936 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2019
    1. Because you didn’t change the instructional design of the book in any way

      But by changing the license you now enable the book to be remixed and adapted to the needs of the students: an open license enables open pedagogy.

    2. I see four groups who are trying to use OER to solve closely related – but ultimately very different – problems: The negative impact on access to education caused by the high price of traditional learning materials The negative impact on student success caused by limitations in the traditional publishing model The negative impact on pedagogy caused by copyright-related constraints inherent in traditional learning materials The negative impact on students caused by a wide range of behaviors related to the business models of traditional publishers (If you use OER and don’t see yourself in one of these groups, what problem are you trying to solve by using OER?)
    1. A large part of the ‘resources’ conversation in OER is this kind of problem. Cheaper access to books. More people using books. Nice measurable problems that can be fixed.

      Lowering costs for learning materials via OER: A complicated problem vs what Dave calls complex problems, like open pedagogies.

    1. It’s a turbulent time for the college textbook industry. Low student enrollment, tight company budgets and changing business plans have hampered growth at major educational publishers such as Pearson, Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education.

      The Inside Higher ED provides resources on news, adult learning, and technology advances. They provide information on online learning environments. This is deemed useful as online education is becoming popular. One of the articles I found was the alternative to textbooks. Publishers are jumping on board to creating custom textbooks at lower prices. The market is changing and moving to open educational resources. Publishers plan to invest more in their digital courseware. 3/5

    1. Of course the Open Education conference is just an open education conference and it certainly isn’t the only place to have these conversations. Regional events such as the Northeast OER Summit, the Cascadia Open Education Summit, Wisconsin’s E-ffordability Summit, the Statewide Colorado OER conference and others are wonderful options. Further afield, the OER conference and the Open Education Global conference are both events that welcome critical conversations. As do other events like Digital Pedagogy Lab and the many virtual conference hallway conversations facilitated by Virtually Connecting.

      Nice list of open education and OER related conferences and communities.

    1. CARE Framework

      Thanks to @mkcow below for providing a direct link to the CARE Framework.

  2. Oct 2019
    1. “When we call anything “open” we need to clarify: What are we opening, how are we opening it, for whom, and why?”

      Good and necessary questions

    1. money

      Whose money? Important to determine whether the student or the institution is the winner here. Are we increasing access to high quality resources? I think the answer is yes, but I think it also bears thinking about.

      Another type of savings to consider: the technical debt that students of all ages incur when they encounter a new technology that may or may not be well supported. If OER is trapped inside proprietary technologies with unique logins, it's worth considering how many of those resources we ask students to grapple with over the course of a degree.

    2. make the teaching and learning problems caused by copyright the core issue we are solving with OER

      I still wonder to what degree open educational practices are necessarily or always tied to copyright. That is, can OEP be implemented on copyrighted texts?

    3. Project Management for Instructional Designers

      Ironically this book is licensed "non-commercial." I personally like that license but after years of folks arguing against that license, I would love to hear the rationale behind it.

    1. I launched the open textbook project over a summer, and because I teach at a public university where I had no easy access to graduate assistants or funding,

      I think that this is one of the biggest barrier for changing course materials; if our institutions are not supplying incentives to faculty, what are creative ways to effectively promote OER to faculty?

    1. Cengage’s own research forecast that the use of OER as primary courseware was poised to triple within five years.

      Useful info, which I'm not above using.

    1. a range of business models

      I think Hypothes.is plays a very important role in democratising these discussions. The real places where these decisions are made are often closed off to faculty and students. We need to have serious discussions about which sustainability models are appropriate for education not just the businesses. What is sustainable for education may not always be sustainable for business!

  3. Sep 2019
    1. Notably, several of the catalysts identified by participants were not directly related to an awareness of OER or open textbooks. Several of these catalysts are related to innovation, learner empowerment, and increasing access to knowledge more generally. While these individuals identified as open education practitioners, they did not necessarily cite OER as their starting point for integrating openness in teaching and learning.

