Flickr: Muli Kapul

While the open content movement in education continues to gain steam, more teachers are starting to learn about free content they can use and adapt to their own needs for their classrooms.

But educators are focusing too heavily on acquiring content, rather than contributing and improving to it, according to a company that helps teachers and students access open education resources.

“People often hear the content piece rather than the open piece,” said Bill Fitzgerald, the founder of FunnyMonkey, a Portland, Ore.-based open educational resources company, during a presentation at Educon 2.5. “And it shifts [an understanding] about what open content is.”

That shift is understandable. In education, open content refers to any textbooks, lesson plans, supplemental educational resources, or other educational artifacts that can be freely modified to suit educators’ individual needs. Access to open content is often free or more affordable than proprietary alternatives, so for cash-strapped schools and resourceful teachers who want to go beyond what traditional textbooks offer, this movement, which is being celebrated next month, can be a game-changer.

To keep the focus on the two-way direction of open content — both contribution and use — Fitzgerald and his team offered a framework of nine tips, based on “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” an essay about open source software engineering.

GOOD CONTENT COMES FROM PERSONAL PASSION.

Maybe a particular unit gets you enthused. Or maybe a lesson plan irks you because it falls short of your expectations. Either way, that enthusiasm should be the catalyst for creating, editing, or expanding upon the material, and then republishing it. Good teachers are already doing this, Fitzgerald says — except for the final step.

“The change is what actually happens when it’s done,” he says. “Instead of hitting ‘save’ and putting it on your hard drive, you’re hitting ‘publish’ and putting it on the Web.”

GREAT TEACHERS SHARE THEIR GEMS.

You probably have a lesson or two in your holster that you know is always a hit with your students. Don’t hoard them. Share them with colleagues, and acquire their go-tos as well. Be willing to alter them into a format that jives better with a different teaching style.

LICENSING IS IMPORTANT.

Open content published through open licenses like those offered by Creative Commons allow for varying degrees of modification. If you’re going to edit or combine useful items, be sure you understand their respective licenses, so you don’t find yourself in a spot where others can’t add on to your work.

HAND OFF THE LESSONS YOU’VE TIRED OF.

Just like you should seize upon enthusiasm, so you should acknowledge fatigue. And in the open content world, there’s usually a competent successor willing to put a fresh spin on your material. Also, when the time comes for you and your content to part ways, be sure to publish it in text form to make it more visible in Web searches, rather than as a PDF or Word document.

“This is kind of how it works in the software world too,” said Jeff Graham, FunnyMonkey’s lead developer. “The successful projects are the ones where people are using them, but also where people are talking about them.”

SHARE YOUR PROBLEMS; SOMEONE WILL SEE AN ANSWER.

Every teacher, administrator, parent, and student has a different skill set. Confessing your biggest challenges to the open world—and just as importantly, making sure people know it’s out there—is a strength that shows willingness to improve and may result in advice from those who can help.

COLLABORATE WITH STUDENTS AS WELL AS COLLEAGUES.

Open content isn’t only about peer-to-peer teacher-to-teacher collaboration. It should also allow you a new way to build students’ conceptual understanding by revising old items or creating new ones.

“If you have a set of resources that needs to be cleaned up, that’s a good opportunity for students,” Fitzgerald said. “And by giving your students the autonomy with the support to do this and do this right, you can create an environment where students are sharing this work. People are talking about digital literacy; that’s it.”

VALUE YOUR STUDENTS AS AN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE.

Not only can open content allow your students to tackle concepts from a new perspective, it can also pave a way for them to impart their own knowledge. Who else is closer to the challenges of learning new material for the first time than students who tackle that challenge on a daily basis? Hearing that voice can help you rethink the content you give them, and in an open content world, allow you to edit it to make it better.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF FAILURE

Remember telling your students that you learn the most when you fall short? Time to practice what you preach. And sharing when, why and how you fall short in an open content community can often lead to input that results in the most innovative solutions.

Here are five, drawn from first-hand observation at major 2012 industry conferences ranging from the more traditional Association of Educational Publishers’ and Association of American Publishers’ Content in Context to the edgy SXSWedu event in Austin. These represent one perspective of what the education industry itself is seeing, cutting across individual conferences and events.

1. PAPER IS NOT DEAD

While digital is firing up imaginations and well-equipped classrooms, paper is still the pervasive medium of choice. Digital instruction is simply finally achieving equal billing for serious consideration and state and federal funding. Despite this year’s declaration from the FCC and U.S. Department of Education that the industry should replace paper with digital textbooks by 2017, financial and technical hurdles remain.

For example, one high-profile Open Educational Resources pilot in Utah uses digital resources to create paper high school science textbooks — at an attractive per-copy price of about five dollars, versus $80 for commercial texts. Why paper? David Wiley of Brigham Young University explained at SXSWedu that the digital device cost per student was high and much of the benefit could be derived in how the material was customized, taking advantage of paper’s “unlimited battery life.”

Technical concerns were front-and-center at a Consortium for School Networking/SIIA Feedback Forum held with district and state officials during the ISTE 2012 conference. While WiFi and devices may exist in a school district, distribution can be lumpy, creating hurdles to smooth implementation. “We have schools that are one hundred percent textbook, and schools that are fully digital — a broad spectrum,” said a Louisiana-based tech coordinator.

It is, one administrator from a California district noted, the last mile Internet connection into schools and even individual classrooms “where things get interesting.” Which renders paper as a cheap, convenient delivery mechanism, a good option — for now.

2. MOOCs AND BLENDED LEARNING FLOURISH

Perhaps the most-covered trend in 2012 is the MOOC movement — Massively Open Online Courses in higher education — so pervasive it is now also getting noticed at K-12-focused events. Investors and media are paying close attention to Coursera, edX, Udacity, and other major players. But the attention paid to the newest MOOCs seemed to overshadow awareness of the progress being made in another online instructional area: K-12 web-only and blended learning.

When it comes to blended learning, one of the biggest challenges this year echoed at ed-tech conferences was agreeing on a clear definition. The Innosight Institute in 2012 simplified its original 40 blended learning profiles to a more manageable number — four models. Perhaps symptomatic of the need for clarity, at one event a representative of a well-known education company claimed it had “invented” blended learning because its reading intervention software existed on computers years ago.

3. MALLS, CHURCHES, BUSES: SCHOOL IS EVERYWHERE 

Online learning aside, the physical definition of “school” and its borders are noticeably expanding, and not just to the home.

At the EdNET 2012 conference, online program manager Gloria L. Keaton of Annapolis Road Academy in Prince George’s County Public Schools, MD, noted that online learning labs don’t have to be in school buildings. “Let’s have a lab in a shopping mall. Kids go there. Teachers go there.”

An administrator from Arizona, speaking at the CoSN/SIIA Feedback Forum, said his district started putting WiFi on buses because kids have an hour-and-a-half ride each way. At that same session, a Chicago-area district official said his schools were working with malls and other public areas to install WiFi for students to use while studying. And a Louisiana tech coordinator said churches, as gathering places, are putting in WiFi to become community centers for studying.

Summed up the CoSN/SIIA facilitator: “The last mile (for school Internet access) is changing. But you’re not responsible for that last mile.”

4. MOBILE AND BYOD: THE CLASH OF REALITY AND POTENTIAL

Discussion of mobile devices — school or student-owned — was a huge topic of conversation in 2012. (Check out ZDNet’s post tracking iPad adoption.)

But as with infrastructure, reality lagged behind enthusiasm. Flybridge Capital’s Matt Witheiler opined at SIIA’s Ed Tech Business Forum that mobile education was “under-invested.” At the CoSN/SIIA Feedback Forum, one Oklahoma district tech said he passed out iPads to all teachers on the first day of school, but “a month later all the teachers were complaining they couldn’t get online when they wanted.”

As to students bringing their own devices? It’s a misconception that BYOD is a common policy, said Peter DeWitt, principal of Poestenkill Elementary School in upstate New York and a popular ed-tech blogger, at EdNET 2012. With pressures of Common Core curriculum, teacher evaluations, new tests and other higher priorities sucking all the time out of the school day, “I don’t think schools are prepared for BYOD. I want them to be,” he said. Issues include teacher control, teaching kids to use their devices on school properly, infrastructure and number of tech support staff.

On the plus side, “The iPad has been one of the elements of seismic change, because of how it opened people’s minds,” said David Straus, vice president of product at Kno at the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit.

5. FLOOD OF MONEY CHASING ED TECH

This year saw so much investor, startup and news media attention paid to ed tech, that by this fall whispers began about the potential of a bubble, one that might drag teachers and students who depend on the latest products down with the overheated companies should it pop.

At year’s end the whispers had become chatter as investors met with the industry at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum in New York City. “There’s more money than talent,” said City Light Capital’s

Josh Cohen, bluntly stating a common attitude. He added that while his firm has invested in higher education, it has “been looking to do a K-12 deal since 2004 and still haven’t found the right one.” Overall, Chief Strategy Officer Diana Rhoten of Amplify observed, “The startup end of the space is extremely over-inflated.”

