Creative Commons DOL TAACCCT grant program update at Open Ed 2011

Editor's Notes

• #6: Many of you familiar with joint project from Department of Labor and ED Idea originated in the SAFRA bill - Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act grant program to provide $50M/year for 10 years for the creation of high quality OER SAFRA got attached to Health care reform in US That funding for the $50/year over 10 years got removed during the Health care negotiations this past year in Congress Program reborn as TAACCCT - Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program $2B over 4 years to support the development and improvement of free, community college education programs and worker retraining materials Program announced January 20 of this year
• #7: Real innovation came in the details Grant solicitation said that all new material produced with grant funds must be licensed with a Creative Commons BY license We’re all familiar with this license allows subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the copyrighted work and requires such users to attribute the work in the manner specified by the Grantee. Baked into the grant solicitation. If you want the money, you need to promise to share what you create with other colleges, and with the world extremely exciting; first large scale inclusion of CC at the US federal level the program is a giant leap forward in how grant funds are managed this provides public access to publicly funded educational materials CC BY maximizes the public benefit of the funding dollars expended Innovative use of these materials may be made by any teacher, parent, and school district, nationwide and beyond materials will be available for reuse and value-add by creative entrepreneurs, education start-ups, and traditional commercial businesses.  
• #8: CC and others realize this is a really big deal Open licensing mandate for educational content never been demonstrated at this scale before Realize that open licensing is new for community college audiences what do we do? This is a forward looking requirement, now let’s get it right CC and other groups that could assist don’t fit the requirements of the grant solicitation And looking at the broader OER movement, there’s more to consider beyond license Let’s join forces with some of the other leading groups to provide a complete package to showcase the power and potential of OER Reached out to the Gates Foundation; let’s make sure that this program works; it’ll set the baseline for open licensing mandates at the federal level
• #9: CC is not the only group working to assist the DOL grantees We’ve teamed up with CMU OLI, CAST, and SBCTC to ensure successful TAACCCT grant projects Will provide support for all TAACCCT grantwinners Cable will discuss what each of these groups are contributing next
• #10: - Cable will talk a little bit about what types of services the Open Professionals Education Network will provide to DOL grantees
• #11: Lead organziation is CC
• #12: We all know CC provide the legal and techinical infrastructure to make legal sharing happen on the web CC licenses, public domain tools, SEARCH! Since all new content created by DOL grantees must be licensed under the CC BY 3.0 license, correctly implementing this license for those that are generally unfamiliar with CC licensing, or any licensing for that matter, is very important
• #13: - Some of you are surely familiar with Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative
• #14: We are being asked to address the seemingly impossible challenge of making higher education less expensive and more accessible while also increasing its effectiveness. The difficulty is heightened by the fact that faculty and institutions must support not only an increase in the number of students but also greater variability in the student population's background knowledge, relevant skills and future goals.  OER can be a key component of success, but only if it leverages the results and methodologies of learning science to create transformational innovations that fundamentally change the way higher education is developed, delivered and improved year-after-year.
• #15: Learning science is still young – while, as practitioners, we say we “know what works” our descriptions of “what works” are complex exemplars that are challenging to replicate and scale and even when replicated and scaled often do not “work” in the new context or for the new population. To replicate and scale we need to be able to describe what works as a set of underlying mechanisms that are influenced by a set of student and contextual variables. In other words we need better learning science to create better theories of learning that inform our practice. To get better theories, we need more data from more students in more contexts. Ed tech provides us with the ability to gather that data. Virtuous cycle: Ed tech -> data -> theory -> Ed tech
• #16: This slide should highlight the 4 feedback loops which taken together make the “killer app” Include loops between: Student learning data and the instructor’s activities; tailor and reassess teaching tools and pedagogy based on data Student learning data and the student’s performance; fine-grained data and timely updates based on students progress and performance Student learning data and course design; useful looking at the broader teaching picture because the instructor only sees the data for her course; the design team sees the data for all the classes and uses it to target the next round of course dev and refinement Student learning data and the science of learning; important so we can better understand human learning
• #18: Next partner is CAST (Center for Applied Special Technologies) Provide expertise in universal design for learning principles, including crucial assistance in developing materials for learners with disabilities
• #20: The goal of education in the 21st century is not simply the mastery of content knowledge or use of new technologies. It is also the mastery of the learning process. Education should aim to turn novice learners into expert learners—individuals who want to learn, who know how to learn, and who, in their own highly individual ways, are well prepared for a lifetime of learning. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) helps educators meet this challenging goal by providing a framework for understanding how to create high-performance curricula that meets the needs of all learners by design and from the start.   Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. Drawing upon current research from learning sciences and leveraging multimedia technology, UDL provides a framework for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone—not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs.   