• 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?

It’s kind of hard to leave off each day. I kind of want to skip Thanksgiving and keep working. Reminds me of when I taught Computer Science at Redlands High School and let my students create a video game as a class one semester. I had to kick them out of my classroom each day because they didn’t want to stop what they were doing. Some of the other teachers were frustrated at me because my students were so focused on my class. I even found one student hiding in the corner of my room, two hours after class, working on creating his part of the game. That’s how I feel here.

But it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and everyone else has gone home, so I’ll leave with my favorite quotes/ideas of the week from a recent OCW Consortium webinar on open access in education and policy given by Reuven Carlyle, State Representative from the 36th District of Seattle, Washington:

1. If the public taxpayers fund something, it should be open and accessible.
2. “If we are successful at nothing else in the next year or two, let’s set a goal to fundamentally change the dynamic so that the expectation is one of complete openness … as opposed to openness being the exception. We have to change the social dynamic to one of openness.”
3. Position open access as a cost savings and one of the most disruptive new approaches, to say nothing of the increased learning that comes of this.
4. Have a clear, simple message about this. This is not a techno-gadget.  Be clear on the value drivers.
5. Make the financial case for openness in how it avoids duplication and lack of coordination. We’ll pay for open content once, but we aren’t going to pay for it a thousand times.

Education and Policy (Webinar Nov 2010) from OpenCourseWare Consortium on Vimeo.

As you probably know, David Wiley was recently able to convince Sal Khan of the Khan Academy to start using a CC-BY license on his 1200+ educational videos. Since all of Sal’s Open Educational Resources (yes, we can call it OER now) are delivered via YouTube they benefit from Google’s yummy, new auto-transcription and auto-translation features. I have experimented with viewing Sal’s video mini-lectures with both English and French captions. The English audio transcription seems fairly accurate, and the French translation (auto-generated from the English subtitles) has a little more that is “lost in auto-translation.” This definitely deserves it’s “beta” label, but it is impressive nonetheless when you consider it is all auto-generated.

So what does video auto-captioning mean for OER?

• accessibility (readable by someone with a screen reader or braille output device)
• discoverability (easy for others to find you via Google, etc.)
• searchability (easy to find the specific part you are looking for – i. e. searchable video)
• low-bandwidth access (if text transcripts are made available separately)
• translateability (I think I made that word up)

Once you have an easy way to transcribe video content, several new possibilities open up. While not perfect, the auto-captioned content is definitely more accessible to users with visual and/or aural disabilities. (I just hope future iterations of auto-captioning will allow the content author to invite/approve users to edit these auto-captions, similar to the dotSub model.) But increased accessibility is only one way we can benefit. Now that you have captions, you can search them. Auto-captioning will make it possible to find a particular video on the web, or even a particular segment within a video using a keyword search. Soon you will “Google” through video for a particular scene. MIT is already doing video search (see their Lecture Browser and Spoken Media Project). Finally, raw text video transcriptions use less bandwidth than the original video content, which meets another critical need: access in low-bandwidth areas or places where the cost of bandwidth can be prohibitive. I’ll stop there for now, but it is clear to me that with the explosion of online videos and related rich media, video auto-captioning is a major step forward for the web.