Here’s something you probably never thought you’d see: a list of 100 colleges and universities where you can earn your degree without paying any tuition. Most of the programs on the list look legitimate. And yes, they all have some qualification criteria you must meet to get the free goods.

If open educational resources, open learning support, and open accreditation are just too hard, why not simply participate in one of these programs? After all, isn’t our ultimate goal to provide access to educational opportunity to those who go without?

Yes, but our goal is more than simply being free or inexpensive. For example, we need to remove entrance requirements, we need to provide rights to make local adaptations to the curriculum, etc. In short, we need to be able to scale open education to everyone. Even if there were no entrance requirements at all, 100 tuition-free universities will bless some people’s lives but will not address the larger problem. And the answer isn’t to build more free universities.

To borrow and adapt a analogy (originally a critique of AI) from Dreyfus, building universities to educate mankind is like trying to climb trees to get to the moon. Once you reach the top of a certain tree, you say to yourself, ‘this approach isn’t going to get me there… I need a radical new approach!’ So you climb down, find a different tree that looks taller, and begin climbing it. The trouble is, of course, no matter how many trees you find and climb, while each of them will get you slightly closer to the moon, none can actually get you there. You need to give up tree climbing and start developing space flight.

Another analogy I really love comes from Richard G. Scott. Speaking of the favorite Utah irrigation analogy of “getting the water all the way to the end of the row,” Elder Scott suggested that we should instead focus on getting it to rain.

What these analogies tell us about universal access to education is that we cannot simply scout out taller trees or increase the water pressure in our canals - we need to find completely different ways to approach the problem and abandon bankrupt techniques. And Elder Scott’s analogy reminds us that we should not hesitate to call on God for help - after all, these are His children whose lives we’re trying to bless.

The Open High School of Utah, the first high school to commit to using 100% open educational resources across its entire curriculum, has opened its enrollment application process and received its first application! I’m giddy with delight. If you know someone who lives in Utah, will be a 9th grader next academic year, wants the flexibility of attending an online high school, the privilege of being loaned a laptop for the duration of their studies, and the freedom to forever keep a copy of all the curriculum materials s/he uses throughout high school, invite them to enroll today!

And that’s why students rock is the title of a fabulous new post from Philipp describing the Rip Mix Learners project at UWC, which is supporting a very grassroots approach to open educational resources.

The California bill I covered a few weeks ago, authorizing the establishment of “a pilot program to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers” has inspired me to do finally do one of those things on my “one of these days…” list.

As we drafted the language for the Cape Town Declaration’s Strategy 3 on Open Education Policy, I worked to champion the idea that ‘taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.’ This is the line of argument that helped secure legislative funding for the Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance. This language and other great ideas did eventually make it into the Strategy:

3. Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.

So now what is obviously needed is some legislation that makes these policies real! Borrowing and improving the definition of OERs from the California bill, I’m thinking something along these lines:

Open educational resources are curriculum materials or learning resources whose copyrights have expired, that have been placed in the public domain, or that have been released with an intellectual property license that permits their free use, reuse, revision, and redistribution by others without further permission from the original authors or creators. Open educational resources include items such as courses, course materials, textbooks, lesson plans, videos or podcasts of classroom lectures, homework assignments, activities, tests, and any other tools, materials, or techniques that have an impact on teaching and learning.

Utah’s public schools spend a significant amount of taxpayer money each year purchasing or licensing curriculum materials and other learning resources. Given the limited nature of public funding available, Utah’s public schools can become better stewards of public resources by making greater use of open educational resources. Specifically, in cases where existing open educational resources provide a viable educational alternative to traditional curriculum materials, these should be strongly considered for adoption by the schools and districts. In cases where public funds are used to purchase or license materials instead of adopting educationally equivalent open educational resources, schools and districts have an obligation to justify these decisions to the taxpaying public.

Utah’s public schools also spend a significant amount of taxpayer money each year producing original curriculum materials and other learning resources. In order to provide the largest possible benefit to Utah’s public schools, any time public funds are used to produce curriculum materials these should immediately become open educational resources and be made available for free use, reuse, revision, and redistribution by other public schools and the public at large.

Such measures will create real cost savings for districts and schools. These cost savings can be redirected back into the schools and districts in a number of ways, including supporting teacher professional development regarding the discovery, creation, use, and sharing of open educational resources, summer funding for teachers to improve existing open educational resources, and summer funding for teachers to develop new open educational resources.

I realize right away that a bill espousing these principles may be far too right-headed to have a chance of passing, but as I was recently reminded, “being sure you will lose the fight does not free you from the moral obligation to fight the fight.” And yes, I realize this isn’t the proper format, &c., for a bill, but I’m only testing the ideas at this point. And yes, the ideas in the final paragraph probably don’t actually belong in the bill.

Know anyone who might want to sponsor legislation like this in Utah? Let me know! I’m doing my own searching in the meantime…

The Open Movement and Libraries is a resource-rich course covering a wide range of open topics being offered this fall by Ellyssa Kroski. The course plan linked above is licensed CC By-SA.

I’ve been saying for months now that one of two things will happen during the month of October. Either:

1. John McCain will stand next to President Bush as the announcement is made that the US has finally caught Osama Bin Laden and that our military strategy has been right all along, or

2. Some xenophobic redneck will attempt to assassinate Barak Obama.

I thought that it would be kept a secret until it actually happened, but Palin seems intent on single-handedly inciting “well-meaning” folks into action. According to the Washington Post, today Palin managed to work up a crowd using the “Obama is a terrorist” angle to the point where one of the Palin supporters called out “Kill him!”

