Ali Carr-Chellman, Tom Reeves, and I participated yesterday in “AECTx,” a keynote session in which we each gave 18 minute talks. Without coordinating ahead of time, each of our talks focused on using educational technology and educational research to solve large, societal problems. I was particualrly taken with the clarity of Tom’s formulation. Two slides near the end of his presentation admonished us that we need to:

Stop Focusing Research on Things

• Learning Analytics
• Mobile Learning
• Online Learning
• 3D Printing
• Games and Gamification
• Wearable Technology
• The Internet of Things
• Machine Learning
• Virtual Assistants
• Immersive Learning

Start Focusing Research on Problems

• Poverty
• Primary education
• Racism
• Sexism
• Child Abuse
• Crime
• Lack of literacy
• Poor motivation
• Hopelessness
• Obesity

Tom joked about “research” on the impacts of iPads on learning, and other thing-focused research. While he excluded them (perhaps as a professional courtesy to me as his co-presenter), “open educational resources” very clearly belong on the “Things” list. Openness is, and always will be, a means rather than an end. The moment we allow the means to become the end, we sacrifice the true end on the altar of zealotry.

Of course, I would argue that “Affordability,” “Access,” and “Completion” belong on the “Problems” list. Those are the problems I’m working on, and it’s good to be reminded and recentered from time to time. I think we all need that.

Tom ended his presentation with this quote from Charles Desforges:

“The status of research deemed educational would have to be judged, first in terms of its disciplined quality and secondly in terms of its impact. Poor discipline is no discipline. And excellent research without impact is not educational.”

I’ve long been inspired by Tom’s pleas for “socially responsible research” in education, and it was great to hear that message straight from the source. I thought the whole AECTx was a terrifically inspiring session.

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Using OER the same way we used commercial textbooks misses the point. It’s like driving an airplane down the road. Yes, the airplane has wheels and is capable of driving down on the road (provided the road is wide enough). But the point of an airplane is to fly at hundreds of miles per hour – not to drive. Driving an airplane around, simply because driving is how we always traveled in the past, squanders the huge potential of the airplane. So what is the analogous additional potential of open educational resources, compared to commercial textbooks and other commercial resources? OER are:

• Free to access
• Free to reuse
• Free to revise
• Free to remix
• Free to redistribute

The question becomes, then, what is the relationship between these additional capabilities and what we know about effective teaching and learning? How can we extend, revise, and remix our pedagogy based on these additional capabilities? There are many, many potential answers to this question. Here’s one example.

Killing the Disposable Assignment

If you’ve heard me speak in the last several months, you’ve probably heard me rail against “disposable assignments.” These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. Talk about an incredible waste of time and brain power (an a potentially huge source of cognitive surplus)!

What if we changed these “disposable assignments” into activities which actually added value to the world? Then students and faculty might feel different about the time and effort they invested in them. I have seen time and again that they do feel different about the efforts they make under these circumstances.

But which effective practices specifically might we remix in order to kill the disposable assignment? I love John Hattie’s book Visible Learning as a source for finding effective practices. In the book Hattie compiles findings across over 800 meta-analyses of 50,000 studies of 80,000,000 students to arrive at average effect sizes for over 130 influences on learning, including student influences, teacher influences, teaching influences, and school influences. Here are a few that resonate with me, together with their effect sizes as estimated by Hattie, a brief description, and page numbers from the first edition:

Teacher Student Relationships = 0.72
“Developing relationships requires skills by the teacher – such as the skills of listening, empathy, caring, and having positive regard for others…. Teachers should learn to facilitate students’ development by demonstrating that they care for the learning of each student as a person and empathizing with students.” Pp. 118-119.

Teacher Clarity = 0.75
Clarity – as rated by students (not other teachers) – in “organization, explanation, examples and guided practice, and assessment of student learning.” P. 126.

Worked Examples = 0.57
“Worked examples reduce the cognitive load for students such that they concentrate on the processes that lead to the correct answer and not just providing an answer.” P. 172.

