Why should I adopt an open textbook?

From the privacy – and primacy – of LMS (specifically Canvas) discussion forums to the public “playground” afforded by Hypothesis; From the formality of pre-determined questions (which can privilege the scope and purpose of reading) to open-ended and less formal (re)action and exchange; and From an instructor’s authority to center and control textual discourse to a de-centering of power through a fracturing of attention, interest, and commitment.

Examples of bad peer review and why it is damaging to researchers

Federally Funded Research Results Are Becoming More Open and Accessible

Pedagogy is leading people to a place where they can learn for themselves. It is about creating environments and situations where people can draw out from within themselves, and hone the abilities they already have, to create their own knowledge, interpret the world in their own unique ways, and ultimately realise their full potential as human beings.

Opening up Education: Innovative Teaching and Learning for All through New Technologies and Open Educational Resources

The resource-based economy goes like this: In the future robots will do all the jobs (including creating new robots and fixing broken one). Now, imagine the world is like a public library, where you can borrow any book you want but never own it. Fresco wants all enterprise like this, whether it’s groceries, new tech, gasoline, or alcohol. He wants everything free and eventually provided to us by robots, software, and automation.

New Directions in Open Education

Democratizing science does not mean settling questions about Nature by plebiscite, any more than democratizing politics means setting the prime rate by referendum. What democratization does mean, in science as elsewhere, is creating institutions and practices that fully incorporate principles of accessibility, transparency, and accountability. It means considering the societal outcomes of research at least as attentively as the scientific and technological outputs. It means insisting that in addition to being rigorous, science be popular, relevant, and participatory.

Literacy Compared to What

(Crazy app uptake + riding data + math wizardry = many surprises in store.)

Attendance Policies

Higher education is moving away from its traditional emphasis on the instructor, however, replacing itwith a focus on learning and the learner.

Ashift is taking place in schools all over the world as learners are exploring subject matter through the act of creation rather than the consumption of conten

Smarter State Spending

Data sharing over open-source platforms can create ambiguous rules about data ownership and publication authorship, or raise concerns about data misuse by others, thus discouraging liberal sharing of data.

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

There is a fruitful argument for the cost of these more “traditional” publishing houses, as they spend a good amount of time with editing, formatting, and distribution (often in paper form)

Unpaid Labor

curate

Where would you start?

Where would you start?

The point of replication isn't to shame researchers — it's to build better science

But those crying the loudest to stop the lock-out laws fail to provide an adequate alternative.

ever-growing

many visions for blockchain in education seem to advocate writing it all to the blockchain

“knowledge creation”.

Figure 3 illustrates at what age ceased ‘indie’ journals stopped publishing. Most journals survived the first 2–5 years period, whereas the mortality rate rose in the critical 6–9 years period. After that, the number of journals ceasing dropped sharply, indicating that the surviving journals had found stability.

The development over time of active ‘indie’ OA journals before and after 2002 is shown in Figs. 1A and 1B. A journal was counted as ‘active’ in a particular year if it was still publishing articles in that year. Before 2002 the number of active journals grew very rapidly from a total of 76 journals in 1995 to 207 journals in 2002. The year 2002 was the cut-off year to be included in the studied cohort, meaning that no new journals were added to the data set after this point in time. After 2002, the number of journals in the cohort decreased steadily to the 127 that stayed active in 2014.

The average number of articles published was 31 per year with 74% publishing 0–30 articles, and 9% 60 or more. The study also contains interesting data about the workload done, revenues etc.

“The key question for OA publishing is whether it can be scaled up from a single journal publishing model with relatively few articles published per year to a comprehensive major journal with of the order of 50–100 articles annually.” They further note: “The continuation of the journal relies very heavily on the personal involvement of the editor and is as such a risk to the model. Employing staff to handle, for example, management, layout and copyediting tasks, is a cost-increasing factor that also is a threat to the model.” Both questions are still highly relevant today.

Earlier studies A number of previous studies, both snapshots and some with longitudinal elements, have shed light on different aspects of such type of journals, which for short we will call “indie” journals.

Often the enthusiasm of the founders and their personal network can carry a volunteer-based journal for a few years. But at that same time this type of journal, which lack the support of employed staff and a professional publishing organization, are threatened by many dangers. The editor may change affiliation or retire, or the support of the university hosting the journal might be withdrawn. Authors may stop sending in good manuscripts and it may become more and more difficult to find motivated reviewers. Not being included in the Web of Science, and the impact factor that follows, may in the long run limit the number of submissions severely. On the positive side of the balance the emergence of open source software for publishing (i.e., Open Journals System) and cheap or free hosting services like Latin American Scielo have facilitated the technical parts of publishing.

Most of the OA journals founded in the 1990s were of this variety, later many established subscription journals (particularly society ones) have made their digital versions freely available immediately or with a delay. This has been particularly noticeable in countries where cheap or free national or regional electronic portals have become available, like Scielo, Redalyc, and J-stage. Since around 2003 the OA market has become increasingly dominated by professionally published journals, which finance themselves by charging authors so-called article processing charges, APCs. At first such journals were being launched by open access publishers like BioMedCentral and PLOS, but in the last couple of years the major commercial and society publishers have increasingly started new OA journals and have also converted some subscription journals to APC-financed models.

