[education-wg] endorse S. 1714 and ask for help with FOSS English reading and speech freemium

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

Ah, how much we learn when we walk the halls of power, however
briefly.  Comments below.

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 4:29 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the OSFA. I understand
> today is the deadline for doing so.  Firstly, I want to endorse Greg
> DeKoenigsberg's recommendation to support Senate bill S. 1714, the
> Open College Textbook Act of 2009 below.  Supporting this important
> legislation is well within the Mission, Charter, and Principles of the
> OSFA for all of us in our capacity as citizens, and I hope we can
> cooperate effectively to do so.

As it turns out, this bill is a bit of a red herring.

A good friend in DC called this bill a "press release".  Nice, but
short on substance, and short on support.  Generated some nice pub for
Dick Durbin, but no one ever expected it to go anywhere, and it's
almost certainly going to die in committee.

The meaty bill is HR 3221.  Specifically, sections 501 and 505 in
TITLE V--AMERICAN GRADUATION INITIATIVE.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-3221

>From Section 501:
"$50,000,000 shall be made available for each of the fiscal years 2010
through 2019 to carry out subsection (a) of section 505."

>From Section 505:
(a) Open Online Education- From the amount appropriated to carry out
this section, the Secretary is authorized to make competitive grants
to, or enter into contracts with, institutions of higher education,
philanthropic organizations, and other appropriate entities to
develop, evaluate, and disseminate freely-available high-quality
online courses, including instructional materials, for training and
postsecondary education readiness and success. Entities receiving
funds under this subsection shall ensure that electronic and
information technology activities meet the access standards
established under section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (29
U.S.C. 794d).

Note the language there.  It's extremely important.
"Freely-available, high-quality online courses".

HR 3221 passed comfortably in September and was sent to the Senate,
where it was referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor,
and Pensions -- the same committee where S. 1714 went, obviously.

We'll see what the language in the Senate version looks like -- but
there's going to be a big fight around what "Freely-available,
high-quality online courses" means, and who has the ability to
interpret that language.

With every bill that passes into law that has spending provisions,
there's an addendum that comes out of committee that gives guidance as
to how that spending should be directed.  That addendum is called
"Report Language".  As it stands now, ed.gov will have broad
discretion to interpret "freely-available, high quality online
courses," and they will almost certainly interpret it in the context
of building an educational commons.

Here are the potential issues:

1. The Senate bill comes out, and it has significant differences in
the language.

2. The Senate bill comes out and it's ok, but the HELP committee puts
restrictions in the Report Language that favors current content
providers (with lobbyists and deep pockets).

Both of these issues are very real, and the second the Senate bill
emerges from committee, I'll be writing about it on
opensource.com/education (which I encourage all of you to read, and
perhaps write for).  It may be that this working group could do a lot
of good work by spreading the word and asking difficult questions, if
it comes to that.

> I have proposed an open assessment
> content standard at http://bit.ly/assessCont which I believe also
> warrants support, and I hope others will join me.

This is definitely a key area of interest for ed.gov.  Ideally, what
they want to see is an open source version of a cognitive tutor
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_tutor) and/or other
intelligent tutoring systems
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system).  There's a
great deal of frustration with the folks at Carnegie Mellon, who did a
lot of the cognitive tutor research with grant money, and then turned
around and handed the research to Carnegie Learning, who are now
putting intellectual property protections around that work.  It might
be a bit of an uphill climb to replicate that work as open source, but
it's precisely that kind of project that ed.gov hopes to fund with
their $500m over 10 years.

Anyway.  That was the meat of my conversations.  ed.gov likes open
source, gets open source, and wants to fund open source to help
education.  I've encouraged them to articulate *particular* problems
they'd like to see solutions for, and will continue to press this
angle.  The more effectively ed.gov can say "gee, it would be great if
we could solve X," the more effectively we will be able to drive the
geeks of the world to start working on a solution for X.

--g