Political Science Educator: volume 29, issue 2
Interviews
Matt Evans (the editor of the Political Science Educator) interviewed David Wiley[1] (a key innovator[2], researcher, and creator of
Picture by Mark Philbrick, CC BY 2.0
open licensed objects for the last 30 years) for this issue of the Political Science Educator. Wiley’s start in this space predates the existence of the term Open Educational Resources (OER) and he remains one of the most influential academics in this space. In his published research, he developed the term 5 Rs of Open Educational Resources that describes how one can retain, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute objects that are OERs; and coined the phrase OER-enabled pedagogy[3] to more concretely define what innovation can happen within and outside a classroom with OERs. He was part of the effort to create the educational certificate programs at Creative Commons[4], the organization that invented the licensing system for OERs. He cofounded Lumen Learning[5] and was Chief Openness Officer at FlatWorld[6], two publishers that promote more affordable textbooks through OERs. He holds a PhD in Instructional Psychology and Technology from Brigham Young University. He currently works as an Associate Professor and Academic Affairs Fellow for AI in Education at Marshall University. This interview took place over Microsoft Teams in October 2025, was transcribed using AI technology in Microsoft Word, and has been edited for length and clarity by Evans. Their interview addressed maximizing the utility of OER and OER-enabled pedagogy, as well as incentivizing these practices and their horizon with Generative Artificial Intelligence and conversating books.
QUESTION: What would you tell someone who is a novice to this OER space about why they should consider using OER for their classes?
ANSWER: On the adopting OER side, I would say that there is just so much pedagogical flexibility you get with OER, that you don’t have with Traditionally Copyrighted Materials (TCMs). There are so many things that I, as an instructor, can do, that my students can do, or that we can do together, that I can’t do when I adopt TCMs. On the instructor side, that’s the biggest benefit. On the student side, obviously, the benefit of not having to pay is great. But if I’m not paying for a textbook that looks just like the textbook that I would have used anyway, that is too long, too wordy, has examples that don’t relate to me or connect with me. Like if it has all the problems that the other textbook had, it just costs less, I’m happy that it costs less. But I think that there’s a student facing benefit too of being able to participate more directly. It comes back to pedagogical flexibility. As an instructor, if I were to assign my students to take a chapter, we’re going to work on this chapter in this open textbook this week. I know all the examples are boring and they’re irrelevant [in the TCM], and you hate them. Your assignment this week [if you are using OER], instead of writing essays or doing something else, is to rewrite these examples so that they are interesting and meaningful to you and to the students who come along behind you in the next semester. That kind of work is way more engaging and meaningful. And they put more effort into it. And when I grade it [the renewable assignment], I know that I’m not just putting a mark on something that they’re going to take and glance at to see the number before they throw it in the garbage can immediately. [In the renewable assignment] I’m actually editing something that’s going to add value to the world later on. Students are more invested in it. I’m more invested in it. It’s way more fun for everyone than write me a two-page compare-and-contrast something to prove to me that you read the chapter for today and then I’m going to grade 47 of those while I watch football with one eye on the game and one eye on these kind of mindless papers and I only asked you to write to prove that you read the chapters so you’d be ready for what I wanted to do in class. [Traditional] assessment is just so broken in a bunch of ways. And the kinds of things we can do when you have the pedagogical flexibility that you have when you have OER enabled pedagogy. It’s a set of things you can do with OER in your teaching and learning that you can’t do without the OER. This is more valuable and more enjoyable than what you were doing before with TCM.
QUESTION: What would you say about people who may be a little bit reluctant because they don’t understand copyright? The copyright seems like a big beast that’s hard to get a handle on. Do you feel like people need to know a lot about copyright to get into this space and start utilizing it in ways that are useful for them and their classes and their students?
