μαθηματικοι

If you were to ask open education practitioners to list the most important issues confronting the movement at this moment, I doubt that they would say

There just aren't enough OER: many subjects in many disciplines have few or no OER available.

I'm guessing folks wouldn't mention this, simply because it is so obvious, and not a surprise given how new the OER ecosystem is, so that there simply hasn't been time for all of those subjects to be covered.

I'd like to propose a policy that educational institutions could adopt, or be compelled to adopt by regulatory agencies or legislatures, that would immediately expand the body of available materials for OER and increase the rate at which new open materials are created. By a happy accident, my proposal would particularly increase open supplementary materials, and materials for primary and secondary schools.

I have presented above several versions of a licensing policy based on the works-for-hire doctrine in U.S. copyright law which would quickly expand the current and future body of OER materials available for use by educators. The first version would only add to the rights enjoyed by all instructors while it would not have any costs of which I am aware, and so it should, I hope, be relatively easy to achieve. The second and particularly third versions would require more hard work, and even some sacrifice, by stakeholders and will be harder to realize. But personally I like the idea of fighting an ambitious battle for a solid tool that will make education more effectively serve the common good.

In my first post as the 2022 OER & Beyond Contributing Editor. I'd like to talk about some really amazing work being done on a global stage to bring the open education movement - particularly issues around OER - to life across all of the member states of UNESCO.

Like many faculty, I suspect, I first stumbled into adopting/adapting/creating OER out of a fairly equal combination of an empathetic desire to get cheaper textbooks for my struggling students and an arrogant insistence that I needed complete control over the resources I use in my teaching. Maybe there's also a little selflessness in the desire to have the pedagogical control to do things like add a social justice theme to a math class, or to give my students a voice in the materials they use in my classes.

I can say that personally, one of the moments I cherish the most in my experience as an OER author is when I learned that a resource of mine was the main, required text at a university in a country I've never visited on a distant continent. As nations work to realize the vision of the UNESCO OER Recommendation, maybe these incidents of global sharing will become much more common - and I, for one, am happy to work to help bring about that happy future.

It was my great pleasure to participate in planning the 10th anniversary celebration of the Open Education Network's Open Textbook Library [OTL] in the spring of 2022. Since I tend to think of the OTL as one of the main, canonical OER repositories, it was fun to make graphs with some of its publicly available data, as they are, to me, an almost canonical snapshot of the OER world as it exists now.

I was particularly interested to make this graph showing how popular different licenses are for the works in the OTL:
 

Where does this leave us, as OER adapters or creators who want to choose a license? Perhaps the tl;dr is:

• ND isn't OER.
• NC is fine, but probably doesn't deter profit-seeking entities any more than all CC licenses already do - remember, they all prevent commoditization of CC-licensed works already.
• Plain BY is simple and flexible, but it leaves open the possibility that bad actors (from the point of view of the public good) will make adaptations which will not be open at all.
• Copyleft SA prevents those BY→ARR(c) bad actors, but may cause difficulties for remixing between the two different SA licenses.

Practitioners must balance how concerned they are that individuals or corporations will want to lock up the intellectual children (adaptations) of their OER with how much they think that picking one license with the SA clause will close off valuable future remixes with works sporting the other license with SA.

Personally, whenever I can choose, I release my works under CC BY-SA, since I fear openwashing and other bad actions by profit-seekers, which copyleft will prevent, and I do not particularly see the added value of the NC clause, as mentioned above.

The numbers in the chart at the beginning of this post show that my view is not the majority one. How do you balance the various risks and what license do you end up choosing?

Background

 
I was writing something recently and wanted to use a sentence along the lines of "The OER world is growing by leaps and bounds." I would have preferred to say it was "growing exponentially" ... but I am unwilling to use that word unless it is at least approximately correct in the technical mathematical sense. So I thought I should look around and find the actual graph which showed "the size of the OER world" over time. Surely this is something widely known which was just slipping my mind at the moment.
 
I couldn't find that graph.
 
So I'm trying to make one.
 
To summarize:
Framing Choices:

1. This project will be restricted to OER which are considered to be textbooks.
2. This project will be restricted to works which are marked with CC PDM, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, or CC BY-NC-SA.
3. For an artifact to be considered an OER, it must have been shared in some public forum at some time. After that first sharing, it will be considered forever after part of the body of existing OER.
4. When we are counting the individuals in the population selected by Framing Choices 1-3, we shall consider two works to be the same, and therefore count them only once, if they would be judged to be the same under copyright law.
5. For the individuals in the population selected by Framing Choices 1-3, we shall say that the starting date after which that individual will be considered part of the population is its copyright date.

Research Question:

• How big has the population described in FC1-3 been, over time? The answer should be a graph, please.

Something to get excited about here: while the data do not go particularly far back in time, there are enough of them so that the trends, in this limited period, should be quite robust. In fact, let's put in a linear regression line, to get: The fact that there has been a new book every 2.7 days, on average, over the last years (as indicated by the slope of the linear regression line), is pretty impressive!

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, a pandemic. A year later, nearly 130 million cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed worldwide, and nearly 3 million deaths [see the Wikipedia article COVID-19 pandemic and references therein].
 
Viruses are small. They are approximately spherical with a diameter of 50-200nm and showing the spikes which make them look something like a crown (hence the name coronavirus):

One place people today are accustomed to seeing large quantities of data is in images. A digital image is made up of many small dots: pixels. Modern displays can show pixels of many colors, often specified by RGB (="Red-Green-Blue") values which can take any whole number value from 0 to 255. That is, a color pixel represents three bytes of data ... or twelve bases of genetic data. In fact, if we use this approach to make an image for the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome, we get the following image:

On a recent Friday at around 1pm, I happened to walk into an office on my campus where a student, who was in a class I taught a couple of years ago, is employed as a work-study to answer the phone and greet folks who walk in. He was been bent low over a take-out tray of food, inhaling his lunch, when I appeared.

With wide eyes, in breaths between bites of food, he told me his lunch was just so good... but that was probably because he had been so hungry. I blithely ask him why, thinking he might have been fasting for some reason, or doing some sort of special athletic training (as he sometimes does) — we're very friendly, and it didn't occur to me that it might be an intrusive question.

He told me no, he was so hungry because he hadn't eaten since the previous day's breakfast ... because he couldn't afford to buy anything to eat. He didn't seem embarrassed about it, but merely told me with a very matter-of-fact tone.

I'm not making a legal argument [I repeat]. But I do think that the normative argument above suggests that

Of course, usually the greatest economic barrier students face is tuition. But I have very little agency or even voice in setting tuition at my institution (or others).

Which is in fact one of the things I like the most about OER: I do have a great deal of agency when it comes to the resources required for the classes I teach. What I take the above analysis to imply, then, is

I've used [versions of] the following graph many times when talking about the cost of textbooks, as part of building a case for OER. But I actually think this graph is basically backwards [and upside-down, inside-out, and otherwise non-optimal].
 
There is no denying that it does have a certain visceral impact....

...But I think that graph could be improved, actually to show some measure of the gap between the price of textbooks and what our — inflation-adjusted — intuition says they should cost. The measure should be based on comparing what textbooks cost when a particular person is looking backwards from today to the cost they remember from when they were a student.