As for the traditional educational publishers, only Pearson is an active strategic investor among the major players, according to Baran Rosen of Whitestone Communications. Others, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, “have fallen behind” due to internal issues, flagging sales and other distractions. But Rosen noted investors view the appeal of education as huge, “second only to health care” in size.

MISCELLANY

Finally, there’s the trend category of “lots of talk,” nascent widespread adoption. Big or portable education data is not quite there yet, but there’s been lots of promising activity with the Shared Learning Collaborative and the U.S. Department of Education’s MyData initiative. The maker movement is cool, but hardly ubiquitous in most traditional K-12 schools. Digital badges for informal (and some formal) learning trumpeted by Mozilla Open Badges and the MacArthur Foundation are still in early development stages.

There’s just one caveat about trying to divine trends from these half-dozen events. As Justin Serrano, President of Kaplan K12 Learning Services, quipped at the Software and Information Industry Association’s Ed Tech Industry Summit last spring, “Sometimes these conferences are a little bit like a Dead show. You see the same people moving from one to another.”

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes a column for GeekWire. He attended every event listed here, and even spoke at a few of them.

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By Ana Tintocalis

California is one step closer to bringing free online textbooks for state college students, a huge step for the open education movement. A historic bill on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown would give college professors, and thereby students, an option to use free online, customizable curriculum rather than print textbooks, for which students spend upwards of $1,000 per year. The measure establishes the first free digital library for the University of California, the California State University and California Community College systems.

If the bill passes, students of 50 most popular lower-division courses could access the content through an online portal at little or no cost. Faculty members would be able to remix and repurpose the digital content as they see fit, rather than having to rely on print textbooks.

A similar effort is underway in the state of Washington, led by the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges, which seeks to create an Open Course Library that will include inexpensive online educational content. [Read more about some of the challenges they're contending with.]

Dean Florez, president and CEO of the 20 Million Minds Foundation, who helped craft the bill for State Senate President Pro Tem Darryl Steinberg, says the content within the digital library would also be interactive, with links to chat rooms also known as “open study halls.”

“Our students are so used to being networked … we really see these books as ‘social books,’” Florez said. “Students become engaged with each other, not through the professor, but through the book itself.”

It would take $10 million in start-up costs to develop California’s first open source college library. The state would provide half of that amount; the other half has to be matched by foundations and other private sector players.

Textbook publishers have been reluctant to endorse the bill because the shift would substantially undercut their profits. The Association of American Publishers executive director Bruce Hildebrand says while textbook producers are not against open-source materials, they don’t like “when the government wants to go into competition to become publishers.”

But Florez says the state would not create these e-books. Instead, the state will be relying on content creators to collaborate with faculty, education tech developers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to create innovative enhancements. The materials would then be placed under Creative Commons licensing, which allows students and educators to customize curriculum by choosing content from different resources.

Florez says faculty will have the final say in which e-books will be chosen because an amendment to the bill establishes the Open Resource Council comprised of UC, CSU and community college professors. These faculty members will be in charge of pinpointing which lower division courses should benefit from open source materials, what e-books get approved, and how often the content should be updated.

“[The measure] asks our faculty members to put their stamp of the approval on these books. These are the faculty members that will be using [the books]. I think that was a great improvement in the bill.”

The Governor has until the end of the month to sign or veto the legislation.

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By Frank Catalano

Schools are moving from creamy to chunky — but not in relation to cafeteria peanut butter. The change in texture is happening with content.

Instruction that was structured linearly, captured in books that were all-inclusive monoliths with a predetermined progression for a uniform, somewhat “creamy” consistency, is shifting to newer forms of instructional content that are more “chunky,” beginning as a scattered landscape of digital pieces that are then assembled to support full courses

The trend, steady and apparently inexorable, is inspired by higher education, driven by financial pressures, propelled by foundations and the federal government, and enabled by technology.

Digital course materials are, of course, nothing new. One of the highest-profile such initiatives, MIT’s OpenCourseWare, is a decade old. And digital textbooks, which have morphed from crude PDF representations of paper books to interactive iBooks, have also been available for years.

Now, digital curriculum — in both college and K-12 — seems to be shifting from attempts to break apart comprehensive digital textbooks to meet classroom needs, to building up lessons and courseware from individual instructional chunks. And that has the potential to make the traditional definition of “textbook” somewhat quaint.

Encouraging this acceleration of digital chunky content, in large part, is the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement.