      This is an interesting conclusion as it has oft been stated that OER are a gateway to OEP. While that appears to be the case for 3 of the participants, for the rest it appears that OER was not the starting point to OEP. What bears deeper investigation is whether the second or third step to OEP was OER. Reminds me of a blog post I wrote a few years back wondering if OEP required OER http://clintlalonde.net/2017/02/04/does-open-pedagogy-require-oer/

    2. There is a growing need to establish literacies around open education, copyright, social media and networked learning as a foundational skill.

      Among both students AND instructors. Instructors teach what they know, and if they do not feel comfortable themselves working in these environments b/c they lack digital skills, then they will not encourage students to work openly.

    3. Thomas further commented “it’s openness in what we bring into the classroom, openness in what we take out of the classroom, and an openness between what happens between the students and myself and the students and each other in how we organise the classroom.”

      Great quote

    4. Alice noted her feeling that the use and sharing of OER were one of the “less threatening” components of OEP.

      This is an important change in perception that has occurred in the past 10-15 years of OER. OER's used to be met with much skepticism by faculty. It is nice to see that these are now becoming "less threatening" and, by extension, more accessible.

    1. One notable barrier that has prevented faculty from adopting OER is concerns about the quality of the materials. The present study extends upon a growing body of research indicating that OER are not perceived to be lower in quality than traditional textbooks.

      I have trouble believing many faculty members will be swayed by undergraduate students' perceptions of quality. There's a difference to be explored in "quality of disciplinary content in the abstract" vs. "quality as a study aid for this particular course."

      This is of course a broader concern for advocacy for OERs, not a critique of this particular study.

    2. One reason why the students assigned open textbooks may use those textbooks more is that they perceive a greater need for/relevance of their textbook relative to those assigned traditional textbooks

      The absence of the teacher here seems like an issue. To what extent may the students have come up with that perception on their own, or might they perceive it because the teacher told them about the work involved in vetting this particular textbook? What, if anything, did the traditional textbook teachers say?

      (Further down the paragraph it's made clear that the OERs were adapted to be more relevant, which I agree is part of the attraction of OERs and including that is fair. But I'd still like to know what the teachers said in class about it, if anything.)

    3. and students assigned an open textbook reported a significantly higher percentage of underutilized textbooks (M = 52.20, SE = 1.38) than those assigned a traditional textbook (M = 48.44, SE = 1.21)

      Students who have been primed with the knowledge that this course uses a lower-cost OER text are more critical of textbook price vs use in other courses?

  4. Jul 2019
    1. “My professor shows us slides, but, um, the book is not used at all, and that’s a book that I bought for $200, and that, even though I’m not using it the price is going to go down. I mean, it’s unwrapped, so that right there takes away its value.” — 2nd year student at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY

      To me the vast part of the problem is that students assume a "required" textbook is actually required. It doesn't take much work or thought after even the first semester of Freshman year to realize this fallacy. Students need to learn the fine art of choosing their own textbooks. More on this: https://boffosocko.com/2011/07/30/on-choosing-your-own-textbooks/

    2. My professor shows us slides, but, um, the book is not used at all

      The student's description of the course reminds me that conversations about OER go hand-in-hand with conversations about pedagogy. How does adopting and (co)creating OER texts affect the how's and why's of teaching and learning? And for instructors (and students) new to OER, how can they receive support before, during, and after the use/creation of an OER text?

    1. Open Education Resources OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license permitting their free use or re-purposing by others Much of the challenge in identifying ownership is due to the fact that it is hard to differentiate between who is the user and who is the producer when it comes to open learning in the classroom.

    2. Open learning, also known as open education

      requires a open, sharing, collaborative environment. Promotes pedagogical dialogue. OER have potential to transcend "geographic, economic, or language barriers". Also, OER strengthens digital literacy.

