Octeto

During his recent keynote address to the State Educational Technology Directors Association, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent an unexpected shout out to the Open High School of Utah, spending about 30 seconds of his 30 minute talk praising the effectiveness and flexibility of our teaching model, and particularly emphasizing the individualized attention and personalized instruction our students receive. You can hear the Secretary talk about OHSU from approximately 14:45 – 15:20 in the video above.

This is a wonderful and very public affirmation of the OHSU approach (which is founded on open educational resources), and I hope it will spur additional interest in our model. Only 49 additional Open High Schools left to establish in the US… and then a few thousand or so throughout the world =)

Great responses from Carson and Downes to my post yesterday on adoption as linking. It’s great to participate in a conversation at this level of depth again – it’s been too long for me (and entirely my own fault). I’ll make my next contribution in the coming days, but wanted to make sure everyone saw their responses.

I recently suggested that we need to begin looking beyond simply sharing OER and get around to adopting them. The post generated several comments, and I want to respond specifically to comments from Stephen and Stephen.

Both Stephens agree that my idea of adoption, which involves revising and remixing, is wrong-headed. Downes writes “Here at OLDaily, I have been ‘adopting’ open educational resources for ten years, linking to a half dozen or so of them every week day… Who needs the grief [of adapting OER]? We link to them and let learners use them directly.” And Carson agrees, “blog-like linking makes sense for OER for a number of reasons.”

If linking is going to constitute the primary method of adopting OER, every penny spent on the process of openly licensing material for OCW or OER publication has been wasted. I can link to CNN. I can link to the New York Times. I can link to Mashable. I can link to Apple and Microsoft. You don’t need openly licensed anything to build a course out of links.

I know that Downes has a more disciplined definition of openness than his comment implies; however, the comment is telling. While he says “I have been ‘adopting’ open educational resources for ten years, linking to a half dozen or so of them every week day,” it’s clear that a large number of the resources he has linked to in the past 10 years has not been licensed under an OPL, GFDL, or CC license. There’s an easy temptation to equate the term “open educational resources” with anything that (1) you can link to, and that (2) the link-clicker can access without paying. While Stephen doesn’t define OER this way, I know many people who do. And this slip from one of the most careful thinkers and writers online should cause you concern. The larger community is slowly losing the rough consensus we previously had around the meaning of OER. OER used to mean content that used an open license. This impoverished idea of OER as “anything you can link to for free” is not going to prove helpful. Looks like the OER definition is headed into the the quagmire of “learning object” land. But I’m digressing…

When you define “adoption” as linking, there is literally no need to concern yourself with licensing or openness. When you define adoption as linking, you undermine everything that separates OER from the other resources on the web. When you define adoption as linking, spending a million dollars a year to support the process of openly licensing materials is like paying $150,000 to buy a 250 MPH sports car when you live in a nation with 75 mile per hour speed limits. It begs the question – why did you waste the money? You’re never going to get to drive that fast… Are you having a mid-life crisis? If you’re going to define adoption as linking, why not just maintain traditional copyright over the things you publish online? It will be significantly less expensive and troublesome than open licensing (try asking the Copyright Clearance Center to help you get CC like rights to anything), and everyone in the world can “adopt” your materials.

Carson continues:

I’m sure it will be described as “arrogance” to assert MIT profs are likely to reuse materials primarily from the MIT site, but I believe educators will adopt the materials most suited to the academic needs of their students and the academic structures of their programs, to the technologies at use on their campus, and to the cultures in which their educational activities are embedded. There’s less localization needed that way. I’ve articulated this as the idea of nearest approximations. And what is the nearest OER approximation to the needs of an MIT professor? Likely, materials on the MIT OpenCourseWare site.

This statement essentially says, “Localization is too hard to be bothered with. So rather than adopt others’ OER and deal with the issues involved in localizing them, we create materials from scratch and then share them with others.” And what are those “others” supposed to do with those OER? If localization is too hard / expensive / time consuming for a group of people as smart and well-resourced as MIT faculty, are we really expecting others to be able to engage successfully in this process? And if the answer is “no, we just expect them to link to our materials,” then I have to ask again – why spend the money to openly license materials if the assumption is that no one will ever exercise the rights we spent so much money granting them under that license? Downes’ comment “who needs the grief?” seems to echo Carson’s sentiments.

Now that I think about it, the assumption that adoption means linking might partially explain why so many OER projects make media choices (like using PDFs instead of HTML for text content) that preclude meaningful revising / remixing right from the get-go. (I understand that there are other issues, like cost, that factor into these decisions as well.) But let’s say we promote OER with hype that says “you can revise and remix our materials to suit your local conditions and the needs of your local learners!” Let’s also say we believe, in our heart of hearts, that people won’t revise our materials – they’ll just link to them. And since we really believe that to be true, we feel safe reifying that assumption in our media choices. Now which is the cause and which is the symptom? Are we using PDF and other uneditable media because people aren’t going to revise our OER? Or are people not revising our OER because of the media choices we’ve made?

Maybe the “not invented here” syndrome isn’t the real cause of what appears to be an almost complete lack of revise / remix of OER. Maybe the root cause is actually the “revise / remix is too hard” syndrome. If you have this syndrome, why are you doing OER? Why not just post your materials online under default copyright? People will still be able to adopt (link to) them…

In the deleted scenes of my OpenCourseWars chapter (a [fictional] history of the OER movement) I wrote:

Much was said behind closed doors about the great tradition of “Western Imperialism.” OCW was even compared to the famous Trojan Horse and made out as a vehicle for bringing Western pedagogies, ideas, and language into a variety of cultural settings where these would otherwise have been unwelcome. It worried me.

It worries me even more now that I realize that some of the foremost thinkers in the OER space are willing to define adopting as linking.

Oddly enough, Downes shrugs off the one tangible benefit you could actually get from “adoption is linking” thinking in his dismissal of formal education and the institutions that provide it. He writes:

He [Wiley] is locked into the idea of them [OER] being adopted by instructors and merged into course packages. But I still think he has the wrong model. Here at OLDaily, I have been ‘adopting’ open educational resources for ten years, linking to a half dozen or so of them every week day, a total of some 16,000 in all. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people have used them. No, maybe not instructors. But who cares?

I care. Deeply. Here’s why I care if instructors are adopting OER or not: I care about people’s access to formal education. Whether you like it or not, many jobs require some type of post-secondary credential. You can rail about this all you like, but a degree / certification requirement is the reality for many people seeking jobs today, including a good friend of mine. About 25% of the jobs on Monster.com in our area require a post-secondary credential, including most of the “good paying” jobs. Out of work and with a family to support, he doesn’t have time to philosophize about whether post-secondary institutions should continue to exist or not. He needs a credential.

