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alexandra m. pickett

An Open Letter to Professor Edmundson | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    "Given your critique of "online education," I find it ironic that learning designers and others who work day-in, day-out on online (and blended) learning spend much of our time saying similar things to our faculty partners and university stakeholders as you so eloquently articulated in the above quotes. The error that you make, and it is a fundamental error, is that you confuse what is going on at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, M.I.T. with edX and Coursera, with traditional online learning. You write as if you are critiquing online classes, but what you are really taking issue with are the new crop of massively open online courses (MOOCs). This error is not merely semantic. Confusing online learning with MOOCs disallows any meaningful analysis of the challenges and benefits of either format. Conflating online learning with MOOCs also closes the possibility of any substantive discussion of how institutions of higher education are responding to challenges around access, cost and quality. And perhaps most troubling, by conflating online learning with MOOCs you are mischaracterizing and devaluing the hard work of your fellow educators to bring the active learning principles, the principles that you yourself espouse, to new teaching modalities."
alexandra m. pickett

State of Washington to Offer Online Materials, Instead of Textbooks, for 2-Year College... - 0 views

  • If the course designers feel that the best instructional materials are online versions of traditional textbooks, that's fine. Or they can use a smorgasbord of teaching modules and exercises developed by other open-learning projects, such as those created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University. Interactive-learning Web sites and even instructional videos on YouTube are also perfectly acceptable resources.
  • Traditional textbook publishers, which now promote e-textbooks, aren't the solution, insisted David Lippman, who teaches math at Pierce College and is a self-confessed open-source purist. "I find the publishers' online offerings nothing more than the old ancillaries they've always offered bundled up in a proprietary system," he said.
  • Maybe we collectively need a Sociology 101 textbook (with all of the supplemental materials included). Ohio (or Washington or Texas or Florida) releases an RFP for the creation of a "Sociology 101" textbook. Maybe you win the bid ... maybe Pearson wins the bid. The difference is, the publisher does not own the copyright - the State of Ohio owns the copyright - and chooses to share that textbook with everyone with a CC BY license. Everyone can now use / modify the open textbook, Ohio has saved a bunch of money for its students, so did other states / countries, and the publisher still had an income stream.
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  • What is most important is that we collectively get to high quality, multi-format (digital web, mobile, print-on-demand), accessible, affordable educational instructional materials. Creating and maintaining those materials is expensive, and no one is going to do it for free - nor should they. What I'm suggesting is higher education teaches roughly the same top 100 highest enrolled courses... the same can be said of K-12. As such, there is an historical opportunity to share - using creative commons licensing - the digital courses and textbooks we all need. Yes - we all teach / build courses slightly differently ... and open licensing allows anyone to make changes to fit local needs.
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