    1. 1)

      As I reflect on how instructors and students might co-create an OER text, I see questions like this, generated by the instructor/author, as an opportunity to establish and explore essential questions together. After brainstorming these questions, a possible next step would challenge students to write their own chapter (or other unit) in response to this question.

  5. Jun 2019
    1. I love the way you're thinking about design and pedagogy here. It makes me want to think more about possibilities for such design...I'm wondering what the startup effort would be for many teachers...

    2. Elsewhere, I use GitHub to facilitate multi-stage written assignments. Students are asked to revise an earlier written assignment, responding to instructor feedback, and to create a record of their revisions in their commit history to the earlier submitted document.

      This is an interesting idea. I've done similar things with Juxta, but I can see how Github would be a great tool for this...how much effort goes into teaching the tool?

    3. There is no lesson plan or outline we must read in order to enact an educational experience; instead, the website lets us have an educational experience right away and then lends itself to a series of follow-up questions, exercises, and reflective practices. Otherwise put, the website actively facilitates a pedagogical experience rather than providing access to pedagogical documents. There is no set up required.

      This is an interesting comment. I'm struck by the notion that the site enacts the learning process rather than provides materials. I'm also wondering how this might fit into the "open education" ethos.

  6. May 2019
    1. Despite popular rhetoric along the lines of “you can’t learn from materials you can’t afford,” their rather ingenious experiment showed that increasing access to learning materials by adopting OER instead of traditionally copyrighted resources (TCM) will almost never measurably improve learning. Learning will only improve measurably if you ALSO do something else.

      OMG YES!!!!!

    2. This was justified by the fact that there is a lack of empirical evidence to support expanding the use of OER.
    1. We need to emphasize program consolidation where appropriate, in order to direct more resources to high-demand programs such as computer science and education.  In addition, the Board’s Open Education Resources initiative will provide textbooks for certain courses at little or no cost.

      Ease tuition hike with free textbooks?

  7. Apr 2019
    1. The example of the Linux kernel shows that this is completely possible.

      I think the Linux kernel analogy breaks down even more in considering "the other 93%" of educational content, which David has already identified here as more niche, less kernelesque, than content for core courses. Seems to me, the more specialized and rarely used something is — either in digital technology or in content — the less likely it is going to be the focus of widespread, shared activity.

      If commercial publishers could rely on OER content for core classes and generate revenue from wrapping them in additional services (as David describes here), what is their incentive to devote any resources to labor-intensive, niche content that would have far lower revenue margins?

    2. Traditional textbook content like words and images are just like the operating system kernel – kind of boring.

      This is the part of the argument here I don't find convincing. I'm not sure we can liken content — yes even "traditional textbook content" — to OS kernels or roads as a kind of "boring" infrastructure. Content is an expression of knowledges/understandings right? If anything, content seems more like the "interesting" part that relies on the kernels/roads.

      Yet I am interested in the idea of thinking of content as PUBLIC infrastructure, in the sense that like roads, we have common interests in securing public sources for the resources necessary to produce and maintain educational content.

  8. Mar 2019
    1. We refer to this idea as the access hypothesis.

      In thinking about the questions I’m raising in my presentation at OLC Innovate 2019, let's start by asking the question whether we think the "access hypothesis" is a significant component in measuring the impact of OER on student learning?

    1. But often — and maybe even usually — when we complain about the cost of books, we’re complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books.

      And at the same time, OER’s lack of such ancillary materials is often blamed for its slow adoption.

    2. By teaching students to expect that books ought to be free, we are teaching them to be bad citizens.

      Point taken. Maybe the lesson is not about the price of books, but who should pay for them. A lot of course materials are produced in factory-like conditions by underpaid creators who have no intellectual property rights in the works they produce.

    3. a holdover

      I love the word for these types of anachronisms: skeumorph.