The cost of formal education is the main barrier for him and others. Post-secondary education is ridiculously expensive. Out-of-reach-for-many-people expensive. Crippling-even-successful-graduates-with-terrifying-student-loan-debt expensive. And textbooks and other educational materials are a huge chunk of that cost – as much as 70% of the annual cost depending on the kind of post-secondary program you’re in. At a time of near-record-low education funding and near-record-high unemployment, it is all but criminal if OER are not being adopted by faculty. And to be specific about what I mean by adoption, I mean it is a travesty that OER are not displacing traditional, expensive textbooks and other materials, thereby making education significantly more affordable and accessible.

This is one concrete OER benefit that could be realized even in the “adoption means linking” scenario, but Downes’ gives a different answer to the cost problem, essentially recommending that we burn down universities and plant something more useful in their ashes. This proposal seems to be based on the assumption that typical undergraduates (many of whom can’t even attach a file to an email) can successfully navigate a MOOC or something like one. (If you’re not familiar with MOOCs, these appear to be collections of learning experiences in which facilitators work as diligently to avoid providing direction as Berg and Schoenberg worked to avoid establishing a tonal center in their music. And apparently for similar reasons.) I don’t find this proposition believable. Yes, formal institutions have a host of problems, but they’re also a lynch-pin of society. We can’t just throw them out, ignoring the avalanche of problems that would come cascading down if we were to make such an attempt. Fixing them is much harder, yes, but worth the additional effort.

This is why, for me, the gold standard in OER adoption is and will continue to be “displacing adoptions” – cases in which OER actually save someone money. In the post-secondary case, a displacing adoption saves students money. In the primary and secondary cases, a displacing adoption saves institutions and taxpayers money. I’m sure MIT OCW is saving MIT students money. I wonder how much they’re saving? How many displacing adoptions are happening inside MIT thanks to the existence of MIT OCW? Since their OCW is the largest of them all, they could potentially be saving their students more money than anyone else. I’d love to see some data on this out of MIT OCW.

Now, this is not to say that I devalue the kinds of linking and uses Carson refers to:

Public health workers around the world benefit from the materials Johns Hopkins and Tufts have published. We’ve spoken to entrepreneurs in Haiti who’ve used MIT’s materials to further their solar panel business, bringing light to some of Haiti’s poorest neighborhoods; to NGOs designing locally appropriate recycling technologies for Guatemala with OCW; and to educators in Indonesia recasting their architecture curriculum using ours as a reference.

These are fabulous uses that provide real, concrete benefit to the public. However, if these are to be the primary uses of OER, then we should rename them Open Public Good Resources, or Open Philanthropy Resources, or Open Informal Learning Resources, or some other name that indicates that our primary interest is not reforming education. If our primary interest is reforming education, then OER is an appropriate name.

I realize that I will further ostracize myself from the ed tech blogging community by saying this, but I really care about formal education. I think it’s important societally. I think many of it’s traditions are grand and inspiring. I think it’s worth saving. And while I know the job of reform is much harder than throwing up our hands and trying something else, I’m committed to trying.

While my gold standard for OER adoption is the displacing adoption, my platinum standard is the localized displacing adoption. Have you ever set through a keynote address where the presenter used slides s/he’d obviously prepared for a different talk weeks or months earlier? A deck of slides s/he hadn’t bothered to tweak for the event at which you heard them speak? It feels insulting, rude, and careless. It’s the same feeling students get from the highly decontextualized, generic textbooks and other materials we assign them. They’ve just never had a personalized experience in formal education, and don’t know that anything else is possible. And in a sense they’re right – when materials are copyrighted, or when adoption is defined as linking, nothing else is possible.

OER change what is possible – if and only if we exercise the permissions and rights to revise and remix we’re granted in OER. As Mark Twain suggested, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” Similarly, the man who does not revise / remix OER has little advantage over the man who doesn’t.

We’ve been sharing open educational resources for over 12 years now. There are literally 10s of 1000s of them out there, many of them structured as OCW (collections of course materials), some of them structured as complete open courses, some of them structured as complete open textbooks, and many of them not really structured at all. The “sharing ball” is rolling. There are more materials that need to be shared, but the eventual sharing of these materials has now become inevitable.

What is anything but inevitable is the adoption of any of these OERs. As a thought experiment, pick your favorite institution you believe is committed to open education. Have they ever adopted an OER produced at another institution for in-class use? If they have an OCW collection, can you find a single third-party OER in the collection? If even the institutions that claim to be committed to OER aren’t reusing OER, who will?

While the mainstream of education will finally begin sharing OER this decade, those leaders who think of themselves as being on the cutting edge of the open education movement need to start walking the walk / becoming living examples / modeling the desired behavior of adopting others’ OERs.

If open education practitioners (both individuals and institutions) cannot move from large-scale sharing to large-scale adopting, the field is dead. I’m reminded of a scripture:

For what doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him, and he receive not the gift? Behold, he rejoices not in that which is given unto him, neither rejoices in him who is the giver of the gift.

A sustained program of giving becomes pretty pointless when it’s clear that no one is willing to receive, regardless of how impressive the scale of would-be giving is. And if the givers don’t play the role of receivers every now and then, the field risks a damning perception of arrogance whereby reusing OER becomes something that only second-class programs do. Who will adopt / reuse then?

We need brave adoption leadership now just as badly as we needed brave sharing leadership ten years ago. Who will provide it?

Former COSLers Joel Duffin and Justin Ball are continuing their work on tools that make OER more valuable and useful. The OER Recommender (now part of the Folksemantic project) is one of the premiere tools in their bag. If you’ve visited an OER that uses the recommendation service (see “Related Resources” on the right of my Blogs, Wikis, and New Media for Learning page at USU OCW), you know that with one line of javascript you can provide automated recommendations of related OERs to any site. It’s one of the coolest OER services around.

Joel and Justin are currently soliciting feedback on the OER Recommender. How useful are the recommendations? How easy is it to include them in your site? How easy is it to style their appearance or control the collections from which recommendations are drawn? Please take a few minutes and head over to Folksemantic and complete one of the OER Recommender surveys at the bottom left of the page. You’ll very likely end up adding the service to your site…

I’m just finishing Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget for a review for Ed Tech magazine, which I will also be publishing here. Over the weekend Lanier also penned a piece titled Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind? for the New York Times Magazine. A few comments on his NYTM piece.

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. What is wrong with this is not that students are any lazier now or learning less. (It is probably even true, I admit reluctantly, that in the presence of the ambient Internet, maybe it is not so important anymore to hold an archive of certain kinds of academic trivia in your head.) The problem is that students could come to conceive of themselves as relays in a transpersonal digital structure. Their job is then to copy and transfer data around, to be a source of statistics, whether to be processed by tests at school or by advertising schemes elsewhere.

Much to unpack here. First, is what appears to be a critique of reuse. The entire paradigm of open educational resources is (supposedly) built on the idea of reuse and the benefits that will come to those who reuse. (Like the old adage, “good programmers write good code; great programmers steal great code.”) Problematically, almost all of the activity in the OER space has been sharing. One directional sharing. Like a shot in the dark, fired off into the night without recognition or concern over whether those materials would be used or not.