Why not just cut straight to the “L-word” (lynch), Sarah? I mean, clearly Obama hates America. Isn’t that what we should do to people who disagree with us and who have destroyed our 15 point lead in Florida? Have them killed by a mob? (At the same rally another Palin supported shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man from one of the networks and told him, “Sit down, boy.”)

If a so-called “normal” person incited this kind of mob mentality, they would be arrested. What kind of world are we living in here?

The full text of the California bill is available online here. Or, for your reading convenience, you can view it below.

BILL NUMBER: AB 2261 CHAPTERED
BILL TEXT

CHAPTER 671
FILED WITH SECRETARY OF STATE SEPTEMBER 30, 2008
APPROVED BY GOVERNOR SEPTEMBER 30, 2008
PASSED THE SENATE AUGUST 21, 2008
PASSED THE ASSEMBLY AUGUST 28, 2008
AMENDED IN SENATE AUGUST 18, 2008
AMENDED IN SENATE AUGUST 12, 2008
AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY MAY 23, 2008
AMENDED IN ASSEMBLY APRIL 16, 2008

INTRODUCED BY Assembly Member Ruskin

FEBRUARY 21, 2008

An act to add and repeal Article 2 (commencing with Section 78910)
of Chapter 7 of Part 48 of Division 7 of Title 3 of the Education
Code, relating to community colleges.

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL’S DIGEST

AB 2261, Ruskin. Community colleges: open education resources
centers.

Existing law establishes the California Community Colleges, under
the administration of the Board of Governors of the California
Community Colleges, as one of the segments of public postsecondary
education in this state. Existing law establishes community college
districts throughout the state, and authorizes these districts to
provide instruction to students at community college campuses.

This bill would express findings and declarations of the
Legislature relating to open education resources, as defined. The
bill would authorize the board of governors to establish a pilot
program to provide faculty and staff from community college districts
around the state with the information, methods, and instructional
materials to establish open education resources centers. The bill
would define open education resources for its purposes. The bill
would specify that a lead community college district be selected from
community college district applicants based upon a demonstration of
its ability to accomplish specified objectives. The bill would
require participating districts to report program information to the
Chancellor’s office of the California Community Colleges, who would
be required to report the findings to the Governor and the
Legislature on or before January 1, 2012. The bill would specify that
no additional state appropriation may be requested or provided for
purposes of this act.

The bill would repeal these provisions on January 1, 2012.

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

SECTION 1. The Legislature finds and declares all of the
following:

(a) Open education resources are learning materials or resources
whose copyrights have expired, or that have been released with an
intellectual property license that permits their free use or
repurposing by others without the permission of the original authors
or creators. Open education resources include items such as courses,
course materials, textbooks, streaming video of classroom lectures,
tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used
to transmit knowledge that have an impact on teaching and learning.

(b) Community colleges need to take greater advantage of open
education resources, especially for basic skills and general
education classes, including, but not limited to, algebra, that use
course content that remains generally unchanged over time.

SEC. 2. Article 2 (commencing with Section 78910) is added to
Chapter 7 of Part 48 of Division 7 of Title 3 of the Education Code,
to read:

Article 2. Open Education Resources Centers

78910. (a) The Board of Governors of the California Community
Colleges is authorized to establish a pilot program to provide
faculty and staff from community college districts around the state
with the information, methods, and instructional materials to
establish open education resources centers. Community colleges
participating in the pilot program shall support program costs
through existing state funds appropriated for purposes consistent
with this program, or through federal and private funding. The
Chancellor of the California Community Colleges may designate a lead
community college district to coordinate the planning and development
of the pilot program.

(b) For purposes of this article, “open education resources” are
learning materials or resources, including, but not necessarily
limited to, books, course materials, video materials, tests, or
software, the copyrights of which have expired, or have been released
with an intellectual property license that permits their free use or
repurposing by others without the permission of the original authors
or creators of the learning materials or resources.

(c) The lead community college district specified in subdivision
(a) shall be selected from community college district applicants
based upon a demonstration of its ability to accomplish all of the
following:
(1) Develop and implement a model for the creation of open
education resources (OER) course content that is pedagogically sound
and fully accessible, in compliance with the federal Americans With
Disabilities Act (Public Law 101-336), by students with varying
learning styles and disabilities.
(2) Develop community college model OER courses and instructional
materials that meet the requirements of the Intersegmental General
Education Transfer Curriculum (IGETC) or of basic skills education
courses in English, English as a second language, or mathematics, or
that meet the requirements of both the IGETC and the basic skills
education courses.
(3) Develop a community college professional development course
that introduces faculty, staff, and college course developers to the
concept, creation, content, and production methodologies that enable
OER to be offered to students in community college classes,
including, but not necessarily limited to, all of the following:
(A) Substitutes for textbooks.
(B) Addressing issues relating to copyright, the obtaining of
permission for use of material, and other intellectual property
concepts.
(C) Accessibility for students with disabilities.
(D) Delivery options that incorporate multiple learning styles and
strategies.
(4) Create an OER information repository to serve as the single
point of contact for information about community college OER, the
public domain, OER courses and course materials, research and
production processes, and professional resources for creating and
repurposing OER.
(5) Identifying sources of adequate funding to accomplish
paragraphs (1) to (4), inclusive.