  9. Feb 2019
  10. quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com
    1. Why an HTML/CSS First Approach Works for #OER and why #OER Must Work for an HTML First Approach

      I'm in strong support of an HTML-first approach for both humans and OER. Great stuff Greg! Love the offline, non-digital learning activities!

    2. For too long the field of #OER has simply been a field studying itself. We debate what is open and what is not. What is a resource what is pedagogy...and is that pedagogy really praxis....

      I don't really get this opinion, or how it pertains to Greg's otherwise important point about the format of OER. Seems like it ignores BOTH the great many tangible contributions folks have made in the field of OER AND the very important conversations that also take place around topics as or more important than technical formats, like pedagogy, and the socio-economic ecosystem in which OER participates.

    1. We propose a different motivation structure for OER adoption. Our plan is to give some of the estimated yearly savings from OER use to the department, our teaching and learning center, and our library (5 percent/2.5 percent/2.5 percent, respectively). As an example, if a biology course enrolls 1,000 students per year, and the typical text savings would be $100 per student, adoption might save students $100,000 per year. Providing even 5 percent of the projected savings from OER adoption directly to the department as flexible money would be highly motivating to many departments; the teaching center and library are incentivized to support adoption and access. Although the savings from such a plan would accrue to the students, the retention of even one or two additional students due to better textbook usage by the students would, from an institutional perspective, pay for such an initiative. And, particularly for public universities, controlling cost, increasing access and enhancing success align with our mission.

      An amazing incentive that drives kickback to departments, not individuals.

    1. Do

      I like that most of these focus on process…as opposed to product. I still think they need to be revisited and remixed to capture my earlier note.

      Also thinking about issues of ownership, sharing, and IP online. This would call in a need for CC-licensing, open learning, OER, etc.

  11. Jan 2019
    1. The immense value of NOT “achieving a useful consensus” around what we mean by “open” and staying in that deeply interesting conversation is precisely because when we foreclose it, when we leave it, we miss out on new understandings for ourselves, and close them down for others. It’s no surprise that some women with very different global perspectives, like Maha and Sarah Lambert (whose paper “Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education” inspired Maha to write today) would remind me why we need to keep definitions of open, open.

      This paragraph is a core part of the main point I was trying to convey in this post. I was trying to celebrate respect for/comfort with/the value of ambiguity/messiness/"the other" in the term "open pedagogy" that the closed term "OER-enabled pedagogy" wasn't invented to support. As Maha Bali put it differently (better?) in part of a tweet about how truly open discourse might have: "Respect for the 'other' ... that does not reciprocate that respect. Comfort with ambiguity and messiness the 'other' does not have."

    1. Nate Angell has made similar comments in the past

      Read more about how I wasn't thinking about techno-determinism.

    2. Others will doubtless continue this deeply interesting conversation and I wish them well as they do – I am in no way criticizing them as I withdraw from these conversations.

      But no hard feelings.

    3. I’m convinced that the terms “open pedagogy” and “open educational practices” are understood so differently by so many people that there is literally no hope of achieving a useful consensus about the meaning of either of these terms. Some definitions are centered on OER. Some are centered on the public, linkable nature of the “open web.” Some are centered on social justice. Some are centered on collaboration. Some are centered on innovation. Some are centered on learner empowerment. Some are exercises in the permutations of these. There have even been arguments made that a clear definition would somehow be antithetical to the ideal of open. As I said, there appears to be no consensus coming for the meaning of either of these terms. For my own personal purposes of writing, researching, and advocating, the absence of a shared understanding of these terms removes any utility I previously hoped they had. Consequently, I don’t think I’ll use these terms any longer or participate in the discussion about their meanings going forward.

      David abandons debates about open practices/pedagogy.

    4. We learn by the things we do.

      Something everyone in the open education community might agree on.

    5. All of the activities that we associate with knowledge creation and other forms of scholarship are remix activities. They involve standing on the shoulders of giants, whether remixing existing knowledge in novel ways or combining previous understanding with genuinely new insight. Everything is a remix on one level or another.

