Open Learning Platforms
The Next Frontier of the Struggle with Publishers
Steel Wagstaff, UW-Madison
Hugh McGuire, Founder of Pressbooks & Rebus Foundation
10.11.18 | Open Education Conference
What are ‘platforms’ & why should we care?
Exploring the state of things (as of late 2018)
The textbook is dying.
We are living in the age of courseware (content + ’personalized’ homework)
OER Delivery = Content + Platform
CONTENT
The actual book, activity, object that learners use
Examples: All the books in the Open Textbook Library; OpenStax books; everything in Merlot; OER Commons; LibreTexts libraries; Open Education Consortium; etc
Content can be copyrighted, in the public domain, or permissively licensed (e.g. CC licenses). Openly licensed content is increasingly ubiquitous (for text), but usually requires a platform to edit, remix, integrate w/ LMS.
PLATFORM
Where the content/OER is authored, edited, assembled (with assessments), & distributed.
Examples: Mindtap [Cengage]; Connect [McGraw-Hill]; Revel [Pearson]; Textbook & Marketplace [Top Hat]; Open Author [OER Commons]; Waymaker & Candela [Lumen Learning]; Pressbooks; OpenStax CNX [legacy]
Platforms can be proprietary or open-source (most are now proprietary). Can be free/pay to use (as an author); free/pay to implement (as an institution/instructor); and free/pay to access (as a learner).
Our fixation on [OER] discovery and assembly distracts us from other serious platform needs – like platforms for the collaborative development of OER & open assessments, where faculty & students can work together to create & update the core materials that support learning in our institutions. ...
If the OER community doesn’t … start providing and promoting viable alternatives to publishers’ platforms, the best possible future for OER is being locked down inside a Pearson MyLab playing second fiddle to proprietary content.
— David Wiley, “Of OER and Platforms: Five Years Later,” January 24, 2017
Perhaps our best, most pragmatic path forward is to help people understand that courseware is a combination of content and platform, and teach them to ask about the licensing of the content and the licensing of the platform separately. (Is the content OER? Is the platform open source?) For the time being, the majority of answers will be “the content is OER & the platform is proprietary”.
… Once you understand that it is possible for content to be open and the platform to be proprietary, as is the case for almost all courseware containing OER today, it becomes quite clear what’s being sold. It’s not the content. … [R]epeating the message that content and platform are licensed independently will eventually get people thinking about the licensing of courseware platforms.
The battle to open source these platforms will be a very different battle than the battle over content licensing. The majority of faculty members are capable, in theory, of creating and choosing to openly license a collection of materials that could replace the textbook they use for their course. Not so with courseware platforms. While the cost of creating, maintaining, and hosting software has dropped significantly in the last decade, creating a courseware platform is still orders of magnitude more expensive and orders of magnitude more complex than creating an open textbook.
— David Wiley, “How do we talk about “open” in the context of courseware,” February 21, 2018
There is absolutely no question that the value of base informational content—the part of a textbook that could easily be replaced by a Wikipedia article, for example—has commoditized. This is one reason why textbook prices are coming down … In the curricular materials markets, there are two pricing bands that are beginning to emerge ... T[he second] band, in the $60 to $100 range, tends to have products with lots of formative assessments, student and instructor dashboards, nudges and reminders, and maybe adaptive capabilities. Here, publishers are trying to establish a different value proposition from the print textbook. The "courseware" products that typically inhabit this price band can provide both students & instructors with a lot more information about how the students are doing …
If the Wikipedia-like portions of the textbook have little to no economic value, then what else are students paying for and how much should they have to pay for it? How much is professional curation—in the form of scope and sequence—worth? How much is it worth to have somebody align learning objectives, assessment questions, and the informational content? To keep the content up-to-date? To provide frequent, auto-graded or easy-to-grade formative assessments? To provide dashboards that show progress on those assessments? To provide adaptive learning tools as differentiated instruction aids? …
— Michael Feldstein, “Some Thoughts on OER,” June 7, 2018
GAO report from July 2005!
Three graphs depicting the consumer price index for ‘educational books & supplies’ and ‘College Textbooks’ since 1967 [USA]. �Generated October 2018 at Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the U.S. Bureau of Labor websites.
What do we want from our platforms?
Or why it matters who owns the pipes, not just the flow
Pressbooks as an open platform:
an update [our 2017 presentation]
Steel’s 2015 Authoring Tool Wishlist
What we’re working on
Steel’s 2018 Platform Wishlist
Is Open Source?
WHAT WE’VE DONE
Built Pressbooks on WordPress. Core has been open source (GPL 3.0 license) & in GitHub since 2013
Have also released tons of open-source components.
Please contribute!
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
Stay open & keep improving.
Development roadmap
Future release plans
Scheduled release project status
Uses Broadly Accepted Standards
WHAT WE’VE DONE
HTML5 + CSS3
Supports: Schema.org, HTML Book,
Now have LTI provider plugin (uses IMS Global standards: LTI and Thin Common Cartridge)
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
MARC record export
LTI Advantage?
Caliper instrumentation?
Allows for Easy Import/Export of Content
WHAT WE’VE DONE
Import tool works for docx, epub, WordPress, Pressbooks files and some HTML
Can export to lots of file formats
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
Allows Content to Be Cloned/Remixed
WHAT WE’VE DONE
Built an API for Books + slides + commentary. Implementation for Pressbooks
Built a book cloning tool
Built a compare revision feature
Added support for media attributions (thanks BC Campus!)
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
Add a glossary tool [coming in next release]
Add an index tool
Add support for cloning H5P activities [coming soon, we hope!]
Add support for cloning annotations
Includes Interactive Components
WHAT WE’VE DONE
Allow native embedding of multimedia
Added support for interactive OER content built on open-source platforms: including TablePress, H5P, PHET simulations, Open Assessments, eduMedia]
Graceful fallback when exports can’t include multimedia/interactive content
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
Includes Web Annotation
WHAT WE’VE DONE
Added support for Hypothesis
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
Permits Ethical Learning Analytics
WHAT WE’VE DONE
Built dashboard to view network statistics ...
WHAT WE’RE PLANNING
Is this possible? Research & listen.
If so, begin to instrument extensible, standards-based learner-centric LA
How systems connect
Authoring Platform [Pressbooks + H5P + Hypothes.is ]
Learning Analytics statements
Learning Record Store [i.e. Learning Locker]
Learning Management System [i.e. Canvas]
LTI plugin (can deliver content & grades)
Import into an LMS
Thin Common Cartridges [IMS Global standard] consist of an XML manifest file and pointers to a number of structured resources. A Thin CC for a Pressbooks book will include discrete links for each of the book’s parts & chapters [top right].
If LTI links are used, content can load in an iFrame as though it were native to the LMS [a Pressbook in Canvas, bottom right].
Future Goals
Accomplishing the Pressbooks Development Roadmap
Future Goals