(d) Participating districts shall report to the Chancellor’s
office of the California Community Colleges, upon request, on all of
the following:
(1) The number of faculty and students who use OER in their
courses.
(2) The quality of faculty and student experiences with OER
compared to traditional courses.
(3) The grades earned in OER courses.
(4) The cost of OER course materials compared to non-OER
materials.

(e) The Chancellor’s office of the California Community Colleges
shall report findings made pursuant to subdivision (d) to the
Governor and the Legislature on or before January 1, 2012.

(f) No additional state appropriation shall be requested or
provided for purposes of the section.

78910.5. This article shall remain in effect only until January
1, 2012 , and as of that date is repealed, unless a later enacted
statute, that is enacted before January 1, 2012, deletes or extends
that date.

As Jane reports on the Creative Commons blog, California’s OER pilot program has been signed into law:

Last week, a bill enabling the California Community Colleges to integrate open educational resources (OER) into its core curriculum was signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. AB 2261 authorizes the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges “to establish a pilot program to provide faculty and staff from community college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resources centers.”

Hal quotes me as saying that ‘introducing Open Educational Resources into the public education system is the most significant development since the establishment of Land Grant colleges and universities in the mid 1800’s.’ In fact, in my OpenCourseWars future-history, the federal OER bill is actually called the Third Morrill Act. I stand by this statement that OERs will be the most important development for higher education since the creation of the Land Grants, and I’ll go one step further and say that the widespread adoption of OERs by higher education and K-12 will be the most important thing that has happened to formal education since the advent of formal education.

You may think I’m blowing smoke, but OERs represent a mass-democratization of access that goes beyond formal education or even public schooling. Think about it - public schools are available only to (1) citizens (2) of a certain age. OERs, on the other hand, are available to everyone, regardless of nationality or age. As institutions adopt OERs and improve them they will contribute these changes back to the community. Like a feedback loop in a microphone and speaker, more and more OER of higher and higher quality will be increasingly available. Thank God that I’m alive to see this all happening! I’m truly humbled, and I hope to be able to continue to contribute to the advance of the open education movement.

A question Shawn asked in writing about social objects last week made me wonder… What if Facebook worked like Blackboard (or pretty much any other LMS)?

Imagine if every fifteen weeks Facebook:

• shut down all the groups you belonged to,
• deleted all your forum posts,
• removed all the photos, videos, and other files you had shared, and
• forgot who your friends were.

How popular or successful would Facebook be then? How popular or successful is Blackboard now? The closed learning management system paradigm is bankrupt.

You know those “deleted scenes” offered on DVDs? Well, I’ve pulled together a collection of deleted scenes for my chapter 2005 - 2012: The OpenCourseWars
in the new book Opening Up Education from MIT Press.

Apparently I wrote more material for the chapter than they needed. In the words of Billy Joel’s The Entertainer:

So, rather than sacrifice the ending of the piece, or leave out things I thought were interesting, I chose to lop several sections off the front of the history. At http://opencontent.org/future/ you’ll find the first four sections of the history from my early drafts. I offer them for your sci-fi / historical-fiction-written-from-the-future pleasure.

Lots more great discussion on the open education accreditation front! Including posts from Steve Carson (Borderlines) about the interface between the various functioning pieces of higher ed, Antonio writing about why we shouldn’t view the homemade certificate as a “sacrilegious contamination between two worlds, formal and informal” education, and Tannis wondering about how a few historical models of accreditation might inform our current thinking.

I hope all this interesting thinking and writing continues… We’re right at the tipping point (you might say precipice). =)

There have been some good comments on my post from yesterday, and interesting posts elsewhere around the net. I realized I needed to clarify my model a bit after reading Stephen’s comment:

A slightly different model has emerged in George’s and my Connectivism course. We have the 20 for-credit students at the University of Manitoba, and the open access students. We’ve published the details of all the assignments. We had a student who signed on as an open access student but who would be submitting her assignments at her home institution, for assessment there. This distributes assessment, allowing for assessment to be basically open-sourced.

In my Introduction to Open Education course, I had 8 or so normally enrolled students at my own university, and dozens more at no university at all who just followed for fun or for the “homemade certificate” which the Chronicle called a “diploma” again and again. But I also had another 8 students or so who were at their own universities, signed up for an Independent Study or Independent Research or Directed Readings kind of course (whichever was least painful to get enrolled in and would count toward their degree). I marked all their assignments and simply submitted a grade to the supervising professor at the end of term. I couldn’t really “outsource” the assessment piece of the course to these students’ supervising faculty, because there was no one at the students’ home institutions who knew anything about open education (hence their desire to take the course from me).

It occurs to me now, though, that this in and of itself is an interesting hack of the higher education system. These students paid tuition and took a course that partially fulfilled their graduation requirements, and my class is not in the universities’ course catalogs and my name is not on their faculty rosters. How much of a degree could you do this way? In a PhD program like the PhD in Instructional Psychology & Technology at BYU, each student is required to complete at least 18 hours in their area of specialization. This is a fairly common model in US graduate schools. In practice there is a huge amount of flexibility in the specialization courses taken, adapted to each individual student’s needs and interests. So if a student took all Independent Studies for these specialization courses and a sequence of six courses from the Edupunk Un-iversity (or Anti-university or Alter-university or Meta-university or whatever it is), they could potentially take 20% of their entire PhD program this way.