Open Access (OA) is nowadays increasingly being used as a business model for the publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals, both by specialized OA publishing companies and major, predominantly subscription-based publishers. However, in the early days of the web OA journals were mainly founded by independent academics, who were dissatisfied with the predominant print and subscription paradigm and wanted to test the opportunities offered by the new medium. There is still an on-going debate about how OA journals should be operated, and the volunteer model used by many such ‘indie’ journals has been proposed as a viable alternative to the model adopted by big professional publishers where publishing activities are funded by authors paying expensive article processing charges (APCs). Our longitudinal quantitative study of 250 ‘indie’ OA journals founded prior to 2002, showed that 51% of these journals were still in operation in 2014 and that the median number of articles published per year had risen from 11 to 18 among the survivors. Of these surviving journals, only 8% had started collecting APCs. A more detailed qualitative case study of five such journals provided insights into how such journals have tried to ensure the continuity and longevity of operations.

A longitudinal study of independent scholar-published open access journals

create their own interactive learning tools

There is still much more emphasis in hyperbolic education discourse on pushing content rather than enabling connections between people

a handful in a few major world languages

The majority of content comes from Western, developed countries

expand access to some knowledge

xploratory grants for developing new pathways.

Colleges using data analytics have to make sure their students have “open futures” — that their programs create educational opportunities, not the other way around.

disheartened that open education is still mainly focused on MOOCs and OERs, rather than on the broader concept of open textbooks, open research, and open data.

“Students chose how they were going to display how they were going to master those standards through projects,”

The copyright for the materials in this collection is held by Universal Music Canada and their affiliates. These materials have been made available with their consent. Patrons may not download, reproduce, alter or transmit files/images without permission from the copyright holder(s). These files/images may not be used for commercial purposes but may be used under the fair dealing or educational exemptions outlined in the Canadian Copyright Act.

Six Things Faculty Can Do to Promote Student Engagement

The web breaks us out of a product-centered publishing cycle and allows us to become part of an ongoing flow, in which knowledge is perpetually negotiated within networks.

educators and students alike have found themselves more and more flummoxed by a system that values assessment over engagement, learning management over discovery, content over community, outcomes over epiphanies

We need to enable and facilitate alternative development models if our vision of universal OER adoption is to become a reality.

While the open educationfieldtends to focus onthe development and scalability ofeducational resources and practices, networked learningtends to emphasizethe pedagogical experience of learning communities and interpersonal connections, and connected learning promotes instructional designs for holistic, participatorylearning.

who are the gatekeepers in deciding what that looks like.

it can mean that students see themselves as actively building their learning

does “open” actually transform the way in which we do “school,” the way in which we teach and learn?

Free? Open access? Open enrollment? Open data? Openly-licensed materials, as in open educational resources or open source software? Open for discussion? Open for debate? Open to competition? Open for business? Open-ended intellectual exploration?

Look for existing networks for collaboration that could be adapted to fit the strategy if formal networks are desired.

ANCHOR INSTITUTIONS

OER must have the right metadata

SUPPORTING ROBUST TECHNICAL and INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

the Foundation will provide enhanced support for grantee collaboration.

the technical basis for OER

robust and flexible infrastructure.

Moreover, ZTC degrees ensure that the benefits of open materials follow students from enrollment to graduation, allowing for a pathway of personalized courses that guide students toward completing their degrees.

Open materials can empower faculty with the aca-demic freedom to tailor their courses to their students’ needs and even engage students in meaningful learning experiences through adaptation and improvement of the open content itself.10

reserve part of its portfolio to con-tinue funding the infrastructure necessary to support the field

Therefore, we refreshed our OER strategy to focus on our goal of using grants to help OER reach mainstream adoption.

high-quality academic materials

I hired a bunch of undergrad students and recent alums, and paid them out of my own pocket to assist me.

and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

and refreshed OER strategy.

The infrastructure

Develop innovative OER models

the frustration faculty members sometimes feel when searching for open content to include in their courses.

thinking more broadly about what ‘open’ means and how open connects to a variety of different areas

Scaling Up OER

New Hampshire System Plans Open Education Push

“papers are the only scientific artifacts that are guaranteed to be preserved.”

Annotation can help us weave that web of linked data.

If the limitations are acknowledged and accounted for, there is no reason why open education should not offer genuine opportunities for promoting equity of access to higher education

addressed the way we treat student writing as the waste product of assessment.

If texts — content — are at the heart of a course, and content is now shaped into a process that depends on learner engagement in order to function fully, then OER propels us into truly student-centered territory.

the learning-analytics industry still lacks the kinds of standards and protocols that would make it easy to extract, organize, and share such data among institutions for research purposes.

Sakai development is actually accelerating.

Preamble Share We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

talking about open pedagogy as the “second power of open.”

talking about open pedagogy as the “second power of open.”

Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?

the LMS’s institutionally friendly attributes have an important role in shaping our thinking about teaching and learning.

In considering considerations, I think it’s important to begin with a thinking (or erasing?) exercise that asks you to forget everything you know or think you know about ed tech and start over.  

Designing for Open Pedagogy with CCCOER

List of publications on open access research data

The essay competition will run until June 15th and will be judged by a committee of scientists, librarians, members of industry, and students based on the following criteria. 

SSRN had one of the early freemium business models for an open access service.

that OER can provide benefits to some schools, but that commercial resources will continue to have value because of the tech-based enhancements, in analytics and adaptive learning and other areas, that they offer beyond academic content.

Wiggins and McTighe’s solutions—backward design, sharing detailed rubrics with students, etc.—are certainly the right way to do teacher-centered, standards-driven education based on measurable outcomes.

Input feed: lkfitz's bookmarks

5 billion reasons for open access

FLEXspace is a repository and open online education resource institutions can use to research and share information about successful learning space design.

To me, this is what OER for the web should start to reflect.

Open access is not fully realized without open peer review, which would provide opportunities for scholarly dialogue and critique throughout the writing process and beyond, argues Alex Mueller.

Work on exploitation arising from asymmetries of information is an important example.

A public must allow for new members to join as the old fade away. A public must not die every semester. 

Around 40% of Swiss research is open access

first MOOC was open in the sense articulated by the Open Education Consortium: knowledge, insights, and information were shared between students, and new knowledge, skills, ideas, and understanding built through sharing. This is perhaps the purest form of open education, in which the instructor is a facilitator, and the students collaborate to create a shared understanding.

Cape Town Open Education Declaration (n.d.) declares that the promise of open education is that “each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.

Jenkins’ argument is that cultural progress is necessarily the result of freedom

material objects that may be patentable, rather than copyrightable, may be open. The Open Design Definition, for example, was developed in 2000 by the Open Design Foundation for the world of manufacturing design

My experimentation with open pedagogy – and my attempts to guide students’ learning with/in and across open platforms – was a social endeavor that invited reciprocal networking.

I can be in Egypt and in my home office at the same time. And because I can communicate with her at any moment, unexpectedly, I am always in Egypt and in my home office.

Writing and submission. The process of compiling findings, writing accompanying narrative and making this available for public view and scrutiny can be simplified by the use of new improved software. These tools can help identify relevant papers through increasingly powerful learning algorithms (e.g. F1000Workspace, Mendeley, Readcube). They can also enable collaborative authoring (e.g. F1000Workspace, Overleaf, Google docs), and provide formatting tools to simplify the process of structuring an article to ensure all the necessary underlying information has been captured (e.g. F1000Workspace, EndNote). Submission for posting as a preprint, and/or for formal publication and peer review, should be as simple as a single click.

After hundreds of emails with developers and peer-reviewers, his open-source book will be ready for use at UConn. Neth began planning for the second version of the book in January and the project has taken more than four months.

SocialBoost — is a tech NGO that promotes open data and coordinates the activities of more than 1,000 IT-enthusiasts, biggest IT-companies and government bodies in Ukraine through hackathons for socially meaningful IT-projects, related to e-government, e-services, data visualization and open government data. SocialBoost has developed dozens of public services, interactive maps, websites for niche communities, as well as state projects such as data.gov.ua, ogp.gov.ua. SocialBoost builds the bridge between civic activists, government and IT-industry through technology. Main goal is to make government more open by crowdsourcing the creation of innovative public services with the help of civic society.

I utilize some of the useful critiques OA has generated to inform the discussion of OER creation and practice.

Books can learn from the web how to be bounded, but open.The web can learn from books how to be open, but bounded.

Active OER: Beyond open licensing policies

“free vs. open”

Blogs tend towards conversational and quotative reuse, which is great for some subject areas, but not so great for others. Wiki feeds forward into a consensus process that provides a high level of remix and reuse, but at the expense of personal control and the preservation of divergent goals. Wikity takes lessons from federated wiki, combining the individual control of blogging with the permissionless improvement of wiki.

Do we mean free open access?

the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked

We’re also losing the organic and open shape of the web. It’s becoming something much more rigid and more hierarchical.

The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.

Open Education Resources and Repositories

what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost.

Those students that bought the cheap version of the text back in 1991? They were pill-splitters. And they failed at pill-splitting (and maybe at the course). Do we own that failure? What we’ve learned over the past five years or so in OER is that what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost. It’s the simplicity that you can get when you’re not working with an industry trying to milk every last dollar out of students. It’s every student having their materials on day one, for as long as they like, without having to navigate “simple” questions of what to buy, what to rent, and when-is-the-book-on-the-syllabus-that’s-required-not-really-required.

Asking What Students Spend on Textbooks Is the Wrong Question

Pedagogy in Public: Open Education Unbound

Is it possible to add information to a resource without touching it?

The University of New Hampshire Open Educational Resources Ambassador Pilot

To maximize its utility