Tom Caswell

Listen. Share. Learn.

Get in touch

Blog

  • Open Education Policy in Washington State

    Last week I gave a presentation on Open Education policy in Washington State at the OpenCourseWare Consortium Global 2011 meetings in Cambridge. It’s great to see both the Hewlett and Gates Foundations focusing on community college Open Education efforts. I am fortunate to work in a system that has well-defined governance structures, which allow me to build a solid case for how engaging in Open Education creates efficiencies and leads to increased, measurable student success. Here are my slides:

    Open education policy in WA

    View more presentations from Tom Caswell

  • How Creative Commons Helped Me Graduate

    Image by Flickr user Globalism Pictures (CC-BY)

    I am graduating today, and along with my faculty advisors and my family, I have Creative Commons to thank.

    Not long before graduation I received a friendly email reminder informing me that I still needed to submit a capstone paper to complete my Ed.S. degree in Instructional Technology & Learning Sciences. I had just moved and started a new job that was keeping me very busy. I didn’t have time to write a capstone paper from scratch, and it looked like I would need to delay my graduation.

    Fortunately I have written many articles as a graduate student. Surely I could republish one of my earlier papers, couldn’t I? The answer I got from my advisors was “no” because the rights to all my published papers were now owned by publishers. All except one. I had written a report for Creative Commons while working as a consultant on their Student Journalism 2.0 project. The report was openly licensed with a CC-BY license, which meant I had permission to modify and republish it to fit the requirements of the capstone paper.

    So as I celebrate my graduation here from the OpenCourseWare Consortium Global conference, I am grateful to Creative Commons who helped make it possible. This is yet another example of how being open can be useful in unexpected ways. Thanks, CC!

     

  • Creative Commons Announces Support Program for US Department of Labor C3T Grantees

    Creative Commons is pleased to announce we have been awarded a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide support to successful applicants of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (C3T) grant program with our partnering organizations Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. 

    The free of charge technical assistance services will provide a competitive advantage for organizations seeking C3T grant funds and ensure that the open educational resources created with these federal funds are of the highest quality. The partnering organizations will provide the following areas of expertise: open licensing, learning and course design, professional development, and adoption and use. C3T applicants interested in these free services should include boilerplate language in their proposal. This suggested language, as well as a high-level description of services, can be viewed at http://creativecommons.org/taa-grant-program
    Creative Commons is excited to participate in this groundbreaking effort and grateful to The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its generous support in facilitating open learning. 

    *****

    The following is updated copy from http://creativecommons.org/taa-grant-program

    Updated April 13, 2011
    Creative Commons is pleased to announce we have been awarded a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide support to successful applicants of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (C3T) grant program with our partnering organizations Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI), CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC). 

    Applicants interested in partnering with Creative Commons for this support should incorporate the following paragraph into their C3T proposal:

    Aligned with Section III D of the SGA “Leveraged Expertise,” [enter applicant name] will partner with Creative Commons, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. These highly experienced organizations will provide comprehensive infrastructure support and capacity building along the following dimensions:
    • Creative Commons is the global leader in open content licensing and will provide technical support in meeting the open licensing requirement and ensuring interoperability of C3T funded content.
    • Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative brings expertise in applying results from the learning sciences to the design, implementation, evaluation and continuous improvement of open web-based learning environments.
    • CAST is a pioneer in the field of Universal Design for Learning and will offer grantees technical support and enabling technologies to ensure that all of the digital content and learning environments developed in this project succeed with the widest range of learners possible.
    • The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges is one of the leading community college systems in the nation fully embracing open educational resources and open licensing, and will develop best practices in adoption and use, policies and professional development that work for participating institutions.

    Services will be coordinated through Creative Commons.

    Good luck with your applications! Creative Commons will contact all successful grantees after the first round winners are announced. More in-depth detail on services will be provided after the DOL announcement. Questions should be directed to TAA@creativecommons.org 

    ————————
    High-level description of services
    The partnering organizations will provide C3T grantees a comprehensive set of support and technical assistance to ensure their success. Those services include reinforcing open licensing practices, increasing access to existing open educational resources (OER), Universal Design for Learning (UDL), accessibility and web-based design best practices, as well as professional development in critical policy and adoption practices. Every effort will be made not only to link grantees with existing resources, but also to encourage linkages among them to maximize benefits and build open licensing capacity in the community college space
    Open Licensing Support: Creative Commons will lend technical support in meeting the open licensing requirement and ensuring interoperability of content. Creative Commons will explain its licenses and tools (especially CC BY) to grantees, and provide both explanatory documentation and outreach to help institutions understand and effectively implement this requirement. 

    Course Design and Best Practices: OLI and CAST will provide expertise and enabling technologies to ensure that all of the digital content and learning environments developed in this project are designed to succeed with the widest range of learners possible.

    Web-Based Learning Environments: Plus Platform and Plus Co-Development: OLI and CAST will offer two additional options for deeper involvement in building web-based interactive environments. Institutions selected to participate in the “Plus Platform” option will have access to OLI’s web-based learning platform to host their own open educational resources. A group of multiple subgroups will be selected for “Plus Co-development” support and engage in a full design process for OER resulting in 3-4 complete learning environments created and hosted on the UDL-enhanced OLI web-based learning platform.

    Making the Case: Policy and Best Practices: SBCTC will utilize its system-wide experience in adoption, re-mix, re-use and distribution of OER to help grantee institutions develop best practices and policies that take full advantage of the C3T grants and process. SBCTC will help grantees understand the direct connections between OER adoption and performance-based funding. SBCTC will develop and provide professional development on adoption and re-use of C3T open content for faculty, deans, provosts, presidents and trustees.

  • 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.
    (more…)

  • Open Education Tools: The affordances of openness

    Paper list of BBS numbers laying on a keyboard. Top of page says, "Don't Modem Without It!"
    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?