Tom Caswell

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  • 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.

  • Where are your courses, Mr. Most Accessible?

    People's Choice Award for Most Accessible OCWIt may seem strangely ironic that a project like the Open Course Library received the People’s Choice award for “most accessible” since our finished product is not yet available. (If it’s so accessible, where is it??)

    Let me explain. Accessibility and universal design principles have been a priority from the first day of this project. We are also working to share our project design and progress using social media and a wiki that describes our process.

    So over the next couple months as some people may be tempted to ask, “Where are your courses, Mr. Most Accessible OCW Winner?” I’ll just tell them about how we are adding captioning to several hundred YouTube videos, trying to make our open courses a little bit more accessible. I can’t wait for our official launch at the end of October. It’s going to be great!

  • 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!

     

  • Reflections on Educause Institute

    This week I’m attending the Educause Learning Technologies Leadership Institute in Portland, Oregon. The first couple of days have focused on sharing research-driven best practices in communication and relationship building. Making the case to higher administration. The buzz word at this event is “leaderful.” I’m still trying to define it, but I’m pretty sure we’ll all leave the Portland Double Tree wanting to be more leaderful.

    Not surprisingly, most of the examples used so far deal with changes, upgrades, and other issues surrounding Learning Management Systems. This is useful to my eLearning team at SBCTC because we are at the start of a major LMS transition. How we communicate about these LMS changes is key to making a successful transition. Paul Fisher’s explanation of the 5 factors to adoption from Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation:

    • Relative advantage – How much does the innovation improve over the previous generation?
    • Compatibility – How easily can the innovation be assimilated into an individual’s life?
    • Complexity or Simplicity – How difficult is the innovation to adopt?
    • Trialability (ease of experimentation) – How easy is it and what is the risk of experimentation?
    • Observability – How easy is it to share the benefits of the innovation within your network?

    Paul also talked about the power of politicking — of having the “meeting before the meeting.” He said that one of his most effective strategies involves showing up to as many informal gatherings and other events as possible to take the temperature of his constituents on important issues. That way he already knows where his constituents will come down on the issues before critical meetings take place. That’s the power of politicking.

    I have also come to realize that even when I attend events that have nothing to do with open education, that subject always comes up at my table for some reason. Maybe it’s me. I often come away from dinner with a couple of business cards from people who want to start sharing their educational materials more openly. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s me.

  • 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