Open accreditation may be much closer than we think. We just need to continue to find creative ways to hack our courses into the existing university systems around the globe. At the same time, we need to establish a recognizable brand name for the collection of courses we would offer, so that folks will have heard of them. Until then, we’ll have to ride the strength of our names.

“Dr. Smith? For my specialization courses I’d like to start with a three course sequence from the Edupunk Un-iversity.”
“The what?”
“You know, those classes that David Wiley and Brian Lamb and Stephen Downes and those guys offer online.”
“Oh, sure. Sounds great. Which three?”

Now, these courses may not fit well outside of Instructional Technology type programs, but hey - we’ve got to start somewhere, right? Throw your thoughts about what should be offered over on the new Edupunk Un-iversity page on the OpenContent Wiki. I’ve thrown up some starter ideas, too. And we already have our first student waiting to enroll as per the comments on yesterday’s post - so what are you waiting for? Let the experiments commence! =)

D’Arcy had a great post tonight about the three parts of open education. It validates something I’ve been wondering to myself about for a while. While I use slightly different language, you can me my take on the three toward the end of my Open Ed 2008 General Session presentation (start at slide 100):

I’d love to engage in a bit more of a discussion between what I think of as learning support and what D’Arcy calls open access, just to make sure I understand what he’s saying.

I’m thinking about it from the “future of higher education” perspective, as opposed to the “what constitutes open education” perspective (as D’Arcy is). Still, it’s pretty cool that we pick basically the same three - it just means that the future of higher education is open education! In the presentation I basically argued that we can already see the three core functions of higher education starting to pull slowly apart from one another - the OCWs provide access to all the educational content (and now some research content thanks to MIT’s recent deal with Elsevier), places like Yahoo Answers provide the learning support and question/answer function (and RateMyProfessor carries much of the advising load), and Western Governor’s is a fully accredited university that offers no courses - only assessments (in other words, just credentials). This disaggregation is already happening, and higher education will just pull itself apart faster and faster in the future. Whenever a business function can be separated and specialized in, that business function is destined to be either spun off or outsourced. Wither the university then, huh?

In the video D’Arcy refers to open accreditation as the elephant in the room. Well, the elephant certainly stepped on me last week in Jeff Young’s Chronicle of Higher Education article, When Professors Print Their Own Diplomas, Who Needs Universities? After saying I was giving out diplomas a few times, Jeff accurately reports about my Introduction to Open Education class last year, “unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit, but they did end up with something tangible: a homemade certificate signed by Mr. Wiley.” He even interviewed one of the unofficial students from Italy:

That [homemade certificate] was plenty of recognition for Antonio Fini, a doctoral student at the University of Florence, in Italy. “I include it in my CV,” he says.

I wonder if, somehow, we’ve stumbled into part of the answer for open accreditation. Of course, WGU still charges tuition, but D’Arcy’s right. Let’s talk more about this… Maybe instead of hacking Wordpress, we should be hacking degrees. Anyone up for a completely informal, completely open, homemade certificate-style diploma? A handful of courses offered by all of us - take intro open ed from me, connectivism from George and Stephen, media studies from Brian (you know you’ve always wished he would teach it), and then complete three cumulative edupunk projects under the tutelage of the Reverend, D’Arcy, and Tony. Maybe D’Arcy will also offer an elective in mobile video production? Why not? I want my homemade edupunk diploma!!!

I enjoyed Kimberly’s review of Learning Networks, but the following leaped off the screen at me:

“The goal of making it possible for anyone, anywhere, at any time, at any age to engage in the learning process”

How do issues of cost play into this ubiquitous goal of distance education? Isn’t the goal of distance education (and learning networks as described in the book) really ‘making it possible for anyone (who can afford to pay for the credits), anywhere, and anytime, at any age…’? The goal of anyone, anywhere, at any time, &c., is just begging to be problematized… I’m sure others already have, but it occurred to me today that this might be worth pursuing.

The free software crowd are always having to explain to people what “free” means, with sayings like “Free as in speech versus free as in beer.” That analogy encountered some trouble at iSummit 2008 last month in Sapporo! =) I’m not really writing on the free vs open topic anymore, but this photo was just too fun to pass up.

I hope you know about the amazing StoryCorps project. They’re recording the life stories and memories of ordinary people, and the stories people tell are personal, touching, and incredibly moving.

We’re only two weeks away from the opening of Open Education 2008, and at this year’s conference we’ll be undertaking an oral history project of our own, recording interviews with conference goers about their participation in the open education movement. We’ll be asking questions like:

• How did you get involved in the open education movement?
• Which of your contributions to the open education movement are you most proud of?
• What are the most important lessons you’ve learned as you’ve been involved with the movement?
• From your perspective, what are the biggest obstacles for the movement?
• What do you think is the ideal future for the movement? What do you think is the most likely future for the movement?

We’ll be remixing highlights / memorable moments from interviews and sharing these the final day of the conference. But even if you can’t attend the conference this year, I hope you’ll take a few minutes with your favorite audio recording application, answer these questions, and leave a link to your mp3 file in the comments below, along with your name, affiliation, and some contact info. Something like this:

Open Education Oral History Interview, David Wiley, Brigham Young University, david.wiley@gmail.com

To be included in the project archive, your interview audio should be licensed CC By. All the audio we collect will be made available for direct download as well as through iTunes (I’ll post download links after the conference). While we hope to assemble a critical mass of interviews before / during the conference, the archive will be “open” for submissions even after the conference on an ongoing basis.