Organizing and Transforming = 0.85
“Overt or covert rearrangement of instructional materials to improve learning. (e.g., making an outline before writing a paper)…. The types of strategies included in this category (such as summarizing and paraphrasing) promote a more active approach to learning tasks.” Pp. 190-191.

Feedback = 0.73
Pp. 173-178.

Reciprocal Teaching = 0.74
“The emphasis is on teachers enabling their students to learn and use cognitive strategies such as summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting…. The effects were highest when there was explicit teaching of cognitive strategies before beginning reciprocal teaching.” P. 204.

An Example of Open Pedagogy

When you can assume that all the materials you’re using in and with your class are open educational resources, here’s one way to remix the effective practices listed above with OER in order to provide you and your students with opportunities to spend your time and effort on work that makes the world a better place instead of wasting it on disposable assignments.

• Begin by establish relationships of trust with students. You’re about to ask them to do something they’ve probably never tried before. They won’t follow you if they don’t trust you.
• Provide a clear description of the assignment – students will revise and remix the core instructional materials of the class (which are OER) with other OER and with their own original work in order to create a small tutorial (in any medium) on a topic that students in the course generally struggle with. They will then use their tutorial to teach the topic to one of their peers. The best tutorials will be integrated into the official OER collection or open textbook for use by other students starting next semester.
• In addition to a clear description of the assignment, you should also provide a detailed description of how the assignment will be graded and / or examples of high quality student work.
• Show a variety of worked examples. If this is the first time you’re using this valuable assignment, use the OER that you’ve compiled to support student learning as your examples. Talk students through the process of selecting existing resources and remixing them into something that specifically supports their learning. If you have existing student work that you can show, even better.
• Invite students to engage in the remix activity (aka organizing and transforming) with an eye toward their upcoming peer tutoring interactions (using strategies like summarizing, questioning, and clarifying in the design of their remix).
• Provide constructive feedback to students on their remix and invite them to revise their tutorials.
• Once the revisions are complete, invite students to engage in the reciprocal teaching experience. After reciprocal teaching, invite the students to make a final round of revisions based on their partner’s experience with the materials.
• After your review, publicly congratulate the students whose tutorials will be integrated into the official course materials for next semester.

This assignment clearly leverages the reuse, revise, remix, redistribute permissions of open educational resources in order to enable students to extend and improve the official instructional materials required for the course. Because students know their work will be used both by their peers and potentially by future generations of students, they invest in this work at a different level. Because the assignment encourages them to work in any medium they prefer, students pick something they’ll enjoy, which leads them to invest at a different level. Because any one of these remixes might end up helping next semester’s students finally grasp the concept that has proven so difficult in the past, faculty are willing to invest in feedback and encouragement at a different level.

Examples of Student Work in the Context of Open Pedagogy

I’ve been iterating over a version of this approach for several years now. While nothing is universally effective, it tends to result in insanely awesome student work. An early version of this assignment back in 2007 brought you Kennedy and Nixon debating the merits of blogs and wikis, Rick Noblenski: Blasting Caps Expert and Wiki Advocate, and a father and son confrontation over District Policies Regarding Blogs and Wikis.

Later versions of this assignment brought you versions of the open textbook Project Management for Instructional Designers, which now includes multiple video case studies; completely rewritten examples in-text; alignment with the Project Management Professional certification exam; an expanded glossary; and downloadable HTML, PDF, ePub, MOBI, and MP3 versions of the book (among other improvements). The book is also used as the official course text at least one other university.

Of course I’m not the only one experimenting with these kinds of assignments – Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation is another one of my favorites (see this essay for a description).

Defining Open Pedagogy

What makes this assignment an instance of open pedagogy instead of just another something we require students to do? As described, the assignment is impossible without the permissions granted by open licenses. This is the ultimate test of whether or not a particular approach or technique can rightly be called “open pedagogy” – is it possible without the free access and 4R permissions characteristic of open educational resources? If the answer is yes, then you may have an effective educational practice but you don’t have an instance of open pedagogy. Open pedagogy is that set of teaching and learning practices only possible in the context of the free access and 4R permissions characteristic of open educational resources.

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A Tiny Thought Experiment

Imagine you had a favorite textbook (hey – it’s a thought experiment). Now imagine receiving a letter informing you that the author has passed away and left you all the copyrights to the book. You immediately walk across the room and pull your copy off the shelf and open to the copyright page. You carefully cross out the words “All Rights Reserved” and replace them with the words “Some Rights Reserved – this book is licensed CC BY.” Have you changed the quality of the book in any way? No. Simply changing the text on the copyright page does not change the rest of the book in any way.

Consequently, we learn that quality is not necessarily a function of copyright status. We are forced to admit that it is possible for openly licensed materials to be “high quality.” We are also forced to admit that taking poor quality instructional materials and putting an open license on them does not improve their quality, either.

No Monopoly on Quality

Because quality is not necessarily a function of copyright status, neither traditionally copyrighted educational materials nor openly licensed educational materials can exclusively claim to be “high quality.” There are terrific commercial textbooks and there are terrific OER. There are also terrible commercial textbooks and terrible OER. Local experts must vet the quality of whatever resources they choose to adopt, and cannot abdicate this responsibility to publishing houses or anyone else.

Accuracy and OER

Some people are unable to believe that any process other than traditional peer review, licensing, and publication can result in content that is highly accurate. If you were to create a kind of content wild west, where anyone could publish anything and anyone could edit anything published by anyone else, this would obviously result in horrifyingly inaccurate content when compared to content produced via the traditional process.

Except that it doesn’t.

In 2005 Nature conducted an experiment in which they directly compared the accuracy of Wikipedia articles with the accuracy of traditionally reviewed, licensed, and published articles in Encylopedia Britannica.

They explain,

We chose fifty entries from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on subjects that represented a broad range of scientific disciplines. Only entries that were approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias were selected. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to bring the length of the entries closer together.

Each pair of entries was sent to a relevant expert for peer review. The reviewers, who were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia, were asked to look for three types of inaccuracy: factual errors, critical omissions and misleading statements. 42 useable reviews were returned. The reviews were then examined by Nature’s news team and the total number of errors estimated for each article.

In doing so, we sometimes disregarded items that our reviewers had identified as errors or critical omissions. In particular, as we were interested in testing the entries from the point of view of ‘typical encyclopaedia users’, we felt that experts in the field might sometimes cite omissions as critical when in fact they probably weren’t – at least for a general understanding of the topic. Likewise, the ‘errors’ identified sometimes strayed into merely being badly phrased – so we ignored these unless they significantly hindered understanding.

The results?

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

With 42 usable reviews returned to Nature, this means the average article in both encyclopaedias contained 4 / 42 = 0.09 seroius errors, and 162 / 42 = 3.8 smaller errors per article for Wikipedia and 123 / 42 = 2.9 smaller errors per article for Britannica.

In other words, alternative authoring and review processes used to create openly licensed resources like Wikipedia can result in content that is just as accurate as the traditional peer review, publication, and licensing processes used to create works like Encyclopedia Britannica.

Distracting People from the Issue at the Core of Quality

Beyond issues of accuracy, when publishers, their press releases, and the media who reprint them say “quality” with regard to textbooks and OER, they actually mean “presentation and graphic design” – is the layout beautiful, are the images high resolution, are the headings used and formatted consistently, is the book printed in full color?

But this is not what we should mean when we talk about quality. There can be one and only one measure of the quality of educational resources, no matter how they are licensed:

• How much do students learn when using the materials?

There are two ways of thinking about this definition of quality.

