OLDaily

OEP (Open Educational Pragmatism?)
Doug Belshaw, Thought Shrapnel, 2018/05/01

This is more from the OER 2018 conference in Holland last week. Doug Belshaw discusses his conversations with Michael Shaw from Tes Resources. Shaw described how warm the OER community had been. "He found the hosts and participants 'incredibly welcoming' and the debates 'more open than [he’d] expected on how commercial organisations could play a part' in the ecosystem." That's nice, but maybe a little too cozy. The risk here, writes Belshaw, is the tendency of commercial partners "to embrace, extend, and extinguish" open source projects. And I would warn participants in OER conferences to beware the "charm" and "feeling of reuniting with familiar faces" (as described by Martin Weller). Community is nice. But it's easily subverted. And it shouldn't be confused with outcome and purpose.

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Moocs are a solution in search of a problem
Chris Fellingham, Times Higher Education, 2018/05/01

According to Chris Fellingham, MOOCs " arose from the boredom of Stanford University computer science professors fed up with teaching the same lectures each year. Out of idle curiosity, they wanted to see what would happen if they dumped their courses, lectures and all, online for anyone to take." According to this story, OOCs then searched for a problem to solve - providinbg new skills to university graduates, say, or offering new kinds of certificates. None of that is my experience, nor is it even true outside the narrow bounds of Coursera and Udacity. MOOCs were created in order top provide access to learning using open educational resources, modeling the connectivist philosophy George Siemens and I had been working on for a number of years. The problem of access is real. It exists because the people writing in places like Times Higher Education do not consider access to be a problem at all.

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Are Etextbooks Affordable Now?
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/05/01

For most people in the world, the answer to this question is still "no". I have always worked on the principle of a two-times-order-of-magnitude reduction in cost as the standard for digitization. The textbook that used to cost $60 should now cost $0.60. This loss of income is offset by a similar increase in the number of copies distributed. So the textbook that had a press run of ten thousand is now distributed to a million people. The failure by publishers to pass on the cost savings associated with digital distribution is met by those unable to afford the cost with the very reasonable response of unauthorized copying.

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George Mason’s President Says Some Donor Agreements Fell ‘Short’ of Academic Standards
Nell Gluckman, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/05/01

According to this article, "agreements show that the Koch Foundation and other donors had room to influence the selection and work of the professors whose positions they spent millions to support." More. The only surprise here is that anyone thinks this is an exception. It is an illusion to think that corporations and wealthy individuals do not expect a measure of control over the institution in exchange for their donation, even where written agreements do not exist. The withdrawal of donations to the University of Alberta in the wake of its decision to award an honorary degree to David Suzuki is clear evidence of this. The cost of contributions is compliance. Let's not pretend anything else is true.

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The Wisdon and/or Madness of Crowds
Nicky Case, 2018/05/01

This is a really nice visualization of some of the (very) basic concepts of learning in self-organizing networks. It takes a social perspective (as opposed to, say, a machine learning perspective) and offers an intuitive and accessible way to comprehend learning networks. It's text and animation (not video) and thopugh it says '30 minutes' it actually took me only 15 minutes to finish. I think it's worth the effort (though you'll want to kill the sound right away - bottom left).

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Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices
Catherine Cronin, Iain MacLaren, Open Praxis, 2018/05/01

This is a taxonomy more than anything but also "aims to provide a useful synthesis of OEP literature for education researchers and practitioners." The authors assert "one or more of the following bodies of work were cited in all subsequent academic literature in the area of OEP:

1. OLCOS (Open eLearning Content Observatory Services) project (2006-2007)
2. OPAL (Open Education Quality) initiative (2010-2011)
3. UKOER programme (2009-2012)
4. CILT (Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching) research, UCT (2009-present)."

This suggests to me that their focus was a bit narrow (surely discussion of open educational practices existed outside reference to these initiatives - like this one, for example, or this one, or this one, or even this one, or for that matter our discussions about MOOCs from 2008 and forward, all of which address open educational practices (if not the canonical version offered in this article)).

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