Master & open course materials are linked 

• Faculty update both together
• Older versions still available
• Proprietary content is flagged and hidden from open course

They have a new RFP for an LMS that is requiring an open publishing feature. 

Goals:

• Design and share 81 high enrollment gatekeeper courses
• Improve course completion rates
• Lower textbook costs
• Provide new resources
• Fully engage our colleges in the global open educational resources discussion

Phase 1: 42 courses released this Monday

Phase 2: 39 courses available in Spring 2013

"Every faculty member works with an instructional designer and a librarian."

Q1= design, Q2= more design, Q3 Teach pilot course, Q4 review

Process: 81 courses built by our own faculty:

1. Define learning objectives
2. Go to OER library for materials
3. Fill in missing content with created content

How does OER help teach more students and teach them better?

• No-rivalrous, scalable, searchable
• Allow for preview

Results?

• 81 courses with 411,133 enrollments
• Textbook savings of 41 million a year
• Completion rates may also increase if students can afford to actually buy the text

Phase 1 Faculty Concerns

• Many were unfamiliar with the particular LMS
• No way to compare work between course teams
• Too many websites to keep in track of

Phase 2

• Using Google Docs to collaborate and share as we go
• All project management information in one Google Site

They are also using Tegrity.

More information on http://opencourselibrary.org

Related articles

• RFP Process for New LMS Will Commence This Fall (elearningcentralia.wordpress.com)

Open Ed Conference: Are commercial publishers friend or foe of open education?

Image by matthileo via FlickrSpeakers: Eric Frank and Nicole Allen

Are commercial publishers friend or foe of open education? This session will challenge five common assumptions about the role of commercial publishers in the open education movement. The presenter will share lessons learned from the frontlines of the $8 billion college textbook industry, and demonstrate why profit motives and financial incentives can be critical elements in fostering a healthy open education ecosystem that helps increase the mainstream popularity, usage and long-term financial sustainability of OER.

This session will begin with a brief overview of the disruptive business model of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of free and open textbooks. The presenter will then challenge five common assumptions about the private sector and open textbooks.

Specifically:

1. Commercial activity is counter to the goals of the open education movement. Widespread use of high-quality OER is a shared goal within the open community. The presenter will discuss how a commercial publisher can play a central role in the creation, distribution and usage of OER that helps move it from the fringes to the center of the national conversation on higher education.

2. If you build open content they will come. While a few open content sites attract thousands of users, most do not. For many faculty, open educational content is regarded as ancillary to their primary textbook. The presenter will walk through the adoption process to illustrate why it takes a publisher with a demonstrated track record in developing and marketing textbooks, along with a significant investment, to compete with the vast commercial catalogs and sales and marketing operations of large academic publishers,

3. The non-commercial clause is not in the spirit of true openness.Copyright holders have different objectives for their creations. While the non-commercial clause isn't suitable for all, for a professional publisher to reach scale and build a sustainable model around open, the non-commercial clause may be not only appropriate, but necessary for long-term survival.

4. There's already more than enough open content out there. Supply, not demand, remains a hurdle for the mainstream adoption of OER. There is a distinction between open content and adoptable open content. The presenter will provide examples of the kind of support and supplemental teaching materials faculty expect from a textbook publisher, and the resources required to change the perception, among many faculty, that free comes at the expense of quality.

5. Authors shouldn't profit from writing openly-licensed textbooks. There are many motivations for writing open textbooks. For academic authors seeking to do the right thing for students and be fairly compensated for their work, the commercial open textbook model makes sense. The presenter will share examples of both first-time and market-leading authors who have embraced the commercial open textbook model as a way to improve textbook affordability and enjoy a more sustainable income stream for years to come.

Notes:
Eric Frank is a founder of Flat World Knowledge and begins with a discussion of what FWK is all about - commercial publication of open texts. They want to create great textbooks, give faculty and students control, give students choices, and ultimately to dramatically lower the cost. They choose authors, the books are professionally developed, and developed a platform for distributing texts. They give electronic access to students for free and charge for POD versions of the book and for learning supplements. He is solving the issues around maintaining the "original" in a sea of derivatives and formats. 44% of the students take advantage of the free versions. The students, according to Frank, are saving about $80 using FWK. Large media companies like Random House are investing in FWK. He is saying that users of Flatworld textbooks are showing increases in course completion and grades. He says that they are not just a repository but that they do a lot of marketing around their books including conferences, direct mail, and review copies. They also provide support for students and teachers. They are 3% of the market share. He talked about the "stages of grief" that publishers and some institutions go through with open software or textbooks.