• One is to realize that no matter how beautiful and internally consistent their presentation may be, educational materials are low quality if students who are assigned to use them learn little or nothing.
• The other way to think about it is this: no matter how ugly or inconsistent they appear to be, educational materials are high quality if students who are assigned to use them learn what the instructor intended them learn.

Really. For educational materials, the degree to which they support learning is the only meaning of quality we should care about.

Publishers put forth the beauty = quality argument because they have the capacity to invest incredible amounts of money in graphic design and artwork that visually differentiate their textbooks from OER. But when learning outcomes are the measure we care about, we see over and over again that many OER are equal in quality to commercial textbooks. (That is, over and over again we see OER resulting in at least the same amount of learning as commercial textbooks.)

We should never give into the temptation to focus on vanity metrics like number of pages or full color photos simply because they’re easy to measure. We have to maintain a relentless focus on the one metric that matters most – learning.

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We’ve pulled together a summary of what’s happening with our post-secondary work for fall semester 2013 in a press release posted on the Lumen site, which begins:

Twenty institutions have partnered with Lumen to offer open content options for high demand, high enrollment courses that serve more than 6,000 students in total. Because these students are no longer required to purchase commercial textbooks or course materials, cost savings are estimated at approximately $700,000.

(This is our post-secondary impact for fall 2013, and doesn’t include winter term 2013 or our secondary work with the Utah open textbooks which is now statewide in math and science.)

The release also provides some details regarding the impact on student learning outcomes of the OER adoptions we’re supporting, information about a math pilot we’re running in winter semester 2014, and a description of our newly redesigned services and support model which we’ve branded “Candela.”

Thank you to everyone who is supporting our efforts to increase the quality and lower the cost of education – our institutional partners; the small but passionate Lumen team; the many of you who say and write positive things about our work; the Shuttleworth Foundation who have provided direct financial support for our work; and the broader community of OER funders and organizations who make our work possible, including the Hewlett Foundation, NGLC, the Gates Foundation, the Saylor Foundation, OpenStax, CK-12, Boundless, CMU OLI, and dozens of other individuals and orgs.

It feels like we’re really making a difference in people’s lives – we’ve saved students around $1M this year, and I firmly believe we can do 5x – 7x that next year.

Happy anniversary, Lumen!

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Let’s take Physics for example.

Here’s the MIT OCW Physics course from 1999. It includes videos, lecture notes and other readings, assignments and exams with solutions, and a recommendation that you buy a commercial textbook. There is a study group that learners can join. There does not appear to be any way to interact with the instructor. The course uses a very traditional pedagogy and is openly licensed.

Here’s the Coursera / Georgia Tech Physics course from 2013. It includes videos, assignments and exams, and includes a recommendation that you buy a commercial textbook. There appears to be a study group that learners can join. There does not appear to be any way to interact with the instructor. The course uses an inquiry-based pedagogy and does not appear to be openly licensed.

This OCW collection and this MOOC have a LOT in common. While they differ in pedagogy and licensing, from the public perspective maybe the most important difference between these two big collections of freely accessible online resources – and the two genres of OCW and MOOC more generally – is market positioning and expectation management:

MIT OCW has always positioned itself as primarily teacher-facing. The collections of materials are intended to support faculty at other institutions in teaching similar classes or engaging in professional development. When independent learners manage to benefit from MIT OCW, this is a happy coincidence – a secondary benefit of the primary mission of supporting faculty around the world. Since MIT OCW is teacher-facing, of course there is no faculty member there to support students. Only the very bright and extremely self-motivated can benefit, but that’s ok since serving students isn’t their actual mission.

The commercial MOOC providers have positioned themselves as primarily student-facing. Their collections of materials are intended to support student learning, and their Terms of Service explicitly prohibit faculty around the world from using their materials in the courses they teach (there will be no secondary benefits). Since they are student-facing, the lack of a faculty member there to support students is keenly felt. The idea that only the very bright and extremely self-motivated can benefit from these MOOCs, which is what appears to be happening, is problematic since serving learners is their stated mission.

