The OER Research Hub has published a new study in OpenPraxis looking at the impact of OER on teaching & learning practice.

The Hub has been working with numerous OER and open education projects around the world, gathering data clustered around their 11 hypothesis, and this report pulls data from 15 open projects, including the BC Open Textbook Project, where I’ve been working closely with Beck Pitt and the BC Open Textbook Faculty Fellows for the better part of the past year gathering regional data from BC faculty.

Aside: I think it’s quite excellent that we have a project like the OER Research Hub around capturing data on all these projects and enabling the kind of meta-analysis (like this report) to happen. Big thumbs up to the Hub.

While there is much to dig into here around the 11 hypothesis, a couple things stood out for me.

First, contrary to other findings on remix and adaptability that have shown relatively little customization of OER’s and open textbooks, the Hub’s research reports a relatively high degree of adaptation of OER’s (77.7% of educators, formal, and informal learners reported adapting content). However, this wide difference could be attributed to the fact that adaptation wasn’t explicitly defined in the research and was left open for the respondents to determine what qualified as adapting content.

Interestingly, it is not the open licenses that enables more experimentation with the content (only 14.8% of educators reporting that they use open licenses to share content), but rather the fact that the resources are online that enables adaptation. Being online is a much more important factor in reuse and adaptation that being openly licensed.

With all the recent post OpenEd talk of the value of open textbooks for changing educators practices, one of the more tentative findings that stood out for me showed that educators who are exposed to OER’s tend to seek out more OER’s and are more likely to share their own resources.

The findings here are primarily clustered around 2 projects: OpenStax and Siyavula. In the case of Siyavula, I know they have done extensive work in teacher training around the use and creation of OER’s, using book sprints as a workshop model. So, teachers using OER’s as part of the Siyavula project are not only using OER’s, but are deeply immersed in creating and adapting OER’s with support, which would tend to increase their overall understanding of OER’s. These types of collaborative sprints may also account for the fact that Siyavula teachers reported more collaboration with their colleagues as a result of using OER’s (50%) with over 70% of Siyavula teachers also saying that they often compare their teaching with that of their colleagues.

Also relevant to the open textbook debate and the value that open textbooks & OER’s in general have in changing faculty practices, there is evidence that faculty who use OER’s reflect strongly on their practice with 64.3% of those surveyed saying that they use a “broader range of teaching and learning methods”, and they are likely to compare their own teaching with others. There is also an interesting tidbit that over a third of educators who use OER have blogged in the past year, showing a connection between using OER’s and other forms of open participation.

Photo: OER Research Hub is in the cards Alan Levine CC-BY

Some positive news today from the University of Guelph on the Open Ed situation.

The UofG was not opposed to sharing the mark more broadly within the post-secondary sector as evidenced by our efforts to provide a license to BC Campus. However, it is evident that the various meanings of the term ‘OpenEd’ will be challenged to co-exist and therefore, the University of Guelph is taking steps to release the official mark in its entirety, although this will make the mark available for others to attempt to make it their official mark or to apply to register it as a traditional trade-mark.

Much of this post has been cross-posted at the open.bccampus.ca website, but I wanted to repeat it here because I think that the work that John Hilton III and others are doing at the Open Education Group is important work for the entire OpenEd community. It helps build the case that open resources are viable resources for educators who are concerned about the efficacy of their teaching resources which, as the recent Babson survey tells us, is the most important quality faculty look for when choosing their resources: proven efficacy (a problematic point which I’ve talked about before).

John Hilton III is one of the leading researchers in the area of efficacy of open educational resources (which includes open textbooks). Recently, John has been gathering empirical research on the efficacy of open educational resources compared to traditional publishers resources and publishing the studies at the Open Education Group website. The Right to Research Coalition sponsored a webinar with John where he presented some of the findings comparing the use of open resources with closed resources.

Here are the slides from the presentation, and the archive of his webcast is below.

The “big picture” takeaway from John’s presentation came in a slide he shared early on (see above). The aggregate result of eight different studies he examined shows that 85% of students who use free open resources in a class do as well or slightly better than students using traditional publishers textbooks. (updated May 14, 2015: John left the following comment about this post over at the open.bccampus.ca site that reads “Thanks for this post – one quick clarification. The “50-35-15? breakdown in the image is actually about student and teacher’s perceptions of OER. That is about 50% say the OER they have used is as good as traditional texts, 35% say it’s better, 15% say it’s worse. 10 different academic studies have focused on whether students who use OER do better or worse than their peers using traditional resources have largely found no significant differences. See http://openedgroup.org/review for more details.” So, the empirical evidence from 10 research studies actually shows an even more compelling argument).

