Tag Archives: OER

Open Participants, Syndicated

Current Minnesota legislation related to open education

Executive summary: There are four bills in front of the Minnesota legislature currently. Three involve poorly-funded mandates; one offers incentives for positive change.

The Bills:

SF130 was introduced 1/14/2019 and is titled “Affordable Textbooks”. This bill defines an affordable textbook as any textbook that costs $40 or less. These could be traditional print textbooks, OER, “or other educational resources intended to be used in place of a traditional textbook.” This means, subscription-based products from mainstream textbook publishers in addition to open-licensed OER. Although reducing textbooks costs is an apparent goal of the bill, it could be used to move from print textbooks to less-expensive digital alternatives while avoiding a shift to OER.

The Bill calls for 15% of courses at state colleges and universities to use “affordable textbooks” by August 31 2021. It does not specify a cap for spending per course, so it is conceivable that a course with multiple textbooks or with a textbook and supplementary texts could still result in student spending in excess of $40.

The issue with this bill is that $40 seems to be an arbitrary number. Does it relate to current student spending? Does it relate to the cost of “other educational resources” the textbook companies are preparing to roll out? And finally, how is the state going to legally require 15% of courses to use “affordable textbooks”?

 

SF699 was introduced 1/31/2019 and is titled “Z-Degrees”. The bill defines Z-Degree as a zero-textbook-cost associates degree and requires each “college” to “offer the opportunity to earn a Z-Degree”. “College” may mean universities as individual units, or it may mean every college within a university. Z-Degree course offerings must include “at least two distinct [zero-textbook-cost] courses in each transfer curriculum goal area and at least enough credits in each transfer curriculum goal area to complete the transfer curriculum package.”

SF699 specifically includes a requirement that “Each instructor must review and approve open educational resources for use in a course.” It defines OER as OER advocates would expect: “high-quality teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others, and may include other resources that are legally available and free of cost to students.” This is a good working definition of OER; the sticking point in this bill seems to be the “Each instructor must review and approve” part. This seems to be a violation of the faculty’s contract and against the spirit of academic freedom. And the appropriation associated with this whole Z-Degree mandate is $2 million spread across two years, for the entire system! That’s probably not enough to pay for the work involved in making a Z-Degree happen in every college in the state, even if everybody was excited to do it and ready to go. And how are administrators going to force faculty to review and “approve” (but not adopt) OER?

 

SF2214 was introduced 3/7/2019 (its companion HF2426 was introduced 3/13/2019) and is titled “Inclusive Access Pilot Program”. It is a short bill which calls for a pilot program to “address textbook affordability in postsecondary institutions and determine the cost savings for both students and the participating institutions.” Inclusive access is defined as “digital distribution of course material instead of traditional textbooks”. The bill calls for BSU and South Central College to be pilot sites that would “receive incentive funding…for purposes of developing and utilizing inclusive access for all courses offered at the institution, where available.” This sounds very cool at first glance. BSU would get incentives…to do what?

It turns out that “inclusive access” is a sneaky code-word for requiring all students to purchase license keys for a publisher’s digital “walled garden” of educational material (some of which may in fact be open, but it’s all behind the pay-wall). This cost would be assessed as a mandatory course fee. So it would probably be lower than current textbook costs – at least to start. The other sneaky clause in the bill is “for all courses offered at the institution”. Once Pearson achieves a monopoly of all the courses on campus, then it will no longer have to compete on price.

 

Finally, HF2730 was introduced 3/27/2019, amending MN Statue 2018 section 136F.58 to include incentives for “Open textbook development”. This bill calls for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities to “develop a program to expand the use of open textbooks in college and university courses.” It calls on the system office to “provide opportunities for faculty to identify, review, adapt, author, and adopt open textbooks” and to “develop incentives” to meet those goals.

The system office will (“in coordination with faculty bargaining units”) develop a “program that identifies high-enrollment academic programs and provides faculty within the selected disciplines incentives to jointly adapt or author an open textbook.” The bill is careful to specify, though, that these activities “must be implemented pursuant to faculty collective bargaining agreements that govern academic freedom and textbook choice.” So, it’s a carrot instead of a stick and it will provide faculty with incentives to choose a path that both supports student cost-reduction and respects academic freedom.

How much of a carrot? The bill would allocate $500,000 over two years, which isn’t a bad start. As high-volume programs started quantifying their savings, presumably that number would increase. An incentive ratio of 10% has apparently been discussed (based on success in other states), where a department might receive an incentive payment of 10% of the money they saved students using their new OER. This seems like a good idea, although the system might want to “prime the pump” a bit to move a couple of high-volume programs and get the process started.

