EdTech@VCCS

franken_durbin

U.S. Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Al Franken of Minnesota have introduced legislation called the Affordable College Textbook Act with the goal of making college textbooks affordable and openly available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Bill S.1704 does 5 things, according to Senator Durbin’s press release:

Creates a grant program to support pilot programs at colleges and universities to create and expand the use of open textbooks with priority for those programs that will achieve the highest savings for students;
Ensures that any open textbooks or educational materials created using program funds will be freely and easily accessible to the public via a CC BY license;
Requires entities who receive funds to complete a report on the effectiveness of the program in achieving savings for students;
Improves existing requirements for publishers to make all textbooks and other educational materials available for sale individually rather than as a bundle; and
Requires the Government Accountability Office to report to Congress by 2017 with an update on the price trends of college textbooks.

In its own press release about Bill S. 1704, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) noted several existing open textbook programs that have proved successful in lowering costs for students, including Tidewater Community College’s “Z Degree” Program in Business Administration, the first degree program in the nation with zero textbook costs.

Also, last week at the OpenEd Conference in Utah, three OER projects from Virginia’s Community Colleges were included in the closing keynote: the Chancellor’s OER Adoption Grant, Tidewater’s Z Degree, and Northern Virginia’s OER General Education Certificate. The calculated cost savings to students from these 3 projects as well as other OER projects across the nation were tallied at $1 million dollars. (see related post on OpenEd 2013).

These are exciting times, and there is some real momentum developing around textbook affordability and OER. Virginia has a foot in the door. I hope the Commonwealth, and the VCCS, will continue to be a big part of these important efforts.

The_Future_of_Higher_Education___With_Good_Reason_Radio

The public radio show With Good Reason broadcast an episode this weekend on The Future of Higher Education and featured the Minding the Future/OpenVA conference. The episode is embedded above, in case you missed it. Below is an excerpt from a WGR press release about the show:

The program will feature the panel of David Wiley, Kin Lane, Alan Levine, Gardner Campbell, and Audrey Watters, moderated by Professor and Chair of History and American Studies at UMW Jeffrey McClurken. Experts from Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia State University also will discuss the challenges and opportunities of digital learning. The two-day conference was sponsored by the State Council for Higher Education and the University of Mary Washington.

Carol_Ann_Childress

A few weeks ago, VCCS colleague Carol Childress passed away unexpectedly. Her death is a significant loss for the VCCS, both in the Information Technology Services unit where she worked as well as in the rest of the community college system. Carol assisted with enterprise and other centralized technology systems. She was close to fulfilling 30 years of state service, having worked at Virginia Western Community College and then with VCCS ITS at the Greenfield facility. She was truly dedicated to the Virginia Community College System, and kept ITS grounded in the mission to serve students first.

To remember and honor Carol, the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education has setup a scholarship fund in her name. Carol generously supported the mission of the VCCS through her years of service and also supported the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education (VFCCE) through the CVC Campaign.

If you wish to contribute to this fund, you can send a check payable to the VFCCE to the address below. Please indicate that your contribution is for the Carol Childress Scholarship Fund. You can also donate on-line at www.vccs.edu/giving/.

VFCCE
101 N 14th Street, 15th Floor
Richmond, VA 23219

Here is a video of my OpenEd 2013 presentation.

OpenEd 2013

A Second Chance for First-Year Students: Using OER to Increase Student Success

Here are my slides from my session at the OpenEd Conference.

OpenEd 2013: Opening the VCCS from Richard Sebastian

Have you registered for the FantasTech Virtual Conference?

Mark Nov 8-15, 2013 on your calendar and join VCCS colleagues, as well as other educators from around the globe, at this virtual conference. Come as you are (or stay as you were!) without packing, standing in a line, or missing a meeting at work: well, OK, that’s not the best tag line, is it? How about this, though: registration is free. Get online and register now! http://inside.reynolds.edu/inside_itde/cde/virtualconf/default.htm

This year’s theme is Global Teaching and Learning. How are you reaching out beyond the walls of your campus? Do you use technology to bring in guest speakers via Skype, Bb Collaborate, or other video system? Are you sharing or using resources from other open sources? What does it mean to be global in 2013?