Research from the modern learning sciences has demonstrated that learners are incredibly variable. Not only do we find massive natural individual differences between learners, modern learning science has also discovered that individuals differ dramatically moment-to-moment depending on the context. These two ideas—variability and context—have become the backbone of a new learning science that focuses primarily on the interaction between natural learning variability and the environment in which learning takes place. The shift toward an interaction perspective has powerful implications for both the way students are taught and the way curricula are designed. From this perspective, learning design is largely about creating high-performance learning environments flexible enough to be responsive to the reality of the variability that exists in those environments. UDL provides a framework for understanding critical dimensions of learning variability in a way that allows non-experts to design environments that reflect the current state of knowledge in the learning sciences.   Universal Design for Learning is defined in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 as a scientifically valid framework for guiding educational practice that: a) provides flexibility in the ways information is presented, in the ways students respond or demonstrate knowledge and skills, and in the ways students are engaged; and b) reduces barriers in instruction, provides appropriate accommodations, supports, and challenges, and maintains high achievement expectations for all students, including students with disabilities and students who are limited English proficient. In setting a vision for transforming American education powered by technology, The National Education Technology Plan (2010) calls for state of the art technology and Universal Design for Learning concepts to enable, motivate and inspire all students to achieve, regardless of background, language or disabilities.   In addition to this definition, the framework of UDL has been elaborated by CAST in Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age (Rose & Meyer; ASCD, 2002), The Universally Designed Classroom (Rose, Meyer, & Hitchcock, Eds.; Harvard Education Press, 2005), and A Practical Reader in Universal Design for Learning (Rose & Meyer, Eds.; Harvard Education Press, 2006). UDL has three core principles and a set of guidelines that support curriculum design: For further information, please visit the National Center on Universal Design for Learning, UDL Guidelines http://www.udlcenter.org/aboutudl/udlguidelines/changes   Accessibility as a Necessary Foundation The first level of UDL guidelines address issues of accessibility to the learning materials for individuals with physical or sensory disabilities. We recommend that course developers adhere to at least the base level accessibility standard stipulated by the Federal Government in Section 508 (Section 508 of the Rehab Act Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities). Section 508 implementation requires agencies to make information technology accessible for people with disabilities. Section 508 implementation is guided by IT Accessibility & Workforce Division, in the U.S. General Services Administration ’s Office of Government wide Policy, who has been charged with the task of educating federal employees and building the infrastructure necessary to support Section 508 implementation. Accessibility considerations are best dealt with during design, not as a retrofit after a product has been developed and therefore, involves coordination of individuals responsible for design, development and ultimately those involved in procurement, or use of electronic and information technology (EIT).
• #21: - The washington state board for community & technical colleges
• #22: Washington state has experience through the adoption of open policy and the work around the Open Course Library to provide assistance in planning and leadership As we mentioned, point of the grant program is to provide technical assistance to grantees to help them get the open licensing part right Not a lot of expertise or experience within community colleges for this; also little capacity And of course no one wants $2B of poorly designed digital content In addition to community colleges and other eligible grantees creating content, another key is to use others’ content help realize the full potential of OER through this grant program; piece is to provide professional development to faculty, administrators, others in the support of this important program
• #24: As of September 26, wave 1 is launched DOL has posted grant abstracts of the winners on their website They will share the full winning proposals soon This is crucial to our OPEN consortium work Help identify needs and begin outreach to grantees DOL will hold a kickoff meeting for the first wave grantees; OPEN Consortium invited to network there We’ll be holding our own kickoff for our work DOL wants to continue moving on the next wave of the SGA; they’ve offered an input and Q&A session via 2 webchats ealier this month Each wave lasts 3 years Could be looking at 2015-16 for end of this program
• #25: 32 grant winners Almost $500 million allocated Ranging from $2.5M (the amount promised to each state) up to $20M for consortia
• #27: Another project is the learning resources metadata imitative, also funded by the Gates Foundation build a common metadata vocabulary (10-15 terms) to tag educational content that then can be consumed by major search engines and other applications In collaboration with the Association of Education Publishers Realization that if teachers and students can’t find high quality materials that align to their needs, what’s the point Also comes at it with the understanding that OER search and discovery is a tough nut to crack; been going on for years within this community Work being done in the open with a technical working group There is a draft properties schema available for public review right now
• #28: This is still in development, but you an imagine how it might work Right now if you go to Google and type in potato salad recipe, this cool little menu pops up on the left navigation bar that allows you to filter your ingredient choices For example, you can filter whether you want to see potato salad recipes that contain mustard, or contain paprika, or the like What if we could do this when searching for educational materials? For example, I’m a teachers, and I want to discover high quality educational materials appropriate for English, and what if I could filter for resources based on Typical age range Learning resource type By open license What if I could filter for resources licensed under a liberal cc license, so I know I can use it, remix, and reshare on our class blog? This is the promise of LRMI We’ll be providing assistance to DOL grantwinners to help them tag the OER they create with the LRMI vocabulary
• #30: Cable
• #31: Prepare to stand united against antiquated business models that would rob the public from its right to get the legal rights to access what it paid for.
• #33: Want audience to use boilerplate language from Creative Commons website for application to align with DOL design principles.
• #34: creative commons twitter handle - @creativecommons Facebook page - facebook.com/creativecommons annual campaign - creativecommons.org/donate