 

Takeaway from the bills:

Academic freedom seems to be challenged when legislation attempts to impose mandates (especially unfunded or poorly-funded ones) in place of incentives. If passed, laws of this type would probably be challenged by faculty unions, with good cause. However, incentives and an appeal for volunteers might get the OER ball rolling on campus.

Open Participants, Syndicated

#OpenLearning2019…once more unto the breach

…of yet another connectivist #MOOC that is

… and my first post for  Open Learning 2019 because I have to post to have a feed to complete sign-up. This procedure guarantees that I will have written at least one blog post for Open Learning 2019, which puts me ahead of Open Learning 2017, although at least I came away from it with a Hypothesis account and another MOOC feed in my reader.

I’ve participated in MOOCs since 2010, including the occasional x-version.  The past few years, participation has not matched intentions, and I’ve been on an extended blogging hiatus as well. When I missed most of Open Learning 2017, I told myself next year but missed that too.

So here I am following #openlearning19 tweets, reading blog posts and collecting links. And if it helps kick starts a return to blogging? Lagniappe.

Open Participants, Syndicated

CC License Flavors

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Creative Commons license itself comes in several flavors, depending on how many of the rights normally included in “all rights reserved” you want to retain, and which ones you want to be more flexible on. Each of these licenses exist in three forms or layers: a full-on legal description, a user-friendly commons deed, and a machine readable version that talks to things like search engines. Most of the time CC is seen as a wide-open license to do anything, but it doesn’t have to be. Maybe rather than going from least restrictive to most, instead I’ll go from most restrictive (most like full-on copyright) to least. There are four basic elements: BY, SA, ND, NC, and they mix and match into six levels of licensing.

The most restrictive CC designation is CC SA NC ND. This specifies that people can use your work as long as they give you credit (attribution is part of all CC licenses), but it says they CANNOT sell the version they make for a profit and they CANNOT change your content in any way (that is, make no derivatives, no adaptations). This still means they can share your work freely, as long as they don’t sell it or change it. But this isn’t considered optimal for OER, because in addition to compiling anthologies, educators often expect to be able to adapt your content to contextualize it for their students. This license can also have a final added stipulation of share alike, meaning that any work that incorporated your content ought to be licensed under the exact same CC license. This isn’t on the CC organization’s matrix, but it prevents people from switching to a less restrictive license which might let the people who remix down the line to do something like sell the work for profit or adapt it.

NC SA is a little less restrictive, in that it does allow for adaptation. But it still prohibits sale for profit and requires the adaptations carry the same license.

NC, Non-commercial without Share Alike allows for adaptations and doesn’t protect against those adaptations being part of a commercial work.

No derivatives (ND) doesn’t allow for adaptation, but it does allow people to sell the work for a profit and it doesn’t require that the work they sell has a similar license on it.

Share alike alone DOES let someone sell an adaptation for a profit, but it has to retain a share alike license on it, so that might limit the market for such a work. I’m not sure I see the point of SA all by itself, other than to limit the market by undercutting anyone thinking they can somehow corner the market and monopolize distribution of a work.

The most open CC license is actually just CC BY. This allows a user to do anything with your content as long as they give you credit for creating it. All the other more restrictive licenses also include attribution – it’s just assumed in the rest. There’s an even more open condition if the work is in the public domain. Creative Commons calls that CC0, but it’s not technically a CC license.

All these CC licenses are ways of modifying copyright, so they apply where copyright law applies. That means NOT to things like patents, privacy restrictions, or moral claims. Exceptions and limitations to copyright like fair use also aren’t affected by CC licenses. But this can create complications if some work that begins as fair use finds its way into OER texts or coursework and now all of a sudden things like photos that may have been useable under fair use maybe aren’t any longer. So it’s important to understand the chain of custody, but I’ll say more about that another time.

 

Image from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ CC BY-SA 4.0

Open Participants, Syndicated

Outline of my new #EnvHist course

 

2925PosterWide

As part of preparing content for this Spring’s “People In the Environment” section I’m teaching on American Environmental History, I’m “porting” my textbook over to a full-on OER (open educational resource). This should allow me to make the content available to students in a less expensive and more flexible version, in both print and ebook formats, as well as making the chapters available to other educators as stand-alone modules they can mix and match, remix, rewrite, etc. As I do that, I’ll be able to add CC content from elsewhere and link to outside text, graphics, and video, as well as including narration and possibly even links to my lectures in the electronic version of the text. I believe Pressbooks allows for linking and embedding, and Camtasia allows adding interactive elements like quizzes along the way in the text. I’m going to try to incorporate both.