We’re seeing a huge anti-MOOC backlash now, but never saw an anti-OCW backlash. Why? Perhaps because even though to the public mind they’re doing essentially the same things – publishing large collections of curated, high quality, freely available course content – OCW managed the public’s expectations better.

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I have more questions than answers. Some of these are things I wish I’d done better at P2PU. Some of this applies to tech projects more than other types of projects.

Change is good – It’s also frustrating, it’s hard, it drains your motivation and enthusiasm, and people don’t like it. But if you are building something new, dealing with change really is the one thing you need to be good at. Very few things will work they way you thought they would. When the ground under your feet moves – don’t panic, enjoy the ride!

What is the problem you are solving? – Never forget to ask this question. Never forget your answer. And make sure it’s a problem you care about.

Outsource the “plumbing” – Find people who will do your accounting, legal, HR for free (pro bono support is easier for non-profits) or pay for it. It’s a gigantic distraction.

Learn how to prototype and test – No matter how smart you are, or how well you understand your users, try out a new idea before you dedicate huge resources. And embrace the fact that you will always throw away the first version (unless you are ridiculously lucky, in which case you don’t need good advice anyway).

Be smart about your tech – Unless technology is the core of your business, use existing off-the-shelf platforms and solutions. Do NOT build anything yourself. You will regret it.

Update (thanks to the excellent Helen Turvey, and Steve Song). Added one more:

Bring a friend (or more) – Starting something new is stressful. Rarely do things go according to plan. Having someone who is in it with you is key. Not just for the days when you need a kind word, a kick in the butt, or someone to make a joke – but also for the days when you’re on top of the world. Cause it’s more fun to share! (hint -> sharing nicely!)

Update 2:

Chris has turned all the feedback she received into a collection of 64 Tips to Blossom and Thrive.

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At the end of that post I said I would share some thoughts on how the popularity of MOOCs can be used to move the open agenda forward, and this post makes good on that promise. In order to do that, I’ll have to briefly outline the open agenda as I believe it pertains to open educational resources (others are far better positioned than I to consider the open agenda in other contexts like open data, open governments, etc.). That will require a brief definition of OER. Rather than beginning each sentence in the next several paragraphs with “I believe,” “To my mind,” and “In my opinion,” I’ll just caveat all these here and now by saying this is my own personal view of the agenda for OER. Yours may vary.

Defining Open Educational Resources. There are two defining characteristics of an open educational resource. Any creative work with these two properties can be considered an OER:

1. Access to the resource is free and unfettered. That is, the resource can be accessed without the user being required to pay, provide personal information, or jump through any other hoops as a prerequisite to access.
2. All users have free 4R permissions with regard to the resource. That is, either by virtue of open licenses or the work being in the public domain, anyone and everyone has the legal permissions necessary to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the resource.

Some Preliminary Context on the OER Agenda. Universal access to free, high quality education is important for reasons so grandiose that to mention them risks trivializing them. These reasons include nothing less than the happiness and prosperity of individuals and families, and the possibility of civilized society. OER have an important part to play in the “universal,” “free,” and “high quality” aspects of this aspiration. This relationship is the driving motivation underlying my personal commitment to OER.

For a number of years I have felt that the overwhelming majority of educational researchers are focused on the “high quality” problem, to the virtual exclusion of the “universal” and “free” problem from the discourse. This is another factor in my decision to focus my professional work on OER.

The OER Agenda in the Short Term – “Universal” and “Free”. This relationship is very simple – because the adoption of OER can drastically reduce the cost of education, the adoption of OER can drastically expand access to education. Deployed effectively, OER move us (perhaps asymptotally for extra-educational reasons) toward universal and free. The “universal” and “free” problem has been the primary concern of the open education movement during the first 15 years of its existence, and I feel like we are making reasonable progress on this problem.

