Free online textbooks work
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
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.
I shared my attempt at this on Hacker News a few years ago.
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/
> 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.
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?
That's basically what I did with organic chemistry.