The first visualization we’ve developed is one we call the “Waterfall.” The vertical axis represents students’ final grades (higher final grades at the top). The horizontal axis represents time, with each cell representing a day in the semester. Each individual row represents an individual student. Finally, the darkness of the water droplet represents the amount of time that student spent that day completing gradable activities. Click the thumbnail to see the full visualization.

We call this visualization the Waterfall because the drops have all but evaporated away by the time you reach the bottom of the image (meaning that students with lower final grades spend much less time on their work), reinforcing what we know about the relationship between time-on-task and academic performance. It’s also interesting to be able to see Christmas break, Thanksgiving, weekends, etc., as empty white columns in the data – almost as if holidays were rocks at the top of the waterfall.

Kudos to Aaron Johnson, Seth Gurell, Marissa Nielson, and Mary McEwen who are the students participating in this work.

To support technological innovation in learning, President Obama has proposed investing $500 million over ten years in an Online Skills Initiative designed to produce free and open online courses that contribute to post-secondary success, Duncan said. These courses can be used by students, schools, and self-directed learners, and they also will be freely available to commercial publishers.

“Our commitment to open educational resources includes a commitment to you: That they will be fully open, including open to commercial producers of learning materials who want to add value to these resources and sell enhanced, proprietary versions,” he told the publishers.

“We see this step as both an investment in our students and an opportunity for your industry.”

This open courseware initiative “will create new demand from colleges and universities for online courses,” Duncan said. “It will open a new market for supplementary materials—one that you are uniquely positioned to fill. Our online skills program will create new opportunities for you as publishers and software developers—and will deliver the best possible education for students in the 21st century.”

While it doesn’t make an explicit statement, we now know an answer to a question many have been asking – “How will AGI-funded OER be licensed?” We now know that the resources created under the AGI funding will either be licensed CC BY or placed in the public domain. We know this because no CC licenses with SA or NC clauses live up to the promises made in the above statements. And the GFDL has been relegated to the realm of the OPL.

I am surprised by this announcement – but pleasantly so. As I’ve stated before in discussing open access to federally funded research, I believe that resources produced with taxpayer dollars belong to the taxpayers. Since corporations pay taxes, they deserve both access to research they help fund (e.g., through NIH and NSF funding) and to the OERs whose production they help fund (through AGI funding). And if other taxpayers can reuse, redistribute, revise, and remix OERs, they should be able to as well.

The primary reason the AGI program (Online Skills Initiative) interests me is that it represents a desperately needed national investment in a new kind of infrastructure. For many years now I have argued that content is infrastructure:

I believe we must view the vast body of open educational resources as “content infrastructure.” By “content infrastructure” I mean that instead of thinking about open educational resources as being the educational opportunity we are trying to share with people (the end of our work), we should think about them as the basic resources necessary for doing our job (a means to the end of our work). A vast collection of open educational resources is, of course, the first milestone in our work, not the end of our work….

Content is infrastructure, and as the OCWs and Connexions continue to come online, the next great wave of work for those of us interested in bringing educational opportunity to the developing world will focus on building instructional design capacity so that this content infrastructure can be successfully leveraged and utilized locally.

OER should be available for everyone to leverage and use in creating and providing the most innovative educational services imaginable, just as other infrastructure like roads, power, and water are available to entrepreneurs. Because OER differ from other infrastructure projects by being nonrivalrous, access to this infrastructure can be truly free and open to all.

Call it “Infrastructure 2.0″ or “Knowledge Economy Infrastructure” or any other kind of buzzword you can come up with, if you like. The point is that a broad, openly licensed pool of OERs ar desperately needed to spur innovation in the education space. As Linus said in one of my all time favorite quotes:

And don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.

Our education system is currently running an exceptionally small number of experiments, not engaging in massively parallel anything. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of schools and universities across the country, but as a group they don’t really differ from each other significantly. This is why there is so little true innovation in education – when everyone is doing (largely) the same thing, no one is innovating!

We’ll only have massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle when institutions are providing their students with significantly different experiences. By providing a large collection of OER, the government significantly decreases the cost and risk of running one of these experiments, thereby encouraging innovation. (Of course, there are some policy changes they could make that would also decrease the risks / make it possible to run an institution on a truly different model, as well.)

Anyway, I believe it’s great news about the AGI-funded courses. Since the Obama administration has shown a preference for CC BY in the past, I would guess that’s what we’ll see, and that’s great news.

I had an absolutely brilliant time at TEDxNYED over the weekend, reconnecting with old friends like Larry Lessig, George Siemens, Neeru Khosla, and Dan Cohen, and making new friends like Michael Wesch, Gina Bianchini, Amy Bruckman, Chris Lehmann, and Dan Meyer. The videos of our talks will be online in a few weeks.

