I believe free online materials can be tremendously valuable, but...
> To see how effective these courses can be, look at Big History’s impact on students’ writing skills, and particularly how it helps close the gap between high- and low-income students. At the beginning and end of the school year, teachers who use the course get a measure of how well each of their students is writing. According to the OER Project’s internal data, on average, only 26 percent of the students taking Big History in low-income schools start the academic year rated “proficient” or better in writing. By the end of the school year, that number has jumped to 62 percent—which is roughly on par with Big History students at private schools.
Color me skeptical that a history course can magically turn students into proficient writers over one school year.
As a mid-level engineer, lately I’ve come to think that improving my writing (or more broadly, communication) skills is the best way to grow my career.
All of those great ideas you have aren’t worth anything if you can’t communicate them. We try to make technical decisions as objectively as possible, but often some amount of persuasion is required to align everyone on your preferred outcome.
Just anecdata but this matches my (as an engineer) experience exactly.
For any engineer, transitioning to people management of any sort, or just to have a better voice in any decisions, I think that broadly communication improvement, and probably some sort of project management should be a very high priority.
Another note is that if the material is actually something that a student can engage with the work tends to be a lot better because people take more pride in it. In high school I tended to get lousy grades and struggled to focus, but in college it's been easier because I have more flexibility in my topics and can choose things that matter more to me.
I'm not. A course that is heavy on reading and writing can transform the writing ability of a student, especially when the starting point is relatively low.
I've witnessed this in my friends when we were in college. English was not our first language, and we started with roughly the same level of writing ability. But the ones in philosophy/history/sociology classes quickly outgrew those of us in engineering school. I've read some of their assignments, and the improvement could be seen on a weekly basis.
It's important that digital textbooks are more than a pdf of the pages found in a traditional textbook. You can do so much more with an explorable interactive experience.
I shared my attempt at this on Hacker News a few years ago.
Nice work, a great gift to us all. I originally started "Designing
Sound" as a website full of easily clickable and runnable Pd
patches. In some ways publication with MIT forced me to shoehorn a
much richer experience into a standard textbook format. To that extent
I remain disappointed with how "web" technologies turned out for
education. In the end I had to take down the site in the face of
leaching parasites that linked to the material in such a way as to
saddle me with the bandwidth burden while freeloading as "meta
educational" sites. 15 years later I am resolved to make my next text,
after "Ethics for Hackers", be a more permanent free resource taking
account of lessons learned.
That's a real shame. Ideally we'd bundle together a bunch of things like this into a torrent so that the people using them paid the bandwidth costs, but 70% of people are using hand computers that have been deliberately crippled to make this impossible.
I admire your work. Can I ask how you deal with upkeep? I can't possibly keep updating software to deal with new JavaScript versions, and fielding reports like, "It fails on xx browser running on yy platform" are a real impediment to progress.
I've been thinking about how to solve this problem, which Konrad Hinsen calls "software collapse". I think we can define an "archival virtual machine" specification that is efficient enough to be usable but simple enough that it never needs to be updated and is easy to implement on any platform; then we can compile our explorable explanations into binaries for that machine. Thenceforth we only need to write new implementations of the archival virtual machine platform as new platforms come along: JavaScript, WebAssembly, PostmarketOS, or whatever.
Here are some of the things I've written about this in the recent past, though I seem to be suffering from profoundly pathological levels of analysis paralysis:
I think there will always be a hard core of explorables that really need the performance of a modern computer to express what you want to express, but I think there are a huge number that aren't, and for which the penalty of running 10x or 100x slower than they would in JavaScript with WebGL is worth the benefit of lasting forever without any maintenance.
For things that have some direct real-world applicability, like solving a sparse linear system (that isn't too large) or estimating the transmittance spectrum of a slice of the atmosphere, this kind of reproducibility seems even more important to me than for tutorial material.
