In case the quotes didn’t clue you in, this post doesn’t argue against massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the ones offered by Udacity, Coursera, and edX.  I think they are very worthy ventures and will serve to progress our system of higher education. I do however agree with some criticisms of these courses, and that there is room for much more progress. Â
Unbundling Education, A Simple Framework | M. P. STATON.
Found this interesting infographic via Adam Menter…the open education model has a big hand in the unbundling, I believe.
With recent announcements and events happening this week and over the next few months, 2012 is shaping up to be an interesting OER year. CCCOER Staff and board members will be involved in the following efforts and we invite you to join us.
Open Education Week March 5-10
March 5-10, 2012 has been named Open Education Week and is devoted to creating awareness of open education and its benefits worldwide.Â
In medieval days – university classes consisted of students handwriting out the copies of the text from slowly lectured texts.
The printing press was a huge disruptive technology. University educators with “lecture books” where students still had to copy the same lecture-notes . Â Not much has changed since then in teaching. Â The disruptive technology of books didn’t change school. Â Why do we think computers will?
The technical argument:
Education is sharing. Â Students share with teachers (projects and homework) and teachers share with students (content and ideas). Â When there is no sharing, there is no education.
Knowledge is magical:
You give knowledge without giving anything away. Â When items are put in a tangible form, I know longer have it in my possession and have to compete for access…the exception is when ideas are stored digitally. Example: paper newspaper vs CNN.com – users don’t have to compete for the resource when it is digital. We have an unprecendented capacity to share digitally. The cost of sharing one $250 page book from $1000 copied by hand to $.000084 for a digital share. Â Distribution of digital sharing follows the same pattern.
Sense-making, Meaning-making:
Educationally sharing digital content is about helping users connect with prior knowledge and is “local”. Having the ability to edit or adapt material to help with the sense-making is vital and necessary. Â Copyright prohibits this despite the Internet’s ability to help it. Â Creative Commons, on the other hand, enforces sharing. What the Internet enables – OER allows.
Buy One, Get One:
You don’t always get one when you buy one – for instance, the public investment in research at universities. $2750 per article with all costs included – yet the public doesn’t have free access to these peer-reviewed articles. All taxpayer-funded educational resources SHOULD be OER.
Financial Argument:
Wiley debunks the theory that if you give it away for free, people stop buying. Â Shows examples of students registering for courses after using OER, correlations between free online book sales with strong print sales, and for-profit business being successful using CC licensed textbooks (Flat World Knowledge).
Flat World Knowledge model – use online for free or pay approximately $35 for a print-on-demand text. Â Students have saved approximately $39 million.
Project Kaleidoscope – 10 high enrolled courses on 8 campuses – sharing adopted OER texts targeted at specific courses. Â 97% students rate the text about the same or better.%83 like the format as well or better than traditional texts. 87% would choose or have no preference on their next courses based on the availability of these types of texts.
CK12 – teachers adapt CK12 materials for K-12 in a printed version. The model shows how high schools can pay $5 instead of $80 for textbooks. Expensive books are slow to turn over – content becomes dated over the 7 year adoption cycle. Â The $5 model allows students to consume the text, and interact with it, because the schools will revise and reprint the next year. There has been no significant difference using these texts without providing professional development in using this technology – (the cost reduction is significant though!).
Utah takes the lead – Statewide secondary schools will be using open texts starting in 2012.
Openness facilitates the Unexpected
Examples:
Syllabi in a wiki. Â Students can change it if they want. Â No one touched the wiki (even with permission) at first. Â Later, they added assignments – things they wanted to see.
Student work archived on blogs (making optional avoids FERPA). This work becomes searchable artifacts for others outside the course. These pieces get connected to the greater web for comment, sharing, and motivate students to up their game. The work becomes part of the student’s online identity and so they take the time for more quality work.
Open the course online for non-registered students to participate. 75 people participated with 7 graduate students. Â The global audience made it richer. Â The partipants got a certificate from David with a “good job” on it. See Chronicle article.
Use of badges for grades on courses created using a MORP type format.
Openness:
Easier to use data to fix courses. Â There is a relationship between openness and analytics. Â Requires permissions to be able to make those fixes.
Speed of Innovation:
Content IS the infrastructure. ‘The physical components of interrelated systems…essential to enable, sustain, or enhance’ societies and enterprises. – wikipedia. Â To speed up innovation, increase quality and decrease the cost of the infrastructure. Lower cost and higher quality decreases the risk of innovation.
Do the Right Thing – the moral argument:
If we can push a button that betters the world, wouldn’t you? Shouldn’t you? Â Putting materials online with open license is “pusing the easy button” for educational sharing. What is the responsibilities inherent with that. What kind of obligation do we have to push that button since we have the ability to do it?
“The good we can do is constrained only our creativity and commitment.”
http://davidwiley.org/
Ever wished you could choose what would be covered each year during those continuing education seminars? In this webinar, you will learn how to harness social media to build your own Personal Learning Network and expand your personal professional development choices into any and all areas of interest. DIY ProfDev is here!
Thu. Jan. 26, 2012, 2 pm (PT) 3 pm (MT)
Register - It’s free!
Maybe this will help explain why you should be…oh, and I found this via Twitter…
Today was both a celebration and a starting point for the Opencourselibrary.org project. Â We celebrated the folks who developed courses in OCL – Phase1 and kicked off Phase 2 with a mostly new group of faculty course developers.
Cable Green (Project Director for Phase1 and now at Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons) started Round 2 off right with his lunch keynote. Current director, Tom Caswell, then took the reigns to connect experienced developers with the newbies in an overview and Q&A session. The real work begins tomorrow.
