Saylor101: Saylor Course Development

Unit 1: Saylor Academy and Open Education

• Unit 1 Learning Outcomes Page

• 1.1: Mission and History

  The Saylor Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. We have one trustee, Michael J. Saylor, who is the founder, CEO, and chairman of the business intelligence firm MicroStrategy Inc. Saylor Academy’s mission is to open education to all, and it works towards that mission primarily through developing and maintaining open college courses.
  

  • 1.1.1: Early Years

    The Saylor Foundation was established in 1999 but did not actively enter the open education space until 2008, when Mr. Saylor hired the first program director to launch his Free Education Initiative, which has focused exclusively on the development of free, online courses. Since that time, the Free Education Initiative has evolved to a new name -- the Saylor Academy --  and expanded rapidly for several years to support the development of over 300 higher education, K-12 and professional development courses. These courses were developed by hundreds of academic consultants, several devoted editors, and dozens of Academy staff over a period of about 5 years.
    

  • 1.1.2: Current Efforts

    Following several years of rapid growth, it became clear that fully supporting over 300 online courses was more than our small core staff could manage. In addition to customary course updates necessary for any course, the open access materials comprising many of our courses were subject to “link rot.” Without the ability to dedicate the necessary resources to adequately maintain this full suite of courses, the Saylor team made the decision to focus development and maintenance efforts on a subset of about 100 courses. These are the courses you will find listed in the course catalog here. The remaining 200 courses have been archived on our legacy site here, and are available for independent study, remix, and adaptation, but Saylor staff do not actively maintain these courses and they are not currently slated for redevelopment. With our available resources, Saylor is focused on advancing open education in three key ways -- improving our supported open courses, expanding open credentialing opportunities, and leveraging open learning technologies.
    

• 1.2: Open Education Movement

  While the open education movement is defined by a diversity of different objectives, its most salient shared goal is to increase student access to educational resources (for a glimpse at some of the various perspectives of different OER stakeholders, take a look at this work-in-progress strategy document). MIT is credited with jumpstarting the movement when it announced in 2001 that it would offer all its course materials online – free of charge to the public – via the MIT OpenCourseWare project. In 2002, UNESCO held a Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, during which the concept of open educational resources was first articulated and defined. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has been the primary grant-maker in the open education space over the past ten years via its Open Educational Resources program area, has defined the term open educational resources (OER) as: “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or repurposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”¹
  

  
  

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  ¹ Atkins, Daniel E., Brown, John Seely, and Hammond, Allen L. (2007). “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities”. Menlo Park, CA: The William and Flora Hewlett Academy. p. 4. Retrieved December 3, 2010.
  

  • 1.2.1: OER Content Licenses

    • Creative Commons: "About the Licenses" URL

      Read this page, which explains the different types of licenses Creative Commons has made available to copyright holders. As indicated in the Hewlett Foundation’s definition, a key element of the OER movement has been the adoption and use of alternative licenses that enable the free use or repurposing of educational content. To this end, Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that “develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation,” has released several licenses that enable copyright holders to articulate the rights they wish to reserve for themselves while waiving others. These licenses provide copyright holders with a way of licensing their work such that they enable and encourage others to share, promote, remix, and/or build on their work. All Saylor courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License and all resources linked within Saylor courses must be public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons, GNU, or other license that explicitly allows broad republication and redistribution. Open resources allow Saylor to host (and in many cases revise) course materials so students can have unfettered access. Additionally, licensing our courses CC BY allows and encourages adoption and reuse by those in many other learning contexts.
      

  • 1.2.2: Approaches

    The open education movement consists of many different models, stakeholders, and contributors, including commercial and non-commercial content producers (e.g., Khan Academy, TEDTalks, OpenStax), content repositories (e.g., OER Commons, and Skills Commons), school initiatives (e.g., Tidewater Community College’s Z-Degree, Maricopa Community Colleges’ Maricopa Millions) and more. The open education movement is a vibrant ecosystem consisting of hundreds of different contributors, schools, aggregators, re-users, developers, and OER enthusiasts. 

    Over the past few years, stakeholders seem to have reached a consensus that the problem of content has been solved (i.e., enough OERs exist), but the movement needs to increase its reach and adoption. To do so, the movement must deal with large, complex challenges, such as designing and delivering assessments and working with accreditation agencies to enable OER users to receive degrees. Saylor approaches these challenges by supporting open courses in high-enrollment areas and working with partner schools, credit-recommending bodies, corporations, and other organizations to encourage both recognition of Saylor students’ nontraditional learning (through credit or other credentials) and broad adoption and reuse of our courses in disparate settings around the world. 
    

    Open courses mean that in nearly all cases, students aren’t required to do any of the assignments in a Saylor course. This means that the students who complete our courses are particularly motivated. We want to capitalize on that motivation by providing the necessary scaffolding for student success and retention, and by making the courses as engaging as possible. This includes interesting content sequenced appropriately, but also frequent formative and other assessment activities paired with specific feedback and examples. It also means that students will bypass things they don’t see as valuable, so each course component needs to be interesting, practical, and obviously related to the course goals.
    

• 1.3: Your Role as a Course Developer

  As a Saylor Academy consultant, you will be tasked with conducting revision of one of our existing courses, or creating a new course from scratch. You may be asked to replace copyright or other unsuitable content with appropriate open content, revise or redevelop a final exam, develop a series of assessments, conduct a peer review, implement review results, or complete any number of other review/content creation tasks. Please note that we adopt a collaborative approach to course development and that all materials submitted to the Academy will be reviewed, edited, and often modified by editors, peer reviewers, and other Academy consultants and staff. We request that you remain open to this feedback and share our collaborative approach.

  We are entrusting you to identify, curate, and frame existing web-based educational resources and to tie them to achievable learning outcomes for a chosen course. We rely on your teaching experience, pedagogical approach, and subject matter expertise to craft the most high-quality, instructive courses possible and we welcome any and all suggestions you might have for the refinement of our processes. It is important to remember that in order to be sustainable and scalable, all Saylor courses are designed to be learning pathways for self-directed, independent learners. Students will not receive feedback from a professor. We need you to intuit the problems and questions students will encounter as they work through a given course with the materials you have selected and to be as inventive as possible in shaping our courses such that they respond to those issues.