It is 2:30, where is Nicole Allen!?

Okay, Nicole Allen did not speak here today, quel dommage. I would have liked to see this as a debate.

Related articles

• The CC community participates in Open Access Week 2011 (creativecommons.org)
• The Case For Making Online Textbooks Open Source [INFOGRAPHIC] (greenbananablog.org)
• Pearson, Blackboard, And Education's New "Openwashing" (fastcompany.com)
• Textbook Rebellion (protestsf.com)

Open Ed Conference: Towards an aggregated profile of the Global OER and OCW audience

Speakers Mary Lou Forward, Meena Hwang and Una Daly

Developing a profile of our global audience through aggregated surveys of OER and OCW users worldwide.

What are the demographics of those looking of open education resources and open courses? based on their surveys, most of the people visiting http://www.educationportal.com are mostly over 40. They are getting mostly life-long learners. Only a third of the visitors are there to support their studies. The most popular answer to their survey was "to update my job skills."

People were visiting from 57 different countries.

All of this points out the importance of translations.,

Survey data is up at http://www.ocwconsortium.org

There was then examples of a wide variety of users who provided comments about how folks are using OCW.  There are huge communities being built around open content around the world. One site in China that hosts ed videos and a microblogging has 1.4 million followers. One study group has 3000 members.

Una Daly got up to talk about who is using the open repositories.  She discussed the OER advocate training programs, online communities of practice, and adopter communities. She mentioned the grant around adoption of OERs and the Hoopa Tribe Reader.

Related articles

• CC News: The Power of Open (creativecommons.org)
• Big Winner: OUR Open Course Library (elearningcentralia.wordpress.com)
• Sir John Daniel of the Commonwealth of Learning: Open Education and Policy (creativecommons.org)

Open Ed Conference: "Which License for OER?"

Image by kool_skatkat via FlickrSpeakers: Ahrash Bissell, Gary Lopez, Philipp Schmidt

Tired of the never-ending debate about "Which license for OER?" We agree! Perhaps we should talk about "Which assets" instead.

For too many projects, and for too long, the OER community has grappled with the proper interpretation of open-content licenses, their use, and possible sustainability strategies built around them. The Creative Commons licensing suite has emerged as the global standard for OER licensing, yet it has not lessened, let alone solved, this debate. The problem can be distilled to three key issues: 1) there is more than one CC license, 2) interpretation of some licensing terms (such as the non-commercial term) is subjective, and 3) the license chosen is widely perceived to be a key factor in determining workable sustainability models for OER use and production.

In this session, we will examine each of these issues, paying particular attention to their effects on people's perceptions of OER, the different ways in which licenses are justified and used, and the overall impact on the progress (or lack thereof) of the field.

We will also discuss whether it could be helpful to shift the frame of the debate, from "Which license?" to "Which assets?" In brief, the contention here is that the persistent focus on licensing has stifled the emergence of creative new production, use, and delivery models and reduced the impact of OER accordingly. One option is to embrace hybrid production models, where all "OER" are released with as few restrictions possible (e.g., under CC BY), but not all resources (from a given producer) need be released as OER. We are hoping that the discussion will reveal other options as well.

We are anticipating that we will be able to integrate the insights gained from this discussion into helpful resources for both existing practitioners and newcomers to the OER field.

Notes: There was no presentation here but this was a question and answer session. How do we produce OERs in a way that schools can use them. The speaker claims that copyright issues are not really an issue in the classroom. He is a proponent of the "CC by" license. He discussed the OER decision tree for organizations seeking to be involved in OER production. He thinks that a dual publication model might be a good idea. If you have some materials that are aligned by standards or that they were put together with scaffolded learning in mind. Can we publish a restricted version for the purposes of standards AND then break that up into open modules.

What do you do with faculty who want to release their materials for free but then they get picked up by someone who wants to put a license on it that will allow them to make money?

Two reasons licenses are important is that they can protect the author and to foster more reuse. There is now no "blessed sources" for texts in the open environment. We do not know enough about the sustainability issues around the licenses to know what the effects will be - we need more research.

Jaroslav made the point that BSD used to be an open source operating system that was made commercial. We e need more consensus on licenses.