If the fancy strikes you, please pass the word on about the project through your own blogs and networks. We anticipate this being a very rich resource in the future…

The OER Handbook is currently featured on the homepage of the Creative Commons site (you can also access the OER Handbook story directly via the CC blog). Kudos to everyone involved!

We’ve completed the print layout for the Open Educational Resources Handbook for Educators v 1.0! Our favorite designer, Corrine Beaumont, has done an amazing job with the print layout, all the way down to using openly licensed typefaces throughout.

The printed, paperback version of the OER Handbook is available through Lulu.com in both black and white and full color formats. Of course, as an openly licensed book, the fully formatted PDFs are available for free download in both black and white and full color.

Also, I’m very excited to announce that thanks to the generous support of Open Ed 2008 conference sponsor Agilix, Open Ed 2008 conference participants will each be receiving a printed copy of the OER Handbook. My thanks to Seth, the Wikieducator community, Corrine, the Hewlett Foundation, and Agilix for making the handbook possible!

The Open Education 2008 Scholarship winners have been selected! This year’s winners are:

• John Britton, Chinese University of Hong Kong (student)
• Philise Rasugu, African Virtual University
• Julian Sukmana Putra, Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia (student)
• Stian Haklev, Norway
• Robert Boyczuk, Seneca College, Toronto

Congratulations to the winners and to everyone who applied - we had about thirty applicants for five scholarships, and the judging was tough! Also, many, many thanks to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their continued support of the Open Ed scholarships.

Finally, the Open Ed 2008 program is now available online. The speakers and topics for this year are incredible… This should be the best Open Ed conference ever! =)

Being at Brigham Young University now, I have many more opportunities to think about the relationships between my personal beliefs and my professional interests. This year’s Annual University Conference theme has focused on light, and during his address this morning, McKay School of Education Dean Richard Young quoted Matthew 5:14-16:

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

It occurred to me again that the password is a modern bushel. In other words, we develop these fabulous online materials, which could be highly useful to people throughout the world, but we then immediately put these materials behind password “protection,” which keeps people from accessing and using them. Why? Why do we put the candle of education under the password bushel? Why not set it on the candlestick of open licensing, so that it’s influence can radiate throughout the world?

I wonder if the meme “a password is a bushel / an open license is a candlestick” can catch on…

For the next two weeks I’ll be pointing to video highlights from last year’s Open Education 2007 conference in order to whet your appetite for this year’s meeting. First up on the hit parade is Brian Lamb’s incredible keynote from last year’s conference.

BTW, you can also see the Rick Noblenski “blasting caps are dangerous” video mentioned by Brian in the keynote, which was developed by some of my students at USU. (If you haven’t seen Nixon vs Kennedy debate on blogs vs wikis or open water, also produced by students from the same class, I’d highly recommend them as well.)

If you can’t wait to see the rest of the videos, make the jump to the full collection of Open Ed 2007 videos, where you can also download the videos to your iPod or PSP. Otherwise, just sit back, relax, and I’ll highlight additional videos from last year’s conference here as we get closer to Open Ed 2008…

As reported on Ars Technica, a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision has given some legal teeth to open licenses:

The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Maybe this will finally quiet the “confused” people out there who think that those of us who support open licenses are anti-copyright. As pointed out by this case, open licenses depend heavily on copyright law to provide “incentives” for users to comply with the license and (as a last resort) enforcement mechanisms.

A good friend suggested to me yesterday that openly publishing my course materials may not be possible at BYU due to the Brigham Young University Intellectual Property Policy. Curious that such a restriction on my ability to openly share my course materials might exist, I explored the policy in more detail. Here’s what I found.

1. Course materials are Creative Works as defined by the IPP:

Intellectual properties are divided into two categories: technical works and creative works. Technical works include intellectual properties that are generally of a scientific, engineering, or technical nature—such as patentable or unpatentable inventions, devices, machines, processes, methods, and compositions; computer software; and university collections. Creative works include all intellectual properties not covered in technical works that are of an artistic, scholarly, instructional, assessment, or entertainment nature. Examples of creative works might include creative productions, such as works of art or design; musical scores; books, poems, and other types of scholarly or creative writings; films; video and audio recordings; and instructional materials, such as textbooks and multimedia programs. All computer software is included in technical works except that which is clearly developed for entertainment or for instructional purposes, e.g., electronic textbooks and textbook supplements, classroom and self-study tutorials. (Section I Para 1)

2. The university does not claim ownership of Creative Works when these are created with only nominal use of university resources.

The university retains ownership rights to all technical works but relinquishes ownership rights to the developer(s) of creative works when “nominal” use of university resources are involved in the production of the intellectual property. When “substantial” university resources are used in the production of creative works, however, the university will retain its ownership position, and income from the project will be shared with the developers. (Section IV Para 2)

3. “Nominal Use” of university resources is defined as things done within the normal scope of your employment at BYU.

Nominal use of university resources is use that is within the required activity of one’s appointment at BYU…. maintaining assigned levels of teaching, scholarship, and citizenship activities, so that anticipated performance in these areas is at the expected level. (Section IV.b Paras 1-2)

4. Course materials are explicitly mentioned in the Nominal Use section of the IPP.

Course or instructional materials may not be generated with the use of support units financed by the university (e.g., the Center for Instructional Design [note from David: this is now called the Center for Teaching and Learning]). Courses or instructional materials generated in the normal course of teaching, without such support, are allowed. (Section IV.b Para 3)

Conclusion: As long as I produce course materials myself, without additional funding or support from the university, courses and instructional materials I produce to support my own courses are created with only nominal use of university resources, and the university does not claim ownership. Therefore, as the rights holder, I will be able to continue openly licensing the materials I use in teaching my courses.

