Tom's Two Cents

McGraw-Hill recently released their MH Campus site, which integrates with a wide variety of LMS software to give faculty direct access to content from  “the vast library of educational materials and services produced by McGraw-Hill and its partners – at no additional cost to the institution.”

The concern I have is that using content from MH Campus will make it very difficult to share that course down the road. This is because their free content is not openly licensed, meaning it cannot be legally shared beyond the closed LMS.

From McGraw-Hill’s MH-Campus Terms of Service (p.3, emphasis added):
“2.1.2.1 Faculty Authorization. Subject to the Terms, Faculty Users will have access to Supplementary Content through MH Campus™ and may use such content in such manner as Faculty Users deem appropriate only for instructional purposes, only in the courses Faculty teach at Your Institution and only for the benefit of the Students enrolled in such Faculty’s courses. In addition, subject to the Terms, Faculty Users are authorized to view Textbook Content through MH Campus™, but shall be prohibited from distributing such content to other Users, including without limitation, to any Student Users.”

The LMS of the future will make it technically very easy to remove student data and openly share courses. Including bit of proprietary MH content into courses will slow the pace of open course sharing. Ultimately it will mean more work down the road to untangle faculty course materials from MH content that is not licensed for open sharing.

Open educational resources is an efficiency we all need. It allows us to build on and improve the existing content, rather than spending resources reinventing the wheel. Beware of “free” content that limits your ability to share openly.

Related Posts:

• Open Education Policy in Washington State

• Creative Commons is the global leader in open content licensing and will provide technical support in meeting the open licensing requirement and ensuring interoperability of C3T funded content.
• Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative brings expertise in applying results from the learning sciences to the design, implementation, evaluation and continuous improvement of open web-based learning environments.
• CAST is a pioneer in the field of Universal Design for Learning and will offer grantees technical support and enabling technologies to ensure that all of the digital content and learning environments developed in this project succeed with the widest range of learners possible.
• The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges is one of the leading community college systems in the nation fully embracing open educational resources and open licensing, and will develop best practices in adoption and use, policies and professional development that work for participating institutions.

Services will be coordinated through Creative Commons.

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I recently read a blog post about why Google should buy Blackboard (instead of paying $6 billion for Groupon). Buying Blackboard seems like a really bad idea to me, and here’s why: Google tends to buy companies with (1) GREAT software and (2) a large and growing user base. The “great software” requirement probably explains why Google hasn’t made a bid for Blackboard. In fact, the *only* reason for anyone to buy Blackboard is for the user base. But these are not happy users, so really you are just buying a (very expensive) problem.

Some folks may want a Google to buy Blackboard because they think that somehow being owned by Google will make everything easy (like Google Docs) and cost nothing (like Gmail). But think about it: If Google bought Bb they would then have the nightmarish task of changing/improving *almost everything* about the software while trying to keep existing customers happy. Doesn’t exactly sound like “low-hanging fruit” that someone should quickly snatch up, does it?

If you want to see an example of great GDocs-LMS integration, have a look at Canvas, by a company called Instructure. It’s a great, new LMS that integrates tightly with Google Docs and other great apps (like DimDim for videoconferencing). Google could buy Instructure instead, make it totally free and open, and then pull customers away from Bb. Five years later you’ll have the same result (lots of folks switched over to Google’s LMS), without the nightmare transition for Google… and without spending $1.5 billion. And we’ll all live happily ever after (as long as you don’t mind a few Google Ads for Viagra during your Human Anatomy course).

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Eight weeks after enrolling in a course at Peer2Peer University, I turned in my final assignment today and paused to reflect. For a first pass, I felt the organization of the Copyright for Educators course was very good. The content was interesting and to the point. Participants were organized into groups based on their location, something that makes sense when dealing with regional differences in copyright. And although I was placed in a group with North American colleagues, I was still exposed to enough international copyright concepts.

The structure of the CE course was fairly straightforward. Activities were spread out over six weeks, with readings and a case study for each week. Groups were responsible for self-organizing and responding to the case study each week, as well as grading and commenting on the work of the other groups. The final week consisted of creating a case study of our own, along with an answer to that case study. I subsequently found out that these will be adapted and used in future sections of the CE course. A very clever, sustainable course design, I must say!

Work was meant to be done in groups, and each group was given a wiki page to work out the case study and a blog to post their final answers. A course chat was also provided, but organizing a weekly chat didn’t work well for my group so we abandoned it after the first week. Instead we used long email threads to push ideas back and forth. (I think the course administrators expected to harvest some ideas and feedback from the chat logs, so I got permission from my group and sent them our email threads.) The number of emails seemed to annoy one of our group members, who quickly dropped out. Perhaps an asynchronous discussion board would be more useful in future courses, given the busy schedules most people keep and some people’s apparent aversion to receiving lots of email. I get about a hundred a day… I helps me feel loved

While there wasn’t much interaction with the admins, I don’t really think that was the point. After all, I assume it was called Peer2Peer for a reason. The admins did a nice job of setting things in motion, clarifying topics, adjusting groups and deadlines, etc. Their response times varied, but generally I think they were on top of things. I assume they have just as many outside activities going on as the course participants — if not more.

One thing that took everyone by surprise was the attrition within groups. By the third week our 6-person group was down to three, and soon that became two. But two is enough to provide for interaction, and I worked with an excellent partner. I suppose 50% or higher attrition shouldn’t come as a surprise when you are dealing with busy professionals who are learning for the sake of learning. Reality tends to interfere with such pure motives. Well, almost pure. I was able to arrange independent study credit as part of my PhD program of study, so I had some additional motivation to keep going. Had I ended up alone in my group the experience would have been totally different, but with at least one person to consult the experience was quite satisfying.

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Carla Federman, US History Teacher at Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School, is teaching her Cold War class with a new twist this year. She will be reenacting the Cuban Missile Crisis using 15 different Twitter accounts. You can follow the tweets at http://thea.micds.org/twitster/index.php, or if you use Twitter you can follow the individual characters here. TwHistory was the brainchild of Marion Jensen, and started with a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg earlier this summer (press release here). My colleagues at the Open University of Catalonia have been doing interesting work on microlearning with Twitter, including interesting work on using Twitter in language learning by Graham Stanley. They were even able to interview Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Twitter, about using Twitter in education (here and here). So what are your thoughts on microlearning using Twitter?

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