Aect2013 Kaleidoscope Open Course Intiative

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome to Anaheim! It’s a pleasure to be here, and my first time at AECT. I’m excited to have the opportunity today to share with you one of the most profound experiences of my professional career, the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative.I’d like to take an opportunity to thank Dr. Reigeluth, for the encouragement to join AECT last year, to AECT for the opportunity to present. And thanks to you for choosing this presentation.I’m Ronda Neugebauer, Lumen Learning’s Faculty Success Lead. I’m also a graduate student with Indiana University Bloomington in Instructional Systems Technology, a Kaleidoscope founding member, and current adjunct faculty member at Chadron State College in northwestern Nebraska teaching transitional reading, writing, student success, and digital literacy courses.So to take the pulse of conference attendees by a show of hands (and feel free to raise your hand more than once): how many of you are –administrators?faculty?instructional designers?programmers?researchers?students?What am I missing?Alright, and how many of you have heard of OER?And how many of you are now using or have used open materials?Thanks for your feedback!Great…so let’s get started… Image:http://aectorg.yourwebhosting.com/events/Anaheim/
• #3: The Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative was founded in 2011 by Kim Thanos and David Wiley.Imageshttp://www.project-kaleidoscope.org/http://www.lumenlearning.com/team
• #4: The project received initial funding in 2011 as well as follow-on funding in 2012 from a Next Generation Learning Challenges Wave I grant focused on improving college completion for at-risk students using technology solutions.Screenshot:http://nextgenlearning.org/nglc-overview
• #5: In 2011, Kaleidoscope’s founding 8 members consisted of community colleges and open access, 4-year schools from California to Nebraska to New York. I represented Chadron State College, a four-year open enrollment institution, as a collaborator in developmental reading, writing, and college success courses.Today, just shy of 2 ½ years later, the project partners have grown to a robust group of 23 collaborators across the nation.
• #6: Kaleidoscope’s goal is to improve the academic success of at-risk students by:using the best of existing open educational resources, also known as OERto improve student successby eliminating textbook costs as a barrier improve learning materials using a continuous, assessment driven enhancement process, andcreate a collaborative community to share learning, investment, and faculty developmentQuote:http://oli.cmu.edu/
• #7: Open educational resources are defined as teaching materials - such as textbooks, syllabi, lesson plans, videos, exams, etc. - that use an open license, such as the CC BY of Creative Commons. Dr. David Wiley, in his 2010 “Open Education and the Future” TedxNYED talk, related how at its core, OER are about what he calls the permission to engage in the “4Rs: Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute”All of these impact teaching and learning.Images:Source David Wiley, http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1270http://creativecommons.org/licenses/http://www.lumenlearning.com/oer
• #8: So why does Kaleidoscope use OER? Over the last three decades, college textbook prices (the highest line in blue on the graph) have risen more than three times the amount of the average increase for all goods and services (the lowest line in burgundy on the graph).Table:http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-college-textbook-bubble-and-how-the-open-educational-resources-movement-is-going-up-against-the-textbook-cartel/
• #9: And with this rise in textbook prices, we see a direct relationship between the costs of textbooks and student success. Recent research conducted by the Florida Virtual Campus quantifies the ways high textbook costs affect student persistence and success.Perhaps what’s more alarming is what we don’t see in the data over time related to drops and withdrawals.Research: http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2012_Exec_Sum_Student_Txtbk_Survey.pdf
• #10: So why use openly licensed materials?There’s the practical matter of broken links: when you link to materials online, you never know if the links might disappear,if the content changes, if the edition changes, or if the materials end up behind a pay wall. There’s also freedom from the textbook in saving students money, improving access to materials for everyone to use on the first day of class, and no longer suffering “financial aid wait” sometimes weeks into the term, or work paydays, before students purchase their textbooks or other content for class.Finally, the permission to edit OER empowers faculty and students alike with the flexibility to customizethe content for the diverse needs of learners and continuous quality improvement, which in turn (and hopefully!) prompts a richer conversation about collaboration around curriculum.
• #11: The approach centers on creating and adopting open course designs for high-enrollment courses, collaboratively, across multiple institutions, using the best of existing OER and supporting development of the “full instructional package” of open materials. Implementation of sound instructional design, such as what meets Quality Matters initiatives, appropriate author attribution of course materials, and utilization of learning analytics are the drivers for continuous improvement in open content, learning, and instruction.
• #12: Given that faculty collaborators in the initial phase of the project (myself included) had little or no knowledge or experience with OER, including open licensing, mining the wealth of existingOER, and identifying quality OERwere unsure of how to effectively collaborate across institutionswere not strong instructional designers or educational technologists norknew how to utilize learning analytics for continuous improvementit was imperative that the project included OER experts in advisory roles from different organizations. These advisors continue to support the project through the current iteration of our work and beyond.Images:http://www.lumenlearning.com/http://home.byu.edu/home/http://creativecommons.org/http://www.cmu.edu/index.shtmlhttp://www.mit.edu/http://www.aacu.org/http://openstaxcollege.org/http://www.saylor.org/http://www.instructure.com/http://opencourselibrary.org/http://www.ck12.org/teacher/http://nextgenlearning.org/http://www.gatesfoundation.org/http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
• #13: During the 2011-2012 iteration of the project, there were 8 participating institutions 67 faculty 10 courses created with OER and adopted137 course sections andover 4200 students impactedThe results of the 2011-2012 phase pilot were reducing the cost of textbooks to $0an average change in student success of C or better estimated at 10%100% of faculty committed to OER use in the futureFor some courses there was no statistically significant difference in students using OER instead of purchasing textbooks – which is a win for reducing the cost of higher education.Source:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnkMwQNsnjwUdEpzZDNEWlpJYnNyaENwNWFuelhXbFE&usp=drive_web#gid=0For others – especially related to math – having access to materials on the first day of class and beyond made a difference (students who used MyOpenMath instead of Pearson’s MyMathLab never experienced the latter’s trial access for, say, the first two weeks of class with the expectation that the student must pay or they are “cut off” from the course materials. In this slide, we see one partner’s collective results over time with the navy bars representing student success for those participating in the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative and the gold bars representing student success for those not involved in the project.We can see an increase in student success rates of C or better with Mercy College students over 5% in fall, nearly 12% in spring, and more than 8% overall.
• #14: The current phase of the project includes the creation and sharing of over 20 additional open course designs – the impact of which means for some institutions, students will not have to purchase textbooks for the first two years of college.
• #15: Notably, one of project collaborators, Tidewater Community College in Virginia, this year announced they “will be the first institution in the United States to offer a degree in which students pay nothing for required textbooks.” http://www.tcc.edu/news/press/2013/TextbookFreeDegree.htm
• #16: Additionally, the next phase will support institutions with leadership and faculty training and support for a sustainable change toward improving higher education.
• #17: Overall Kaleidoscope is about leveraging OER innovation to improve teaching and learning for student success.
• #18: Thank you for the opportunity to be here today and share the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative experience! It’s been a pleasure presenting at AECT and please let me know if you have any questions or are interested in more information about the project. All the best to you!