UK Open Textbooks: key points

Last month I presented the UK Open Textbooks project at the Learning On/With the Open Web event organised by the Disruptive Media Learning Lab and held at the Coventry Transport Museum.

You can see the submission here but I thought it was a good idea to record the headlines here in case the conference site is removed at some point. The full report on the activities of the UK Open Textbooks project will be available from December 2018.  Keep an eye on the Twitter feed for more info!

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An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open copyright license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public.  The UK Open Textbooks project (2017-2018) has explored the readiness of the UK open textbook market through a combination of survey research, interviews, and a series of case studies.  Key takeaways include:

• 20% of students who start a UK degree course will not finish, with maintenance costs a significant factor
• Current students will average £50,000 in fees and maintenance loans upon graduation
• NUS data indicates an average spend of £1,000 per student year on books and materials
• 88% of UK students claim to have skipped purchasing a textbook because of price
• There is a significant body of research demonstrating the quality and efficaciousness of open textbooks and OER more generally
• Open textbooks are funded by universities, foundations, governments and other institutions to disrupt the traditional model of textbook publishing
• In the open model, authors are typically paid for their work, which is then released under an open licence (usually Creative Commons)
• This allows content to be freely copied, shared, edited, remixed and used in new ways without further permissions
• Using open textbooks can also lead to significant innovations in teaching and learning through open pedagogies and open educational practices
• Many UK universities have begun to explore the possibilities!

We are currently assembling a report that will summarise the impact of the activities we have organised in the course of the project – this will be available in December 2018.

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MOOC and the workplace: key support elements in digital lifelong learning #bizmooc

Here are my slides from today’s presentation at Upgrading Business Competence Globally For Today and Tomorrow at the Cracow University of Economics.

What I heard, what I did not hear and what I wish I had heard… Reflections on the World Conference on Online Learning, Toronto, 2017

Interesting blog post from Paul Prinsloo that captures some of the tensions in educational technology today…

opendistanceteachingandlearning

Recently I’ve had the privilege of attending the World Conference on Online Learning in Toronto, organized and hosted by Contact North I Contact Nord. What a conference it was! At times, it resembled a medieval marketplace or bazaar with a variety of voices and opinions demanding attention. In addition, amid the noise and excitement, if one listened closely, one heard silences, things that were not said, things that were left out, or things you just missed hearing because you were at a different part of the conference.

So what did I hear? What did I somehow miss? Moreover, what did I wish I heard?

What I heard…

In our discussions about online learning, we have to put pedagogy central and first, and not technology.

The first of the five presenters in the opening plenary of the conference, Laura Czerniewicz (University of Cape Town) posed, at least for me, the most…

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Intervention – “Control, Resistance, and the ‘Data University’: Towards a Third Wave Critique”

AntipodeFoundation.org

by The Analogue University[1]

From Auditing, Controlling, to Desiring Data

The term “neo-liberal university” has become shorthand for a range of contemporary pressures in university life (Burrows 2012; Strathern 2000). However, increasingly we are not only considering specific pressures – such as workload, anxiety, and the reduction of research to profit – but also the general position of the university itself in history (Chatterton et al. 2010: 251; Gill 2009; Mountz et al. 2015; mrs c kinpaisby-hill 2011).

In an early critique of the neo-liberal university, Marilyn Strathern (2000) put the bifurcation point for North American and European Universities around the turn of the new millennium, when neo-liberal metrics and audit culture moved from the worlds of business and accounting into mainstream academic life. This first wave of critique of neoliberalism in the academy saw education as a public good being forced to mimic the market where academic values could…

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Open Educational Resources from Government and Partliament

OUseful.Info, the blog...

Mentioning to a colleague yesterday that the UK Parliamentary library published research briefings and reports on topics of emerging interest, as well as to support legislation, that often provided a handy, informed, and politically neutral  overview of a subject area that could make for a useful learning resource, the question was asked whether or not they might have anything on the “internet of things”. The answer is not much, but it got me thinking a bit more about the range of documents and document types produced across Parliament and Government that can be used to educate and inform, as well as contribute to debate.

