For those who’ve been in the education industry for a while, you know not all conferences are created equal. Some are expensive, some are free. Some are national, some regional. There are summits, symposia, seminars. You might sit at a roundtable or just meet up and talk with a dude named TED. Un-conferences are not anti-conferences and under no circumstances will Bill Gates send you a $5,000 check for sharing your ideas. If you’re lucky enough to go to one of these events, I’d strongly encourage you to avoid the trust fall.
Jamboree is a funny word.Last week was the 2013 OpenEd conference in Park City, Utah. This is one of our favorites because it is built squarely on one of our foundational principles: that open is good. The show didn’t disappoint. It featured lots of really smart people talking about openness in education. For our part, we had a few of our own folks present on this topic so dear to our hearts. Here are some quick summaries of their talks:
Using Open Badges and an Open Course to Enhance and Extend Learning
(Presented by Dan Randall, Buck Harrison, Rick West, and Garrett Hickman)
In this session, we presented a design for an Open Badge system currently used in an undergraduate course for preservice teachers at Brigham Young University. The system was designed to provide portable credentials for students using Mozilla’s OBI and extend learning in the course. To be sure these credentials carried weight, we focused on rigorous and clearly defined criteria when developing our badge assessments. Our badges themselves were built as competency-based credentials that could be stacked to showcase higher levels of skills and understanding. Using Canvas and WordPress as our public platforms, we were able to extend the reach of the class beyond our institution. Anyone, anywhere in the world was able to access our materials and earn our Open Badges. For more information on our design, check out our slides. We also have an article in TechTrends that details our design considerations and future research.
Building a Successful Business Model Around Open Licenses
(Presented by Brian Whitmer and Mike Zackrison)
There’s an inherent tension between open source/open licenses and corporate entities. Sometimes it seems that if someone is making money then it can’t possibly be open for reals. In fact, Canvas almost wasn’t open source. When we first started Instructure the investment community told us open source would kill our business. We backed off (in spite of our belief in open source) assuming they all knew something we didn’t. But then when we started trying to sell the product, everyone kept saying, “You’re stuff is awesome, but you’re going to get bought six months from now and then we’ll be back where we were before.” Suddenly, open source became a crucial part of our business strategy because it addressed that concern perfectly.
In this session we talked about how that attitude can negatively affect the sustainability of open projects, and discussed examples of how the companies that spring up around open projects can actually be beneficial for sustainability because they help bring users, marketing dollars, and potential for re-investment. Then we walked through suggestions about how companies can avoid parasitic relationships with open projects, and how they can position open licenses as an asset rather than a liability. In the end, it’s all about playing nice – participating and re-investing in the community – and remembering sustainability.
Solving the 4Rs with Common Cartridge
(Presented by Bracken Mosbacker)
Common Cartridge adoption has grown rapidly in the last few years and is now one of the easiest ways to make your content available across learning platforms. In this session, we talked about the CC data model in terms of how to organize content, align content to standards/outcomes/licenses, and supported assessment options. We covered the new version of CC this year, which allows for light-weight content sharing, and the enhancements coming in 2014. We also discussed some great tools for converting between different content formats: wordpress2cc, moodle2cc, and cc2html. Common Cartridge is awesome and you should all believe in the power of the vuvuzela.
So as you attend conferences this year – or even in the daily course of your work – keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to bust education wide open. After all, the goal of open education is open minds. (Sorry to open that can of worms, but it was an opening we couldn’t resist.)
Keep Learning,
Brian
P.S. Here's lookin' at you @jimgroom (do we still owe you a shirt?). ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment