Open Source

RECENT POSTS

What’s Next for Open-Source Education?

February 23, 2011 | 4:30 PM | By

Ten years ago, the concept of a university openly sharing its prized (and expensive) curriculum for free with anyone who was interested, especially one has highly regarded as M.I.T., was unheard of. But in the past decade MIT OpenCourseWare has paved the way for the open-source content movement.

On their tenth anniversary, ReadWriteWeb enumerates what the next decade will bring for the organization. Highlights: the inevitable app, reaching out to high schools, and collaborative studying.

“It’s quite humbling for us to see the impact OpenCourseWare has had,” says Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, Chair of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee and a member of the original faculty panel that first proposed the program. “We set out to create a resource other faculty could draw on to improve their classes, and tapped into a much larger need around the world. Millions of people have come to the site for the chance to learn, even without credit offered or access to faculty.”

Read more here.

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Source

How Free is “Free”?

January 6, 2011 | 1:53 PM | By

The article about CK12′s open-source digital FlexBooks compelled a reader to respond with some  questions.

He writes:

I have developed a strong interest in open or free text ever since I purchased a brand new grey-market, European textbook for 60 dollars, a full third of what Americans pay for the same biology book. I also got into a heated discussion with my professor about free education, and free information. I was upset because he forced us to buy his access guide and sub par “media lab” that he created with flash sometime in 2002. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, CK12, digital textbooks, Open Source

The “Living Book” Movement: Free Education For All

January 3, 2011 | 2:06 PM | By

Flickr: fd

By Sara Bernard

They’re free, they’re customizable, and they meet state standards.

Those are the three biggest selling points of CK12 Flexbooks, digital educational content for K-12 schools.

FlexBooks are developed through a combination of author donations, licensing partnerships, university collaborations, and incentives for community-based authorship, and teachers can customize them to their hearts’ content.

“We can’t make all kids get an education,” says Neeru Khosla, CK-12′s co-founder and executive director, “but we can make it simpler, easier, and more affordable. That’s the philosophy behind the openness as far as I’m concerned.”

While print is still not out of the picture, Khosala says , open-source textbooks are certainly the wave of the future.

Q: Have you seen a lot of growth in the open source movement in education recently?

A: Yes, we’ve made a lot of strides. For me, it’s the spirit more than anything else. It’s not about profits. It’s about making sure that everyone has access to information. You can argue, “How can you expect people to have access to information if they don’t have access to computers?” But I think that more and more, computers are becoming readily available in libraries and schools.

The open educational resources movement is also creating more organized sources of information — more contextualized information, rather than just, “Here it is, now you have to go find it.” There are a whole bunch of other organizations like us, such as the Open Learning Initiative from Carnegie Mellon. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, California Free Digital Textbooks Initiative, CK-12 Foundation, digital textbooks, FlexBooks, Neeru Khosla, online textbooks, Open Source

Will College Textbooks Be Obsolete?

November 29, 2010 | 8:00 AM | By

Flickr: djfoobarmatt

By Sara Bernard

These days, college students have many more options for buying less expensive versions of their required texts. With sites like Amazon, Half.com, and Craigslist, as well as textbook rental programs, they no longer have to rely on those heavy, expensive texts.

Online textbooks that use open source software — which are becoming more easily available, customizable, and inexpensive — are beginning to overtake the college textbook market. In Washington state, for instance, some community colleges are considering allowing students to purchase open-source textbooks for as little as $10 a pop. The textbooks would be funded by a $750,000 piece of legislation that would solicit materials from professors, experts, and previously published open source materials for the 81 most popular classes at Washington’s community colleges. This is part of an even larger statewide initiative, the Open Course Library, to gather all the materials for these classes — not only the textbooks, but also the syllabuses, tests, lecture notes, and videos — and make them widely and cheaply available.

Virginia State University is trying a similar approach in partnership with Flat World Knowledge, an open-source textbook landing site, where Virginia State students can access course materials for free online and pay just $20 to download them, along with study guides and other supplementary multimedia resources. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: digital textbooks, Higher Education, Open Source

Alaska Educator Makes the Case for Throwing Out Textbooks

November 23, 2010 | 2:09 PM | By

Flickr: wohnai

What’s the wave of the future in education? If you ask John Concilus, it’s doing away with textbooks. Concilus, the educational technology coordinator at the Bering Strait School District in Alaska, which houses the vast majority of its curricula on a fully modifiable, 14,000-page Wiki makes his case on his blog, The Education Bazaar.

“In the Education Bazaar,” he writes — a theoretical world that reverses the dominant paradigm of top-down, vendor-driven education materials — “school districts, schools and teachers select and or build software, write curriculum content, and devise solutions that meet their needs, not the needs of the vendors and the usual benefactors in the existing system” (read: print textbooks).

In his post “Is K-12 Ready for Open Content Textbooks?” he maintains that eliminating textbooks is still a major hurdle to cross for most schools: “Research shows [...] that for most teachers in most schools, the textbook actually is the curriculum. [...] When we ask many teachers and school administrators to consider Open Content textbooks, we are asking them to essentially abandon their entire curriculum.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Open Source

Could the future of College Education Be In the Ether?

November 5, 2010 | 11:31 AM | By

Flickr:RobertS.Donovan

There’s something in the education zeitgeist about the explosion of online higher education this week. Could it be that the future college experience will exist primarily in the ether? So say the soothsayers…

“College leaders don’t yet know how to credential the knowledge students are gaining on their own, but they may soon have to, said Mark David Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We are not far from the day when a student, finding unsatisfactory reviews of a faculty member on ratemyprofessors.com, will choose to take a class through open courseware online and then ask his home institution to assess him, Milliron said. Colleges need to prepare for that reality, he said.”

“California’s use of online distance education is “limited,” and campuses across the state should partner with a leading online university to expand students’ access to a college degree through online college classes, according to an extensive review of the state’s college access. [As an example}, Indiana legislators passed a law this year that would let students apply for state-funded financial aid grants to Western Governors University (WGU), an accredited online university based in Utah.”

“Online education is best known for serving older, nontraditional students who can not travel to colleges because of jobs and family. But the same technologies of “distance learning” are now finding their way onto brick-and-mortar campuses, especially public institutions hit hard by declining state funds. At the University of Florida, for example, resident students are earning 12 percent of their credit hours online this semester, a figure expected to grow to 25 percent in five years.”

Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of Michigan all now offer substantial portions of their courses online. In Britain, the Open University, which has been delivering distance learning for over 40 years, offers free online courses in every discipline on the OpenLearn Web site; the Open University also maintains a dedicated YouTube channel and has often had courses listed on the top 10 downloads at iTunes University. There, students can gain access to beginner courses in French, Spanish and German as well as courses in history, philosophy and astronomy — all free.

The democratization of education may well be on its way.

FILED UNDER: Higher Education, online learning, Open Source