In the mean time, I’m posting the final version of the notes I wrote before creating slides for the talk. This is the fifth or sixth version of the notes, and due to time constraints not even all of this version got in – but much of it did. My words on stage didn’t mirror these rough notes directly, but the notes capture the spirit of the talk. You can view the slides for the talk on Slideshare.

Open Education and the Future

What is meant by “openness” in education?

Let’s begin by defining terms.

For over a decade, openness in education has been an adjective describing educational artifacts.

Open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks all mean teaching materials that are shared with everyone, for free, with permission to engage in the 4R activities.

The 4Rs are reuse, redistribute, revise, remix.

Open access to research means that articles describing the results of research are shared with everyone for free, generally with permission to engage in the first 2R activities (but sometimes all 4).

While the nouns being modified (content, resources, courseware, textbooks, and research articles) differ from each other, the activities that we associate with operationalizing openness is the same – acts of generosity, sharing, and giving.

Openness is about overcoming your inner two-year-old who constantly screams, “Mine!”

Unfortunately, much in modern law and policy works together to enable us to shout “Mine!” ever more loudly, to stomp our feet with ever less self-control, and to hit each other with harder and sharper toys, all the while soothingly whispering in our ear that this unbridled selfishness is appropriate behavior. Regrettably, many educators and administrators have allowed themselves to be swayed by the siren’s song that sings the half-truth, “It’s ok. It’s legal. Go ahead.”

Openness reminds us of what we knew intuitively before society gave us permission to act monstrously toward one another.

What is the appropriate role of openness in education?

The question is deeply insidious. The question implies that openness might play any of several roles in the educational enterprise. The question distracts people from seeing that openness is the sole means by which education is affected, and that education is inherently an enterprise of generosity, sharing, and giving.

Suppose we have two people: One has some kind of expertise, the other desires to have this expertise but does not. At its core, it is this asymmetry that makes education possible. And education is the sacred relationship of sharing that these two individuals enter in to. If the one refuses to share with the other, there is no education.

And in fact, we call those educators most successful who share the most thoroughly of themselves with the most students.

Of course, this sharing isn’t a simple “want one of my cookies?” kind of giving away. First, the sharing we call education is a complex, conjoint effort in which the offering act and the receiving act are equally important and have to come into coordination and the actors have to come into an at-one-ment with each other.

The nature of the sharing we call education is significantly affected by new media and technology.

Expertise (or whatever you want to call the source of the asymmetry) has the magical property of being nonrivalrous or noncompetitive – meaning that a teacher can give of them without giving them away. You are probably familiar with Jefferson’s comparison: “He who receives ideas from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.”

(It’s a good thing for society that expertise works this way, or else teachers would be like the proverbial honeybee who can sting only once and then dies.)

While expertise can be given without being given away, external expressions of expertise (like a book) cannot.

Or could not, until recently. New media and technology have given digital expressions of expertise this same magical quality. While you have to wait for a book to be put back on the shelf before you can read it, everyone in this room can read the online version of the book simultaneously.

For the first time in the history of humanity, external expressions of what we know have the same magical property as knowledge itself. Like the flame of Franklin’s candle, both ideas and their expressions can now be given without being given away.

This ability to give without giving away provides us the technological capability to share on an unprecedented level. In other words, the Internet enables education on an unprecedented level.

(There are additional important aspects of education beyond sharing external expressions of expertise, things like debate, discourse, discussion, and other types of communication. And it turns out the Internet is pretty good at facilitating these as well.)

However, technology never appears on stage alone. Technology always plays opposite its nemesis, policy. And this pair have quite a stormy history.

The 15th century saw what many have argued to be the greatest technological advance of the millennium – Gutenberg’s printing press. In contrast to this unprecedented capability to produce books, leaflets, and other expressions quickly and inexpensively, the 15th century also saw restrictions on the distribution of information that make a global DMCA seems like a parade of rainbow sparkle ponies.

While Gutenberg’s own masterwork was a 42 line edition of the Bible in Latin, the common people were desperate for access to an edition of the scriptures they could actually read. Rather than utilize the new capabilities afforded by the press to provide meaningful access to the word of God, the church instead used the press’s efficiencies to ramp up production of indulgences (papers you could purchase to have your sins or the sins of a deceased ancestor forgiven), while affecting policies outlawing possession of memorization of the scriptures in various vernaculars. For example, 15th century English law read,

“Whosoever reads the Scriptures in the mother tongue, shall forfeit land, cattle, life, and goods from their heirs forever, and so be condemned for heretics to God, enemies to the crown, and most arrant traitors to the land.”

However, as it always does, capability plus demand made for a thriving market for pirate Bibles. And during the first year this law was in
force thirty-nine people were hanged for its violation and their bodies burned.

This collision of powerful new technology, outdated policy, and overwhelming demand enabled the series of major historical events we now call the Reformation.

