January Optimism about OER

ivan

Last year in March I did a lot of soul searching about my mission in the EdTech space. At the time, figuring out the incentives for authors and teachers to produce open educational resources (OER) seemed like an insurmountable mountain to climb. I didn’t see a clear path for interoperability between content sources. OER yes, but OER how?

Since then I’ve learned a lot more about the open content landscape and I’m starting to feel more optimistic about the prospects for OER. Could year 2018 be when the switch-over happens? I think so.

 

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Impression from NYC and the RC

ivan

Two months ago I was on a train going from Montreal to New York City. It’s a long ride, but I used the time on the train to triage all the coding project ideas I could work on while at the Recurse Center (RC). So many projects; so many ideas.

Today I’m on the same train heading back to Montreal and have another 10 hours to triage the thoughts, experiences, and observations about the big city and the social experiment that is RC. Here is my best shot at it—stream-of-consciousness-style—before I forget it all.

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The textbook business

ivan

This is a followup on my previous post about the challenges of open educational resources (OER) production and adoption. I’ve come to the conclusion that the key aspect holding back the “OER dream” is not the lack of collaboration tools or the ability for teachers to discover material, but the quality of the content. You can’t write a textbook by committee. It’s as simple as that!

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The state of open educational resources in 2017

ivan

I spend the last couple of weeks exploring the open educational resources (OER) landscape and wanted to write down my thoughts and observations about the field. The promise of an OER “revolution” that will put quality learning material into the hands of every student has been around for several decades, but we are yet to see OER displace the established publishers. Why is it that “open content” hasn’t taken off more, and what can we do to make things happen in the coming decade?

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Improving the math chapter

ivan

The goal for the NO BULLSHIT guide to MATH & PHYSICS was to make a concise textbook that teaches university-level calculus and mechanics in a nice “combined package.” The math fundamentals chapter grew out of the need to introduce the prerequisite material that many students often lack. I didn’t want to be like “y’all should remember this math from high school,” because if you don’t remember the material such comments would not be very helpful. A review of high school math would be more helpful.

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Linear algebra problem sets progress

ivan

I’ve been working on the problem sets for the linear algebra book non-stop for the past month. It’s a lot of work, but also very rewarding. I’m going through online resources and looking for inspiration by reading exams and books to find illustrative exercises and challenging problems. This leads to a lot of  learning and reviewing of ideas along the way…

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