I think that it was this kind of thinking which led to the Java Virtual Machine. Not for the specifical problem of archiving, of course, but for portability, which is almost the same problem. Archiving is just porting to a future platform.
Archiving is porting to platforms that are created after you die, which makes it harder to test on them, which in turn can make the porting task harder in some ways.
I did mention the JVM in two out of four of the notes I linked there, and it was certainly an influential step in the direction I'm going, but I'm aiming for deeper levels of reproducibility than the JVM tries to offer.
I haven't much upkeep or compatibility issues. There are a few people that have started working on translations. I imagine they might need some help. In general though, it's a simple site with no server communication, running on github pages, with almost no libraries.
I use the site for my own students when I teach physics, and they catch a few typos and bugs each semester.
great work! it' such a pity that so much gets put into PDFs still as a medium for textbooks when interactive content is so much better.
I've been working on some integrations along the lines of explorable texts that are backend by compute in jupyter - like this mini one on fourier series https://curvenote.github.io/demo-fourier/ (pres the power button to connect to a binder instance).
There ia notebook behind the scenes, and the idea is to try and move from custom web/js development towards something that a content creator say who is familar with python can use. Also open up the possibility of computing with libraries in the python ecosystem, and with compute needs beyond what we can achieve in the browser.
Still this example is a one off react site, built with JS knowledge.
Working from the other direction I'm also working with folks on a static site generator that can use Markdown(MyST) and Juptyer Notebooks to build book like content, this is a little like JupyterBook but with a JS stack that can integrate the explorable JS based interactivity on the link above.
The idea is again to let people focus on content and have a site generator let them build the deployable book. The cli that does that is open source and in beta at the moment in terms of readiness https://curvenote.com/docs/web but we're excited about what it can do already and busy working on the explorable integrations - looking for feedback and direction too :)
I'm a homeschool parent, I used https://openstax.org/ high school physics book with my son last year. Really great resource, its essentially Newtonian physics for the first 3/4ths, so hasn't really changed in 300 years, no need to publish a new textbook every year. Also they embed Khan Academy videos, embedded Flash based "games", and they have really well done end of chapter questions with answer key (need to show proof of homeschooling to get them to email you the answer key). Highly recommend it!
And, unlike the OER project Gates is funding, the resources from OpenStax and Khan Academy are under Creative Commons licenses that guarantees they'll stay free. The OER resources here are "open" only in the sense that, for the time being, they don't charge you to access them. Gates carefully avoids any mention of licensing throughout his entire article.
So I'm comfortable labeling OER as "openwashing", given the current draconian copyright environment.
In addition to OpenStax and Khan Academy, I can recommend MIT OCW and, if it's legal in your country, downloading textbooks from Library Genesis.
However, surely Gates is correct when he says, "Courses should be created by educators and subject-matter experts, supplemented with professional development, and regularly improved with feedback from the teachers who use them."
There's also LibreTexts, which are designed to be remix-able. I think they pull in most/all of the OpenStax content into their platform as well as generating their own.
It's probably also worth mentioning Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, although you probably won't find an up-to-date textbook for a class in them unless you're studying Classical Greek or something. And no lesson plans.
It sounds like you are trying to insinuate that he's pushing the OER project to make a profit at a later time.
The Gates Foundation has funded KhanAcademy in the past.
I don't know all of his motivations, but if someone is making a profit out of this at a later time, it'll probably be oer-prj.com, not Gates or his Foundation.
But there's nothing wrong with profits. Profits are great! My concern is teachers and students potentially being put into a very unprofitable situation where they become dependent on oer-prj.com, perhaps when their angel funding runs out. Under current copyright law they wouldn't have the right to keep making copies of the PDFs they can download today, unless those materials are explicitly licensed to protect them from such rugpulls; they'd have to either pay whatever price oer-prj.com decides to charge, or switch lesson plans and textbooks with, potentially, no warning. Possibly no price will be sufficient if the rugpull is part of a US sanctions package against their country.