      All knowledge production is a remix.

    1. Opening the Textbook: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2017

      great collection of reports from babson

    1. Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice

      Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process. This paper builds upon the Design Justice Principles, developed by an emerging network of designers and community organizers, to propose a working definition of design justice: Design justice is a field of theory and practice that is concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices.

    1. A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South

      Abstract: At the heart of the open educational resources (OER) movement is the intention to provide affordable access to culturally relevant education to all. This imperative could be described as a desire to provide education in a manner consistent with social justice which, according to Fraser (2005), is understood as “parity of participation”. Drawing on her concept of social justice, we suggest a slight modification of Fraser’s framework for critically analysing ways in which the adoption and impact of OER and their undergirding open educational practices (OEP) might be considered socially just. We then provide illustrative examples from the cross-regional Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project (2014-2017) to show how this framework can assist in determining in what ways, if at all, the adoption of OER and enactment of OEP have responded to economic inequalities, cultural inequities and political exclusions in education. Furthermore, we employ Fraser’s (2005) concepts to identify whether these social changes are either “affirmative” (i.e., ameliorative) or “transformative” in their economic, cultural and political effects in the Global South education context.

  12. Dec 2018
    1. Inflation-adjusted Textbook Pain Multiplier for Decision-Makers

      Analysis and solutions to better convey the economic impact of rising textbook costs.

  13. Nov 2018
    1. How do I listen to a podcast?Rajiv Jhangiani shares about critical open pedagogy on episode 226 of the Teaching in Hig

      Well presented, thoughtful look at OER in high ed. Great resource links.

    1. OER matters not because textbooks matter. OER matters because it highlights an example of how something central to our public missions, the transfer of our foundational disciplinary knowledge from one generation of scholars to the next, has been co-opted by private profit. And OER is not a solution, but a systemic shift from private to public architecture in how we deliver learning.

      I love this framing of OER as public infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of knowledge. I think it is not only generational, but also more broadly to the public. OER use is not limited to just students within our institutions, but are available freely and openly more broadly to the public. To anyone. I think we need to make that point more widely known. Every OER that is made freely available is making knowledge more open to not only students in our institutions, but to anyone, anywhere. It truly is "public" infrastructure.

  14. Oct 2018
    1. Universal education is now widely viewed as one of the basic requirements for a modern society and it serves as a chief catalyst for socio-economic and personal development.
  15. inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
    1. OER is an equity strategy for higher education: providing all students with access to course materials on the first day of class serves to level the academic playing field in course settings

      OER and equity

    1. "The study indicates that, based on two years of implementation across scores of colleges, OER can be an important tool in helping more students — and particularly low-income and underrepresented students — afford college, engage actively in their learning, persist in their studies and ultimately complete,"
    1. We can involve students in the process of curating content for courses, either by offering them limited choices between different texts or by offering them solid time to curate a future unit more or less on their own (or in a group) as a research project.

      Content is a process, not a product.

  16. Sep 2018
    1. One concrete example of combining constructionism and openness into OER-enabled pedagogy is Wiley's (2013) notion of "renewable assignments," which he contrasts with "disposable assignments."

      I don't see "renewable assignments" mentioned in Wiley's 2013 work.

    2. We define OER-enabled pedagogy as the set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions which are characteristic of OER.

      Definition of "OER-enabled pedagogy".

    3. Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy

  17. inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
    1. Within the context of this study, OER refer to free, open textbooks, which replaced previously adopted expensive, traditional, commercial textb

      suggests that OERs replace traditional textbooks or purchased resources, thus is there any relationship to any pedagogical change related to the use of OERs?

    1. “The survey’s results should be a wake-up call for everybody involved in higher education. This is especially true for the publishing industry, including our own company, as we historically contributed to the problem of college affordability,”

      Cengage Survey

    1. While each tool has differing ways in which it can be used in the classroom and with various Learning Management Systems (LMSs),

      What's the relationship between the LMS and OER or perhaps more specifically "open educational practices"?

