Tom Caswell

Listen. Share. Learn.

Category: OER

  • Upcoming Saylor Foundation Open Textbook Challenge

    From the College Open Textbooks blog:

    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.

  • MH Campus: “Not for Sharing”

    Three months ago I blogged about concerns I have over McGraw-Hill’s MH Campus portal. If you are not familiar with the tool, MH Campus allows faculty to easily insert content from McGraw-Hill and its partners into their course. This includes some content that is available at no charge to faculty; but make no mistake, using this content comes with a price.

    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!

     

  • Learning Resource Metadata Initiative Announced

    Ok, I know I’m 2 days late on blogging this announcement. The Learning Resources Metadata Initiative was announced Tuesday. I’m looking forward to reading through the metadata specs when they are done. (Metadata specs are a wonderful, natural sleep aid.)

    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.

    More info here at the FAQ: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/FAQ

  • Schema.org + OER = Mmmm Good!

    If you’ve already tried searching Google for recipes (try crepes), you know that along with the search results you get a nice list of ingredients with check boxes on the left of your search. That’s all due to a schema that allows for common criteria that Google or any other search engine can read. When web sites follow these standards for recipes, users can filter results in various ways. In my crepe recipe example below, I have the option of limiting search results to recipes under 100 calories (although you won’t find any crepe recipes  with whip cream and Nutella in that list.)

    But schemas are good for more than finding specific recipes. Imagine if 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 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/.

  • Looking back at Open Ed 2010, looking forward to 2011

    Today I reviewed some presentations from Open Ed 2010 and thought about the last several years of the Open Education movement. Here are a couple clips from the Barcelona conference, starting with a nice overview from my favorite OER advocate, Hal Plotkin:

     


    Hal Plotkin: impressions about Open Ed 2010


    Hal Plotkin at Open Ed 2010:
    “Meeting President Obama’s 2020 College Graduation Goal – The Role of Open Educational Resources”

    And in case you missed Hal Plotkin’s “new speech” from his 2011 Connexions conference keynote, it’s a must.
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