Legal protection from such scams is central to the usual definition of "Open Educational Resources", as articulated for example by UNESCO: "Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others." https://www.unesco.org/en/communication-information/open-sol...
The so-called "OER project" Gates is funding fails to meet that bar.
It does appear that https://www.youtube.com/c/OERProject/videos are CC-BY-3.0, though none of the other material seems to be. Naive searching doesn't turn up any of the videos or material extracted from them on Wikimedia Commons or archive.org but maybe that'd be a useful project.
Added: the Gates Foundation did (and may still for all I know) provide funding to some OER projects 10+ years ago, also to Creative Commons on the idea that organization was infrastructure for OER or something like that. I'm not really suprised if they've focused on getting schools to adopt whatever they are funding, really open or not, since then; it sounds like they've had some success. If there's a trove of under-exploited openly licensed educational videos linked above based on that engagement, and/or based on YouTube adding the ability to opt into CC-BY-3.0 licensing sometime before then, I'm mildly satisifed.
I’ve been thinking about writing an open textbook (on a graduate level math topic that comes up frequently in undergrad math courses) but haven’t quite found a publication route that I like. Anyone have any advice on where to publish such a thing, or how to go about distributing it?
Start by just putting it online. Get a wordpress, or use github pages, or dump a bunch of files in an AWS bucket, but get it online first. Worry about publishing once people start actually asking whether they can get paper or ebook copies, at which point you'll also get people suggesting ways to get it published. The biggest hurdle to having good information accessible to all is folks never putting that information online for the rest of the world to actually learn from =)
LibreTexts is supposed to be good in terms of authoring and remixing content. They definitely have distribution — used a lot at UC Davis and other big schools, with millions of students reached annually.
If you want to write, publish and deploy - online the tool I am building can help you do that, either via markdown+git or an online editor https://curvenote.com . That would let you write but also use LaTeX math for equation typesetting as well ad numbering, referencing etc... you can also host and deploy it on a free service too as well as convert to PDF/Tex when/if you need to generate a hard copy.
I would start by just publishing articles to a Wordpress site. You'll get long-tail SEO on articles and often helpful feedback. Build up from there and eventually you'll find you've written a textbook.
That's basically what I did with organic chemistry.
Work? Being no worse than commercial textbooks can be a surprisingly low bar. "[A]ligned to state standards and created by well-known subject-matter experts and master teachers" is regrettably far from sufficient to avoid being really really bad.
OER authorship processes and incentives seem regrettably similar to those of closed textbooks. Especially around correctness. Even the few which manage an online errata/issue database can still struggle because of culture and incentives. Eg, "Ok, we'll tweak that wording so it's "not wrong"", rather than crafting a much harder real fix, despite no hope that students won't be left harmed. Anyone know of any efforts somewhere getting this right?
So for instance, openstax and Utah Open Text (two projects in comments here) have astronomy texts, which like the most popular commercial intro astronomy college textbooks, teach the Sun as yellow. Another place this conception shows up, is on astronomy education research's lists of common misconceptions in astronomy education. :/ Conversations with even first-tier astronomy graduate students can go "What color is the Sun? Yellow. Sunlight? White... wait.. err... that doesn't make sense, does it?" Incompatible conceptions, perhaps first learned in kindergarten, persisting unintegrated into graduate school. Persisting with repeated reinforcement. Because the incentives around textbook correctness, let alone around transferable understanding, are just that severely dysfunctional. Even Wikipedia has been managing to more-or-less get this one right for a few years now. But not textbooks. And not OER textbooks.
The OER bit seems like it could help, by enabling different processes and incentives, but... not just yet. I'd like to suggest there's an untapped market and opportunity for disruption... but what might that look like?