Students performing as well or even slightly better while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in textbook costs is an important finding. However, a John notes, this is just eight studies and there needs to be more research done to be able to see if this result can be replicated in other cases. But still, it does beg the question that if students are doing as well or even slightly better in classes that use free open resources, then how come we still are asking them to spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks when the outcomes are the same?

Here is the presentation.

In the run-up to her keynote for the OER15 Conference —  which I hope to see in person — Sheila MacNeill asks for examples and ideas concerning the “mainstreaming” of OER and open educational practice in higher education. I’m really looking forward to seeing how Sheila ends up addressing the question, following on important questions and valuable reality checks she’s already presented.

As I mulled over a few ways of responding to her query [I started this post weeks ago], I happened to read Tony Hirst’s statement of Academic Philosophy. I was particularly struck by Tony’s definition of open practice: “driven by the idea of learning in public, with the aim of communicating academic knowledge into, and as part of, wider communities of practice, modeling learning behaviour through demonstrating my own learning processes, and originating new ideas in a challengeable and open way as part of my own learning journey.”

Tony’s statement frames the benefit of open practice as something that is publicly engaged, that broadens the impact of academic works, and that brings long-held ideals of scholarship up to date to utilize the contemporary environment. I suspect most attendees of OER15 understand these benefits, and have first-hand experiences of them. So maybe I am bashing a straw man when I contrast Tony’s statement with so much of our rhetoric, where just getting something to “open” seems to be the end goal in itself. That if we can just get a Creative Commons license (without that nasty NC clause, natch…) on more materials, surface more research and learning on the open web, then we will have at that point found success. I support those goals myself, and happily work to promote and implement them. They are very good things to do and they result in real benefits.

That said, imagine you are someone who has not had an amazing experience of openness. You are a practitioner with head down, dealing with the professional and personal pressures most of us are fighting through. What benefits are offered by “going open”? I think for most people the first words that pop into mind with a proposed move to open are “hassle”, “uncertainty” and “more work”.

I came to open education as something of a refugee, fleeing the wreckage of misguided Learning Objects projects in which the goals of sharing and collaboration were torpedoed by notions of control, ownership and exclusion. I struggled with Learning Object Repositories and Learning Management Systems, while at the same time was truly having enlightening rewarding fun amongst a loose nascent network of educational bloggers. The pragmatic advantages of “just sharing” were so obvious. It still baffles me how the serious people in the field could not see them. Then there was the human side… I could feel the joy and energy of organic emergent practices in my bones.

I started to gravitate to the open education movement because there were people there who also felt this way. There were plenty of serious people in the movement as well, and it seemed to me that while OER made progress on the intellectual property problems we repeated the fundamental errors of Learning Objects in many other respects. Maybe that’s why I’ve thought of open as a necessary condition or means, but nothing like the desired end.

It does not help here in 2015 that “open” has been used in so many ways that it may not even function as a viable term anymore. In the opening chapter of The Battle for Open, Martin Weller outlines one of the most problematic points of demarcation:

…for many of the proponents of openness its key attribute is about ­freedom – ­for individuals to access content, to reuse it in ways they see fit, to develop new methods of working and to take advantage of the opportunities the digital, networked world offers. The more commercial interpretation of openness may see it as an initial tactic to gain users on a proprietary platform, or as a means of accessing government funding.

For a while, I thought one way to sharpen the value proposition of open to prospective allies would be to emphasize “freedom”, to make “freedom” something more than an “attribute of openness”. But I have to admit, when I’ve floated that idea to people in conversation nobody seems too enthused. “Freedom” is a term that carries its own baggage (I find it impossible to avoid using quote marks for “freedom” in 2015), and the word has already proven vulnerable to abuses and absurdities.