So the new elements I’ll be adding to my text will include color (!), fonts, revised format, quizzes and discussion prompts (possibly links), audio narration, videos from the web (YouTube, Archive), and links to my Camtasia lectures. I’ll also be updating the content. I think I’ll continue with the 15 chapters = 15 weeks format. But I might throw in some additional chapters that people could swap in or use as extra credit opportunities if they chose. The goals of many of these chapters is not to cover the topics exhaustively, but to make students aware of the issues and introduce basic ideas. The outline will look something like this:

Module/Chapter 1: Prehistory

Goals: Push back the “beginning” of the story, introduce Beringia, climate change, staple crops

Module/Chapter 2: Recontact

Goals: Introduce the Columbian Exchange (Crosby), native population disaster, early commerce (silver, sugar).

Module/Chapter 3: Colonial America

Goals: Compare Euro and native land use traditions (Cronon), Examine role of religion justifying colonialism, impact of slavery on land use.

Module/Chapter 4: Frontier & Grid

Goals: Understand role of western expansion in Revolution and early republic, consider barriers to expansion (Proclamation Line, Free Soil debate, Trail of Tears), describe pioneer life, immigration.

Module/Chapter 5: Industrial Revolution

Goals: Examine changes caused by industrialization on use of commons, incorporation, labor, economic and environmental externalities. (Steinberg)

Module/Chapter 6: Transportation Revolution

Goal: Understand changing technology and public policy around development of canals, steamboats, railroads. Consider tension between public and private sectors in issues like land grants, monopoly. Continue to automobiles and highways (with extra material on ethanol vs. leaded gasoline), air travel and containerized freight.

Module/Chapter 7: Commodities

Goal: Examine shift to a commodity market: population changes, new industries in packing (pork & beef) and their discontents (The Jungle), ice, lumber (and fires), flour (and populism).

Module/Chapter 8: Green Revolution

Goal: Cover beginning of commercial agriculture, ag. Improvement (manure, rotation), green manure (alfalfa), guano (Incas, Liebig, Humboldt, Chinese labor, Chincha Islands War, Guano Islands Act), Nitrate (Caliche, War of the Pacific, Haber-Bosch process), Phosphorus and Potassium, Hazards and pollution (Gulf Dead Zone), the Dust Bowl, Ogallala Aquifer, Export of Green Revolution to Developing World (Borlaug, Indian debt and suicide).

Module/Chapter 9: City Life

Goal: Examine what cities are for. Consider American colonial cities built on native cities (Cuzco, Mexico City, Plymouth), Land Reclamation and filling wetlands (Mexico City, New York, San Francisco), Sanitation and water supply (New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles), symbiosis with hinterlands, Horses and mechanized transport, Urban reformers, parks and suburbs, contemporary exurbs and CSA.

Module/Chapter 10: Wilderness and Country Life

Goal: Distinguish between Conservation and Preservation movements (Muir v. Pinchot), examine ideas of wilderness (Cronon) and exclusion (Jacoby).

Module/Chapter 11: Farmers and Agribusiness

Goal: Examine America’s change from a country of farmers to an urban nation, implications for farmers, rural life, consumerism, politics.

Module/Chapter 12: Treasure Underground

Goal: Examine the mining and drilling of underground resources: Cerro Rico silver, ideas of subsoil ownership, copper, iron and steel, gold rushes, petroleum (in the world, the US, and the relationships between corporations, government, foreign policy).

Module/Chapter 13: Population and Limits

Goal: Examine Malthusian ideas, challenges to them such as #stopthemyth and Rosling’s demographics, consider controversies over Population Bomb, Limits to Growth, peak oil.

Module/Chapter 14: Externalities

Goal: Review the ways economics deals with the idea of externalities, with examples. Politics, Globalization, Dependency.

Module/Chapter 15: Environmentalism

Goal: Review American people’s concern over environmental issues. Consider alternatives to contemporary lifestyle. (incorporates “Food and Choice” chapter from book with survey of environmentalists.

 

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

OER EnvHist!

 

In addition to the Creative Commons course I’m taking this semester, I’m also involved in a project to turn my American Environmental History textbook into an OER (Open Educational Resource) prior to using it to teach a course called “People In the Environment: Environmental History” in the Spring semester. “People In the Environment” is a required course for all Bemidji State University undergrads, and it is usually taught in interdisciplinary teams. It has been ages (literally between 5 and 10 years!) since a historian has been on one of these teams, so I’m going to rectify that in the Spring. I’m going to trach a survey of American Environmental History this Spring, and then I’m putting in a request to teach a more in-depth version of it, with readings from some of the major works in the field, this summer.

As part of that process, I’m going to turn my American Environmental History textbook, which is already a very cheap alternative to the other textbooks available from academic presses, into a fully OER production. I may continue to sell copies of it on Amazon, since that seems like one of the lowest-cost ways to get a decently-printed paperback into peoples’ hands. Currently the book is $25 and the Kindle is either ten bucks or free (if you have Kindle Unlimited or if you buy the paperback you get a free Kindle copy). It will probably come down a bit from there. I’ll also probably be making audio and my course videos available online in a more permanent form. Maybe discussion prompts and quizzes and exam questions, as I put together the course material.