I had a look at the OERProject YouTube channel[1] (which it turns out _is_ freely licensed—at least for some videos, as pointed out in another comment here[2]). But the thing that bothers me so often about video content is a dearth of sources cited. We can start out small potatoes: simple attribution—okay, great, your video is CC-BY-SA, but where did you get the still that you used @x:29 into the video? From there, though, what I'd like to see is Wikipedia-style sourcing, or, failing that, where all major inflection points in the video come with at a minimum a sort of "See more" block of links that you can use to dive further into the topic. Not only is it the right thing to do, it would be a tremendous boon to teaching the fundamentals of scholarship, which students already have dedicated classes for, to learn e.g. how to write research papers and discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources. What these videos do, on the other hand, is to say, "Hey, you know all that stuff that you're learning in your writing class? It's all bullshit—after all, look at us; we're actually a part of a professional publishing pipeline, and we don't do anything like that."
52 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] thread> To see how effective these courses can be, look at Big History’s impact on students’ writing skills, and particularly how it helps close the gap between high- and low-income students. At the beginning and end of the school year, teachers who use the course get a measure of how well each of their students is writing. According to the OER Project’s internal data, on average, only 26 percent of the students taking Big History in low-income schools start the academic year rated “proficient” or better in writing. By the end of the school year, that number has jumped to 62 percent—which is roughly on par with Big History students at private schools.
Color me skeptical that a history course can magically turn students into proficient writers over one school year.
That is the "write better" treadmill. Run it long enough (on any meaty topic) and you will improve.
I write a lot nowadays. Proposals, reports, documentation, papers.
One might think that scientific writing is entirely different from humanities writing. That would not be true.
I had a very good middle school education in humanities, and that education comes in handy whenever I write something, anything.
Writing has some core characteristics that are everywhere. Once you learn them well, they keep paying forever.
All of those great ideas you have aren’t worth anything if you can’t communicate them. We try to make technical decisions as objectively as possible, but often some amount of persuasion is required to align everyone on your preferred outcome.
http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
I've witnessed this in my friends when we were in college. English was not our first language, and we started with roughly the same level of writing ability. But the ones in philosophy/history/sociology classes quickly outgrew those of us in engineering school. I've read some of their assignments, and the improvement could be seen on a weekly basis.
Practice matters. Feedback loop matters.
I shared my attempt at this on Hacker News a few years ago.
https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17178031
Here are some of the things I've written about this in the recent past, though I seem to be suffering from profoundly pathological levels of analysis paralysis:
https://dercuano.github.io/notes/uvc-archiving.html
https://dercuano.github.io/notes/archival-vm.html
https://derctuo.github.io/notes/veskeno-outline.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32218329
I think there will always be a hard core of explorables that really need the performance of a modern computer to express what you want to express, but I think there are a huge number that aren't, and for which the penalty of running 10x or 100x slower than they would in JavaScript with WebGL is worth the benefit of lasting forever without any maintenance.
For things that have some direct real-world applicability, like solving a sparse linear system (that isn't too large) or estimating the transmittance spectrum of a slice of the atmosphere, this kind of reproducibility seems even more important to me than for tutorial material.
I did mention the JVM in two out of four of the notes I linked there, and it was certainly an influential step in the direction I'm going, but I'm aiming for deeper levels of reproducibility than the JVM tries to offer.
I use the site for my own students when I teach physics, and they catch a few typos and bugs each semester.
I've been working on some integrations along the lines of explorable texts that are backend by compute in jupyter - like this mini one on fourier series https://curvenote.github.io/demo-fourier/ (pres the power button to connect to a binder instance).
There ia notebook behind the scenes, and the idea is to try and move from custom web/js development towards something that a content creator say who is familar with python can use. Also open up the possibility of computing with libraries in the python ecosystem, and with compute needs beyond what we can achieve in the browser.
Still this example is a one off react site, built with JS knowledge.
Working from the other direction I'm also working with folks on a static site generator that can use Markdown(MyST) and Juptyer Notebooks to build book like content, this is a little like JupyterBook but with a JS stack that can integrate the explorable JS based interactivity on the link above.