I know this post is muddled. You’d think that after more than a decade of living inside this space I’d have a little more focus. I really enjoyed Martin’s book for that reason, as he lays out these contradictions with clarity, and even makes them read fresh to my tired eyes. Towards the end of The Battle of Open, he outlines some credible outcomes likely to emerge from open practices, most of which should resonate with educators and their institutions. One is the ability for higher education to demonstrate its worth to society, as in “a digital, networked age, erecting boundaries around the institution is harmful because it speaks of isolation.” Another is the development of literacies and practical skills that will be necessary for our graduates. “Open practice allows students to engage in the type of tasks and develop the type of skills they may need in any type of employment, without reducing a university education to merely vocational training.” Authentic and experiential learning needs to embed openness when it comes to the development of these abilities. I would add that genuine engagement with networked practice is also essential if we hope as citizens to develop an informed worldview on issues such as privacy and surveillance, intellectual property, and the economic effects of digital disruptions — not to mention coming to grips with the nature of digital communication itself. And finally, while Martin is justifiably cautious about making extravagant claims of reduced costs, the benefits here are real and demonstrable.

OER is killing education shared CC by empeiria

I note that some kind of re-alignment of focus seems to already be underway. In 2015, we hear less about Open Educational Resources as a goal, and more about supporting open educational practice. I see that while the URL and hashtag of the conference remains “OER15” the opening sentence on the conference website describes the event as this year’s “Open Education Conference (OER15)”. And what once was the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s annual conference is now called the “Open Education Global Conference”. And the consortium itself has rebranded itself as the Open Education Consortium. (I hasten to add there is also that other Open Education Conference, which is back in Van Rock City this year.)

So I end my response to Sheila’s query with a question of my own. Would the cause of open be better served if we go further in this direction, and stop talking about “open” as a goal and instead focus on using it as a tactic to support allies who care about authentic, engaged, accessible, sustainable, and relevant public education?

Truncated week as I took Monday & Tuesday off after OpenEd.

• Shortlisted candidates for an 8 month co-op gig we have with the open textbook project. Brendan Lane, our current co-op (and an awesome one at that) is leaving at the end of the month after working on open textbooks for the past 8 months. I am sure he has cleaned up enough bad html code to last a lifetime.
• Met with Ministry of Advanced Ed in Saskatchewan to talk about open initiatives in that province. We’ve recently opened up our textbook review process to both Alberta and Saskatchewan faculty and are looking for ways to make more collaborative moves under the tri-provincial MOU.
• Brainstorming meeting yesterday on how to promote and support Open Pedagogy projects (like many of the UBC student as producer projects that Will and Novak talked about in their OpenEd presentation). We also talked about developing more localized sprints along the lines of the work being done by Lumen Learning where we go to institutions to build local capacity by engaging in a textbook adaptation project.
• After OpenEd I came back wanting to have someone else check over our attribution statements for textbook adaptation projects we have done, and to ensure that we have done things correctly as per the CC licenses. Working on adaptations on projects (or, even more challenging remix projects) is complicated when you are mixing and matching sources of content with different licenses, so I have reached out to Creative Commons to see if they can help us by checking over our work on the first adaptation projects we are rolling out the door.
• Our fantastic Communications Director, Tori Klassen, is leaving BCcampus & heading over to Vancouver Community College, so we had an impromptu office goodby lunch for her yesterday.
• Began working on venues for OpenEd 2015 in Vancouver.
• Open Education Week is coming up in March, and it looks like we are going to try to put together a series of lunchtime webinars for the week with different open textbook groups (faculty, librarians, students, adapters & others) participating in the webinars. I may be tapping some of you on the shoulder in the coming weeks
• Heading to VIU to do a workshop with Jessie Key on Open Textbooks on January 15th. Also have booked presentations for UNBC and Selkirk College in the new year. The virtual open textbook roadshow is coming to an institution near you.
• Getting ready to move the new Nursing and Mental Health textbook I’ve been working on to the editors for release early in the new year.
• Added a cap of 5 reviews per faculty to our textbook review process to try to encourage a greater diversity of voices in our textbook reviews.
• I’m facilitating a couple of open online courses – a one week course on OER’s starting Saturday with EdTechOpen (register here), and another longer, 4 week course on adopting open textbooks. Did some work prepping for those.
• Did an interview with a group doing an evaluation of the work of the OER Research Hub. They wanted the opinion of a partner who has worked with the Hub about what it was like working with them. Really, if it wasn’t for Martin, Beck and the rest of the OER Research Hub reaching out to us after I flailed trying to organize some research on our project, I think we would have missed a valuable opportunity to add to the body of OER research that is in demand by practitioners around the world. For that I am eternally grateful for their help and support. I’ll add Rajiv to my grateful OER researcher list as well as he, too, helped push the current research project along.

Big fan. Proudly sporting my shiny new OER Research Hub t-shirt.