Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

The OpenEd Conference’s future is unclear. Last week, during this year’s edition (Phoenix, AZ, Oct 30 – Nov 1), their current organizers, David Wiley and Lumen Learning, announced that they will step away.

“This year’s conference is the last I plan to organize,” said David Wiley, Founder and Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning and Education Fellow at Creative Commons, said in a statement.

“As currently constituted, the conference does not leverage all the energy, enthusiasm, passion, and leadership ability in our increasingly large and increasingly diverse community,” Wiley explained.

Momentous news from our cofounder @opencontent today about the Open Education Conference. It’s an exciting time for the OpenEd community, and we look forward to seeing what this revisioning brings. https://t.co/obf7Tpts0Y

— Lumen Learning (@LumenLearning) October 30, 2019

The Open Education Conference, the primary OER-related gathering in the U.S., reached its sixteenth year.

This year’s edition attracted a record attendance of 850 people interested in open educational resources and practices. [Picture above]

Since its creation, the event generated a sense of community; participants met, shared ideas and fostered collaborations.

Analyst and consultant, Michael Feldstein, explained, “OpenEd was always at least partly an exercise in coalition politics. The attendees were a mix of people coming with different primary and secondary goals that overlapped enough for them to make common cause. That coalition has crumbled. In fact, it has been crumbling for some time.”

Researcher and professor George Siemens tweeted “adjourning a central community will damage, at least in the short term, the overall #opened movement. Groups will spin-off, driven by individual’s identity (we saw this in the lead up to the social media conversation). Fragmentation. Antagonism.”

Whether new organizers will handle the conference is unknown at the moment. “This is not a call for another person or organization to come forward to keep the same conference running the same way into the future,” said Wiley.

“It is not the end of OER or open education. But there are multiple paths leading forward from here,” wrote Michael Feldstein.

Community input is being already shared on Google Doc.

Provide your input on the future of the OpenEd Conference! See below for links for both the community-created feedback form and where to view responses. #OpenEd19 https://t.co/BCs4q3V1WW

— Open Ed Conference (@openedconf) November 1, 2019

Well That Was a Memorable OpenEd Conference https://t.co/n08sY1uWtU pic.twitter.com/FreOicYwwA

— Phil Hill (@PhilOnEdTech) November 2, 2019

Hey #OER peeps. @SaltLakeCC surpassed 10 million in savings. We are running 801 open sections this fall. @Jeffaird @brenda_utah @evolprof @TimBeagley @TJS2266 @SLCCHuftalin @CNBlank @a_canavan @acorbettscott @opencontent @OpenStax @LumenLearning @open_textbooks @AdamDastrup pic.twitter.com/5GZPAqHp4m

— Jason Pickavance (@jpickava) October 24, 2019

IBL News | New York

MIT president, L. Rafael Reif, wrote another letter to the institution’s community dealing with the troubling atmosphere at the university after Epstein’s payments and cover-up.

Addressing the fury ignition on campus, Reif said, “it is clear we still have a long way to go to achieve our ideal of ‘One MIT.”

“I will never forget the voices of students, staff and faculty who spoke about the painful impact on our community of MIT’s engagement with Epstein, including the intense effects on survivors of sexual assault,” he wrote.

In his letter issued this Thursday, Reif mentioned the AAU campus climate survey, which indicates that at MIT, out of the 2,035 female students who completed the survey, 189 experienced sexual harassment severe enough that it “interfered with [their] academic or professional performance.” And 211 female MIT graduate students responding to the survey reported experiencing harassing behavior from a member of our faculty or other instructional staff. For 65 of them, the harassment came from their advisor.

Out of 4,602 MIT undergraduates for 2018-19, 46 percent are female, according to the admissions department, and women make up 35 percent of this year’s 6,972 grad students.

In addition to disrespecting women, he admitted that minorities, staff, and other groups at MIT “confront similar obstacles and harms that also demand our empathy and attention.”

“Let’s not rest until we create an MIT where every member of our community is treated with dignity and respect,” Reif concluded.

IBL News | Milwaukee, WI

IEEE’s Learning with MOOCS awarded Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, for his “meritorious service for outstanding contribution”. Meanwhile, Dr. Russ Meier, professor at Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), received recognition as Chair of the conference.

Both scholars were awarded during the sixth edition of the Learning with MOOCs Conference this week in Milwaukee, WI.

[In the picture above, Manuel Castro, IEEE fellow and organizer of the conference, with Anant Agarwal on the left]

Two universities were honored for the Best Paper Award:

• Improving MOOC quality using learning analytics tools, Jeffrey S. Cross, Tokio Tech, Japan
• F-Lingo: Integrating lexical feature identification into MOOC platforms for learning professional and academic English, Alannah Fitzgerald, The University of Waikato, New Zeland

“There is a vibrant community of investigators researching and the future is very bright,” said Russ Meier, who read the 37 papers presented at the conference.

He summarized his conclusions of the event in the video below.

The 2020 Learning with MOOCS event will be celebrated in Antigua, Guatemala, from September 30 to October 2. Universidad Galileo will host the gathering.

[Disclosure: IBL was one of the sponsors of the conference, along with Future Learn, edX, Class Central and the Milwaukee School of Engineering]