In other words, to what extent might such documents be used in an educational sense, whether in the sense of providing knowledge and information about a topic, providing a structured review of a topic area and the issues associated with it, raising questions about an…

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Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

Interesting article on the role of big data and psychological profiling in the 2016 USA presidential elections.

aNtiDoTe Zine

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The Higher Education and Research Bill

The Disorder Of Things

The third and final reading of the UK’s HE Bill has been scheduled for next Monday, 21 November. If it passes the Commons and then the Lords, it will become law. Thanks in part to the turmoil around Brexit, this Bill has flown under the radar for virtually everyone, perhaps even most students and academics. But the consequences, if it passes, will be disastrous. Many academics seem to think it is just yet another piece of regulatory dross, yet another bureaucratic millstone to add to the many around their necks – and thus barely worth registering a protest about. The reality is actually very different. As I’ve warned on this blog before, the Bill will have a drastic impact on the economy of UK HE, and on the education we provide. Last-ditch resistance is urgently needed.

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#opened16 live blog: Gardner Campbell

Kicking things off here in Richmond, VA. we have our first keynote, Gardner Campbell.  The presentation began with a video montage featuring (among other things) a young Bob Dylan; quotes and graphs about different educational models; sections of It’s a Wonderful Life; Indie music; and end scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.  

We were then introduced to Robert Wagner Dodge, a ‘smokejumper‘ who escaped a raging forest fire by acting rather counter intuitively.  He lit a fire in front of him, reasoning that once the smaller fire had burned out he could shelter in the ashes.  None of his companions would follow him, and they perished.  Campbell refers to this kind of learning as ‘insight’.

‘Insight’ is a term that has grown in use as civilisation has become more complex.  There are many synonyms for insight (both formal and informal) and the word is used in many ways.  We normally understand it as:

• an accurate and deep understanding of a person or thing
• the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of a person or thing

From psychiatry:

• a breakthrough in understanding one’s own mental illness

Insight-oriented psychotherapy relies on conversation between therapist and patient.  (It can be contrasted with biomedical approaches that place the emphasis on medication.)

The question is posed:  why do insights come to us in the way they do?  A typical process might look like this:

• Concentrate
• Search
• Mental block/Impasse
• Distraction/Relaxation
• *space*
• Problem is somehow solved; a solution presents itself
• Feeling of certainty – the Eureka!

The solution can’t be forced or rushed. What happens in this *space*?  From cognitive science there is a suggestion that certain regions of the right hemisphere of the brain become unusually active before an insight is reached (a related area is related to appreciation of jokes).  Gamma wave activity (the highest electrical frequency of the brain) spikes at this moment.

Campbell invites us to think about these kinds of ‘Eureka!’ moments in the context of formal education.  We make novel neuro-chemical connections between existing parts of our knowledge.  This goes beyond the classroom:  the pattern of making new connections prepares us for some fresh insight where we generalise about categories of our understanding.  Campbell employs a couple of quotes from Bruner to support the idea that this way of understanding learning is unlike traditional pedagogy.

Trying to force an insight can actually prevent the birth of an insight.  This is a counter-intuitive outcome:  we learn by avoiding the learning activity (or at least waiting until the appropriate psychological state is arrived at).

Campbell refers to some students essays on their responses to The Eureka Hunt.  Rather than thinking about it for themselves, many obviously just searched online for ‘the right answer’.  Their goal was evidently just to ‘succeed’ rather than authentically engage with the text.  There is a whole industry devoted to mantras of student ‘success’.  Campbell invites us to question this idea of ‘student success’.  Some of the claims associated with it (“4 deadly mantras of student success”) include:

• “Students don’t do optional” – life will be a matter of conformity, not the exercise of freedom – why encourage it now?
• “Define more pathways” – restriction of unique pathways, enforced rubrics
• “We need to graduate more students” – Campbell suggests that students in fact graduate themselves
• “Our students are our products” – !

Such approaches, it is contended, do not encourage the right kind of insights.  Essentially they all treat the learner as passive in their own education.  An open, Connectivist course for AAC&U faculty and collaborators will explore these issues from January 2017.

 

The Open Research Agenda

Here are the slides I’ll be using today for my presentation at the CALRG Annual Conference.  The Open Research Agenda is an international consultation exercise focused on identifying research priorities in open education.

You can read more about the project here:

The Open Research Agenda (2)

The Open Research Agenda (1)

Why Ethics?

We had a few technical difficulties today, but for those who have been kept in suspense here are the slides I prepared.  This presentation is a short introduction to philosophical ethics in a research context.