The Open Agenda in the Medium Term – “High Quality”. The idea of “high quality” only has meaning locally – it does not have meaning globally. If educational materials are expressed in a language I don’t speak, or use examples that are foreign to me, then regardless of the “accuracy” of their expression they will be low quality to me. By definition, high quality means personalized for me.

There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution.

The Open Agenda in the Long Term – Infrastructure and the Unexpected. My two favorite saying with regard to OER continue to be “openness facilitates the unexpected” and “content is infrastructure,” both of which I have been saying for almost a decade. Once there is a high quality content infrastructure freely and universally available, there is absolutely no way to predict the incredible advances that will occur. To quote Linus Torvalds, “don’t ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit.” Who could have predicted what would happen as a high quality communications infrastructure (the internet) became increasingly universally and freely available?

I don’t work on OER because I believe I can see the endgame. I work on OER because I want to enable an endgame beyond imagining. I work on OER to create the infrastructure which people will leverage to – somehow – achieve universal access to free, high quality education.

Where Do MOOCs Fit In?

For a complex tangle of political reasons, “the people in power” are currently paying a tremendous amount of attention to issues relating to access to education, and the role of the cost of education in regulating that access. MOOCs have popularized and significantly advanced the conversation regarding both universal and free. The general public is beginning to believe that technology may have the near-term potential to provide a genuine solution to the problem of making education both universal and free. We can take advantage of the space MOOCs have created in the public conversation to introduce and advance the idea of truly open educational resources to people who are unfamiliar with it.

The comparison I made above between MOOCs and learning objects was a carefully chosen one. I believe that MOOCs will run – are already running – up against the reusability paradox. I believe people will eventually come to realize the pedagogical restrictions that are inseparably connected with the copyright and Terms of Use restrictions of MOOCs. As with the learning object mania of yesteryear, diehards will stick around but the rest of the world will move on as the experiment fails. If we message correctly before that happens, we can create a general understanding that much of what is frustrating about MOOCs to faculty, students, and others would be solved by the simple application of an open license (the same way an open license can resolve the reusability paradox).

MOOCs have carried the ball a significant way down the field toward universal access to free, high quality education. We should be grateful for the work they’ve done on behalf of that goal. The primary risk we have to guard against now is someone hanging out the “Mission Accomplished” banner. MOOCs are not openly licensed, and consequently will struggle with issues of quality and will never become part of the educational infrastructure that enables truly breakthrough advances. MOOCs get us one step closer to the goal, but we need to continue advocating for true openness in order to create the space in which those advances can happen.

It’s almost as if we’re actually, slowly, iterating toward openness.

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Today Lumen released its first six Open Course Frameworks. Open Course Frameworks are an idea I am very excited about, because they greatly simplify the process of adopting OER for the average teacher or institution. Open Course Frameworks are:

• curated collections of OER,
• mapped to learning outcomes,
• openly licensed with detailed attribution,
• organized in a way that looks and feels like an online course,
• published on open source platforms, and
• compatible with Lumen’s ImprovOER continuous quality improvement service (which we are publicly showing for the first time at InstructureCon in a few weeks).

In keeping with Lumen’s focus on supporting the most at-risk students, our first set of Open Course Frameworks is a developmental education sequence, comprised of:

• College Success
• Developmental Reading
• Developmental Writing
• English Composition
• Beginning Algebra (Developmental)
• Intermediate Algebra (Developmental)

The first four courses are published in the open source Canvas platform by Instructure. The math courses are available in the open source MyOpenMath platform. Both platforms make it easy for you to make your own copy of a course that you can extensively customize (or not) and then teach for free. And of course, because the courses are openly licensed you can pull the materials out and teach them elsewhere, too.

Recent surveys have shown that faculty and administration believe that open educational resources can save students money and potentially improve student success. But the same surveys show that the biggest barriers to OER adoption are the time and effort it takes faculty to find resources, vet them for quality, and align them with course outcomes. OCFs solve these problems.