There will not be measurable positive impact on teachers and learners until the field of OER moves into a phase of reuse. A phase of aggregating and bundling and reusing OER. Other than the Open High School of Utah, I can’t point to a single example of a school that has committed itself to a philosophy of “aggregate first, create second.” Everyone involved in OER creates and shares, but hardly anyone uses OER produced by someone else.

It seems to me that Lanier’s question is one of how can we leverage the technology that’s available to us while being very careful to preserve, protect, and value our humanity. This is essentially the same question many of us asked 10 years ago about the work being done on learning objects. And I don’t think one has to look too far to see that this question, and the lessons we learned from asking it, have not been particularly widely learned.

What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good.

As Scott said earlier today on Twitter, this argument is both correct and obvious. But as a critique of a research agenda dedicated to increasing access to information and curriculum materials, it is one we have to be willing to address.

To the degree that education is about the transfer of the known between generations, it can be digitized, analyzed, optimized and bottled or posted on Twitter. To the degree that education is about the self-invention of the human race, the gargantuan process of steering billions of brains into unforeseeable states and configurations in the future, it can continue only if each brain learns to invent itself. And that is beyond computation because it is beyond our comprehension. Learning at its truest is a leap into the unknown.

This paragraph upsets me more than any other in his piece. The false dichotomy between the two purposes of education is, unsurprisingly, false. We should admit, acknowledge, and be happy that one of the purposes of education is to transfer what the previous generation knew to the current generation. Without this continual transfer of knowledge, each generation would find itself back in the dark ages again. And to the extent that we belittle or downplay the importance of this function of education we will pay a price.

Yes, as Lanier says, education is also importantly about creativity, discovery, and innovation. And yes, we often overlook this function of education in favor of the transmission type of education. But as is true in so many other parts of our lives, we cannot allow ourselves to be pulled exclusively to one side or the other of this debate. We must maintain a thoughtful, reasoned, careful position in the center. This fight, the fight to remain in the center, is at the core of many of my concerns recently.

Let’s use the technology available to us, not to replace the human, but to help us be more human. Not to replace interactions between students and teachers, but to better direct those interactions. To help teachers know who needs help with what, about what, and when. To help learners find help when they need help.

I’ve said in the past that the best purpose of technology in education is to help us be more generous with one another. I still believe that.

About a year and a half ago I began writing about OCW 2.0 – OCWs whose long-term sustainability is tied to business models that include “up-selling” some OCW visitors the opportunity to earn university credit. Specifically, I predicted that:

Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit will be dead by the end of calendar 2012.

Many assumed that I was really only talking about every OCW initiative except MIT’s. But I really did mean every OCW initiative. Today, the Chronicle’s article MIT Looks to Make Money Online reports:

But as MIT grapples with dwindling resources, generating revenue from distance education is clearly an idea under consideration by university officials. In December, a panel suggested the following possibilities in a major report:

• Creating an “extension studies” program for continuing education using a combination of on-campus courses, distance learning, and an enhanced OpenCourseWare Web site. Estimated revenue potential: $10-million.
• Creating select master’s-degree programs that would be taken primarily via online education. Estimated revenue potential: $30-million.
• Offering some undergraduate subjects for credit via e-learning. Estimated revenue potential: $60-million.

The end of 2012 is still a long way away… There’s plenty of time left to be right.

As I read posts about the availability of new open textbooks in a variety of formats, I’m reminded that an open textbooks is much like an iceberg. The textbook itself is the tip that we see above the water. To be more specific, I should say that the student edition is the tip we all see above the water. A tiny fraction of the open textbooks (read: student editions) in the world have a corresponding teacher’s edition that includes problem solutions, lesson plans, teaching tips, and other information teachers and faculty have come to depend on. An even more minuscule number have additional supplementary material available like Powerpoint slides, review flash cards, etc. available.

So the next time you hear someone complain about why no one adopts all the great open textbooks in the world, ask them if their favorite open textbook has a teacher’s edition or supplemental materials available. Asking a teacher to give up the problem solutions and other features of a teacher’s edition is like asking someone to make bricks without straw. Why would a teacher do that to him/herself?

If you want to see open textbooks adopted more broadly, rather than blaming the teachers who won’t “make the jump,” spend your energy creating the support materials that are prerequisite necessities for teacher adoptions. CK-12 (at the secondary level) and Flat World Knowledge (at the higher ed level) have this nailed and, consequently, are getting some scale in their adoptions.

The Open High School of Utah today announced the public opening of its OpenCourseWare collection of 9th grade curriculum materials. 10th grade materials will come to OHSU OCW during the summer of 2011, with 11th and 12th grade curriculum materials coming in the summer of 2012.

The OHSU OCW collection is unique because a large portion of the materials shared in OHSU OCW are pre-existing OER, created by other institutions and aggregated by OHSU for use in supporting student learning. As opposed to most OCW collections, which are comprised almost entirely of materials created by the institution sharing the materials, the OHSU breaks ground by extensively reusing pre-existing OER within its formal curriculum and, consequently, it’s OCW.

As indicated at the bottom of each page, original materials created by OHSU are licensed CC BY. Interestingly, some pre-existing OER aggregated in the OHSU OCW collection use other open licenses that are not remixable from a license compatibility standpoint. These are attributed individually in compliance with their licenses and so that potential reusers can check licensing terms for themselves. (May I just repeat again what a total and complete pain in the neck the SA clause is for downstream users? I shake my head sadly when I think about how much more sharing we could accomplish if we weren’t dealing with tracking individual attributions and other compatibility issues caused by the SA clause.)

The Open High School of Utah uses Moodle as the core technology for coordinating teaching and learning activities, augmented with a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools and social media, including Aviary, Voicethread, Sliderocket, Twitter, Glogster, Flickr, and Google Docs. Because one of the OHSU goals is to see the Open High School model adopted, adapted, and improved around the country and around the world, the OHSU uses these tools that are free or very inexpensive, and also makes its OCW available as downloadable Moodle packages. It’s slightly more complicated than “just add water,” but worlds easier than starting a school from scratch. Perhaps you’ll consider opening the “Open High School of (insert your state’s name here).” Having been through the charter and other processes once now, I’d be more than happy to pass along lessons learned if you’re interested.

One day I hope to attend an “Open High School Conference” with representatives from OHSs in every state of the union and several countries around the world.

Congratulations to the OHSU for this release and the successful opening of their second academic year, now serving 9th and 10th grades.

Open education seems to be getting some traction here in Utah. In addition to our recently launched Utah Open Textbooks project targeting high school science, I was very pleased to see open education generally, and the Open High School of Utah model specifically, recommended prominently in the Utah Advisory Commission to Optimize State Government’s Report to Governor Herbert issued last week. The Utah Student Association Open Textbook Initiative gets a mention also, although I don’t believe it has a website yet.

Education recommendations are included in Section 3. Quoting from throughout the report (emphases below are mine):

3. Leverage technology and existing resources in education to expand the use of technology in teaching and learning, utilizing open?source learning materials, and coordinating efforts to generate economies of scale.