ANSWER: I don’t think you have to know a ton about copyright [to use OER]. If copyright is something that’s scary to you, then I think it’s great to hear that lawyers from Duke Law School, Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School got together and created these [Creative Commons] licenses that really do exactly what they say. And they have stood up in court, and you don’t have to understand anything about them, except that you’re required to attribute and maybe that’s it if it’s the CC-BY[7], the Creative Commons Attribution license[8] that you’re looking at. All you have to know is you can use the stuff out there and do anything with it that you want as long as you attribute the original author. And that’s all possible because of these lawyers working behind the scenes, and so that you don’t have to understand any of it. Frankly, if you had to understand it all, there would be a ton of friction in the system that would make it hard to share or hard to adopt. I’ll give you a good example of that. In the early 2000s, like starting with MIT, of course, where lots of educators used to include the non-commercial condition in the licenses that they would choose for their OER, it turned out that not even Creative Commons knew what a commercial use was, and they said so in writing very publicly. They did an international survey of Creative Commons licensed users and said you hear a bunch of things that someone might consider commercial, but you think that’s commercial or not. A number of people felt like adopting NC [Non-Commercial] license material in a college course. If students have to pay tuition to be in the course, that’s a commercial use and would not be allowed. And so like the confusion about what is commercial and what’s not and am I violating copyright or am I not. People just started shunning the NC license material. Because it was creating all this friction and you saw the whole field move kind of in 2007. Everybody just moved to attribution because everybody understands what attribution means. Share alike was kind of hard for people to wrap their heads around. Nobody knew what non commercial meant and so to avoid the friction everybody just started using attribution and that makes Creative Commons super easy to explain, right? Because you don’t have to know anything about copyright; It’s just you’re allowed to do anything you want as long as you attribute the original author when you do. And then I mean, I can’t tell you the number of workshops I’ve done about copyright basics and the Creative Commons licenses at each of the three families of conditions and what they mean and what they don’t mean and at the end of the day if we just all use attribution all that complexity goes away.
QUESTION: How do we recruit more faculty into this space of OER?
ANSWER: I actually think it’s really simple. I just think they need to be incentivized. If it is counted toward promotion and tenure the same way that writing an article did, or something else, then I would do it more. Or if I could get release time to do it, I would do it more. Or if I could get a mini grant to do it. I mean, you know, speaking as kind of every faculty: Everybody’s got way more work to do than they can do already, and now you ask them to write their own textbook or go review a bunch of open textbooks and figure out which. You’re essentially asking me to re-prep my class when you asked me to adopt OER, which everybody hates. You know, changing textbooks and doing a new prep. So there has to be some incentive for the majority of faculty. There will be some faculty that can hear all the amazing things that will happen for their students, if you do this and just that by itself is enough to get them kind of moving and motivated. But they tend to not have as many kind of time related obstacles as most faculty might have, but if you’re like, if you’re teaching a 4-4 and you’ve got service responsibilities and something else, the idea that you’re going to spend a bunch of time to write your own textbook or go to Google and search and see what might be out there, and then to engage in this big revised remix activity and I literally get no credit, in terms of release time or extra funding. Or it doesn’t even count for my promotion or tenure, if there’s literally no reason for me to do it. There are 100 other activities that I am incentivized to do that it makes sense for me to do so. I can get promoted so I can get tenure, right? When this isn’t on that list, it makes it super hard.
QUESTION: So, it’s really about the financial resources that help cultivate this space, like having an OER grant committee, a statewide consortium where people can network and share resources across these academic institutions?
ANSWER: Yeah, I would think of all of those as incentives, either in some form or another. Like if I get to go to a meeting and hang out with some interesting people and learn from it, that’s an incentive. You know, or if I might if I might get recognized as an awesome instructor who adopted OER for 2025. That could be an incentive. That is something, maybe that could go in an awards section of my CV that might count toward tenure promotion. Fact that you’re just so overtaxed. I really think 99% of it is about just creating a number of incentives. If you have enough incentives, one of them will speak to you.
QUESTION: In thinking about open pedagogy[9], one of the things you laid out is that this is about moving away from disposable assignments. Are there other components that you see within open pedagogy[10] that you see other people practicing through open pedagogy[11]?
ANSWER: So you mentioned disposable assignments, I do all this work and then I throw it away at the end [with disposable assignments]. If I’m working on an OER textbook chapter, for example, it is going to have this life that’s going to be longer and it’s actually going to add value to the world. That’s all great in terms of motivation. I enjoy doing it more. I’ll invest more time and effort in it. But depending on the discipline that I’m going into, if I can add on to my fledgling little resume that I’m a co-author on, you know, this book, then that could give me the leg up that I need competing with this other person for the job, right? The kinds of things that you might do and the artifacts that you create but then go on to a public website and have this life. That maybe that textbook is used at 40 other institutions and you’re a co-author on it now, so that there’s the immediacy of, you know, just feeling like the whole thing is more valuable and interesting and engaging. But then there are other downstream effects as well. When you put that on your resume that gives you a leg up for a job. Because somebody invites you to come do a workshop that maybe you might not have gotten invited to come, but you did because you’ve been involved in this kind of work. There’s a bunch of interesting and positive downstream effects.