Related articles

• Blackboard to add support for CC Attribution (creativecommons.org)
• OERs: Public Service Education and Open Production (downes.ca)
• Commonwealth of Learning adopts CC BY-SA as part of new OER policy (creativecommons.org)

3 Reasons Why OERs are Better Than "Free"

I see a lot of emails, Tweets, and blog postings that include free materials from both corporations and individuals included in lists of "open education resources" or OERs. I always have to let people know that I am not anti-corporate: I am using a corporately produced computer and posting to a corporate blog. So why so picky about licensing? Because open licenses mean sustainability. We have a good basic definition of OERs from Stephen Downes: "Open educational resources are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone." Notice that there are no limitations there of any kind. It does not say you must be a member, ask permission, or be vetted by the Ted Talk people (which are great and basically free but not openly licensed). So what is the big deal? In online learning, some instructors like to be able to package the learning materials with a course. This is not always possible on commercially licensed products (yes, I said "product" and that is another issue). If the materials are licensed using Creative Commons, that takes care of those issues. Creative Commons licenses allow us the

1. OERs can be remixed and republished
Look closely at "free" textbooks or materials that are not openly licensed. Typically, you are not allowed to reproduce the text in any way. In some cases, you may be able to print it out or link to it. In many cases, downloading it and uploading again to another server would be considered a violation of copyright and way beyond the bounds of the Teach Act.

2. OERs do not disappear
OERs do not graduate, retire, or accept contracts. OERs do not move to other colleges or get bought out. Regular readers of this blog have had to join me in mourning the passing of a lot of really great tools on the internet - Drop.Io was one. If it were an open source program, someone would still be using and developing it today. I am still using Delicious Bookmarks but holding my breath as it has been sold. One of my favorite textbooks on Semiotics was free for years on the internet and I knew many people that used it. It was bought out by a publisher and it only exists at Archive.Org's Way Back Machine as a fond memory. I have seen teaching materials dissapear from the internet when If something is really worth teaching, it is worth putting an open license on so others, long after you have retired, will get to benefit from your wisdom and influence.

3. OERs are adaptable to your community
Why should your students have to adapt to your material? Shouldn't that be the other way around? The entire time I have been in education (even as a student), I have been dealing with instructors who say "We will use half of this textbook and everything else will be taken from the four other books you had to buy." Why? Because it would be a copyright violation for the instructor to bundle in only the pieces he or she is actually going to use. This is the same for free materials on the internet - if you can't adapt that "free" resource, you have to continually add to the reading list.

When I first got into teaching, I never had to ask for syllabi or materials because the teachers I worked with believed that a textbook was not a course and hand-outs and tests were not teaching. Teaching is what one does. The spirit of collegiality impelled them to share and help a new teacher. I hope that I have carried that spirit forward as well. But in these days of copyright happy corporate culture, I am using the Creative Commons license to again let others know that they don't have to ask.

Related articles

• A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER) (downes.ca)
• Background and action paper on OER (downes.ca)
• Commonwealth of Learning adopts CC BY-SA as part of new OER policy (creativecommons.org)
• Open Educational Resources: A Definition (downes.ca)

Finding Creative Commons Videos on YouTube

We are in the middle of helping faculty develop courses for a grant that requires that all of the content be openly licensed: Creative Commons or public domain. YouTube is making it easier to find such content:

The "Filter & Explore" link lets you find content that is licensed as Creative Commons as well as find content that is closed captioned.

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• Creative Commons Licensing Comes to YouTube (freetech4teachers.com)

OERs and the Next Stage of Open Textbooks

By rubyblossom. via FlickrThere are some exciting things happening in the world of open education resources and open textbooks. I have worked in the recent past on projects that create or find open education resources, participated in presentations on open textbooks, and this latest project feels like the next step in all of this. I am working as a consultant (instructional design) on the Kaleidoscope Project. The purpose of the project is to create collaborative efforts between colleges to create courses using existing OERs with each course being developed by at least two partner institutions. A number of our College of the Redwoods faculty are participating in this grant. The focus on the grant is not the production of open textbooks or course materials (although that is happening anyway) but on design and results:

"Project Kaleidoscope will close the loop on improved course design and student learning. Using OER and a common assessment process will allow faculty teams to improve the course design and learning results based on analysis of embedded assessments and deeper learning results. Actually, the project requires this on-going, iterative review and improvement."