3d. Expand the use of online textbooks

Details: Encourage participation in open-source or online textbooks and related materials to reduce costs to school districts and post-secondary education students. Support the Utah Student Association Open Textbook Initiative, which seeks to provide a common open textbook for Math 1050, with materials for additional core courses expected. The initiative requires a one-time investment of approximately $75,000 for administration and development of materials.

Impact: Combined school district savings could eventually be $1 to $2 million annually. Collectively, Utah’s higher education students could save $1 to $3 million annually.

3e. Expand online high school courses

Details: The Governor, along with the State Board of Education, should set a future goal of the number of high school courses to be delivered online by 2015 (e.g. 20%). The Governor, working with the State Board of Education, should evaluate the available online courses and delivery methods.

The Commission evaluated one model with great potential to deliver high-quality, online education with teacher-targeted “just in time and just on topic” assistance to students. The model gathers information that allows educators to know the capabilities of each student and to individualize learning to individual students’ strengths. Through technology, teachers could handle a higher number of students while providing higher-quality instruction to those students on a statewide basis. Consideration should be given to providing some courses in an online format only to reduce the need for specialized teachers.

Impact: Further analysis required. Online instruction should result in savings related to a reduced need for buildings, buses, and administration and a higher student-to-teacher ratio. The value of delivering high-quality courses to underserved areas of the State should also be evaluated.

Slowly, but surely…

Two weeks ago, Washington state representative Reuven Carlyle wrote a blog post about his vision for open education in the state of Washington, in which he referred at length to my recent Educause article, Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation.

A thoughtful constituent of Carlyle’s, Professor Amy Kinsel, professor of History at Shoreline Community College, took the time to pen a thoughtful, critical response to his post and my ideas specifically. I’d like to respond to several of her points here.

As you note, access to information is powerful, and government-supported institutions should not be in the business of restricting access to information. However, equal and open access to information is only a part of what is necessary to provide educational opportunity for everyone. You write, “We need to educate more people to higher levels.” But will educating more people to higher levels happen simply through opening the spigot of information and letting it flow?…. As an experienced educator, I know first-hand that education does not consist primarily of the transfer of information from books or professors to students. Access to information alone does not equal education…. Merely knowing ideas and information is not enough.

I wholly, completely agree with this statement. Access to a wealth of content, information, books, articles, and other resources is a necessary – but not sufficient – condition for learning. What we must not overlook in this statement is that access to content is a necessary condition for learning. While it would be inappropriate to suggest that access to content alone is sufficient, it would be equally irresponsible to overlook the critical role content plays in supporting learning.

Yesterday’s Chronicle included a story about Mirta Martin, dean of the Virginia State University business school:

Last year Ms. Martin became so frustrated from hearing stories about students who were performing poorly because they could not afford textbooks that she made a pledge that no needy student would go without a book…

The Chronicle story goes on to describe how Flat World Knowledge, a for-profit company that publishes openly licensed textbooks, has partnered with the VSU business school to insure that those students have access to all the content they need to succeed in their classes – including (of course) the option of free online access to all of FWK’s textbooks.

As I have said before, content is infrastructure – a critical piece of the teaching and learning puzzle we all need to be able to assume is freely available to everyone at very high quality. Once this kind of ubiquitous, high quality learning infrastructure exists,
student success will increase (as per Ms. Martin’s story), and the rate of innovation and experimentation in education will increase. Increasing the rate of innovation by providing necessary infrastructure is the best way to help desperately-needed breakthroughs in education to happen more quickly.

Wiley doesn’t like proprietary textbooks and advocates for open-source textbooks, presumably because of cost rather than an aversion to textbooks. For any introductory college course that presents a great deal of material that is new to students, assigning a pedagogically-sound textbook is essential to student success. This is especially true in an online course where reading is the primary method for conveying this material to students.

Yes, one problem I have with textbooks is their ridiculously absurd cost. In the Chronicle story I referenced above, Ms. Martin is quoted as saying “For our accounting books senior year, there’s nothing under $250.” The unjustifiably high cost of textbooks turns into access problems for students, which means they can’t complete assigned readings, etc. This is a serious problem.

But there are other problems with textbooks. For example, in many instances a textbook is out of date (that is, important new information has become available in the field which is not included in the textbook) before the book is even printed – yet alone used by students. Or consider the way that, once you’ve finally got your course planned and working, the publisher cancels the edition of the text you use and issues a new one (with no substantive changes) that still somehow requires you to spend a significant amount of time replanning your course…

But more importantly to me, as a scholar and educator, the copyrighted nature of a typical textbook prevents me from using it in all the ways I want to. For example, if I only need one chapter out of a book, can I (legally) make 100 copies of that section and hand it out to students? No. Can I (legally) directly change outdated parts of the text? No. Can I (legally) add my own material or other openly licensed material directly into the text? No. Over the years faculty have found workarounds for all of these issues (e.g., ignoring the law and photocopying anyway, assembling course readers at great expense in copyright clearance time and to student pocketbooks, etc.), but these are all workarounds. Yes, we’re used to them now, but when you step back and examine the issue critically there is no good reason we should have to work-around the content we teach with. Adopting openly licensed textbooks and other materials eliminates these and many other problems.

Like most educators, if I could find a good well-written open-source textbook, I would assign it. Yet high-quality open-source textbooks don’t exist in many disciplines, particularly in politically-contentious fields like History. Until pedagogically-sound open-source texts are available in our disciplines, faculty like me will continue to assign commercially-published textbooks.

This is, of course, an entirely legitimate concern. This is why initiatives like Washington’s Open Course Library are so desperately needed. Hopefully when the Open Course Library opens its doors next year, a much larger number of professors will have a top-notch alternative set of materials that are available for their students at no cost, that they can customize specifically for their needs, etc.

This year, if students who register for a U.S. History survey course at Shoreline buy used textbooks and sell them back to the bookstore, they will have an effective cost for a commercial text with full-color illustrations and maps and online study aids of $27.26. Because this textbook covers the entire three-quarter U.S. History survey curriculum, students who enroll in all three U.S. History courses, buy a used textbook, and sell it back to the bookstore will have an effective textbook cost of $9.09 per quarter. With a cost-effective commercial textbook option like this, I don’t need to ask my students to use a second- or third-rate open-source text.

I don’t believe anyone would recommend assigning a second or third-rate book regardless of its licensing status or cost.

I think the kind of alignment of courses Amy describes, which reduces the costs of materials for students, is absolutely commendable. In fields where there is currently no legitimate openly-licensed alternative, this may be one of the best scenarios. But wouldn’t it be even better if, for the same cost (e.g., a printed version of an open textbook from FWK costs $30) a student could get a brand new textbook, that s/he could highlight and annotate according to his/her own study habits (without having to try to decipher the highlighting of previous owners), and that s/he could keep at the end of term?

Many absolutely first rate textbooks are already available from FWK and CK-12, complete with teacher’s editions, problem sets, and other supplemental materials. Some openly licensed courses and course materials are created through grant and governmental funding, like the Washington Open Course Library. Others are created by individual faculty as labors of love, like Preston McAfee’s first edition of Introduction to Economic Analysis. Of course these books don’t appear ex nihilo, created without effort or incentive. So if you really wish an open textbook existed for your class, you have two choices – sit back and wait for one or go find some funding and write your own!

Wiley doesn’t like commercial learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard. It’s true that these are profit-making ventures and colleges pay fees to use them. If the cost of these systems is Wiley’s main concern, there are open-source alternatives available.

In today’s environment, cost is a real concern, although not the largest. And yes, open alternatives like Moodle and Sakai have existed for years now.

Yes, passwords in Blackboard restrict access to each classroom to students who are enrolled in the class, and student information and student postings are inaccessible to students after the end of the quarter. But why is this wrong? The online class disappears just like a face-to-face class ceases to exist when the instructor and the students no longer meet.

I think it’s a terrible shame that our face-to-face courses end after 15 weeks. Just when you’re finally learning everyone’s personalities and preferences, and students are starting to really master the material, it all ends. In a traditional, physically-bound classroom setting, this may be inescapable. But again, if we step back and critically reimagine teaching and learning in the context of modern technology, there is no a priori reason that courses must work in this manner.

What’s more, the “conceal-restrict-withhold-delete” process that Wiley criticizes is necessary and desirable for a number of good reasons that include student privacy rights and the responsibility of the instructor to create a safe learning environment for students. Frankly, I don’t see how a different approach would be consistent with federal law and with appropriate classroom pedagogy. Students may share their own personal information and classroom work as they see fit, but a college may not. Not only would doing so be illegal, it would not help students learn. In a “thriving community of learning,” students explore ideas, voice opinions, and try out arguments. All of these things are a bit scary and ought to be done in a classroom environment that feels safe to the students. Students need to feel confident and secure in their classrooms in order to risk stretching their minds by asking the “dumb” questions that show they are thinking or voicing the “weird” ideas that show they are learning. What sort of freedom of expression and thought would students engage in if they were worried that anyone in the blogosphere could see their names and read what they wrote forever? I’d have at least half or even more of the class opting out of posting online if they thought their posts would be open to the world.

Amy and I agree that no faculty member can legally post student work in public. And we agree that students need to feel safe in order for them to engage substantively in conversations and other activities. However, in several years of inviting my students to carry out discussions on the public internet and inviting them to post their assignments to the public internet (rather than submitting them to me privately), I’ve only ever had one student decline.

I explain to my students that discussions on the open internet can still be framed as formative, learning conversations and not as one’s final opinion. I tell stories about comments and perspectives that have been shared by people from other cultures and other countries (folks coming from the public internet outside our formal class participants) that have enriched previous class conversations. I tell stories about electronic newsletters linking to particularly thoughtful student essays, engaging an even more diverse group of people in the conversation and building students’ professional reputations. And I remind students that, at the end of the day, many of the jobs they will take will require them to frame and publicly present their ideas (often their ideas in progress!) in a thoughtful way that their peers can engage with. They need to learn how to disagree with someone respectfully (a skill sorely lacking in today’s society), and they need to learn how to take the harsh criticism that sometimes comes. And the principle of transparency improving quality comes into play, too – knowing the whole class is going to see their homework gets most students to turn it up a notch.

My observations (and students’ comments back to me) indicate that students’ experiences with engaging in content-related conversations publicly, sharing and refining their “best current thinking” while drawing on all the resources of the network (including the people in the network), are incredibly valuable for students. For legal reasons I always present this public path as an option to my students, but my experience has been that almost everyone takes it – and is glad they did.

Wiley conceives of online instruction as easily and cheaply expandable. This differs significantly from the reality of my online teaching experience. Wiley’s contention that online teaching can be easily scaled up “to satisfy rapidly increasing popular demand” for higher education would be plausible if education really did consist of transferring information from textbooks and faculty to students. But since an education worthy of the name consists of learning, not information transfer, I submit that Wiley is wrong to suggest that online instruction is a cheap solution to higher education’s capacity and funding shortfalls. Certainly, there are no physical barriers to adding as many students as possible to the online courses I teach. But as a practical matter, making a course open to all comers will mean there are far too many students in the online classroom for critical thinking skills to be developed. If I were responsible not for 25-30 students per online class but 60 or even 100 students, I would need to change how I teach.

I don’t believe I’ve ever suggested that scaling meaningful learning opportunities to large numbers of people will be easy or cheap. However, I do contend that it is absolutely possible if – as Amy indicates – we are willing to change the way we teach. “Blended” or “hybrid” models of instruction provide one example. Take the college professor who teaches three sections of a course. Rather than stand and deliver the same lecture three times a day, three times per week, these lectures can be pre-recorded for students to watch online before coming to class. The nine hours the professor previously spent giving the same lectures over again can now be dedicated to serving the individual needs of more students, answering their questions, etc. This one change results in a large increase in the number of students we can serve with our course offerings.

Other innovative uses of technology can enhance this effect. For example, take a scenario in which students submit their work online and some of this work can be automatically scored. Student performance and grades can be tracked and analyzed at the item / learning outcome level, and this information can be accessed by teachers through rudimentary data dashboards. Using these data teachers can make informed decisions about how to allocate their (new surplus) time interacting with and supporting students’ learning. Not every student will need help every week, and knowing who doesn’t need help this week frees up more time to help students who do need help this week.

This combination of online media and data-driven teaching is not pie-in-the-sky techno-dream, but a concrete strategy that can be implemented today. For example, the Open High School of Utah operates on these principles.

Online education is a useful tool for reaching out to students, but it requires adequate funding. In this necessary discussion of how to make good on the core value of providing access to educational opportunity for everyone, I would first carefully examine how Washington’s colleges and universities are funded and look for ways to stabilize this funding. The current system of ever-declining state support and ever-increasing tuition rates is not sustainable and is already failing to make educational opportunities available for all students. Until we tackle the funding problem, talk of reaching additional students through online instruction will not result in additional capacity, additional access, or additional opportunity. I’d love to teach a second online class this fall, but even a dedicated public servant like me can’t do it for free.

Funding models are an important topic to discuss, and the cost of curriculum materials should be an important part of those conversations. Open educational resources have much to add to the discussion of affordability, increased access, and improved success. Pedagogical models are also important to discuss. When we’re willing to change the way we teach, we can leverage technology and data thoughtfully to increase the number of students we are capable of serving appropriately.

Educause, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges, and other organizations are currently sponsoring a program called Next Generation Learning Challenges. Three of the first four areas they have identified for research are open educational resources, blended learning, and learning analytics – the three themes I have discussed above. The fourth is Web 2.0 engagement, and there are ample opportunities here to further engage and interact with students if we are willing to thoughtfully change the way we teach.

