Back at my lovely hotel, thank you hotels.com, following the first day of the Open Education 2011 conference. Met up with some people I’ve known from before and attended many exciting talks! There were many excellent looking talks, but amongst the ones I attended here’s some ideas that stood out:

Are commercial publishers friend or foe of open education?
Speakers Eric Frank, Nicole Allen

This was a cool presentation about Flat World Knowledge, a for-profit publisher. Their goal is to make money and open textbooks, a novel idea that’s very important in the 21st century world. Cool to hear they’ve raised a lot of venture capital, meaning investors are taking the role Open Education will play in the publishing industry seriously. Good news for my own efforts developing a textbook I plan to eventually sell while still being readable/downloadable for free.

They also illuminated a common problem for OER producers: Just because you make something cool, free and open does not mean professors will adopt the materials. An educational resource is pretty useless if no one uses it, right? Put another way as Eric, the presenter said “problem with open content isn’t supply side” its getting people to adopt. To that end they put considerable resources into marketing to and talking directly to professors/universities. This is something I have thoughts about, but not in great detail so it was fun to hear about. On that note, one of Eric’s closing remarks related to when arguing for the benefit of Open Content, the minute you argue why “Open” is advantageous dishonestly for ideological reasons you lose. That is, if you say “Open” is better than a traditional textbook just ‘cause its open, or for ideological reasons, you lose. I think he’s right, the opportunity with Open isn’t to gain the moral high ground, its to make educational content better than anything the world has seen or imgained before. Helpful for all of us making OER to keep in mind. Also offering hope, someone in the audience said Open Education is the better business model long term. He’s definitely right. I hope until that long-term point arrives I can make enough scratch in the meantime to still be there.

Connecting the Dots
Speakers Alana Harrington

Been following the Saylor foundation since I heard about them from Stian. Presentation consisted of a long video explaining what they do, mostly stuff I already knew. Then they had their team answer questions and give more detail. Interesting note I didn’t know was they haven’t really started seriously marketing their stuff. I consider them one of the top Open Education players right now, so once they start spreading the word it’ll be intriguing how it plays out.

Also found this open textbook challenge on their website that might be worth applying to.

From Shared to Open: The Evolution of Open Education in Washington State
Speakers Tom Caswell Connie Broughton

This presentation focused on Washington state’s development of the Open Course Library. The Library seems cool, but my big take away from this talk was their discussion of how legislation can affect development of Open Content. They discussed two bills in Washington legislature now: SSHB1025 & SSBH1946

I respected their goal to efficiently use public funds to increase student access and success, that and the government element also played out in another talk …

CC and the Department of Labor Community College OER grant program: community updates and early project plans
Speakers Timothy Vollmer Cable Green

This talk extended the work with the US Government relating to OER. Recently, a federal bill was approved offering 2 billion for community colleges, provided they openly license their new materials. The speakers work for Creative Commons and they outlined certain obstacles for community colleges using the money. Particularly interesting were how changing the language of a bill can decidedly alter its impact. Cable pointed out multiple changes he had problems with. I didn’t quite catch all of it, but he also explained with numbers how much money states and the federal government could be saving if they adopted open models.

Perhaps my favorite part of the whole presentation was that it was CC0, as you know I’m a big fan of releasing Public Domain. Had a fun chat with Cable afterwards about it, hope we can continue tomorrow.