College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
Winning Ideas from the Big Ideas Fest
Both Jacky Hood and I along with 150 other leading educators and business executives focused on education convened in Half Moon Bay on December 4-7 for the Big Ideas Fest (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-big-ideas-fest). In addition to listening to 18 speakers (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-speakers-big-ideas-fest) ranging from Martha Kanter, Under Secretary, US Department of Education, to Kaycee Eckhardt, an amazingly giving and passionate Reading Teacher from New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, we ate good food, networked, and worked on some big ideas.
Part of the conference was the facilitation of Action Collabs (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-action-collabs-big-ideas-fest, a great way to brainstorm solutions to core questions. There were nine groups of 15-20 people led by facilitators through the multi-day brain-storming process. Open Educational Resources (OER) were the major focus. Four of the nine groups took on the following question: “How might we leverage open (content, data, and research) to transform teaching and learning?” The groups all followed a six step process: 1) Identify the Opportunity, 2) Design the Solution, 3) Prototype the Solution, 4) Present and get Expert Feedback, 5) Update the Solution based on the feedback and Design if to Scale and Spread, and 6) Present it again. Step 1 included interviewing experts. Former COT director and now Open Courseware Consortium/CCCOER community college outreach manager, Una Daly, was one of the experts. The process was engaging and produced very interesting results. It was fun to see the solutions that 150 bright minds can produce. Strong synergy emerged among educators, business people, foundation managers, and others. The four different groups focused on the same question approached their solutions in very different ways.
Other Action Collab Topics included Assessments and Basic Literacy/Math Skills.
ISKME secured a $50k grant from the Gates Foundation to take the three most promising “big ideas” to the next level. It is a matching grant and ISKME is looking to find another $50k to match the Gates funding, which means that $100k will be used to bring 3 of the 9 ideas presented to the next level. Everyone in the Action Collab I participated in (aka WeLearn) were elated when our idea was paired with another group as one of the winners. WeLearn emphasized vocational life-long learning. Putting tools and knowledge in the hands of those in the workforce to help them learn and grow. In addition to OER and traditional content, we had focused on mentor/mentee matching and close ties to corporations as one of the benefactors of a more skill-based workforce.
This big idea is similar to a concept that the Open Doors Group has been discussing; it is called CHAI (Commerce, Healthcare, Agriculture and Industry) as a potential sharing space for flexible, affordable education/training materials. This is a much larger initiative with a focus on vocational education initiatives utilizing open resources. Very exciting idea that has synergy with the big ideas that surfaced at the Big Ideas Fest. Stay tuned for more ideas.
Mitchell Levy, Co-Director, College Open Textbooks
- 408-257-3000, http://collegeopentextbooks.org
CEO & Author, Happy About
- http://happyabout.com, http://42rules.com, http://thinkaha.com
Related posting: Read move about the Big Ideas Fest from Carol Hedgspeth’s blog post: http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/blog/?p=1845
NOTE: IMAGES ARE CC-BY-SA BY ISKME.
OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS: The future of open education through collaboration
During the past three years, the College Open Textbooks Collaborative (COT) has demonstrated success in building heightened awareness and increasing adoptions of open textbooks and open educational resources (OER) at community and two-year colleges.
A key initiative of COT was outreach to the education community. This included building a peer-focused 1,000+ community to share ideas and start discussions. Over 2,000 faculty and staff participated in on-campus or online workshops learning how to find, select, and adopt open academic materials for their online and face-to-face courses. We’ve identified over 500 open textbooks on the COT website and have facilitated peer reviews of over 140 of them. The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), a Collaborative member, interviewed the pioneering teachers and students who participated in this first wave of open textbook usage. An instructor reported on how integration of open resources resulted in new collaboration:
“My colleagues and I collaborated to integrate the book with our existing syllabi and course curriculum … now we meet regularly to talk about lesson plans.”
The research identified important challenges including a need for more information about the impact of OER on teaching and learning and professional development to support increased usage of OER. This research and feedback from our community of practice indicates the need for additional faculty support to adopt quality open resources, customize them for learners, and enhance the value and currency of resources over time.
To continue the work started in these initial grants and to further promote open education, several members of the College Open Textbooks Collaborative plus Silicon Valley Education Foundation, MathScore, OCW, three community colleges, and other institutions and individuals have created a new collaborative called the Open Doors Group. Open Doors is a group of non-profit and for-profit organizations that have come together to sustain the resources built by COT and to drive adoption of open educational resources in community colleges and beyond.
Various members of Open Doors take the lead on specific projects; recently both Words & Numbers and MathScore have led grant submissions. The group is actively seeking program funding from the Gates, Lumina, and Wallace foundations and is also establishing sustainable business models to support ongoing efforts.
Activities include the ongoing marketing and promotion of the College Open Textbooks website and Ning, and the creation and support of various communities of practice. To view the members and some projects we’re pursuing, please visit the new Website: http://opendoorsgroup.org/
We are open to new members and suggestions for projects and activities. Please reach out to one of us if you’re interested in participating or recommending a course of action or lending a hand.
9/15 Quarterly CCCOER Meeting Summary (surprise visitor)
The quarterly CCCOER meeting on Wednesday, 9/1510 went extremely well including a surprise visit from California State Senator Dean Florez and his chief of staff who participated in the discussions with both the online and in-person attendees at Foothill College.
Highlights from the meeting included:
1) Clancy Marshall from DynamicBooks talked about their product and announced that her firm is in the process of porting 26 open textbooks over to it for a Spring 2011 release.
2) Mitchell Levy from Happy About talked about the release of book “#OPEN TEXTBOOK tweet” and gave physical copies to those in attendance and pointed folks to the WikiEducator site to pick up the PDF ebook version, available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. The marketing team is also sending out books that can help spread the word (and demand) for open textbooks. If you want a copy and are not sure you are on the list, please e-mail info@happyabout.info and ask for it.
Our speakers – Clancy Marshall, GM of Dynamic Books; Nicole Allen, Textbook Advocate Director at The Student PIRGs; Liza Loop, CCCOER; and Alice Krueger, Chairman of the Board from Virtual Ability – did a great job of sharing their views on open source textbooks, the future of CCCOER, student textbook affordability and accessibility for all that need it. Each provided good content that was appealing to the attendees:
- Clancy talked about the the interaction that the DynamicBooks platform offers both students and faculty
- Nicole talked about making textbooks affordable and the work the she and her team has been doing.
- Liza Loop talked about the direction and activities of the consortium.
- Alice Krueger talked about textbook accessibility and gave us insights into how her team worked to provide thorough review of over 60 textbooks
If you would like to listen to the archive of the meeting, click here.
Mark your calendars for the next quarterly meeting on December 9th.
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