In summary, I believe that where high quality open educational resources are available we should be adopting them. Where none are available we should be supporting their creation. High quality content is critical infrastructure that education cannot succeed without. When this infrastructure is too expensive (as is currently the case), innovation is stifled. When this infrastructure is free and open, innovation will quickly multiply.

As Amy points out, information provision is not education. While we should work diligently to increase free and open access to the content infrastructure, we must never lose sight of our equal responsibility to innovate atop this new infrastructure. By definition, innovation necessitates a willingness to teach differently – thoughtfully leveraging the capabilities of the myriad social, analytic, and other technologies available to us. When we can honestly say that we are using all available tools to the best of our individual abilities, we can honestly say that we are fulfilling the sacred trust society and our individual students have placed in us as teachers.

Creative Commons published an interview today with the Open High School of Utah’s Director, DeLaina Tonks. DeLaina does an excellent job describing the school and talking about the impact of OER on education and learning.

Congrats to OHSU on all their recent press and the great things happening there!

Congratulations to Amy Pace, who teaches science at OHSU, for receiving the Presidential Math and Science Teachers Award!

David Porter asks for research about the sustainability of open educational resources. Here is a list of our articles that appeared in peer-reviewed journals last year on the topic of sustainability of OER (with links to publicly available versions in the BYU Institutional Repository):

A Sustainable Model for OpenCourseWare Development
Johansen, Justin and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2353
Keywords: OpenCourseWare; sustainability; open educational resources; development; cost
Description/Abstract: The purposes of this study were to (a) determine the cost of converting BYU Independent Study’s e-learning courses into OpenCourseWare, (b) assess the impact of opening those courses on paid enrollment in the credit-bearing versions of the courses, and (c) use these data to judge whether or not an OpenCourseWare program could be financially self-sustaining over the long-term without grant monies or other subsidies. The findings strongly suggest that the BYU Independent Study model of publishing OpenCourseWare is financially self-sustaining, allowing the institution to provide a significant public good while generating new revenue and meeting its ongoing financial obligations.

In addition to reporting original research, the literature review for this study includes the following new data on sustainability:

“The OpenLearn Initiative at Open University in the United Kingdom (OUUK) was the best comparable program to use when considering the impact opening courses could have on BYU IS. The OUUK has approximately 200,000 course enrollments and 130,000 students each year, similar in scale to BYU IS. In two years of offering course samples, 7,800 enrollments have come from people who used the “enroll now” button in the OUUK’s course samples to convert to a fully paid enrollment (A. Lane, personal communication, December 5, 2008). This means that approximately 1.95% of the OUUK’s enrollment over the past two years has come through conversions from free OCW users into paid course enrollments. Approximately 33% of those conversions were people who were new to the OUUK system, meaning that approximately 0.64% of OUUK’s entire enrollment for a given year were new users that converted to paid enrollment from a free course sample. That equates to an average of approximately 1,280 new paying students converted through course samples each year. Similarly, the Open University of the Netherlands reported that 18% of OCW users were “inspired to purchase an academic course” based on their interactions with OUNL OCW (Eshuis, 2009). The University of California-Irvine (UCI) also launched an OCW offering in November 2006 with a “click to enroll” feature. They report that their OCW site has consistently generated more site traffic and more sales leads than any other form of advertising (K. Tam, personal communication, June 4, 2009).”

A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story
Hilton, John and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2330
Keywords textbooks; open source; flat world; college
Description/Abstract: Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. E–books have been proposed as one potential solution; open source textbooks have also been explored. A company called Flat World Knowledge produces and gives away open source textbooks in a way they believe to be financially sustainable. This article reports an initial study of the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open source textbook model.

Free: Why Authors are Giving Books Away on the Internet
Hilton, John and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2154
Keywords: open educational resources; online technology; digital publishing
Description/Abstract: With increasing frequency, authors in academic and non-academic fields are releasing their books for free digital distribution. Anecdotal evidence suggests that exposure to both authors and books increases when books are available as free downloads, and that print sales are not negatively affected. For this study we interviewed ten authors to determine their perceptions of the effect free digital distribution has on the impact and sales of their work. In addition, we examined the sales data of two books over a two year period of time, in which one book was freely available for the second year. All of the individuals we surveyed felt free digital downloads increased the distribution and impact of their book. None of the authors felt that print sales were negatively affected. Data from our book sale comparison suggest that in the case we studied, free digital distribution did not negatively affect sales.

John Hilton’s dissertation also made strides in the area of sustainability:

“Freely Ye Have Received, Freely Give” (Matthew 10:8): How Giving Away Religious Digital Books Influences The Print Sales of Those Books
Hilton, John
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd3433.pdf
Keywords: open educational resources, e-books, open access, open culture, free books, free e-books
Abstract: Lack of access prevents many from benefiting from educational resources. Digital technologies now enable educational resources, such as books, to be openly available to those with access to the Internet. This study examined the financial viability of a religious publisher’s putting free digital versions of eight of its books on the Internet. The total cost of putting these books online was $940.00. Over a 10-week period these books were downloaded 102,256 times and print sales of these books increased 26%. Comparisons with historical book sales and sales of comparable titles suggest a positive but modest connection between this increase and the online availability of the free books. This dissertation may be downloaded for free at http://etd.byu.edu.

As for OER impact, I’ll quote a few paragraphs from a book chapter I just finished drafting.

From Sharing to Adopting

The first decade of work in open educational resources involved laying the groundwork of copyright licensing and demonstration projects. Before anything else could be done, it had to be legally possible to share teaching and learning materials, and we had to demonstrate that sharing these materials would not put universities out of business. While this infrastructure work has largely succeeded (e.g., Creative Commons licenses have been both widely adopted and upheld in court), infrastructure is typically deployed in order to be used – not just for the sake of deployment. Consequently, emphasis in the field of open educational resources is beginning to move from sharing OER to adopting OER. Like the first decade of work in OER, this first involves helping adoptions happen, and then demonstrating that they do no harm educationally.

Flat World Knowledge (FWK) was not the first organization to produce Creative Commons-licensed textbooks, but they seem to be the first to take widespread adoption of their materials seriously. As a for-profit publisher, FWK provides their complete textbooks online for free under a CC license and sells copies of their textbooks in other formats (e.g., paperback, audiobook, etc.). By employing a full-time sales team and working in harmony with the traditional university textbook adoption process, FWK has gotten their open textbooks in front of tens of thousands of students. According to a FWK press release:

This Fall [2009] semester, 38,000 college students at 350 colleges are enrolled to utilize Flat World textbooks, up from only 1,000 in Spring 2009 at 30 colleges. The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82% cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class. “We’ll save college students and their families nearly $3 million in textbook expenses this semester,” said Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder. “We’re on track to expand to 50,000 students in Spring 2010 and 120,000 students in Fall 2010. By the conclusion of 2010, Flat World will have conservatively saved 200,000 students over $15 million.”