Hopefully turning this authoring project into an OER authoring project may give other Environmental History teachers an incentive to not only use the material but contribute to it and add their own content and perspectives. I don’t claim to have any type of unique insight into Environmental History — except maybe my feeling that it should be much more available to students and that opening this project up a bit might help make that happen!

Open Participants, Syndicated

The internet and information literacy

Sigh… So work got away from me so I didn’t get to participate as much as I would have liked so this is my attempt to catch up.

Week 2 we examined the Internet and how it relates to education and open access.  I did the reading early and then didn’t have time to fully participate to get my questions answered.  When I read and annotated the Tim Berners-Lee article I didn’t get the chance to respond to some of the questions I was asked about my comments, which deserve to be answered.  As I read the article I was struck by the income bias.  The article while very informative and enlightening, has a bias toward those who can afford access. Gardner Campbell noted my concerns and is I believe on the right track with inclusive access for all.  Gardner also provided a link to Pew research showing the increase in usage of the internet.  But as I looked through this data I was struck by how we are still biasing access with income and education.  While general use has increased, lower income and education have just now reached the use point of higher income and education individuals were at 18 years ago.  And home use of the internet via home broadband for low income is at 53% and low education at 34% verses high income and high education’s 93% and 91%.  This is not taking into consideration location (data is provided).  Also of note in that same research is that lower income and education individuals are more dependent on their smartphones for all their internet access.  The internet has an inherent bias to those who can afford access, and I think it’s important to recognize that.

Week 3 we examined information literacy and open access.  As a librarian who teaches a credit bearing research course, Facing the Frames just confined what I do.  Although there are differences since my class is 16 weeks and we go into more then just information literacy (we also cover some aspects of writing), the concepts of teaching the student to analyze every aspect of what they are doing is important for librarians to understand and use in every aspect of what they do.  Critical thinking and evaluation is the most important thing we teach.  Which lead into Beyond Buttonology… I have to say I was surprised at this article, because I had thought that librarians had moved beyond teaching the mechanics already.  Critical thinking and metacognition has always been emphasized where I have worked.

That’s my $0.02.

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Kal-toh, chess, and tic-tac-toe

This week we peeked into the world of open and flew into a worm hole.  There is sooo much that can be read into one word, and so many uses of the concept that it gets difficult for me to see the multidimensionality of it.  I have a tendency to stay on the surface because that’s what I understand.

On the surface, open education is teaching through a free means.  Open educational resources are the items used in the teaching that are also free.  I’m good here, this is easy to understand.  No cost to teachers or students for textbooks, articles, or any materials the instructor wants to use.

Chess
“Kal-toh is to chess as chess is to tic-tac-toe.” (Tuvok: VOY: “Alter Ego”)

But let’s talk about free.  Free starts to get complicated because free should just be that, but it isn’t.  Just like free from a library isn’t free if you can’t get to the library or you live outside the service area, free on the internet isn’t free if you can’t get onto the internet.  You need a computer and access to get to the free. So what exactly is free? and how do we provide it to ALL to create real openness?  Also, is free, free when we make students pay to be taught?  And here is when I stop playing kal-toh and go back to tic-tac-toe.

So how does this relate to my own idea of open education?  I’m not sure I have an idea about open education… yet.  I do know that  in my practice I want to save the student from having to purchase material to learn something when practical application and discussion can accomplish the same thing.  But the materials we use are the library databases that are not free since they are licensed via the library budget.  So even though they don’t have a textbook, their tuition pays for the subscriptions, so in all technicality that is not free or open.

Can I create assignments that are completely open?  The easy answer is yes, by using open access articles to do information literacy objectives, I could use all free materials. But again… this is not truly free for the student who doesn’t have a computer or the internet at home, because they would not be able to access the material anyway.  To further complicate this, they have already paid for my class.  I’m not sharing my expertise free of charge, which again technically would not be completely open or free.  I keep getting stuck in the free aspect of open.  Because really, nothing in our society is free.

I keep thinking about Star Trek.  The open society where you explore your passions for self-improvement, self-enrichment, and the betterment of all humanity. There is no money.  Everyone (supposedly) has the same opportunities for learning and working.  In this world open education is open and free.  In our world, there are too many facets to “open” and “free” to truly be either.

So until we can live in the Star Trek world, we do the best we can and cut cost to the student where it is feasible.  To me that means, finding ways to provide open educational resources to the faculty to use, finding ways to integrate what the library already owns into an easier medium for the faculty and student to use, and to explore whatever options present themselves to make the life of the student easier.  As a librarian, I am a facilitator of access.