    2. Between publishers' higher costs of textbooks and students' struggle with large amounts of reading materials, getting students to both access and engage more deeply with texts is a challenge.

      Two challenges that #OER and #annotation together can provide infrastructure to help solve: the high cost of learning materials and engaging teachers and learners in social reading, discussion and analysis.

      Issues to solve: both OER and annotation don't require digital reading, but are both made more powerful through it. Yet technology access and reading preferences don't always support to digital reading.

      Solution: Explore online and offline, digital and print experiments in OER and annotation/social reading.

    1. Not only is the notion that OER-sustainability is the responsibility of the end-user pragmatically unnecessary, it also places barriers to adoption that will inhibit rather than encourage future use.

      This is certainly true. It reminds me of the early historical growth of the Catholic church. Paul of Tarses came in and relaxed the dietary restrictions and the need for circumcision which effectively lowered the barrier for entry into the church. One needn't be a Jew to be a follower of Jesus; this helped early growth tremendously.

  18. Aug 2018
    1. YouTube Lectures by Kevin

      If you hold down the CMD or CTRL key while clicking the video links, the video will open up in a new tab. Otherwise, when you go "back" to the book from the video, you'll be sent back to the beginning of the book. Not great.

    1. OER initiative

      I wonder how a trend towards OER initiatives will change the landscape of for-profit edtech solutions and how they already have

    1. Administrators who are charged with the development of open education policy may not fully understand the opportunities inherent in OER and OEP, partic-ularly for learners.

      The other key area of alignment: with learners.

    2. Open Education: Policies

      Join other folks annotating the full PDFs of @EDUCAUSELI's other two related posts about content and practices in open education:

      1. 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Content
      2. 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Practices
    3. They clearly align the open education policy with the university’s mission statement and strategic goals.

      Institutional alignment is absolutely critical so the policies can be shaped for the institution and so leadership can provide aligned support.

    1. Open Education: Practices

      Join other folks annotating the full PDFs of @EDUCAUSELI's other two related posts about content and policies in open education:

      1. 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Content
      2. 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Policies

      While I think this post does a good job of summarizing OEP, I'm disheartened to see the piece shaped so clearly from the perspective that OER is the necessary heart or foundation of OEP. From my POV, OER and open-licensing is a key infrastructural component, but is neither necessary nor sufficient in the larger and more important project to "reconceptualize and improve pedagogy and advance authentic, participatory, engaged learning" that this work rightly champions. Why must OEP always rest so heavily on OER? It's as if we have mistaken tactics for goals.

    1. Contributions to the practice and theory of teaching and learning literature, including publications in peer-reviewed and professional journals, conference publications, book chapters, textbooks and open education repositories/resources.

      P&T language supporting Open activities

  19. Jul 2018
    1. Commentary: At Lansing Community College in Michigan, OER has been transformative. The college's librarian describes what it will take to make OER work long-term.

      Regina Gong outlines the OER program at Lansing Community College.

    2. access to content and knowledge should not depend on how much money you have. That isn’t fair.”
    1. Figure 2. Student Impact Regarding the Cost of Textbooks

      Wow. Solve textbook problem and you put a big dent in retention problem

    1. a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures.

      Wonderful! I believe this expansive framing is a more useful way to explain the concept of OEP than OER-focused definitions.

    2. importance of OER in making OEP possible

      Like Nate's comment above, I suggest that OER is just one of the ways of making OEP possible. In practice, there are multiple entry points to, and avenues of, OEP. It may begin with use of social media to open conversations, use of open tools, even the preparatory work of creating digital identities, considering equity on the open web, etc. Use/creation/adaptation of OER is usually part of OEP, but not always, and it is not necessarily the starting point (particularly in contexts without any OER policies/support).

    3. Embodying a commitment to learner-driven education, OEP involves students in “active, constructive engagement with [open] content, tools and services in the learning process” in ways designed to help promote learners’ self-management, cre-ativity, and ability to work in teams.

      The editorial addition of "[open]" in this quote betrays what seems like an underlying bias in this work: that open educational PRACTICES require and are always based on open educational RESOURCES. Hence the move to changing OEP to "OER-enabled pedagogy" below. I would argue that yes, there is a deep connection between OEP and OER, that OEP benefits from using OER, but that OEP is possible without OER. And unlike, Abruzzi's story, one might just as easily start from an OEP experience and eventually come to use OER as a part of it.

    4. OEP provide the architecture and philosophical underpin-ning for fulfilling the promise of using OER to expand collabora-tive, inclusive, accessible, and active learning and related pedagogy.

      Again, this makes it seem like OEP is solely an outgrowth of OER, when I would argue that "expanding collaborative, inclusive, accessible, and active learning" is a primary goal that may or may not engage OER.

    5. A key tenet is the positioning of the learner as a central, active player in the learning experience.

      Agreed. And this tenet is far more important that the copyright status of the materials involved.

    6. Going forward, practitioners and researchers envision that the focus around OEP will evolve from a relatively narrow emphasis on development, revising, and distribution of OER to further development of related practices, architectures, principles, and policies

      This imagines that current OEP activities are more focused on OER than may in fact be the case.

    1. In terms of withdrawals, there were proportionally fewer withdrawals for the semester with the open-source textbook compared to the semester with the commercial textbook, a finding that was highly statistically significant (p < .001)

      withdrawls and open texts

    1. There is no global OER repository search, though there have been a number of attempts.

      This one is pretty robust at the moment... George Mason Metafinder

  20. Jun 2018
    1. OER support the practice of open ed-ucation, an umbrella term for the mix of open content, practices, policies, and communities that, properly leveraged, can provide broad access to effective learning opportunities for everyone.

      Great to see my earlier comment led to a fix here: "opportunities" now replaces "materials" and it all makes more sense.

    2. Working in an open education envi-ronment might better prepare students for work in today’s in-creasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary workplaces.

      This would be a great part of a "7 Things..." that focuses on open education in addition to open content.

    3. Many practitioners argue that open education could be positioned as a core education prac-tice, with learners producing, evaluating, using, revising, and shar-ing OER

      maybe add: "as one of the many practices enabled by open education."

    4. Open Education: Content

      I'm a little confused that the title of this work is "7 Things You Should Know About Open Education", but it seems to focus mostly on OER. Is this the first in a series of "7 Things..." works about open education and content is just the first topic?

    5. OER support the practice of open ed-ucation, an umbrella term for the mix of open content, practices, policies, and communities that, properly leveraged, can provide broad access to effective learning materials for everyone.

      Not to quibble, but this sentence makes it seem like the primary outcome of open education is to provide "effective learning materials", which I think unnecessarily limits what #OEP can generate.

  21. May 2018
    1. According to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (n.d.), OER are "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others" (para. 2). OER can be texts (including open textbooks), videos, assessments, lecture notes, slides, or other learning materials.
    1. “OER are not typically counted toward research requirements, because they are seen as lacking the vetting process that comes with, for example, peer-reviewed articles.”
    2. “won’t help in securing tenure.”
    1. The Open Education Tools Symposium, hosted by Hypothes.is in January 2017—with the support of the HewlettFoundation—for the express purpose of identifying the gaps and needs in OER technical infrastructure foundthat “even with the close focus on OER technical infrastructure, the conversations over the two-day event were wide ranging and often lingered on broader questions facing the OER movement: who exactly are we building for; is it really working?....no complete picture of the gaps in OER tooling became apparent during the symposium...”.

      Referencing and linking to the 2017 Open Educational Tools Symposium convened by Hypothesis.