OER, though definitions vary, is at its heart digital instructional content that’s designed to be mixed, modified and shared. In other words, a teacher can pick and choose learning elements he or she needs for a lesson from a variety of sources, make changes, use those lessons in class, and theoretically then distribute either the individual pieces or the completed combination to other educators for their use.

It’s like creating your own music playlist by choosing tracks from various artists and sequencing them any way you want.

Overall, four core factors have come together to fuel the rise of digital content, including OER pieces, across the educational landscape, from kindergarten to college:

PRICE. Ask any educator the appeal of OER you’ll likely to hear, “It’s free content.” While that may not always be true (there is OER available to institutions by subscription through the delightfully named HippoCampus, for example), and not all digital content is OER (just ask any education industry company), perceptions do matter. And the perception that a lot of quality content is available for only the cost of labor has led a lot of school districts and teachers to try it during difficult budget times.

AVAILABILITY. Spurred by entrepreneurs and fueled by funding from, among others, the Gates and Hewlett Foundations (as well as the continued efforts of long-time educational publishers and ed-tech companies), there’s simply a lot more digital content on the web than there used to be, for example Khan Academy videos and materials from NASA. But significantly more has been developed by existing educational powerhouses, start-ups and educators themselves. Anything digital, and granular enough, works.

DISCOVERABILITY. A big challenge has simply been finding what online materials exist on the web beyond known repositories such as Curriki. Two very prominent, and public, initiatives are tackling this.

Last November, the U.S. Departments of Education and Defense launched the beta of the Learning Registry, which is basically a directory of kindergarten-through-adult digital education resources from a wide variety of government, state, district and private sources. What makes the Registry unique is that any provider can register content (the National Archives, Smithsonian and PBS were among the early participants), and any educator can quickly find lessons plans and content specific to his or her unique needs based on subject, grade level or other criteria. And the Learning Registry doesn’t just reside at one address on the web; it’s more of a embeddable, distributed index that can be browsed from many websites.

A second, related effort is the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. Steered by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, LRMI is a fast-tracked project, launched just last June, to make it easier to find educational resources via major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. At its core, this is about consistently tagging digital educational content – no matter who creates it – with metadata that search engines understand.

Taken together, the hope is that LRMI and the Learning Registry will go a long way toward solving the problem of highlighting appropriate educational chunks.

FLEXIBILITY. A large part of the appeal of digital chunked content is its flexibility. Pluto’s planetary status in flux? Swap out chunks without wiping out the lesson or course (but keep the old one, just in case the astronomical protests are successful). And flexibility goes beyond delivery via pixel.

Utah, for example, has the Utah Open Textbook high school science curriculum. Created from OER content, the course textbooks are then printed and distributed. But the cost is $5.35 per book, versus about $80 for a traditional science textbook, prompting the project’s David Wiley to note at this year’s SXSWedu conference that these become books kids mark up and keep, rather than having to turn in at the end of the year.

In higher education, AcademicPub allows digital textbooks to be created with a mix of copyrighted (paid) and open (free) content. The automated process leads to a custom electronic or paper book – essentially, a digital course pack. And there are several other examples.

But the increased use of chunked digital content, especially OER, is not without pitfalls. The overused phrase, “free like a puppy, not free like a beer,” applies to any effort that replaces publisher cost with teacher labor to find, assemble and maintain content (even if, once assembled ,content is shared). And if the materials aren’t printed, every student has to have access to a hardware device that properly displays the content.

Yet flexible, “free,” and findable may trump the downsides as digital curriculum adds more do-it-yourself options  alongside its pre-built counterparts – as long as no student or teacher trips over the chunks.

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes the regular Practical Nerd column for GeekWire.

Flickr: Incase

By Nathan Maton

Back in 2001, MIT launched OpenCourseWare, a bold idea to put world-class MIT professors’ lectures, syllabi and resources online to the world for free. Today, Open Education Resources (OER) industry leaders are arguing that the free content is only the starting point.

The next stage of the open education movement has evolved into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) — the key word being “massive,” as in drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Last fall, Sebastian Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course enrolled 160,000 students and Thrun recently gave up tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, a company that will offer more MOOCs.

But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content.

“It was totally clear to me [several years ago] that content is only the starting point,” Schmidt said at recently at a SXSW session. “The really exciting stuff is going to be the learning, the assessments and the stuff that you need the content for. In a way, we started P2PU because institutions weren’t doing it. How do we build community around it and recognition for this open content is my question.”

The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to.

You’d expect MIT to tout its content as the solution. But that’s not how Steve Carson, director of external affairs for OpenCourseWare, describes the benefits of their project.

