Kahn Academy – DIY OER to Educate the World

Last Friday was an interesting day. I was tipped off by a colleague, Paul Leman, about the Kahn Academy when he sent me a link to Glen Moody’s blog post. At first sight the Kahn Academy looked like a fantastic resource, with 1000+ videos on various topic for students of all ages. But being one who never takes things on face value, I wanted to check things out and see what others were saying about this resource. That’s when I found David Wiley’s post which explained how there was no Creative Commons license attached to the content. I had a look and he seemed to be right. David had written to Sal Kahn the creator of the Kahn Academy previously, but he decided to drop him a further email. Then, as is evident from the comments David received on his post, everyone was immensely pleased to see that by the end of that day Sal had acted on David’s call and prominently displayed the CC license on the Kahn Academy homepage making it an OER for reuse, remixing, sharing, etc. I immediately embedded this video in my Daily Interests blog under the title Education for the World until I had time to write in more detail.

Now I have to take my hat off to Sal Kahn for a truly immense resource. What he has achieved with the Kahn Academy is nothing short of incredible. Single handedly generating instructional videos covering subjects including:

• Economics
• Finance
• Chemistry
• Arithmetic
• Pre-algebra
• Algebra
• Geometry
• Biology
• Trigonometry
• Precalculus
• Statistics
• Probability
• Calculus
• Differential Equations
• History
• Linear Algebra
• Physics

What a wealth of information. This has to be place in the category alongside Academic Earth and Udemy.

This story excites me on a number of levels. Perhaps one of the most significant is the difference anyone can make by openly publishing knowledge online to freely educate others. It’s an approach I’m trying to take myself to make a difference, however small; it is something that I passionately believe in. More power to anyone and everyone doing the same.

Next Generation Textbooks – Flexbooks

Sometimes you encounter something that changes your own mindset, the way you work, the way you want to do things. You want to get involved, to make this better. I’ve just come across one such idea.

The work of the CK-12 Foundations is mindblowingly excellent. Their mission is to create access to cheap textbooks both for the US and Worldwide. How will they achieve this? Well, they’re pioneering the ‘Flexbook‘, which is an open-content, web-based collaboration model where it’s possible to take Creative Commons Licensed content from one of the available standard text on the site and repurpose it for the learning experience required. This is achieved using the online software to extract chapters or sections from the text, mix it with your own content from a Word file for example, and package it together into a ‘book’ that can be exported to a pdf file for printing out and use with learners.

For cK-12′s much better explanation:

• read their About us section
• and (please) view the video

Screenshot of Flexbook site

This needs to be made to work in a much wider contexted. This template could be used throughout education. It’s brilliant. It works for both formal learning setting and individual, informal learning.

Textbook Revolution

This seems like an interesting concept. It’s a site set up by students looking at bringing together in one location freely available online textbooks. The idea of introducing and using such material in lecture courses by both academics and the student population is rather an appealing concept in the present financial climate. This also works well for the idea of informal learning and open educational resources (OER).

The categories across the top of the page seem a little sparse at present, hopefully this will change soon. However, passing your mouse over the Books link reveals two menu items By Subject and By License. The By Subject item shows a useful list of subject to choose from.

Then clicking on any of these items provides a list of available books, with title, author and license arrangements listed.

If you have knowledge of any books that could be added to the lists, then there is an option to submit them.

Link: Textbook Revolution

Openness via Martin Weller

I really like Martin Weller’s thinking, and have referenced him during presentations in the past. I enjoy his ‘The Ed Techie’ blog, and his comments often get me thinking.

Today I had the pleasure of reading his Reflections on openness post. Whilst reading it and watching his presentation via Elluminate I typed the following.

Surely if you where going to start a university now, you wouldn’t do it.

Universities would seem to be institutions designed to perpetuate elitism. With open education are we really still tied into the promotional rewards of these institutions. Should the emphasis in reward come from the community and its valuing of the resources you provide to them, the time you invest, the quality of the discussions you initiate/perpetuate? I believe one has to question from a society perspective the value of closed environments for education now; when digital resources are enabling free access by anyone to some of the greatest thinkers in the world, and providing a platform for anyone with a well-reasoned opinion to be heard and entered into dialogue with. We no longer have to be told who the experts are, we can make a more valued judgement ourselves. I’m not foolish enough to believe that the openness presented to us by this digital world will lead to a free, utopian education for all, and the demise and dismantling of universities, but there are people willing to provide their time and effort to assist by freely sharing their time and resources without necessarily requiring re-numeration for their work. Creative Commons is showing us that.

Whilst accessing Martin’s post, I also had the pleasure of following Mark Smither’s link to his blog. Here is someone else whose writing are going to influence some of my thinking from now on.

I love this social web thingy, and the path of inquiry it can lead you on; a winding path for sure, but one with many places of interest.

I’ve been following Martin on Twitter for a while, and I’m now also following Mark.

A couple of other things occurred to me whilst reading the post and response:

Has the idea of a journal gone to the wall, when open information can have reviewed directly by the community – i.e. peer review?

The Cloudworks concept seems to be looking at unifying resources, a concept that I considered a couple of years ago and then abandoned. It seemed to me more appropriate to retain information on the open web and search for it there, rather than ‘close’ it down again; cloudworks  potentially is an elitist approach attempting to corral and vet information and therefore a philosophy I don’t necessarily hold with. Not even sure it will work. Howard Rheingold created something similar, and I found I didn’t have the time to engage with that. I’m personally moving further away from several Ning based communities for similar reasons or time and access.