  22. Apr 2018
  23. www.openpraxis.org www.openpraxis.org
    8
    2
    1. The eight distinct sub-topics within open education over the past four decades were identified as open access, OER, MOOCs, open educational practice, social media, e-learning, open education in schools and distance learning.

      What I notice is missing from here is open pedagogy which, as Tannis Morgan noted, has historical roots in the late 70's in Quebec. However, it may be that because this is a historical look at open education, and open pedagogy is a relatively recent (despite the work Tannis has discovered) area of interest for open educators, there may just be a lack of formalized research supporting the idea of open pedagogy.

    2. Open education does not constitute a discipline, in the manner of a hard science for example, so there is no agreed canon of research that all researchers will be familiar with. It is also an area that practitioners tend to move into from other fields, often because of an interest in applying aspects of openness to their foundational discipline. This can be seen as an advantage, in that different perspectives are brought into the domain, and it evolves rapidly. However, it also results in an absence of shared knowledge, with the consequence that existing knowledge is often ‘rediscovered’ or not built upon.

      In order for open education to be more than a movement, it feels like we should be consciously moving in this direction - to define a canonical set of resources that are foundational to the field in order to help orient others and further define ourselves as a field/discipline. Because, as we have seen with MOOC's, if we do not do it, then others will do it for us.

    1. In three key measures of student success—course completion, final grade of C- or higher, course grade– students whose faculty chose OER generally performed as well or better than students whose faculty assigned commercial textbooks.

      Well, there you go...

    1. Psychology in Modules (Myers & Dewall, 2015). This textbook was at the campus bookstore in print, loose-leaf format, but could be ordered in electronic or bound formats. In the preface of the Worth Publishers’ textbook, 77 reviewers and consultants from a variety of institutions were listed. The open-source textbook was the 1st edition of OpenStax College’s Psychology (OpenStax College, 2014)
  24. Mar 2018
    1. A $3,000 award is available to faculty who adopt open access course materials by incorporating previously published open access materials into their classes, thereby eliminating the need for students to purchase textbooks or other course materials. A new, $4,500 award is now available to faculty who adapt open access course materials by choosing existing Open Educational Resources and significantly altering them to update the material or to fit the needs of the course. A $7,500 award is available to faculty who create open access course materials. At least 75 percent of the course content must be original, with the remaining 25 percent or less being adopted open access materials.

      OER Stipends

    1. Can you imagine a day when many of the most important contributions to many of the most important OER and open textbook projects are made by people who work for for-profit publishers and other companies, and who contribute to OER as part of their formal job responsibilities? Can you imagine a day when many of the world’s most-used OER were originally published by companies, who continue to invest in their ongoing updates and maintenance? Can you imagine a day when companies are releasing millions of new words, images, videos, and interactives under open licenses each year?

      Sounds a lot like the move of corps to contribute to open source code community.

    1. The books produced and hosted on OpenStax are now used in 47 percent of all degree-granting institutions across the United States. Despite this, overall awareness and adoption of OER remains low, according to a late 2017 report.
  25. Feb 2018
    1. The Hawaii bill, introduced Jan. 19, would have required all faculty members in the university system to teach with OER beginning in the 2020-21 school year. The use of any instructional materials, including textbooks and online tools, that cost students money would be prohibited. Where there were no suitable OER materials existing, the bill said that instructors would have to create their own and offer them to students free.

      a good case of too much "top down"

    1. At first, David found the options to be limited. He started with MyOpenMath and the Open Learning Initiative, which he learned about at the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC) national conference.
    1. At core, Wiley sees 'commercial' as good, while I don't. More accurately, I think, Wiley sees 'commercial' as the only good, while I think that public and community-based non-commercial alternatives are equally viable.

      commercial vs. public good

    1. How do we talk about “open” in the context of courseware?

    2. Second, helping people understand that courseware is a combination of content and platform – each of which is licensed separately – may reduce the confusion expressed in the question “why are people charging for OER?”

      Openwrapping might be helpful way to explain the relationship between content and platform and reduce some confusion