Think of it this way, if 1 in 20 viewers bought this song for $1 , this group would have made $1 Million in a month (assuming there were 20 million unique viewers). Along with the iTunes link and the direct download link, they also sell T-shirts. That’s the power of viral web sharing. The world’s greatest marketing tool is free.

Enjoy the song…

Here’s a quick summary of the bills (there are actually 2):

• The first CA bill would create 50 open textbooks for high-enrollment college courses that would be free online and available in print for ~$20.  Book contracts would be awarded through competitive grant process open to publishers, faculty and organizations, and must use a Creative Commons Attribution license.

• The second bill would create the “California Digital Open Source Library” to serve as a platform for accessing and customizing the 50 open textbooks, and will include incentives for faculty to adopt these and other open textbooks.  It also requires that publishers provide free library reserve copies of textbooks adopted in high-enrollment courses at California’s public colleges.

• No cost is indicated in the bill summaries, but an article on KQED’s website quotes $25 million.  This is a lot of money given the state’s budget issues, but the return would undoubtedly be huge — the state has close to 3 million college students, at least half of which are at the community colleges where books on average cost more than tuition (as of ’08).

How this compares to the Open Course Library:

• WA is covering more courses (81) with less money (about $2 million).  However, CA would create a full open textbook for each course, while the Open Course Library can include non-open materials as long as the cost is under $30.

• Both programs use the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) open license for all new materials, which allows the public to freely use, distribute and adapt the material.  It also would allow publishers to improve and re-sell proprietary versions.

• Both aim to address high-enrollment courses, but WA’s focuses specifically on community college level.  It appears that CA will focus on all three public systems: the UCs, CSUs and CCCs.

Thanks to Nicole Allen and Brandon Muramatsu for this information!

Pearson’s sustainability model for OpenClass it isn’t clear at this point, and that makes building a relationship of trust difficult. In contrast, the for-profit company Instructure is gobbling up market share with their LMS, Canvas. Instructure has made two smart moves Pearson could learn from: (1) Their code is open source — not so much to invite outside development, but more as a defense against the LMS IP being sold to the highest bidder. (2) Instructure has made their sustainability model clear. They provide enterprise-level services for Canvas, which allows them to continue to invest the Canvas platform.

It’s ironic that openness has emerged as a way to protect IP from corporate takeover, but in a very real way this is what Instructure has done with Canvas. And institutions who have had their LMS bought out from under them will think twice before exposing themselves to that risk again.

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!

PC World just published a blog on Open Source Software called “Is Open Source Up to Par? Just Ask the DoD.” When you add the Department of Defense’s Open Technology Development report to the recent decision by the Department of Labor to require a Creative Commons open license on all educational content produced with the $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College And Career Training (TAACCCT) grants, you can see the start of a trend in the US government towards using open licensing as a way to increase efficiency. The big idea for the field of education is that government has a new, more efficient option for creating and distributing educational materials: competitive grants that carry an open license requirement.

“Old School”
Here’s the old model: College students and K-12 institutions buy textbooks from publishers. Publishers pay authors and editors to develop and maintain the content, so naturally they want to make as much as possible on that investment. The publishers also own the copyright and hold the exclusive rights to distribute, revise, and redistribute the content to schools or college students. Why should government interfere or care? #1) The cost of textbooks has tripled since 1986. #2) Since nearly half of US college students use government grants or loans to pay for their textbooks, rising textbook costs are transferred back to the taxpayer. And by the way, US student loan debt just passed credit card debt, hovering around $830 billion. Yeah, we could use a good idea right about now.

The new model
Since taxpayers end up paying the bill for textbooks either way, why not launch a competitive grant process and require the winners to include a shareable license to the digital learning materials they produce? That’s exactly what the Department of Labor is doing with $2 billion in funding. Because we are talking about open, digital content anyone will be able to access, modify, adapt, and improve the resulting educational materials. The cost of making a million copies of a digital textbook is not much more than the cost of the first copy. And if you want it printed, no problem. Printed and bound versions of open textbooks end up costing between 5 and 20 dollars per book.

Requiring open licenses on digital works created with government grants and contracts allows competition and innovation to continue *after* the educational content is created. This is because anyone can access the digital content, build on it, and improve it. Print-on-demand solutions, assessment tools, and customized versions can be added to the original at relatively low cost. But publishers who enhance and resell the content will have add enough new value to compete with the original, free version and with other innovators. This competition will help keep prices low, which is good for students, schools, and in the long run, good for taxpayers. The “open” model doesn’t put anyone out of business — it actually allows everyone to compete and innovate indefinitely.

So what about the guns and the penguins?
Open licenses create efficiencies. This is as true for software as it is for textbooks, as the Department of Defense has learned. From the PC World article:

As with Rifles, So with Software

The DoD then goes on to provide a nice analogy: “Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. The military often finds itself in this position with taxpayer funded, contractor developed software: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system and control of the software source code.”

That has a familiar ring to it too, doesn’t it?

“This is optimal only for the monopoly contractor,” the document goes on to point out, “but creates inefficiencies and ineffectiveness for the government, reduction of opportunities for the industrial base, severely limits competition for new software upgrades, depletes resources that can be used to better effect and wastes taxpayer-provided funds.”

I don’t think I could have put it better myself.

Open technology, by contrast, offers increased agility and flexibility, faster delivery, increased innovation, reduced risk, lower cost and information assurance and security, the DoD asserts.

There is much more to say on this subject, but I’ll pause here for your comments and critiques. Yes, we should still pay textbook authors fairly to build and maintain learning content, and yes, publishers can still offer useful services. Yet I see no reason for government to directly or indirectly fund proprietary K-12 and college textbook publishing empires when more efficient models and providers are now in place.

The bottom line: One way or another, we (taxpayers) pay for textbooks. Let’s do it more efficiently. Or, as David Wiley puts it, “If you buy one, you should get one.”

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.

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?

As an instructor at Utah State University I hated getting the emails from the Blackboard administrator telling me that all courses before X date were being deleted to create room on the server for new courses. Not that those courses were open anyway, but it reminded me of the ephemeral nature of those courses. Here today, gone tomorrow.

I think most folks would agree that there is value to making a course available to students beyond the semester/quarter in which they enrolled. It could be a good reference for them in higher level courses, etc. But could there actually be value for institution?

I get calls each year from the alumni associations of the various schools I attended. They usually want me to donate to something. I find it ironic that those same institutions have effectively LOCKED THE DOORS to the online learning I once enjoyed. If they want me to stay involved as an alumni, why not do something to keep me interested. I’m not talking about a tailgate party. If I could come back to the lectures, notes, groups I once participated in I would come back to (some of) them year after year. YOU ARE A SCHOOL. Your best marketing tool is (hopefully) the LEARNING you provide. STOP THROWING IT ALL AWAY.

The next time I get hit up for a donation by an alumni association, I will refer them here. Bottom line: Open your learning and I’ll open my wallet.

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.