In our own day, as new media and technologies provide us with mind-boggling capabilities for sharing and education, we occasionally run into outdated policies and ways of thinking. For example, we see technology being turned against it potential and made to conceal and withhold. For example, a course management system like Blackboard theoretically has the potential to greatly improve educators’ capacity to share. But instead CMSs takes the approach of hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all the student-contributed content in a course. If Facebook worked like Blackboard, every 15 weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, unsubscribe you from all your groups, etc.

In 2008 a Florida professor began legal proceedings on the theory that his lectures were his copyrighted intellectual property, that students’ notes were derivative works of his copyrighted material, and that he as the rights holder had the authority to say what students could and could not do with their notes. After screaming “Mine!” and stomping his feet at students and administration, he decided to throw a toy. After all, in the current legal context and climate of “intellectual property rights,” it was legal and apparently acceptable for him to do so.

It makes me wonder… could any of these students go on to be professors in this field? If they did, would they need his permission to “publicly perform” a lecture based in part the notes they had taken in his class? Or could any of these students take jobs in this field, since applying what they had learned might constitute another kind of public performance? Do we really want to head down that path?

We also see demand for education growing at an unbelievable rate. Worldwide, in higher education there are currently around 120M students. The increase in demand is estimated to be an additional 150M students. In India alone, two new universities would have to be built each week for the next decade to meet demand. While this demand is growing, our funding is shrinking. This both diminishes our capacity to provide education and makes what we do provide more expensive.

In short, education finds itself using radical new technology in backwards ways, reinforcing those outdated ways of thinking with law and institutional policy, and unable to satisfy rapidly increasing popular demand. Sound familiar? We are pitched on the edge of another great Reformation.

Which brings us back to openness.

Education has to some degree lost its way; forgotten its identity. We’ve allowed ourselves and our institutions to be led away from our core value of openness – away from generosity, sharing, and giving, and toward selfishness, concealment, and withholding. To the degree that we have deserted openness, learning has suffered.

We’ve been blessed with incredible technical capabilities in our day. Will we use them to increase the openness, generosity, and sharing of our institutions? Or will we use them perversely, against their own potential, to further close, conceal, and withhold?

New media and technology do have a critical role to play in the future of education. But regardless of how they audition, new media and technology will only get to play the part we assign them. The only legitimate role for new media and technology in education is to increase our capacity to be generous with one another. The more open we are, the better education will be.

First, the OCWC budget for 2010 is $1,000,000.

Second, the document includes a section called “Value Proposition to Members,” which includes the following explanation:

OCW Consortium currently offers educational institutions the following benefits:

OCWC membership…
• Provides an opportunity to fully participate in an international movement to increase access to education and knowledge, and to attract potential students to member institutions.
• Helps OCW proponents at member institutions in making a case for OpenCourseWare investment to university decision makers, funders and faculty
• Brings down the cost of creating and maintaining an OCW site
• Helps people all over the world learn about and find member institutions’ OCW websites courses
• Provides an opportunity to fully participate in the development of, and gain early knowledge of, toolkit innovations
• Provides the ability to participate in, and gain economies of scale in, the collaborative development of OCW Software
• Provides favorable publicity about member institutions’ role in the OCW movement and in the OCWC
• Provides a facilitated opportunity to learn best practices from other member institutions
• Provides first access to strategic alliances and collaborations with other member institutions
• Reduces the cost of participation in OCWC conferences for members

OCWC membership could…
• Support the generation of research funding at member institutions
• Support the rational management of course-related intellectual property at member institutions
• Attract funding for Open Courseware-related projects at member institutions with OCW sites
• Provide OCW-related technical infrastructure and support to member institutions

So now, with an overview of the value proposition, you can decide for yourself how good a value the OCWC is to the open education movement for $1,000,000 / year.

P.S. OCWC – please add this “Why You Should Join” list on your website where interested people can find it!

“Not only are these universities sustaining their own publications, but they are making meaningful commitments to the global effort to openly publish educational materials.”

So why don’t I feel happy at this news? I think it is because I just don’t understand how the OCWC adds value to the “global effort to openly publish educational materials.”

I understand that the OCWC organizes conferences, and this year’s program looks quite interesting, but with registration running at $450 per person (with no member discount), I don’t think membership fees are underwriting the conference.

The OCW Toolkit is a great idea, but this portion of the website is largely under construction. If you’re considering an OER project at your institution, you should check out this portion of the site, as it includes useful things sample IP release forms for faculty. However, the Toolkit cannot be what $350k + $500/member + Hewlett sponsorship is paying for.