Hooray!

Open Education 2008 Conference registration is now open! This year’s event will be special in a number of ways (more on this soon!), so please come join us for a fabulous event dedicated to open education and - this year - the ten year anniversary of open content!

People love to analogize / equate open education to open source. There are huge problems with this way of thinking… The one that comes first to mind is that many changes to an open source program can be empirically tested to objectively determine whether or not they improve the program (by increasing its speed, decreasing its file size, etc.) at almost no cost (by recompiling the programs and running automated tests), but many changes to an open educational resource cannot be judged objectively (did changing these words really engage learners more? do these new examples communicate the educational content better?) and even when they can be meaningfully tested, this can only happen at rather high costs in time and resources (e.g., setting up and running usability tests or “horse race” research studies involving enough students to produce statistically meaningful results). Of course, this one difference in the community’s ability to judge whether adaptations should be kept or rejected makes a mountain of difference in our ability to collaboratively develop educational resources rationally and objectively. I could go on about the differences, but they aren’t actually the point of the post.

The point of the post is that, because it can be interesting to think about open education in terms of open source (if you’re careful not to push the analogy too far), Tim O’Reilly’s latest bit of writing called Open Source and Cloud Computing about very near future problems for the open source movement should be required reading for open educators. We will face similar problems in the not-too-distant future, and we should be thinking about them now.

As outlined above, I don’t believe we’ve figured out what kinds of licenses will allow forking of Web 2.0 and cloud applications, especially because the lock-in provided by many of these applications is given by their data rather than their code….

But even open data is fundamentally challenged by the idea of utility computing in the cloud. Jesse Vincent, the guy who’s brought out some of the best hacker t-shirts ever (as well as RT) put it succinctly: “Web 2.0 is digital sharecropping.” (Googling, I discover that Nick Carr seems to have coined this meme back in 2006!) If this is true of many Web 2.0 success stories, it’s even more true of cloud computing as infrastructure. I’m ever mindful of Microsoft Windows Live VP Debra Chrapaty’s dictum that “In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.” The New York Times dubbed bandwidth providers OPEC 2.0. How much more will that become true of cloud computing platforms?

That’s why I’m interested in peer-to-peer approaches to delivering internet applications. Jesse Vincent’s talk, Prophet: Your Path Out of the Cloud describes a system for federated sync; Evan Prodromou’s Open Source Microblogging describes identi.ca, a federated open source approach to lifestreaming applications.

We can talk all we like about open data and open services, but frankly, it’s important to realize just how much of what is possible is dictated by the architecture of the systems we use.

There are a number of ways to understand Tim’s point in the context of open education. If we consider the architecture of higher education, for example, the meaning of “lock-in by data” becomes clear. We can easily reconsider “social network fatigue” (which prevents you from joining too many social networks because you can’t stand to type in all your basic personal details for the nth time) in terms of “gen ed fatigue” by which students are prevented from moving from one university to another because they know credits won’t transfer and they can’t bear the thought of taking World Civilization again. A student’s own data - course grades and accumulated credits that belong to them - are not really any more portable across universities than your Facebook profile is across social networking services. Note that this is not a technical problem, it is an policy problem purposely designed to lock a student into a university. While the Bologna Process has certainly been criticized, it is attempting to make it possible for students to move freely between universities. And as my friend Al is so fond of asking, why shouldn’t a student be able to do their physics at UC, their engineering at MIT, their cyberlaw at Stanford, and their religion courses at BYU?

Of course, saying that LMS vendors try to lock our data into their systems would be another reading of this part of Tim’s article, but one that is too obvious because it is too technical; this is more of an open source problem than an open education problem.

Careful reading and thought will show that Tim’s insightful analysis does indeed point toward many of the problems open education will have to face in the near future. Just please don’t take the open source / open education analogy too far.

I heard this quote at the iSummit today, and it completely sums up what we’re trying to do with the Open High School of Utah:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller

I probably would not have named this the ‘Wiley Wiki Design’, but when someone like Leigh names something after you, how do you refuse? =)

I’ve been meaning to write a little about this design I’ve been using for the last several years and how it has evolved, but recent proddings by Leigh, Teemu, and Bron have finally gotten me off the virtual starting line.

Since Fall 2004 I’ve been running my courses in the open via the wiki at OpenContent (course listing). In the theme of this blog, Iterating Toward Openness, these courses started “basically open” and have become more “completely open” (note more completely open, not actually completely open). What I mean is that the original courses had their syllabus and course content out from behind a password with permissions for people to edit. I was disappointed that, even when you put it in a wiki, students still don’t feel empowered to edit your syllabus. They had little trouble editing the online textbook I wrote for the course, though, which was great. And they all wrote their homework assignments on publicly readable blogs. In one of these early classes Stephen ran one of my student’s assignments in OLDaily, which brought the broader community into the conversation those students were having. Strangely enough, the next week all the students’ writing was longer and more thoughtful. Funny what the pressures of peer review will do… So we might say that these first iterations, the 2004-2006 period, were open in terms of their content and discussions, but only students at USU could really participate in the classes.