The idea is again to let people focus on content and have a site generator let them build the deployable book. The cli that does that is open source and in beta at the moment in terms of readiness https://curvenote.com/docs/web but we're excited about what it can do already and busy working on the explorable integrations - looking for feedback and direction too :)
some example of building with it:
- my blog https://www.stevejpurves.com/la-palma-earthquakes - a book like report https://climasoma.curve.space/
So I'm comfortable labeling OER as "openwashing", given the current draconian copyright environment.
In addition to OpenStax and Khan Academy, I can recommend MIT OCW and, if it's legal in your country, downloading textbooks from Library Genesis.
However, surely Gates is correct when he says, "Courses should be created by educators and subject-matter experts, supplemented with professional development, and regularly improved with feedback from the teachers who use them."
It's probably also worth mentioning Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, although you probably won't find an up-to-date textbook for a class in them unless you're studying Classical Greek or something. And no lesson plans.
But there's nothing wrong with profits. Profits are great! My concern is teachers and students potentially being put into a very unprofitable situation where they become dependent on oer-prj.com, perhaps when their angel funding runs out. Under current copyright law they wouldn't have the right to keep making copies of the PDFs they can download today, unless those materials are explicitly licensed to protect them from such rugpulls; they'd have to either pay whatever price oer-prj.com decides to charge, or switch lesson plans and textbooks with, potentially, no warning. Possibly no price will be sufficient if the rugpull is part of a US sanctions package against their country.
Legal protection from such scams is central to the usual definition of "Open Educational Resources", as articulated for example by UNESCO: "Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others." https://www.unesco.org/en/communication-information/open-sol...
The so-called "OER project" Gates is funding fails to meet that bar.
And that's slimy.
Added: the Gates Foundation did (and may still for all I know) provide funding to some OER projects 10+ years ago, also to Creative Commons on the idea that organization was infrastructure for OER or something like that. I'm not really suprised if they've focused on getting schools to adopt whatever they are funding, really open or not, since then; it sounds like they've had some success. If there's a trove of under-exploited openly licensed educational videos linked above based on that engagement, and/or based on YouTube adding the ability to opt into CC-BY-3.0 licensing sometime before then, I'm mildly satisifed.
That's basically what I did with organic chemistry.
Work? Being no worse than commercial textbooks can be a surprisingly low bar. "[A]ligned to state standards and created by well-known subject-matter experts and master teachers" is regrettably far from sufficient to avoid being really really bad.
OER authorship processes and incentives seem regrettably similar to those of closed textbooks. Especially around correctness. Even the few which manage an online errata/issue database can still struggle because of culture and incentives. Eg, "Ok, we'll tweak that wording so it's "not wrong"", rather than crafting a much harder real fix, despite no hope that students won't be left harmed. Anyone know of any efforts somewhere getting this right?
So for instance, openstax and Utah Open Text (two projects in comments here) have astronomy texts, which like the most popular commercial intro astronomy college textbooks, teach the Sun as yellow. Another place this conception shows up, is on astronomy education research's lists of common misconceptions in astronomy education. :/ Conversations with even first-tier astronomy graduate students can go "What color is the Sun? Yellow. Sunlight? White... wait.. err... that doesn't make sense, does it?" Incompatible conceptions, perhaps first learned in kindergarten, persisting unintegrated into graduate school. Persisting with repeated reinforcement. Because the incentives around textbook correctness, let alone around transferable understanding, are just that severely dysfunctional. Even Wikipedia has been managing to more-or-less get this one right for a few years now. But not textbooks. And not OER textbooks.
The OER bit seems like it could help, by enabling different processes and incentives, but... not just yet. I'd like to suggest there's an untapped market and opportunity for disruption... but what might that look like?
1. <https://www.youtube.com/c/OERProject>
2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32338460>