Open content
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The darkish side of open licences
A few weeks ago Eamon Costello highlighted that Taylor and Francis/Routledge had sold the rights to harvest their content for Ai to Microsoft. I, like many others, felt a sense of outrage (although I haven’t published with them for quite a few years). I think it is the sense of powerlessness that is frustrating, they can do this, and make even more money from your content, without any consultation. However, I also reflected that as someone who ran an open access journal and publishes under open access licences, then Microsoft (and any other AI harvesters) could have been doing this happily already, without any need to consult me. I remember…
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The OU as your new favourite open textbook provider
via GIPHY TL;DR – the Open University has an excellent range of free ebooks on Amazon or from the OU which you should check out. What’s in a label? To absolutely no-one’s surprise, the answer is, ‘quite a lot it seems’. The Open University has a very successful (even more successful since the pandemic) OER site, OpenLearn. We tend to think of this in terms of individual resources and short courses. It comes in a number of different download formats, including ePub. What triggered my ‘what’s in a label’ comment is that we also list all the ebooks on Amazon in Kindle format. These should be available in most countries…
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25 Years of OU – 2005: OpenLearn
Around this time I was asked by my OU colleague Tony Walton to join the team preparing a bid to the Hewlett Foundation. They had funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare and we’d been in conversations with them about doing something similar for OU material – releasing it as OER. The thing about the early MIT stuff was that although it was open, it wasn’t that useful. A course syllabus, reading list and some notes is not a distance learning course that can be studied independently. The OU course materials are designed specifically for that purpose, and prior to open textbooks this looked like the best use of OER (it still is, I’d…
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Online Pivot – some Open University resources
As the pivot to online gathers apace, some colleagues have been discussing if we have useful resources at the Open University to help. Lots of other people are doing excellent work online, so I won’t try and collate everything that is out there but rather just focus on OU resources. While we do know a lot about distance & online learning, it’s important to recognise that what is happening now is quite different in nature. This is an emergency, swift response in switching classes to online, which is not the same as a carefully planned 5 year strategy. Our courses take a long time to develop and have the systems…
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Hits & thoughts ain’t evidence
This week we've been populating the impact map for the OER Research Hub. The impact map (http://oermap.org/) has been developed largely by Rob Farrow and Martin Hawksey, and features lots of Hawksey-goodness. You can do the following on the map: Look at evidence for any one of our 11 hypotheses (eg. for hypothesis A regarding performance) Look at the flow of evidence Examine evidence by country Filter evidence by sector, polarity, hypothesis, country Explore the map for OER policies (a work in progress) So, as well as putting our own evidence in there, we have been trying to add in the research of others that really demonstrates evidence for one of…
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Build it and they might come
Some of you will have seen a report about a survey conducted on the use of Open Course Library (OCL) free, open textbooks. The findings were that use was "extremely limited". Over the 42 courses that could use the textbooks, this amounted to 98,130 possible students, but only 2,386 did, some 2.4%. All that is rather disappointing to say the least, and it left me a little puzzled. Why would uptake be so low? Given the question "do you want to buy this $100 textbook or have this free one?" one might expect more than 2.4% to go for free. Tony Bates posted a very good response to it which…
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Understanding OER in 10 videos
A long time ago, back when we still used the phrase 'web 2.0', I proposed an idea for a tool called "9 step" which sequenced online resources together, with connecting narrative. My proposal was that you can learn anything in 9 steps. I think Orson Welles once said he learnt everything he knew about cinematography in an hour, so 9 resources should be enough. Well, due to my inability to see things through and lack of commercial flair I never did anything with the idea. Since then similar things have been trialled, to not much success, but I won't let that deter me from declaring that it was a great…
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Better bums on seats
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikelegend/4879039847/ > During the expansion of higher education in the 90s & 00s it was all about getting more bums on seats. In the UK the Labour government set a target of 50% of 19-22 year olds going in to higher education. The aim then was just to attract as many students as you could. But now we're in a period of reduction in student numbers, the drive is less for pure numbers but for students who will stay the course. It is very costly to universities to go through the enrollment process and for a student to then drop out. And it's often a damaging experience for the student…
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Calling OA academic book publishers
Now is the time for you to seize the moment and make a small to modest profit while performing a useful academic function. Okay it's not quite a passionate rallying cry, but I've been thinking about open access book publishing recently for two reasons. The first is that on an almost monthly basis I get emails from colleagues/peers/random people asking me about my experience of publishing with Bloomsbury Academic because they are writing a book proposal and want to go open access. They've either been told no by established publishers or 'yes, but it'll cost you £20,000 – will your university fund it'. To which the answer is no, or…
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Two OER sites for researchers
I've been involved very peripherally with a project funded through SCORE, and led by my colleague Robin Goodfellow. The aim was to develop two sites, one aimed at overseas postgrads coming to the UK to conduct research study. This site gives advice on matters such as research methods and writing for academic purpose. It is at http://www.readytoresearch.ac.uk/ The other site is aimed more at UK undergraduates and looks at digital literacy, digital scholarship type issues, so addresses topics such as learning with social media, plagiarism, collaborating online. It can be found at: http://www.digitalscholarship.ac.uk/ The interesting thing about the project was that the brief was to build it using only OERs as content.…
