We’d like to draw your attention to KA Lite, an offline version of the Khan Academy developed by a team of volunteers from around the world in collaboration with the Foundation for Learning Equality. KA Lite was developed with the aim of furthering universal access to education, especially those without an Internet connection — or those with a very slow Internet connection. This map shows all registered users of KA Lite around the world.

KA Lite is an independent project, not associated with the Khan Academy, though as the KA Lite FAQ states, Khan Academy is unofficially supportive of the project. The great thing is that the folks behind KA Lite didn’t have to ask for permission because permission was already granted thanks to the CC BY-NC-SA license on Khan Academy materials. This allowed KA Lite volunteers to build an open source application that would support and make available Khan Academy’s 4,200+ high quality educational videos and exercises in an offline setting.

Dylan Barth, one of the creators behind KA Lite, says,

“Through KA Lite, we distribute Khan Academy videos and exercises which are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

The KA Lite sourcecode itself is open-source MIT licensed, and the other included software and content is licensed as described in the LICENSE file (it’s all open-source, it’s just different licenses for different packages we use).

The only potential cost to the end user would be hardware to run KA Lite on (it can run on all types of hardware bundles, from old Windows computers to the $35 Raspberry Pi) and the electricity to run the hardware.”

Check out, download for free, and volunteer for the project at http://kalite.learningequality.org/.

In January I blogged about Blackboard xpLor — a new cloud-based learning object repository that was being piloted at 70 institutions. Blackboard officially released it today, giving educators the ability to discover, create, and share resources across learning management systems (LMS). As part of its launch, xpLor has integrated support for CC license options for creators of content as well as the search and discovery of existing OER under CC licenses, such as the Khan Academy’s rich collection of videos and exercises. xpLor currently offers four CC license options for course creators (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA) in addition to the CC0 public domain waiver, which allows you to waive all copyrights to your work should you choose to do so.

From the press release,

Users can create and store materials in xpLor, and then extend their content by sharing and making it discoverable to instructors across working groups, courses and institutions. Content is delivered through the cloud to users’ LMS; xpLor currently supports Blackboard Learn™, ANGEL, Joule® from Moodlerooms and Sakai. Users can tag and rate content, making it easy to find items their peers found to be valuable.

Content can be adapted over time by multiple users. Content authors can control who can see and change their content, and can apply to their work a variety of rights and permissions from All Rights Reserved to Creative Commons open sharing, to enable crowdsourcing collaboration and remixing of content.

For details with screenshots of the CC license implementation, see my earlier post. If you want to check it out yourself, you can via CourseSites or an existing LMS account with your institution (as named above). If you use a different LMS, xpLor may work with it if your LMS employs IMS standards — since xpLor is cloud-based and built to work across systems. To find out more, see the form at http://www.blackboard.com/sites/xplor/.

*Board of directors: Hal Abelson, Paul Brest, Glenn Brown, Michael Carroll, Catherine Casserly, Caterina Fake, Brian Fitzgerald, Davis Guggenheim, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Laurie Racine, Eric Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Annette Thomas, Jimmy Wales, and Esther Wojcicki.

Nathan Colquhoun / CC BY-NC-SA

The Creative Commons Board of Directors is seeking recommendations from the Creative Commons community for potential candidates to serve on the board of directors and a new, to-be-formed advisory council. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to Creative Commons and advance our mission of maximizing digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Why we are doing this

Creative Commons Board of Directors is making structural adjustments and engaging in succession planning. As part of this process, during the April 2013 Creative Commons Board of Directors meeting, the board agreed to form a Creative Commons Advisory Council for which it is also seeking members. The advisory council is distinct from the board. While it will not have decision-making authority, its role is to provide depth of experience and knowledge for the board to tap.

This open call for board and advisory council nominations is designed to engage the entire Creative Commons community in identifying candidates who will ensure Creative Commons continues to have the resources, leadership, and oversight necessary to carry out its vision and mission, and does so in a way that is inclusive of our global community.

What the Creative Commons Board of Directors is looking for

The board seeks candidates who have a passion and enthusiasm for Creative Commons and can act as ambassadors, fundraisers, and experts.

Creative Commons has developed a matrix of key skills needed on the board and advisory council. In making your nomination for board or advisory council please reference this skills matrix and describe the skills you believe your nominee would bring to Creative Commons.

Nomination process

To nominate yourself or someone else, please complete this web form by July 15, 5pm PDT (GMT -7). Please share this form with your networks and anyone you think may be interested in serving. There is no limit to the number of candidates you may nominate.

Nominations will be accepted on a rolling basis through July 15, 5pm PDT (GMT -7) and reviewed by the board of directors Executive Committee. Potential candidates will be contacted in late July to early August.

Contact

For any questions contact meryl@creativecommons.org.

We’re happy to have two interns this summer: Pei-Yi Wang (Google Policy Fellow) and Teresa Sempere Garcia (Community Support Intern).