Lumen is adamant that these Open Course Frameworks are now and always will be freely available. We do not – and will not ever – charge for access to these materials. Lumen acts as stewards over the OCFs as a service to the education community, in much the same way an open source software project works. In fact, the OCFs we published today were developed collaboratively with faculty members from the nine different institutions participating in the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. We will be releasing updated versions of the OCFs over time as additional faculty use and help improve them. And these six are just the beginning – we will release 25 more OCFs over the coming year, with the next five coming in July.

I’d love your feedback on this idea and your help spreading the word….

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Just a couple of years ago we were all trying so hard to get people to accept the idea that open access to learning was a great thing. Hell, some of the best conversations I’ve ever had in this field have centered around the ideals of openness, but now that the MOOC thing has happened the same people who built rallying calls for more open access to learning are now rejecting this movement. Why? Because it is driven by corporations trying to make money? Because it isn’t really open? Because the press isn’t giving a few people the credit they believe they deserve?

I’ve had a few great conversations with Cole in the past, and as I read his piece my planet-sized ego quietly suggested that I was one of the people Cole is disappointed in. And it’s true that I went through a brief phase of disappointment that I was written out of the history of MOOCs. But I feel like I successfully got over that years ago – before the so-called xMOOCs ever hit the scene.

I try very hard to apply the motto “There’s no limit to the amount of good you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit” when I can think clearly enough to do so. Would I rather spend my time making a difference in the world, or making sure people understood my role in the early history of MOOCs? It’s a stupid, embarrassingly self-aggrandizing question to even have to ask. That humbled me for a while.

And then, just as I was overcoming these petty feelings of being ignored, the xMOOCs emerged. At this point, I moved into my “righteous indignation” phase. No, MOOCs are not open – not in the same sense that I’ve been fighting to help people understand that word for the last 15 years. With the xMOOCs, almost literally over night, the primary effort of my professional career seemed to be undercut. The term “open” entered the popular mind meaning something very different, something severely watered down from the meaning I (and others, but this post is about me) had been working so diligently to establish. My feelings were hurt yet again.

The immaturity of those feelings was thrown back in my face by Cole’s post. For the last 48 hours, the question that has haunted me has been:

Why do those who used to push forward now push back?

And I find that I must ask myself the terrible question again. Would I rather spend my time making a difference in the world, or spending my time railing against MOOCs because they aren’t really “open”? And I find myself humbled again. And the little voice inside me says, “suck it up, Wiley. Yes, MOOCs have overrun the popular imagination. Yes, they are founded upon a severely impoverished definition of ‘open.’ So what are you going to do about it? Complain? Really? How about spending your time figuring out how to leverage MOOCs to move the ‘open’ agenda forward, rather than spending your time whining about how MOOCs have derailed it?”

So, I ask, how can the popularity of MOOCs be used to move the open agenda forward?

Whether you referring to me or not, Cole, I owe you a sincere thank you for this terrific piece of writing. As my kids say, “some people just need a high five, in the head, with a folding chair.” Your essay was the chair to the head for me. Time to follow Neil Patrick Harris’ excellent advice:

Time to be awesome instead.

I’ll share some thoughts on how the popularity of MOOCs can be used to move the open agenda forward later this evening.

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Essentially, this is an effort to create an open narrative infrastructure for legal fan fiction. All of the story content, characters, settings, etc. will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license so that everyone who writes in the world will be able to share, publish, or sell their writing (unlike other fan fiction, which is forced to live underground). Like all fan fiction, our project is especially useful for beginning writers who struggle to juggle the dozens of tasks involved in writing fiction. Rather than starting from a blank page and the need to invent characters, setting, and conflict from whole cloth, beginning writers will be able to start with characters, setting, and conflict already in pocket.

While supporting formal instruction is not the primary aim of the project, once the novellas and stubs are complete Lumen Learning will create CC BY licensed instructional supports to helps teachers bring the Massive Fiction world into their writing courses if they’re interested in doing so.

Check out the Massive Fiction site on Kickstarter and consider supporting the project.

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