The learning outcomes piece of this is what is going to allow us to track the effectiveness of the materials used. Folks in the OER world have an idea of where this might go, that using open textbooks and learning objects can be just as effective and in many cases, more effective than a commercial textbook. Why? Because learning objectives and outcomes differ from institution to institution based on the needs of the local communities. This is especially true for the community colleges who often have to work on getting students up to speed academically. Faculty already have to adapt and remix commercial texts for the needs of the student populations often in the form of additional, costly supplements or multiple books. What I have been finding in my work with open textbooks is that textbooks are often supplanted (not supplemented) by openly licensed video, audio, images (and yes, open textbooks) making the course even more engaging for the students. When colleges work from the learning objectives and then find openly licensed materials that meet those learning objectives, everyone wins. But we have gone through that phase; it is now time to apply learning analytics to OERs and really show what works, what yet needs to be done, and what is possible.

Partners with the grant include Cerritos College, Chadron State College, College of the Redwoods, Mercy College, Palo Verde College, Santa Ana College, Santiago Canyon College, and Tompkins Cortland College. Advisers to the grant include Norman Bier, the ubiquitous Cable Green, M.S. Vijay Kumar, Terrel Rhodes, and David Wiley.  rSmart is supporting the project by hosting the Sakai sites where the courses will live. And Kim Thanos, CCH*, is managing the whole thing on amazingly tight deadlines!

If you are involved in similar research into OERs and learning analytics, I would love to hear about it via email or leave a comment.

Related articles

• 10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should) (mindshift.kqed.org)
• Brazil introduces OER into federal legislation and adopts local government policy (creativecommons.org)
• Creative Commons & the Association of Educational Publishers to establish a common learning resources framework (creativecommons.org)
• Should OER favour commercial use? (downes.ca)

*Chief Cat Herder

OERs and Money: The revolution will happen without you.

Image via Wikipedia"On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." -- Stewart Brand.

I ran across this quote while perusing some funny videos of Daedalus Howell from a while back who was eulogizing the "Ten Things Killed by the Internet." The video is from 2009 and I hope the updated version will one day include "over-priced college textbooks." This was one of those moments of serendipity because I have been reading the debate between David Wiley and Stephen Downes about whether OER should favor commercial use. OERs are "open eduction resources" such as Stephen Downes' book on critical thinking and logical fallacies. My first reaction to the debated question is "no." Why should an open license "favor" the very mechanism that it is trying to subvert? And my second reaction is "So what?" The kind of education that "favors" commercial licenses is going the way of the video store.

I do not envy David Wiley. Going up against Stephen Downes in a debate is no mean feat. Wiley has the credibility gap to over-come with his connection to commercial publishing, and Downes has been a long time OER advocate and contributer who has been writing on this from the beginning.

I personally feel strongly that learning materials should be created by the community that uses them. The publishers just get in the way. We have a number of examples right here at College of the Redwoods of a community of educators getting together to create a textbook and online testing system that works better than anything that a publisher could offer us. Why? Because it is customized and built from the ground up with the needs of the local community in mind. With commercial textbooks, one has to amend, adapt, and supplement. There is nothing wrong with that; it is just not better than community authored. No body ever said "Hey, lets go with the Pearson textbook; they have our students' best interest at heart."

There are good commercial text books, but there are some atrocious ones that cost just as much! And meanwhile, more and more textbooks and learning objects are being created and openly licensed to world. There are companies positioning themselves to facilitate open textbooks and they will be profitable for a while. They are poised to become the Netflix of education. How long will that paradigm last? Who knows. I find it hysterical that with the economy in the shape that it is, with education costs rising faster than inflation and healthcare that commercial publishers feel they have to protect and defend corporate profits in a debate. And it is all available to you for free.

Related articles

• Should OER favour commercial use? (downes.ca)
• Is the OER movement flawed? Join the debate! (downes.ca)
• Tony Bates, Challenging OER "Truth" (highereducationmanagement.wordpress.com)
• Dilemmas of Openness - Conclusion (drapestakes.blogspot.com)

Towards an OER University: Free learning for all students worldwide

Image via Wikipedia

This is from Cable Green's blog:

Universities in Australia, Canada and New Zealand are hoping to achieve "a quantum shift" in higher education access by launching an "OER university". (article)

Concept is: http://wikieducator.org/OER_University

There is an open meeting (all are invited) on Feb 22: Noon – 8:00pm (pacific). If you can’t make it to New Zealand … join the meeting as a virtual participant… I’ll be attending from Olympia, WA ;)   