One of the unexpected takeaways from this project, is our progress in learning how to share large-scale development as it is happening. With that in mind, this phase of OCL will move course development out of proprietary LMS software and into the open using Google Sites and Docs as both our development platform and hosting site for the finished courses. As one of the instructional designers for the project, I am really interested to see how this changes the process for us this year.
Check back to follow our progress through this phase. Â I look forward to your comments and questions.
I wrote a guest blog for the College Open Textbooks Blog where I interviewed Dr. Miles McCrimmon about his recently published open textbook, The Flat World Knowledge Handbook for Writers. You can see that post in its entirety on the College Open Textbooks site. Enjoy.
It’s winter. I hate the cold and the grayness of it all. I hunker down and hide out from the blahness of it all. I become a hermit. And for those who know me personally, they know that THAT is the exact opposite of who/where I like to be. I’m a chatty-Cathy-sunshine-flip flops-cycling-beach kind of girl who just happens to be a bit of a tech geek as well.
When the weather closes in on me like this, I find that I reach out virtually a lot more. I connect with new friends on Facebook, I look for new people to follow on Twitter, and I find blogs – reading and leaving comments more often, as well. In general, I grow my personal network in the cold months. In simplest of terms, I think this is what Stephen Downes (2008) is describing as knowledge formation in his explanation of “What is Connectivism?” in this Ustream video shared in the #CCK11 MOOC which started Monday. It’s being facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes.
For me, when an idea seems complex, the simplest way to conceptualize it is to associate it with something I already understand. Back in high school, we watched a couple of films about the brain, and with cartoon animation simplicity, the concept of neural pathway formation was explained. As Downes described Connectivism, images from those old films popped unbidden into my head.
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It makes sense though – Connectivism is about growing the number of interactions between two nodes which creates connections. In the brain, more neural pathways means increased potential for learning. The more those pathways are used, the easier a skill may seem (like riding a bike or driving – both are difficult at first, but subconsciously easy after practice).
So, what does all this mean to me…hiding inside on this 36 degree, dreary winter day? It means it’s time to connect both digitally, which I’ve done here, and physically, which I’ll be doing as soon as I tie my tennis shoes and head to the gym. I’m not sure if this is exactly the types of connections Siemens and Downes have in mind, but this end user needs both.
An Important email message today about sick leave policy from one of the universities I work for starting me thinking. I am saving these universities SOOO much money by working at a distance. As an online adjunct very little is provided to me… thus was borne this open letter…
Open letter to University administrators and human resources personnel who have adjunct instructors working at a distance:
I am the faceless, nearly nameless, person teaching tens, if not hundreds, of students for you each year via your online courses. Since I never set foot on your campus and in fact probably live hundreds or thousands of miles away, I am saving you a lot of money. Clearly I am saving you money when compared to tenured faculty but even compared to the meager existence of a local on-campus adjunct, the saving from my work is substantial.
For clarity’s sake let me define who I am since you probably don’t know me at all. I teach online courses via my own computer from my home. You pay me by course, or by student. This is my full-time job but I work for several universities in order to earn a full-time income. And following this rant about how much I am saving you, I will detail the benefits gained by working as an online adjunct.
Like most adjuncts face-to-face or online you likely do not pay me any benefits. No insurance costs or pension fund contributions must be funded on my behalf. Sick leave doesn’t apply in my world, nor does paid vacations or holidays. My courses do not close because I am laid up with the flu, I cannot close the course site and say ‘take the day off’ and I cannot ask someone to cover my class and teach it for me because of illness or injury. I teach from my sick bed, and while on vacation, and over holidays. In fact graduate students in online courses tend to do more work and ask more questions over holidays, weekends, and during traditional vacation times because they have extra time for their coursework. And I cannot even imagine a scenario where I would file an L and I claim for injuries sustained on the job.
There is no physical classroom to be provided for myself or the students. No utilities to be paid, equipment, furnishings, or physical presence to be maintained. In fairness you do pay for a learning management system where my course is housed. I have no idea what the balance in costs is between a physical classroom and the cost of one course on a learning management system so perhaps this is a fair trade.
No office space, even office space shared with other adjuncts, must be provided. You don’t provide a computer or Internet access for me to do lesson planning, grading, or other teaching functions which require electronics. I provide my own equipment, keep my software up-to-date, use my own phone for calls to students, and pay for my Internet access while at home and on the road. Some universities do offer discounts on software or reimbursement for phone calls and postage. The hassle of filling out your paper forms and mailing them to you with receipts to get reimbursed isn’t worth my time.
You have no costs for meetings or professional development. I have not consumed a cup of coffee brewed by your staff during a meeting because there are no meetings. And rarely is any professional development offered to online adjuncts. A few offers to audit a class are just about the only costs for PD that you have incurred for me.
You may offer technical support to help me with media creation, troubleshooting, and other issues but I usually figure things out on my own with the help of my PLN. To be honest your technical support people often assume a level of digital stupidity that takes so long to dispel it is easier to figure things out on my own. One does not teach online without some level of competency using a computer and Internet-based tools.
To summarize, I earn few, if any, benefits. I don’t get health insurance, take sick leave, or get paid vacation. You don’t have to provide a parking spot, chair, desk, or a light bulb. I don’t eat doughnuts at meetings or run off 20 copies of a 10 page syllabus. I do provide excellent service to your students and take pride in doing so. Perhaps you should thank me for my generosity and willingness to teach online courses in your institution.
Instead, for this excellent customer service, you continue to spam my inbox with email about local face to face meetings, policies, and politics; none of which have ever applied to me. I am your ever-growing future workforce…it is high time you figure out who and where I am.
