Now that my second assignment for OLTD502 is posted to the Dropbox my mind has moved on to the Creative Commons, open access, and copyright issues, or so I thought. Five o’clock this morning I was woken up from a dead sleep with the realization that I completely missed the “Big Idea”¹ in the lesson I chose for the assignment I had just completed. Typical of me, I got bogged down in the content and failed to recognize the main result that was desired for the lesson. As some of you know, most of my teaching these days is with adults in a Fisheries and Aquaculture Technician diploma program. I chose to critique a standard lecture from this course on world aquaculture, and to revise and transform it with blended learning activities. Instead of the multiple content driven, big ideas I posed there should have been just one: students will recognize the potential the world has to offer for future jobs and research and development opportunities. I’ve since had a chance to discuss the point with a recent graduate and he agreed that this is the kind of intended outcome that needs to be pointed out because students are often so busy rushing from one project to the next that they don’t stop to grasp the bigger meaning of what they’re learning. I’ll be revising that lesson plan again before I use it. I’m also left wondering what my mind is doing while my body is asleep because it certainly isn’t resting.

Now back to Creative Commons. I first learned about the Creative Commons initiative in a professional development seminar three years ago and while I thought it was a terrific idea and I was excited about sharing my work with others and vice versa, I couldn’t imagine where the money would come from to produce the type of biology textbooks we were used to using for teaching. Sure all the information is probably available free, somewhere on the internet, but the job of pulling it all together for a course is tremendous. Fortunately for the class I teach in Fisheries and Aquaculture, the main reference documents we use are published and made freely accessible and downloadable by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations at www.fao.org.

Now I learn that the BC government has dedicated $2 million during 2012-2015 for making available openly-licensed textbooks for higher education in both academic and trades sectors through the B.C. Open Textbook Project. I’m looking forward to having some time to assess some of the textbooks that have been made available at the BC Campus Open Ed website. I also got lost down the rabbit hole of Breanne Quist’s Privacy Compass listing of WEB 2.0 tools and found a cool online microscope lesson with a virtual lab at www.merlot.org that I’m looking forward to explore more over the holidays.

¹ For more about “Big Ideas” and Understanding by Design visit the websites of Grant Wiggins http://www.authenticeducation.org/ae_bigideas/ or Jay McTighe http://jaymctighe.com/.