Please tag this activity with:  #oeru

·         Webinar recording.  (direct link)

·         Creative Commons post

·         Editorial on meeting (by organizer)

Related articles

• Designing assessment and credit pathways for open education learners (creativecommons.org)
• OER: Pie in the sky or meaningful reality? (INVITED BLOGGER OF THE MONTH - November) (ictelt.blogspot.com)
• $2billion for OERs could end the textbook industry as we know it... (downes.ca)
• The Right to Research Coalition's Nick Shockey: Open Education and Policy (creativecommons.org)

OEH: Open Education Hardware?

I have been very interested in the work that has been going on around the $100 laptop and Negroponte's "One Laptop Per Child." Unfortunately, this program has not been a success, and I think it has to do with the business model. Building an inexpensive computer is a hard thing to do here in America.

Access to computers and networks should be as fundamental as access to education. In some parts to the world, they are one and the same, or at least hand-in-hand. Wide-spread access to technology and networks is bringing teacher training and medical information to parts of the world where it is desperately needed. Access needs to be expanded. Not only in places like Africa, India, and China, but even here in Humboldt County, California where the infrastructure supporting much needed distance education is insufficient to meet the needs of the surrounding communities. One thing that stands in the way of this dream of open access for everyone is the cost of adequate and appropriate technology; low cost computers and access to networks.

There are very few in the computer industry who really want a $100 laptop. There is very little initial profit in that. Although, I wouldn't mind selling that contract to China or India. And speaking of India, it looks like they are the ones who are really going to make this happen. They have come out with a $35 tablet computer prototype running Linux. There is a real question about who will manufacture these computers. The Indian government is talking about subsidizing the manufacturing end. I think this is a good move. I would like to see a foundation take this on. A consortium, as in the case of the Sakai Foundation working with UNESCO and a couple of other stake-holder governments, could make this work. If we can have open source software like Linux and Sakai, why not open source hardware? And like the software model, no one will make money off of the hardware, but a company could do quite well for itself by selling support services to governments, schools, and other institutions.

I am glad that India did not wait for companies like Microsoft or Apple to come up with a "solution" because these companies are not interested in the problem and can't understand the problem; they are too busy protecting their brand and their bottom line. Let them. India is going in the right direction and leading the way.

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MIT, Yale, and other Barriers to Education

Image via Wikipedia

Ben Wildavsky wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed called "Is Globally Democratized Learning Always a Good Thing?" I went there to comment, but I set off their curmudgeon filter. It now says Threat Level Orange and won't let me post.

I feel that society and technology has changed how we communicate and how we learn to such a degree that "the traditional hierarchical relationship between professor and student" is more of a barrier than anything else.

First off, it represents an economic barrier that needed to come down a long time ago. There are places in the world where the globalization of education will mean the difference between life and death for millions of people. Many countries in Africa can't wait for the hand-wringers in the Ivy Leagues to decide when teaching epidemiology online is okay or not. They need the information now and they need to learn the best way to learn that information online.

Second, the hierarchical relationship is not the only method of teaching; it is merely the traditional one. Socrates was suspicious of writing because it took away our reliance on memory.

Third, as much as I appreciate the efforts of MIT and Yale, they did not invent open education content. Much of their content online consists of syllabi and reading lists. I do not find comfort in the repetition of "MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon" - these universities are institutions of exclusion. And ironically, I believe one of the reasons Anya Kamenetz is so popular is because she is a product of Yale and the access that background represents. There are far more revolutionary writers on education and open content that will not get that kind of attention.

Statements like "it seems to me that students don’t always learn effectively on their own or with minimal assistance" represent a complete misunderstanding of what online learning is and an unfamiliarity with the basic research into the field of online learning. Students in online classes can have highly interactive, thoughtful, and engaging experiences. There are examples of poor online teaching just as there are examples of poor face-to-face teaching. But to think that the alternative to face-to-face is "interactive software" is a misunderstanding of online pedagogy.

I disagree with Dunderstadt as quoted in this article as well. There is a significant amount of knowledge creation and research that is going on via the internet - for instance in open classrooms like George Siemen's and Stephen Downes courses on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. There are many examples like this.

How will professors of traditional universities be able to provide "the experience and wisdom to intelligently navigate the new world of knowledge" if they are unwilling to experience it themselves?