Pei-Yi Wang / CC BY

Teresa Sempere Garcia
by Christian H. Paleari / CC BY

Pei-Yi has been with CC Taiwan via Academia Sinica part-time since 2006. As a graduate student at the Law School of National Taiwan University, she helped conduct research about open licenses, porting and translating the CC 3.0 licenses and the CC0 text, assisting governments, academic institutions, libraries and museums to apply CC licenses, and analyzing copyright and other legal issues. More recently, Pei-Yi received her LL.M. degrees from New York University School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, with focuses on IP, corporate and international business. Before joining CC as a Google Policy Fellow, she practiced law in Taiwan National Digital Archive Project, a leading law firm, and served as in-house counsel in a multinational electronics contract manufacturing company in Taiwan. In her free time, she loves food tasting, music, and traveling.

Teresa is a free culture and free software activist who has been working in the field for many years. She was one of the creators and organizers of the highly successful Librebus Project in both 2011 and 2012, which took open advocates on a tour of Central and Southern America, running workshops and seminars. Teresa has earned degrees in Advertising and Public Relations (University of Alicante, Spain), Specialist in Design and Communication (Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain), Specialist in International Cooperation for Development (University of Alicante, Spain), and Cultural Management focusing on Culture, Communication and Politics (Catholic University of Cordoba, Argentina). She has worked in educational and cultural projects around the world, including in Belgium, Sweden, Italy, and Slovenia (working as Assistant Project Coordinator of Europe WAGGGS), in addition to Argentina and Costa Rica (working for AECID, the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development). Teresa enjoys traveling, photography, swimming, and cycling.

Teresa is based remotely in Cordoba, Argentina and will be working with Jessica Coates, the Affiliate Network Coordinator, as well as the Regional Coordinators, to facilitate collaborative projects among CC’s global volunteer network, particularly focused on the Global Summit and a new project for the production of CC toolkits. Pei-Yi will be based in Mountain View and will help with the development of the Open Policy Network.

Books /John Liu / CC BY

A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6th confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, looks at the efforts of publishers and colleges to increase the availability of textbook price information and “unbundled” buying options as required under provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The GAO also interviewed faculty regarding benefits of this transparency and offering of new options for students purchasing course materials.

What they found

Findings of the study indicated that faculty are more aware of textbook affordability issues than they used to be, though they see the appropriateness of materials as the most important factor when it comes to choosing resources to use in a course. HEOA requires publishers to include information about textbook prices when marketing to faculty, including wholesale prices and copyright dates of previous versions. While the report finds that publishers have passively made this information available through their websites and other materials, the GAO did not investigate whether publishers are actively providing the information to faculty as required by law. Making this information not only available, but highly visible, is the best way to support and equip faculty to consider textbook costs and potentially explore more affordable and flexible textbook options.

The study also finds that textbook price transparency helped students save money, particularly because of the information colleges and universities posted in course catalogs. Of the 150 institutions the GAO reviewed, 81 percent provided textbook information online during the months leading up to the fall 2012 semester. This allowed students the opportunity to consider the costs associated with each course and the time to seek cost-cutting alternatives like used books and renting. But even with this relief, textbook prices continue to reach into the $200-and-more range for high-enrollment courses. The end goal of the HEOA price transparency provisions is to pressure publishers into lowering their prices for good.

What this means

As Nicole Allen, Affordable Textbooks Advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups (Student PIRGs) explained, “Overall, the report shows that the HEOA requirements have helped students and professors become more aware of textbook costs, and this awareness builds market pressure that will eventually lead to fairer prices and more affordable alternatives. Although right now publishers stubbornly continue driving prices skyward, they can only ignore the call for affordability for so long.”

The report mentions other textbook affordability efforts that colleges and universities explored alongside providing textbook price information. About two-thirds of the schools that the GAO interviewed offered an institutional rental program, and many offered price information for alternate formats, such as e-textbooks. For example, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges’ Open Course Library, which offers Open Educational Resources (OER) and other low cost materials for the system’s 81 largest courses, has saved students $5.5 million to date — about three times as much as the program cost. As the shift of resources towards efforts that provide more options to students and faculty is seen across the US and in other areas around the world, we anticipate more participation in communities around OER. Which is a great thing.

Next steps towards affordable textbooks

The HEOA requirements for textbook price transparency were a good first step, but there’s more work to do to solve rising textbook costs and lack of flexibility in choosing learning materials for courses. OER, like those created, revised, and shared in the Open Course Library have the potential to significantly offset these costs while at the same time providing more options for faculty and students to customize textbooks and other courseware to their needs. CC believes that OER is the next step in providing affordable, flexible, and truly open educational opportunities for students and faculty, allowing global citizens to better choose their own learning pathways.

opensourceway / CC BY-SA

A joint statement issued by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on June 7th affirms the potential for OER as a solution: “As the GAO report suggests, transparency alone isn’t enough. Students need more access to high-quality, affordable options that challenge the current price structure set by a handful of publishers. Open Educational Resources, which include high-quality open textbooks that are free for faculty to adopt and students to use, offer a promising step forward. With many recent technology advancements it will be important for Congress to continue to learn more about the textbook sector to ensure that there are accountability mechanisms in place to protect students and taxpayers.”

The Student PIRGs announcement about the study is here
The full report of the GAO’s study can be found here
And lastly, a podcast with a member of GAO’s staff that led this study is here