When I say that my design has evolved toward a more complete kind of openness, I mean that in 2007 I started trying to figure out how to open participation - meaning the assignment of a credit or credential for those who completed the course. The core components of the current design (used for my Fall 2007 Intro to Open Ed course) include:

• Running everything in the open
• Using an open wiki as the core delivery method and encouraging learner contribution to the core learning goals / outcomes, reading lists, educational materials, etc.
• Using open blogs as the core writing outlet for weekly writing and encouraging broad community engagement in the writing, discussion, and feedback processes
• Only using readings or other course materials that are freely available on the public internet
• Accepting class members regardless of location or their admission status at my university
• Offering multiple paths to credit through:
• - - Normal channels for students at the my university
• - - Backchannels for students at other universities (I had good luck with people signing up for an independent study at their home university with a faculty member who agreed to accept the course grade I awarded at end of term - so students took my open course but received credit at their home university)
• - - A certificate of completion which did not have any university credit attached (it was a traditional-looking certificate with the person’s name and my signature) but was still highly valued by several participants

So I’ve worked on opening access to the content, opening access to the discussions, opening access to materials used in the course, opening participation, and opening access to credit / certification. Obviously my course design isn’t perfect, but it’s healthy to stop and reflect occasionally, and assess the progress we make.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the core design is that several people seem to be moving in this direction with their designs. A list compiled by Leigh includes:

David: http://www.opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus

Teemu: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Composing_free_and_open_online_educational_resources

Leigh and Bron: http://wikieducator.org/Designing_for_flexible_learning_practice

Bron: http://wikieducator.org/Evaluation_of_eLearning_for_Best_Practice

I recently heard from Javed about a course inspired by the model that uses Ning instead of a wiki: http://infotechtools.ning.com/

And, of course, there is George and Stephen’s course coming up this fall: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/

Obviously, no design occurs in a vacuum, and there is a growing conversation about open education, and specifically ways to open access to participation, credits, or certification to people who are not enrolled in your university. So I wouldn’t take sole credit for any of these ideas, but perhaps their aggregation and actual implementation has been a contribution to the field. I hope it continues to inspire others to further open access to their courses.

After reflecting back somewhat, I find myself thinking more about the course I have coming up this fall, and wondering how I can open it further… What will the next cycle in the iteration toward openness look like?

There’s a really interesting company here in Utah valley called Agilix that’s doing some intriguing work in support of the developing world. From today’s press release:

Agilix Labs, Inc. announced the extension of learning solutions to unserved and underserved markets with the introduction of its GoCourse Schoolmate product, a self-contained client-server learning system that supports education initiatives in situations and environments with limited or non-existent Internet connectivity.

“This represents an extension of our GoCourse platform to address the needs of the 95% of the Earth’s population that falls outside the reach of broadband access,” said Curt Allen, CEO of Agilix Labs. “Emerging markets will for the first time enjoy an eLearning experience that isn’t limited by the unavailability of Internet access.”

I know several of the people at the company, and they’re all great and they actually care. But it’s rare to see personal interest and commitment translate into dollars spent and product launched within a “for-profit” company. Kudos to the guys and gals at Agilix.

Anyway, it makes me wonder… is the future of open education taking the online offline?

Everyone involved with a university understands the problems with the textbook industry, but it’s encouraging to see mainstream media continue to cover Flat World Knowledge’s approach to solving these problems in a sustainable manner.

Online ‘open textbooks’ save students cash in the USA Today

Coming This Fall: Free Textbooks in Time

FWK is an example of openness done not for openness’ sake, but because an open approach is actually the best solution to the problem at hand; Pragmatism over zeal.

For those of you that contacted us about problems submitting by the June 30 deadline, we’ve extended the submission deadline until Friday, July 4th at midnight Mountain Daylight Time. Even if you emailed in an abstract and extended abstract, we still need you to submit your proposal via the website. We’ve re-enabled proposal submission; you’ll need to create an account before you can submit your proposal:

http://cosl.usu.edu/ocs/index.php/opened/opened2008/schedConf/cfp

We don’t anticipate extending the submission deadline beyond July 4 — so please submit your proposals right away! Many thanks… Looking forward to seeing you all there!

If you have an idea, project, paper, or any other form of activity (believe me, we’re open to nontraditional!) you’ve been considering submitting to the Open Education Conference 2008, today is the day! Head over to http://cosl.usu.edu/events/opened2008/call-for-papers and submit today!

We’re looking forward to another awesome conference this year. As Brian Lamb recently gushed:

The conference is a fantastic mix of academic and practical topics, where open source technology, open content, sustainable models, and net culture mix into a delicious and sneaky subversive brew. And though Logan can seem a bit remote for travelers, the drive through the canyons of Utah to get there is stunningly beautiful, and the city itself has many charms - I’ve come to think of it as one of my adopted homes. Expect the COSL folks to run a conference that is logistically flawless, yet relaxed, friendly and fun.

Remember that our keynotes this year, all of whom will focus on issues of sustainability, include Teresa Malango from Magnatune (the CC-licensed music label), Gary Lopez from MITE, the National Repository of Online Courses, Hippocampus, and several other projects, and Wayne Mackintosh from the Commonwealth of Learning and Wikieducator. Each will talk about their unique - and successful - approach to sustaining open content projects.

Hoping to see you there!

It is with mixed emotion (but certainly a huge amount of excitement!) that I write today to tell you that I have accepted a position at Brigham Young University. I’ll be making the transition over the summer and begin teaching at BYU in the fall.