While statements about how many courses an OCW project shares can be impressive, statements like Frank’s that demonstrate a concrete, positive benefit on learners begin to indicate the real power of open educational resources.

Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, a collection of complete, online courses licensed as open educational resources, has gone well beyond showing that OER do no harm. In a study authored by Lovett, Meyer, and Thille (2008), OLI demonstrated that OER can be used both to decrease the amount of time necessary to learn statistics and improve student learning:

During the Fall 2005 and Spring 2006 studies, we collected empirical data about the instructional effectiveness of the OLI-Statistics course in stand-alone mode, as compared to traditional instruction. In both of these studies, in-class exam scores showed no significant difference between students in the stand-alone OLI-Statistics course and students in the traditional instructor-led course. In contrast, during the Spring 2007 study, we explored an accelerated learning hypothesis, namely, that learners using the OLI course in hybrid mode will learn the same amount of material in a significantly shorter period of time with equal learning gains, as compared to students in traditional instruction. In this study, results showed that OLI-Statistics students learned a full semester’s worth of material in half as much time and performed as well or better than students learning from traditional instruction over a full semester.

The Open High School of Utah was the first accredited school in the world to commit itself to using open educational resources exclusively across its entire curriculum. OHSU opened for 9th grade in 2009-2010 (with additional grades opening in subsequent years), and demonstrated conclusively in its first year that OER can support learning effectively in a high school context. In the three core areas measured by the state’s ninth grade Criterion Referenced Tests (i.e., English 9, Algebra I, and Earth Systems Science), the percentage of OHSU students achieving proficiency was well above state averages.

I’ll also mention our new Utah Open Textbooks project, which just launched a few weeks ago – the demonstration of impact from that project will be substantial.

Now, more work can be done, but to say that there hasn’t been any forward progress in the last year is disappointing. I think we’re making very reasonable progress, but that may just be my cheery optimism coming through. =)

I’m sure someone will decry this as representing the increased corporatization of open education, but a rather high profile open ed job is now open in WA state. The position is listed as Open Education Project Manager, and was posted by the awesome Cable Green, whose title is Director of eLearning & Open Education. I’ll let him explain:

The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) invites applications from qualified individuals for the position of Open Education Project Manager.

http://www.sbctc.ctc.edu/general/hr/OpenEducationProjectManager.doc

SBCTC is seeking a visionary “Open Education Project Manager” to join the SBCTC team. This critical, full-time position will provide active leadership and expertise in managing open education projects. This position is preferably based in Washington State (State Board has office locations in Bellevue, Olympia and Spokane), though qualified out-of-state candidates will be considered and are strongly encouraged to apply. This position is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which will last two years with the possibility of funding extensions thereafter.

The annual compensation for this full-time position is $60,000. Washington State has a generous benefit package (health, dental and life insurance, retirement, and an optional deferred compensation program). This recruitment will be ongoing until the position is filled. First screening of applications will begin on Monday, September 20, 2010. To ensure consideration, return your completed materials by 5 p.m. Friday, September 17, 2010.

For more information about this position and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, see the attached recruitment announcement, visit http://www.sbctc.ctc.edu, or contact SBCTC’s Human Resource Office at (360) 704-4301.

As more and more job titles end up with “open education” in them, people are eventually going to want degrees with “open education” in them, too. Wonder which university will get that done first?

Many people wonder why the Open High School of Utah has committed itself to using open educational resources licensed for reuse, adaptation, and sharing. I’ve heard that question more than once at the orientation this morning. (Did I mention that folks from RedHat / opensource.com are here doing a video / photo / interview production about the OHSU? But I digress…) Here are some possible hypotheses about why there’s an O in OHSU:

• Because OER are so COOL!
• Because OER are really popular with granting agencies, and OHSU will be able to rake in the dollars!
• Because David Wiley is the founder of OHSU, and it would make him a giant hypocrite if the school didn’t use OER!
• Because in the current economy no school can afford to buy seven $100 textbooks for each of its students!
• Because proving that OER can function just as effectively as expensive curriculum will put commercial publishers out of business!

Alas, none of these hypotheses are correct. The reason for the O in OHSU is local control. While there are numerous secondary benefits to using OER, the primary reason OHSU was originally committed to openness is this: for learners to reach their full potential, teachers need to be fully empowered to help them learn.

When you adopt a curriculum that is copyrighted in such a way that prevents teachers from making improvements and necessary adaptations, you limit teachers’ ability to help students. When you adopt a curriculum that only gets updated and improved on a schedule determined by a for-profit company with no direct interest in your school or students, you limit teachers’ ability to be helpful. When you adopt an expensive curriculum and leave teachers believing that the only supplements worth adopting are also expensive and, therefore, unavailable to them, you limit teachers’ ability to be helpful. Etc. Etc. Worst of all, when you adopt commercial curriculum and forbid your teachers from “messing with it” because you believe a publisher in Virginia knows more about what your Utah students need than your teacher who practically lives her life with them does, you limit your teachers ability to be helpful – and you seriously need to get out of education.

The OHSU’s commitment to openness lets us say, “Teachers. You know your content and you know your students. The entire universe of OER (over 350 million choices!) is available to you, and you’re welcome to write your own material as well. You are in complete control. Put together the most incredible learning experiences you can, and when you see opportunities to improve, do it! Help each and every student learn as much as you can.” No other school can say that to its teachers to the degree that the OHSU can.

So that’s why there’s an “Open” in the “Open High School of Utah.” Just in case you were wondering.

I had the opportunity to attend an Open High School of Utah student orientation meeting this morning. There are loads of students, parents, and teachers here. And the energy in the room is great. The second year of this amazing experiment is beginning! And this year is going to be even better than last year…

Also, as a teaser… we’ve received our unofficial Criterion-Referenced Test scores for last year (these are the end of year, state standardized tests). I can’t blog the specifics until they’re made official, but let’s just say that we’ve succeeded in showing that OER “do no harm.” What do you think – can a completely online, publicly-funded school that commits itself to the exclusive use of OER across its entire curriculum outperform the majority of schools in the state in its very first year of operation? =)

A rare Sunday post for me. This post has nothing to do with licensing, OER, or the other topics I usually write about here. If this topic doesn’t interest you, then as Obi-Wan Kenobi said, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.”

Many people ask me, “Why are Mormons against same-sex marriage?” While I can’t speak on behalf of the whole church, as a reasonably educated person and a devout Mormon I can give an answer. I’ll document my answer along the way to show that I’m not making things up. I offer these answers in an attempt to contribute to a polite, civil dialogue on this topic – something that seems sorely lacking these days. I’m not going to try to convince you that the Mormon stance is the right one – I just hope to help you understand the Mormon stance more clearly.

First, a very brief doctrinal answer.

