Tom Caswell

Listen. Share. Learn.

Category: Openness

  • Why every college alumni association should care about their school’s LMS

    A comment left by Andy Duckworth on my last post got me thinking about how a more open, persistent LMS might be as beneficial to institutions as it is to students. Andy’s favorite feature of the Instructure’s Canvas LMS is “the ability for students to create groups that can persist outside of a specific class.” Canvas does a lot of clever things (integrating collaborative goodies such as Google Docs and DimDim), but persistent groups is my favorite feature too.

    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.

  • Setting the Default to “Open”

    I just started a new job as Open Education Program Manager for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC). My main challenge is getting up to speed with a major project that has been under way for several months. The Open Course Library is taking the top 81 highest enrolling college courses in the state and to creating high quality, openly licensed curriculum for each course. There are dozens of people involved: course developers, designers, librarians, and many other experts. All the challenges of course development come into play, plus some additional things that come with creating a course in the open: content licensing, copyright clearance, and designing for reuse. It’s all there, and it’s a little like trying to grab on to a moving train. But I love it, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.

    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.

  • An opportunity for TwHistory

    A few months ago I helped a friend win the Pepsi Refresh Challenge, which gave $25,000 to one of my favorite music associations, the Associate of Redlands Bowl. The following month he did it again, this time at the $50K level. The basic idea is that there is strength in numbers. So TwHistory has teamed up with other groups to form an alliance by supporting each others’ projects.

    We are competing for a $25K grant for TwHistory and we have a month to collect all the daily votes we can. It’s simple: if we are in the top 10 with the most votes at the $25K level at the end of the month, we get the funding. We are currently ranked #16 out of over a thousand entries, so we are definitely in the running. Here are our deliverables:

    • 10 lesson plans built around historical documents
    • 1 example of a virtual historical reenactment (Sinking of the Titanic)
    • 1 ‘how to’ video posted on our site for educators to learn the TwHistory process

    Vote early and often

    Vote for TwHistory and its partners here.  You can sign in using your Facebook account, so it’s really easy. You are allowed to vote for up to 10 projects each day, so please vote for our partners as well.

  • My 140th Blog Post: Tweets on Open Education

    In honor of my 140th blog post on https://tomcaswell.com, I am posting a few tweets I just submitted to the College Open Textbook Community in response to their call. (The call is still open if you are interested in submitting tweets for their book.) This is my first time blogging tweets so bear with me…

    My Tweets on Open Education

    1) What is Open?
    Open is the natural habitat for educational materials. Imparting knowledge implies sharing it. The ideal environment for education is open.

    2) Why Author an Open Textbook?
    To author an Open Textbook is to give something back, to replenish the pool of education from which we ourselves have drunk so deeply.

    An Open Textbook is the new currency in a reputation-based economy. It survives w/o the protective vacuum of copyright. In fact, it thrives.

    3) Why Adopt an Open Textbook?
    Open Textbooks should be adopted for their quality, affordability, adaptability, portability, scalability, and accessibility.

    4) How to Adopt an Open Textbook?
    Tell your administrators why you want to adopt an Open Textbook, join with others in the OER movement, build support, & overcome barriers.

    5) Why Should Your College/University Care?
    Because Open Textbooks are part of a growing movement towards education affordability that makes sense & is supported by the US Dept. of Ed.

    6) How Does the Student Benefit?
    Students benefit now from educational affordability & later by having high quality educational resources available to review at any time.

    7) Where are we Headed?
    We are headed towards educational affordability and openness, where quality content can be created, rated, shared, & adapted by all.

  • Teaching Tolerance through TwHistory?

    One of the advantages of growing up as a global nomad is that I have lived for extended periods of time in a variety of countries. I have witnessed many different ways people speak, act, look, dress, and do things. I have learned to accept and even enjoy this diversity. As global exchanges of many kinds become more common I see an increased need for tolerance between people. One way to achieve tolerance in the face of cultural, political, and religious differences is to understand and appreciate the backgrounds and perspectives of others.

    Tolerance and cultural appreciation can also be developed by exploring past events, noting one’s own historical cultural shifts as well as those of others. TwHistory.org is a project to create historical reenactments by researching journals and other primary source documents, and then sharing the events via Twitter, as if they were happening in the present. By setting up a Twitter account for each historical figure, individual perspective can be represented. Already, events such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the failed attempt at German unification in 1848 have already been reenacted using Twitter. I think a cross-cultural historical reenactment would be a great next step. There are teachers and researchers interested in TwHistory in Germany, Switzerland, England and the USA — so I think an international TwHistory reenactment is possible. I see it as a way to work through difficult events, such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Think of it as historical therapy. My hope is that by exploring different perspectives of the past we can move towards appreciating diversity and embracing tolerance in the present and future.