Oh, and it’s free.

Here are the TechCrunch, Chronicle, and Hack Education articles about the suit. Not only are the publishers going after Boundless Learning, they’re going after the funders as well. (I usually give my kids a time-out before it gets to this point.)

While it might be cheaper to buy Boundless rather than sue them at this point, publishers are understandably nervous and looking to make a statement about reverse engineered textbooks. The irony here is that publishers routinely copy each other. Compare the table of contents of the top 3 Biology textbooks and you’ll see what I mean.

OER is not on trial here, but there are implications for those who seek to leverage OER to solve real problems. I can’t help rooting for a group that is willing to take a creative risk to help students, and I hope Boundless can continue providing a legal alternative to $200+ textbooks. I want my kids to use their site someday. Long live the copycats!

Publisher Complaint

1. If you use Creative Commons licenses for your OER (or any other openly licensed creative work), you might want to check out: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/32157
2. Please contribute to the new OER Policy Registry: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/32072
3. New video hot off the press from CC Qatar:

• HB 2336 (video)
• SB 6460 (video)

It is notable that even though there was significant opposition to the bills from the universities, everyone supported using and sharing open resources. The concerns centered around *how* to go about implementing an open policy. Today’s conversations are well worth watching for anyone interested in these arguments or considering similar legislation. A quick summary:

EDIT: Cable Green posted a good FAQ on the bills.

Consensus:

• Broad support for quality open textbooks in higher ed. (several universities said they are “all in” for open textbooks)
• Everyone supports the spirit and intention of sharing open educational resources

Concerns raised at hearings:

• Mandatory nature of policy (and how to track compliance)
• Impact on faculty’s ability to publish in peer reviewed articles (and further impact on faculty P&T and retention)
• Copyright vetting and copyright liability burdens on faculty

Tonight I’m thinking of the Ghandi quote David Wiley used almost a year ago: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I’ve been through the first three stages. The final stage we are in, the winning part requires a lot of listening, especially to faculty who are interested in OER but have different ideas about implementation.

Regardless of what happens to these two bills, one thing is clear: Open Educational Resources are moving into the mainstream. It’s time to expand educational opportunities for all. No more waiting. It’s time to share.

WA Representative Chris Reykdal at the Textbook Rebellion #txtbktour11, originally uploaded by caswell_tom.

WA Representative Chris Reykdal supporting textbook affordability at the Textbook Rebellion #txtbktour11 @chrisreykdal

To spur authors to openly license their work, the Saylor Foundation will offer a $20,000 award for submitted textbooks accepted for use in our course materials after a round of peer reviews. To be eligible for the award, the author(s) must agree to license the text under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY) license.

The Saylor Foundation will formally launch the Challenge just after Labor Day so please visit the Saylor.org site at that time and keep your eyes out for more information. The challenge aims to license open texts for over 200 courses currently residing on Saylor.org used in twelve of the most popular college majors enrolled in by U.S. students.

This is exciting news, as we have several faculty in our system who will likely be eligible. I hope this will tip the scales for others developing textbooks and considering going open.

I submitted a question about open sharing at a MH Campus webinar a few weeks ago. My question was not addressed live, but everyone who submitted questions was promised an eventual response. My answer came today, and McGraw-Hill made it clear: “MH Content is not for sharing.”

My question: Many of our faculty are interested in sharing their course materials on the open web. Does the MH Campus allow for this its free content to be shared on the open web. If so, why not share the free MH Campus materials as Open Educational Resources with an open license?

The answer to your question is No. Faculty can share any of their own material with others but MH Content is not for sharing. The terms of service for MH Campus can be found at mhcampus.com under the legal tab.

It’s a shame, really, because with the same basic MH Campus tool plus an open license McGraw-Hill could have done something really innovative.

Most faculty understand that the teaching IS sharing. They are content experts after all — the same group publishers draw from when developing their own expensive content with the old model. But faculty who mix MH Campus and similar materials with their own course content will find their ability to share the result is severely limited.

There is an important lesson here: weaving the proprietary in with the open renders the result unsharable. So if you want to keep control, keep it open!

From https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27603

Today Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) announce the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, a project aimed at improving education search and discovery via a common framework for tagging and organizing learning resources on the web. The learning resources framework will be designed to work with schema.org, the web metadata framework recently launched by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, as well as to work with other metadata technologies and to enable other rich applications.

But schemas are good for more than finding specific recipes. It will change educational search, learning, and OERmagine you could do the same fine-grain sorting and filtering with educational resources. Check one box for pre-college and another box for open, modifiable resources only. This is why metadata (the tags and other hidden stuff that describes the content) is important in educational materials, especially OER. Those who use the proper metadata schemas will be included in the search results. Teachers and learners will be able to drill down and find *exactly* the materials they want at the proper grade level. This is a BIG deal for education and OER stands to gain a LOT more attention as a result. Keep your eyes on http://schema.org/.

Old BBS list. "Don't Modem Without It!" CC-BY believekevin

I remember back in the old days, in the early 90′s, when the Internet still seemed like a fad to most people.  Back before America Online started flooding the world with its endless stream of AOL CD offers, and you couldn’t just assume everyone had email. Back in the days of dial-up. Back then, posting something online was reserved for computer geeks. It was a real novelty to have your own website, and it usually required special software and special access to a server. More and more people we getting online, but mostly just to read content. Producers were different than users.

The advent of many Web 2.0 sites blurred the lines between Internet consumers and producers. Sites like Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter allow us to easily post our own content to the web. A host of web-based tools became simple enough to facilitate sharing, and the web hasn’t been the same since. Now we expect to be able to leave a comment or a rating almost everywhere we go online – even as we read the day’s new. The Internet has gone from being a one-way street (producer to consumer) to a four-way street (producer to consumer, consumer to producer, consumer to consumer, and producer to producer). Or you could say that we have all now become online content producers. Many online retailers allow users to share customer reviews to help steer others away from poor quality products and towards better values.

So what caused the shift to Web 2.0? Most folks probably would have commented or blogged sooner if the means to do so had existed. It seems obvious that if there were no comment boxes on web pages, there would be no comments. The comment box adds that affordance, to use Don Norman’s term. The same is true for Amazon’s video reviews and many other new ways we as users are now able to share our perspectives online.

Now let’s apply a similar logic to Open Education and ask some questions. At the end of a most excellent 2010 Open Education conference, David Wiley talked about what open licensing does for content. He asked us to set aside the digital nature of the content and think about the specific affordances of the open license. I think the idea is that understanding the specific affordances of open licensing allow us to better understand the nature of Open Educational Resources. Here’s a quick list of the affordances of openness:

• tracking content use
  • keeping track of licenses for reused content
• allowing practitioners and students to create and modify derivative works more easily
• providing accessible formats (derivative works) and allowing others to do the same
• others?

So how can we make it easy for newcomers to engage? Let’s face it, most educators don’t know or care about using RDFa to embed a Creative Commons license, in the same way that most bloggers today don’t know or care about inserting an image using HTML.

If you know of software, web sites or tools for creating or sharing OER that are particularly useful and easy to use, please add a comment below. Are the current tools good enough or do we need better ones?