The OCWC also maintains a list of members, which one might be tempted to interpret as a high-level overview of what’s happening in institutional OER. However, the list does not include non-OCWC-members like Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, while other initiatives like Rice’s Connexions don’t qualify for normal membership because they don’t meet the OCWC’s definition of OCW. So, while this list will let you know who is a member of the OCWC, it doesn’t actually provide a comprehensive overview of OER in higher education. And maintaining a list can’t be what $350k + $500/member + Hewlett sponsorship is paying for.

The OCWC also maintains a list of news stories about OCW. But as above, maintaining a list can’t be what $350k + $500/member + Hewlett sponsorship is paying for.

You might argue that while none of these individual activities alone can be what $350k + $500/member + Hewlett sponsorship is paying for, together they are. But rereading the list, I don’t think so.

So, while I genuinely like all of the people involved with the OCWC and I continue to be a huge proponent of institutional openness, I have to continue to ask myself… If the hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on determining a governance structure, drawing up incorporation documents, establishing a board of directors and traveling to board meetings, forming subcommittees, setting definitions (that exclude projects like Connexions), etc., had instead been spent on publishing more OER, wouldn’t the world be a better place?

I’m happy to be wrong. Perhaps someone can explain in the comments…

Curriki will be looking for a new ED shortly and will very much continue to stay active in the OER space (much like Hewlett has continued to do after Mike, Cathy, and Phoenix left).

So, unless I’m missing someone, the list of OER leaders who have moved on in the last few years now includes:

Mike, Cathy, and Phoenix, from the Hewlett Foundation
Ira and Chris, from the Mellon Foundation
Ahrash, from CC Learn
Bobbi, from Curriki
Anne, from MIT OCW

And I suppose I should add myself, from COSL. Perhaps it’s not a big deal to see folks moving on, but it seems somehow significant to me. Inasmuch as the field continues to live and thrive through these leadership changes, we demonstrate that open education is not a radical separatist group led by a few charismatic individuals. Instead we demonstrate that open education is stable, steady, on-going effort to increase access to appropriate, high-quality educational opportunity to everyone worldwide.

If you haven’t seen the published writing I’ve been doing (much of it with students) in the last few years, the majority of it is gathered on the David Wiley page in BYU’s ScholarsArchive. The articles include:

• Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
• Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network
• The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources
• The Open High School of Utah: Openness, Disaggregation, and the Future of Schools
• Psychologism and American Instructional Technology
• Open Source, Openness, and Higher Education
• Open Educational Resources: Enabling universal education
• Overcoming the Limitations of Learning Objects
• Collecting, Organizing, and Managing Resources for Teaching Educational Games the Wiki Way
• The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Christian Higher Education
• A Unified Design Framework for Learning Objects and Educational Discourse
• Using Weblogs in Scholarship and Teaching

(PS. The system the library is using does not currently produce RSS feeds, so I’ve hacked together a Yahoo Pipe to produce a barebones RSS feed. The feed simply gives the names of all the articles on the site with a link to the main page. Hopefully a future update will make it easier to syndicate this information here and elsewhere.)

Coverage at:

• Welcoming Cathy Casserly to the Creative Commons board of directors
• Open Education Resources Get a Big Boost: Cathy Casserly Joins Creative Commons Board

Hewlett made over $16 million in grants last year that were 100% OER focused… In 2009 alone, foundations such as Gates, Lumina, MacArthur and many others pumped over $10 million of investments into OER focused projects. VCs made a couple of forays into OER… And a number of governments made their first investments in OER. In all 2009 was a record year both in the amount and diversity of OER funding, which is amazing considering most other things in the world collapse financially.

So from Vic’s point of view, the field of OER is in transition, and definitely for the better! This is a great perspective that I’m happy to hear.

Vic also writes, “Just to put a a stop to the rumors, Hewlett is not shutting down OER, and it is very much a part of what the education program is doing moving forward.” I re-read my previous post and I don’t think I implied anywhere that Hewlett was shutting down its OER program – just that funding seems to have slowed down. Vic indicates that Hewlett’s and other foundations’s endowments are down 40%, so that makes sense.

Vic’s perspective of what’s happening as the field transitions is good news for everyone who cares about OER.

Today, we read of another “merger” of programs – and top leadership exit – at Creative Commons:

We’ve decided that we can best support the open education and OER communities by focusing our resources and support where we are strongest and provide the most unique value… Such changes mean that some of the activities and, sadly, personnel cannot be integrated successfully with the new structure… In this current transition, Ahrash Bissell, the Executive Director of CC Learn, has left the organization.

Has left – past tense. Apparently, surpassing their year end public fundraising goal (with $533,898) wasn’t enough resource to keep ccLearn going.

I know some well-known ed tech bloggers will comment “good riddance,” claiming that organizations are inherently evil anyway, and that the space is better off without them “investing in” and “supporting” the work of open education (which is best done by a lone individual living off-grid on a rural Appalachian subsistence farm). But does no one else see an “interesting” pattern here?