It is a core tenet of Mormon doctrine that only a man and a woman, married in a way that makes the marriage binding both in this life as well as the next, can receive all the blessings that God wants His children to receive on earth and in heaven. Neither a man nor a woman can receive these blessings as an individual; for over 150 years and for several generations we have believed that we can only receive these blessings jointly as husband and wife. So, when you hear a Mormon say they believe marriage should be between a man and a woman, it’s not because Mormons “hate gay people” as some have suggested. It’s because – doctrinally – our fundamental understanding of the best that both heaven and earth have to offer revolves around a man and a woman being married forever, and the eternal continuation of the family. (If you’d like to read a slightly longer statement on this doctrine, try this statement about the importance of the family to Mormons).

Now for a much lengthier legislative answer.

“That’s all well and good for Mormons to believe,” you may say, “but why try to legislatively force your beliefs on us?” This is exactly the right question to ask, and it is exactly why Mormons get involved in legislation. Let me explain.

The LDS Church (the official name of the church to which Mormons belong) formally and officially supports laws that protect the civil rights of individuals who are lesbian, bisexual, gay or transgender. For example, the church recently lent public support to an ordinance in Salt Lake City that prohibits bias in employment or housing based on sexual orientation or gender identity (see, e.g., this article in the Huffington Post). Without the church’s public support the proposed ordinance would almost surely have failed.

However, to the church and its members, marriage is not a purely civil affair. Marriage is a ceremony Mormons perform inside holy temples. If governments define marriage as being between any two people who want to get married, they may effectively legislate changes in core Mormon doctrine. A 2008 LDS Church news release provides some concrete examples of how this could happen:

Legalizing same-sex marriage will affect a wide spectrum of government activities and policies. Once a state government declares that same-sex unions are a civil right, those governments almost certainly will enforce a wide variety of other policies intended to ensure that there is no discrimination against same-sex couples. This may well place “church and state on a collision course.”

The prospect of same-sex marriage has already spawned legal collisions with the rights of free speech and of action based on religious beliefs. For example, advocates and government officials in certain states already are challenging the long-held right of religious adoption agencies to follow their religious beliefs and only place children in homes with both a mother and a father. As a result, Catholic Charities in Boston has stopped offering adoption services.

Other advocates of same-sex marriage are suggesting that tax exemptions and benefits be withdrawn from any religious organization that does not embrace same-sex unions. Public accommodation laws are already being used as leverage in an attempt to force religious organizations to allow marriage celebrations or receptions in religious facilities that are otherwise open to the public. Accrediting organizations in some instances are asserting pressure on religious schools and universities to provide married housing for same-sex couples. Student religious organizations are being told by some universities that they may lose their campus recognition and benefits if they exclude same-sex couples from club membership.

Many of these examples have already become the legal reality in several nations of the European Union, and the European Parliament has recommended that laws guaranteeing and protecting the rights of same-sex couples be made uniform across the EU. Thus, if same-sex marriage becomes a recognized civil right, there will be substantial conflicts with religious freedom. And in some important areas, religious freedom may be diminished.

In other words, while the effect may be indirect, legislatively defining marriage as being between any two people could quickly translate into limits on the freedom of Mormons to practice their beliefs, both in their churches and in their affiliated organizations (like Brigham Young University).

So the question may be asked in return, “Supporting gay marriage is fine for you to do, but why try to legislatively force your beliefs on us?” I believe this is the reason Mormons get involved in legislative efforts. If legislators take a thoughtless path to legalizing same-sex marriage, their foolhardiness will almost certainly result in broad contractions of our First Amendment rights, which up until now have forbidden Congress from making laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion. Given Congress’ recent willingness to strip away citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights (which should protect us from things like warrantless wiretapping), the possibility of substantive restrictions on freedom of religion feels very legitimate and very frightening.

The recent Salt Lake City ordinance was a good example of thoughtful, carefully constructed language. Quoting again from the HuffPo article:

Church support for the ordinances is due in part to the way the legislation was drafted to protect those rights. Exceptions in the legislation allow churches to maintain, without penalty, religious principles and religion-based codes of conduct or rules.

“In drafting these ordinances, the city has granted commonsense rights that should be available to everyone, while safeguarding the crucial rights of religious organizations,” Otterson said Tuesday.

Previous Utah legislation that sought statewide protections for the gay community did not contain those exceptions.

And although this was the church’s first public endorsement of specific legislation, it is not the first time the church has voiced support for some gay rights. In August 2008 the church issued a statement saying it supports gay rights related to hospitalization, medical care, employment, housing or probate as long as they “do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family or the constitutional rights of churches.”

Supporters of same-sex marriage are very keen to protect what they see as their constitutional rights. Mormons and other people of faith are very keen to protect what we see as our constitutional rights. These two desires appear to be in conflict. However, when people listen to each other and work together, both groups can simultaneously enjoy their constitutional rights without infringing on the rights of the others, as the Salt Lake City example shows.

I hope this very brief explanation clarifies the two primary reasons Mormons currently resist attempts to redefine marriage. Mormons as individuals and the Church as an organization are open to supporting legislation that protects their rights – we just need more of this carefully crafted legislation to support. Consequently, I firmly believe that there is a path through this discourse that respects the views and beliefs of all parties. I just hope our nation is patient, kind, civil, understanding, thoughtful, and careful enough to find it.

Your comments are welcome as long as they stay polite and civil.

A draft of the OpenEd 2010 conference program is now available for review. I post it while still in draft form because so many people are asking for it. So, following the mantra “release early, release often,” please have a look at the program while realizing it is still subject to change!

The final program should be available shortly…

In 2005, COSL engaged in a somewhat unsuccessful effort to bring social study groups to MIT OpenCourseWare. I’ve always been disappointed with how the project sputtered and ended. See, for example, the way the Discussion Group page for Linear Algebra looked back in 2005 on archive.org. Our analytics showed that fewer than 1 in 10 people who visited the Discussion Group page ever clicked on the link to visit the Open Learning Support study group. For a project where critical mass is the key to success, this was deadly. Aside from the link being in the same color as the text on the page, I’ve often wondered if the bullet list on the page scared people off a bit:

• Operates independently of MIT OCW
• Requires users to register and login to participate
• Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting program
• Does not provide formal access to MIT or Utah State University faculty

Now, there are several plausible explanations for the project not being the success I know it should have. We could have just been too far ahead of our time. Or our implementation could have been poor. Or, we could have just been flat wrong about the entire notion of open learning support. On and on.

I still strongly believe that the availability of open, social support for learning is critically important for any OCW to reach its full potential. So I’m excited to see that, five years later, the idea has finally come round again. And, happily, it looks like the open learning support idea will have a better chance of succeeding this time – with big, colored icons that are super easy to find, and a new set of bullets that encourages people to give it a try:

• Get help when you need it
  Ask a question and get matched with someone who can answer it immediately and in real time.
• Work on assignments together
  There’s no need to take an OpenCourseWare course alone. Learn together!
• Connect with others around the world
  Meet other studying the same MIT courses as you. Help them or get help yourself if you need it.

Best of luck to the OpenStudy team from Georgia Tech and Emory. I deeply, sincerely hope that they hit it out of the park. The movement needs a successful OLS in order to get to the next level.