“The most exciting thing is that the last six months of open education have been spectacularly disruptive,” Carson says. “It was kind of a sleepy enterprise for the last 10 years where MIT was doing its thing and there were other projects doing their thing. It was all good and there were positive global benefits, but in the past 10 years I’ve heard people say campus-based education better look out, that this will be threatening to their business model, and I’ve never really felt that until the last six months. The pace of change in open education is qualitatively different than it was even a few months ago.”

Carson argues that MIT’s work is merely a necessary transitory experiment. It only puts classes and course material online, but you still have to watch, frequently from the back of the room, as the professor lectures students. He compares it to Wikipedia. MIT’s videos and materials provide deep references on a subject — but not the actual courses themselves.

Carson is a big fan of Schmidt’s work.  At P2PU, they run online courses that can be taught by a peer (you can create your own course), and they heavily promote the social part of learning. They have a peer mentor program to help students get through their courses and have the most users teaching web development courses, although Schmidt says they’ll be doing less of that. Schmidt believes that even with all the OER in the world, the way people learn is by being excited about it, by making things (even if it is just a blog post) and working together.

“The things I care most about is collaborative skills, are you a good communicator, can you get stuff done?” Schmidt says. “I think that’s the number one thing that isn’t being assessed anywhere that is super important. That’s what you ask when someone wants a job from you: do they get stuff done.”

Carson likes Schmidt’s focus on community, recognition and content because he argues it is more important to discover successful learning techniques rather than merely sign up 100,000 students online. He sees promoting big-sized classes as a way to bring attention to the issue.

“I think one of the higher level struggles these MOOCs are injecting themselves into is to change the way higher education as it is practiced on campus,” Carson said. “It is an opportunity to show faculty members different ways the Internet can support learning.”

And what exactly is the problem all these groups are trying to solve? It’s the sudden acceleration of global higher education demand.

“If you look at the scope and scale of the educational need in the world we’re going to need all of our educational systems firing on all cylinders to come close to even meeting the educational demand emerging in the world,” Carson said. “You could offer a thousand courses enrolling a 100,000 students each and you would not even be scratching the surface of the need in India and China and other developing regions. So we need these educational techniques to solve this problem.”

It took 11 years to get from the launch of OpenCourseWare to the point where a Stanford professor would walk away from a tenure position to launch another online learning venture. So how long will it take to build this next phase? For computer science, experiments like Thrun’s suggest that it may not take that long. Other types of courses Schmidt describes as important don’t yet exist.  And P2PU is still a relatively small community of around 30,000 members. Other countries have small experiments building OER and digital courses using high tech solutions like 3-D simulations, but no strong business model to scale their open efforts.

“We probably haven’t fully made the transition to digitally native pedagogies and learning approaches,” Carson said. “The first generation of distance learning is basically an attempt to move the classroom online, and I think that part of the scalable learning of these massive courses is the breakdown of that model.”

Flickr: NP_Josh

As the open education movement grows, the ripple effects of what it means for teachers to take control of what they teach is being witnessed across all spectrums in education. Customizable content, sharing and becoming part of a community, and deconstructing entrenched ideologies about what constitutes quality learning materials — these are just a few paths that the open education movement is creating.

At the Big Ideas Fest in December, we spoke to stakeholders in open education about how it’s transforming learning.

For some, like Una Daly, associate director of Open College Textbooks the movement is inevitable. Open education is a natural progression in the freeing and sharing of information on the Internet. “Open education is an evolutionary step in making sharing easier for students teachers and public,” she said.

Neeru Khosla, founder of CK12, a nonprofit open education source for free Web-based content in the form of digital “Flexbooks,” points out that customizable content allows educators to meet each of their students’ specific needs, unlike the rigid text format.

But for public school teacher Constance Moore, who teaches art in Oakland, Calif., the logistics of finding open education resources online is a major challenge. “You can’t get online,” she said. “You can barely send a fax from a lot of public schools. There’s a big gap between what’s available and how to access it.”

And that’s exactly the point made by Christian Long, vice president of education at Cannon Design, a firm that works with school districts to redesign learning environments. Long is worried that all the available resources online will get into the hands of those who already have means, leaving those who don’t even further behind.

“Those who have leverage, power and resources are going to pull it off, and those who don’t will be further marginalized in terms of opportunity,” Long said. If the debate is tangled around issues like “public versus private versus charter, we’re going to wake up sooner rather than later with a massive discrepancy.”

Watch the full interviews here.

[Co-produced with Matthew Williams.]