Blogs on Improving Learning

E-literate recently ran a story about the emergence of a genuine science of learning.

Last year Bob Reiser invited me to contribute a chapter to the fourth edition of Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology, to be published by Pearson_._ I agreed on the conditions that I would retain copyright in the chapter and that it wo…

A quick response to some of the conversation prompted by my recent post Advocating for CC BY.

Several months ago I received an invitation to contribute a brief Foreword to a book Patrick Blessinger and TJ Bliss were editing.

There is a growing consensus among those who work in open education - including organizations like BC Campus, Creative Commons, the Hewlett Foundation, Lumen Learning, OpenStax, the Open Textbook Network, Rebus, and others - that the Creative Commons Attr…

Stephen Downes points to some older but interesting posts by Lisa Petrides and Bill Fitzgerald about the role of commercial actors in the open space.

I’ve received lots of feedback since I published the problem with cost framing, some online and some in person at #OpenEd16.

UPDATE: See this follow-up post.

The good folks at Florida Virtual Campus have released the latest version of their Student Textbook Survey.

Having students grade each other’s work is a time-honored tradition among faculty looking to save themselves some time and headache.

We recently installed solar panels on our home.

Although this was written as a critique of physics, truer words were never spoken about educational research: Science is corrupted when it abandons the discipline of empirical validation or dis-confirmation.

For some time now I’ve been critical of “disposable assessments.”

Fifteen years ago MIT announced its OpenCourseWare project.

This began as a comment on Heather’s post, but grew unwieldy and so ended up here.

In case you didn’t see it elsewhere, I’m republishing the press release from Achieving the Dream about the incredibly exciting OER Degrees work that launched today.

The tl;dr: Supporting effective OER adoption at scale has its problems.

Andrew Rickard has written a thoughtful essay on OER, open pedagogy, and commercial interests.

Robin DeRosa has written an absolutely wonderful post about two of her experiences with open pedagogy.

During his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Obama called on Vice President Biden to lead a new, national “Moonshot” initiative to eliminate cancer as we know it.

Earlier this week I read an op-ed - sponsored by Pearson - titled “If OER is the answer, what is the question?”

Terrible ideas and brilliant ones can be surprisingly difficult to tell apart.

The tl;dr.

Mary and Amanda wrote a great post yesterday about BCCampus’ upcoming plans around open pedagogy.

I have a chapter about open educational resources that will be appearing in a book on trends and issues in instructional design and technology later this year.

One of the reasons faculty can be slow to switch from commercial textbooks to OER is a perceived lack of open supplemental materials like powerpoint presentations, lab books, and test banks.

Several years ago I was speaking about OER at a conference in Virginia.

There’s an AP story about open textbooks making the rounds in a variety of outlets over the last few days (e.g., ABC News).

Suppose a faculty member decides she wants to provide some positive reinforcement to students in her class next semester.

Yesterday EdSurge published an opinion piece by Stephen Laster, the Chief Digital Officer at McGraw-Hill Education, titled The Future of Education Isn’t Free.

Last week I read a really incredible paper published as OA in Nature titled, The global landscape of cognition: hierarchical aggregation as an organizational principle of human cortical networks and functions.

Martin’s post has inspired me to share the books I read in 2015, though I have not made the time to produce useless charts like he did. :) I must say that, after staying healthy, the biggest benefit of running is all the audio books I manage to read.

There’s been a lot of discussion about open textbooks, efficacy research, and student cost savings in the wake of this year’s #OpenEd15.

There is much that’s wrong with the educational technology (“edtech”) market.

There’s a great conversation - a debate, almost - occurring right now about two indisputable facts: The College Board recommends that students budget around $1200 per year for textbooks and supplies.

Steve Greenlaw published a brief meditation on grading today.

I’ve written about Pearson’s efficacy work in the past, and Ray Henderson’s twitter post this morning has prompted me to ponder and write a bit more.

There is much to respond to in a comment left by David Anderson (Executive Director for Higher Education at the Association of American Publishers) on Nicole Allen’s recent HuffPo article College Textbooks: Do You Get What You Pay For, but I’ll focus on o…

I know I’ve written about efficacy, student success per dollar, and related topics before, but my mind continues to be drawn back to the issue.

For almost three years Lumen Learning has been helping faculty, departments, and entire degree programs adopt OER in place of expensive commercial textbooks.

Back in June I had the great privilege of speaking at the Mountain Heights Academy Convocation Ceremony.

This week a coalition of almost 100 organizations, including Lumen Learning, called on President Obama to take executive action to ensure that publicly funded educational resources are open educational resources.

Last week I enjoyed some quiet vacation time - sans wifi - on a lake in rural Tennessee with my family.

The following endorsement was neither requested nor compensated… I run dozens of websites - everything from opencontent.org to davidwiley.org to openedconference.org to the veritable reusability.org.

With all the excitement in the air about big data, analytics, and adaptive instruction, it is easy to imagine a future of complete automation.

The Object of Study As we work to move entire degree programs from commercial textbooks to open educational resources, we must answer this critical question - can all commercial materials be replaced with open educational resources?

Wow, there’s been some great writing lately.

Some readers are misinterpreting my critique of the phrase “high quality” as it’s used with regard to textbooks and other educational resources.

Last week I wrote that we should stop saying “high quality” when discussing learning materials.

Recently the phrase “high quality” has come up several times in discussions of educational materials, and I’ve been surprised what a strong, negative reaction I’ve been having each time I heard the word.