The FantasTech Conference will take place in a 3D immersive environment, like Second Life, but so much better. In 1991, Bricken stated that virtual reality was in the “unique position of being commercially available before being academically understood” and that advancements in this “new computational paradigm fundamentally redefine the interface between humans and computers” (Bricken). Unlike Second Life, in the Avaya virtual platform you don’t have wings, you can’t be a cat, necromancer, or ball of fire, and you use your actual name. Avaya is built for business and professional interactions and meant to be simple to use and navigate. And it is. 3D environments need to be academically understood and I invite you to come experience it. Don’t worry: there will be many opportunities for presenters and attendees to practice walking, waving, and clapping (although you really won’t need much practice). We are all learning together.

This story may encourage you to give this virtual conference a try: this summer, I was meeting in the virtual environment to plan this conference with some of my innovative peers in VCCS. My 10-year old grandson happened to be visiting, so I told him to hang out with me and watch this cool thing. He was intrigued, albeit not as ‘wowed’ as I expected. He saw the people (avatars) with whom I was interacting and heard their names and voices. Flash-forward to one month later when he was visiting me at work. A colleague stopped by my office, and when he left my grandson asked “Was that Patrick?” Me: “What??” “You know, Patrick who you met with this summer?” Wow – he was connecting the real and virtual worlds without missing a beat.

This is your future student.

I am hoping your curiosity has been peaked. I am hoping that you will use mindfulness to provide academic understanding to this interface between humans and computers. I am hoping that you will register and attend. Even better, please consider proposing a presentation so we can all learn from one another.

Bricken, M. No Interface to Design. Cyberspace: The First Steps. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 1991.

If you don’t recognize the title of this blog post, it is a lyric from Talking Heads’s song, Life During Wartime, the music video that played on heavy rotation on MTV when the station launched in 1980. I watched it over and over and over that summer, between videos of Men at Work, Eddy Grant, Madness, Duran Duran, and The Fixx. Later in high school, I saw Talking Heads play at UVA and the Hampton Coliseum.

Now, you may ask yourself, why am I referencing Talking Heads on a blog devoted to educational technology at Virginia’s Community Colleges (You may also ask yourself, How do I work this)? Because this link to a Community College Times headline scrolled by on my Twitter feed and rekindled my New Wave nostalgia and connected it to my current work for community colleges. The article profiled Steve Scales, a percussionist for the Talking Heads who toured with the band and appeared in the concert film Stop Making Sense. Scales, a veteran, returned to school after a successful musical career to earn an associate degree in Human Services from Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. From the CCT:

Scales is working toward an associate degree in human services with a goal of being a counselor. He plans to eventually transfer to get a bachelor’s degree, and then a master’s degree. Scales, a Vietnam-era veteran, hopes to use his education to help other veterans.

“I watch the news and see that there are a lot of veterans coming home with a lot of problems,” Scales said. “If I could get a degree in counseling, they would talk to me because I could relate to them.”

Getting used to school life has been a bit of an adjustment for the former “king of clubbing,” he admitted. Recently, he received an invitation to a birthday party for a friend—a well-known photographer. When deciding whether to go to the party, Scales had to take into account his class schedule—he has an 8 a.m. class on Thursdays.

Here are the Talking Heads performing live with a younger Scales on percussion.

Talking Heads - Life During Wartime

Canvas_Grants___Canvas_by_Instructure

Instructure, the company that makes the Canvas LMS, has just announced the Innovation in Education grant, offering a total of $100k in grants to spur innovation in education. Five innovative higher ed proposals (five for K12, as well) will be selected by Canvas to receive $10K in grant money. Submission topics may include (but are not limited to):