I remain as committed as ever to pursuing my work of increasing access to educational opportunity, and believe that there will be many wonderful opportunities at BYU in this regard. As you know, I am devoting much of my time right now to the Open High School of Utah, which I believe will be a shining example to the world of what the future of open education will be like.

Thank you all for your continued support, and I hope to see many of you soon.

Had a fabulous time presenting virtually for Brian Lamb today at the UBC Town Hall today. In response to one of the questions that was asked at the end of the session, I had a thought - perhaps a rare occurrence. It was a memory, actually, of a blog post I wrote almost 10 years ago as a graduate student. The thought was basically this:

Educational reform is much like religious reform, and our openness movement and desires to innovate in higher education are much like the Reformation. When the Church was the prevailing power, it took Luther a significant amount of courage to stand up, nail a list of issues to the door, and say “Go ahead and excommunicate me. I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.”

In today’s higher education environment, accreditation bodies are very much like the Catholic Church of old. They exercise supreme power and authority of our institutions, and should our accrediting body choose to revoke our accreditation, our universities would go straight to the institutional equivalent of Hell.

This control over our schools is both ambient and ubiquitous - everywhere and unseen - much like the Church’s domination used to be. And as long as our institutions have to conform to the wishes of the accrediting bodies, no large-scale innovation or reformation can happen. (As an exercise, try to imagine an accredited institution of higher education that looks meaningfully different from any other.) We need an institution with the courage to nail its list of issues on the door of the accrediting bodies and say “Go ahead and excommunicate me (aka revoke my accreditation). I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.”

Of course there are a number of smaller start-up colleges that have a “who cares” attitude toward accrediting bodies, but these folks were anathema to begin with - so no message is really being sent. We need a “member of the Church” - an accredited institution - to stand up and reject the demands of the accreditors that prevent us from really innovating. Perhaps then we can start to clear out the kludge that is preventing higher education from trying new things and begin keeping up with our quick-paced business, government, and personal lives.

As long as we’re enjoying this recent era of new word creation (c.f. “edupunk“), I’ll throw out the idea of an “EduCarbon Footprint.” Marie Duncan, a doctoral student of mine, is currently finishing a study of the structure of reuse with the Connexions repository. While reading her discussion of why more people don’t reuse existing, openly-licensed material, it made me think ‘we need a measure, like your carbon footprint, of how much you reuse existing educational materials.’ What would such a measure look like? A ratio of how much you reuse to how much you create? A ratio of the amount of open resources you use to closed resources? Would it be useful to have a measure like this? Surely you can think of a better name? And lastly, someone else has probably already proposed this - who was it?

Hear ye, hear ye! The Open Ed 2008 presentation submission system is online. (A nod to the great folks at SFU who produce the Open Conference Systems software goes here.) Check out the OpenEd 2008 Call for Papers and submit your proposal! In addition to traditional presentations, we’ll also be accepting technical demonstrations - so even if you don’t have a paper to present, come show off your edupunk DIY PLE project. Submissions are due by June 30, 2008.

Our keynotes this year, all of whom will focus on issues of sustainability, include Teresa Malango from Magnatune (the CC-licensed music label), Gary Lopez from MITE, the National Repository of Online Courses, Hippocampus, and several other projects, and Wayne Mackintosh from the Commonwealth of Learning and Wikieducator. Each will talk about their unique - and successful - approach to sustaining open content projects.

I’m also extremely excited to announce that thanks to the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we are offering four scholarships to OpenEd 2008. The scholarships include complimentary full registration and four nights of hotel accommodations in Logan, plus up to $750 towards your travel! Details on how to apply are on the OpenEd 2008 Scholarship page.

Please spread the word about the Call for Papers and the Scholarships. Many thanks!

Several readers have asked or emailed about access to the Open High School of Utah’s charter application documents. They are now online for your reviewing and reusing pleasure!

http://openhighschool.org/documents/

The documents are licensed CC By 3.0. We sincerely hope that many of you will reuse the charter application documents to start your own OER charter schools!

Several of you have emailed with statements of support for the Open High School of Utah. Thank you for all the offers of help and the connections and introductions you’re making. Please keep them coming in!!

I especially appreciated this note from Jun in the Philippines:

You have just set a precedent that may be the answer to many of non-developed countries woes in education.

You just might have transformed education as we know it.

Let the “revolution” begin and spread!

This will be a huge amount of work and letters of support like this will keep us going! Thanks!

With extreme joy and happiness I can now announce that this past Friday (the 9th) the Utah Board of Education formally approved our request to create a new charter school to be called the Open High School of Utah. For those unfamiliar with how US charter schools work, a charter school is a publicly funded school with a specific emphasis - like a performing arts high school. OHSU will be a completely online school (or “virtual school” as they are sometimes called) that will use open educational resources exclusively.

Through partnerships we are building we hope to make the OHSU an “early college high school,” meaning that students will have the opportunity to earn an Associate’s degree at no extra cost at the same time they earn their high school diploma. Our pedagogical approach will be heavily influenced by service learning.

As you can imagine, a high school based on OERs has need of a variety of partnerships - especially partners who are also interested in locating / assembling / building an entire high school curriculum’s worth of OER content. There will be lots of opportunities for volunteers to contribute and become part of the OHSU community - finding appropriately licensed resources, assembling these in ways that conform with their various incompatible licenses (no small challenge!), creating new OERs to fill the gaps in what exists, aligning content structures to state and national standards, etc.

I’ll post more information as soon as I have it. If you have ideas re: partnerships please add them in the comments or email me directly at david.wiley@gmail.com.