QUESTION: What are some of your favorite examples of open pedagogy?
ANSWER: Gosh, I mean there are some people in the world who have a definition of an open pedagogy that’s so broad that it takes in literally all good teaching. I’ve read papers about open pedagogy that say the pedagogy is open pedagogy if students are collaborating with each other. It’s like there’s all kinds of collaborative things you can do that don’t require openness at all. That’s a prerequisite. So, my definition of this is really that small. Like when I think about open pedagogy or because that’s so loaded, I like OER enabled pedagogy better. I’m thinking about just the universe of things you can do when you have the 5R permissions. What you can’t do when you don’t. And so that’s always going to be some kind of open activity where you’re co-creating, co-revising, co-remixing some kind of artifact that then you’re going to send out into the world in some way. But there are a bunch of cool examples of like students working in Wikipedia, for example. Because when a normal person has a question, they don’t go looking for a textbook. They go to Google and they often end up Wikipedia. Think of all the people you could impact if you could dramatically improve the quality of a Wikipedia article. Actually, the Wikimedia Foundation has an outreach[12] that they do to educators to try to get educators involved in having their students either writing new Wikipedia articles or making improvements to ones that are there. I’ve seen some examples where students have worked in articles that then became featured articles on Wikipedia for a day. You know, where hundreds of thousands of people came and read this work that they had done that otherwise would have been this essay that they have written and thrown away. Working on Wikipedia, I think, is a really interesting example. Working on artifacts that are going to be used by some group or organization. The communities are another interesting example. You know collaborating with city government or county government to, depending on what the course is, to create something that is needed somehow in the community to be able to come together and do that in the context of the class to create a thing that is useful in that way. More often than not, I’ll start with something that’s already open, kind of generic, or maybe in the wrong domain and work with my students to adapt it so that it works really well in in our domain. A lot of the courses, when I was in Ed school, I was teaching like instruction design courses, project management, things like that that, specifically a project management for instructional designer course and there was no textbook with that name. All the project management texts were for the Business School or something else. And so over a couple of semesters I worked with a group of students to turn that into a kind of generic open textbook about project management into project management for instructional designers, and that book is used at dozens of schools around the country now, and those students do list it on their Vitas as they go out to apply for jobs. But it’s all things like that. It’s creating or adapting or remixing artifacts that somebody is going to find valuable.
QUESTION: OER-enabled pedagogy is a more parsimonious definition than open pedagogy. For OER-enabled pedagogy, is part of the frontier experiential learning and maybe even some categories under experiential learning like service learning or simulations?
ANSWER: Anything that you can create that is openly licensed so that someone else can take it, use it, and get value out of it and change it if they need to for their needs. I think there’s 1000 service learning examples that fit in there where you’re doing that kind of work. I’m sure there are some experiential ones that could use that as the method for, you know, gaining the experience that you were trying to gain. I think it can travel, you know, definitely put on different hats, right? Look, you can use them as service learning context here and experience context there.
QUESTION: Let me ask you about one of the hot topics in education, which is Artificial Intelligence. Could I prevent an AI company from being able to use my object to train its AI if I put a CC BY-NC 4.0 license on it?
ANSWER: Well, all of court rulings so far would say that it just does not matter. You can use traditionally copyrighted material to train an AI model, because it’s a fair use. If you’re familiar with what with the idea of fair use, you have to acquire the copies that you use to train to model legally. You can’t go and pirate a bunch of copyrighted material and make illegal copies of it and then use that to train your model, which it turns out is what Anthropic had done. Anthropic just lost a major court case where the judge very clearly said you pirated a bunch of content you made illegal copies of copyrighted content, and that’s illegal, and you’re going to pay a big fine for that. But there’s nothing wrong with using copyrighted content to train an AI model, because that’s transformative and it is a fair use. You just need to acquire those copies legally. And what that means is for anything that’s CC licensed you can acquire these copies legally, because that’s what the license says. Anybody can access and download and make copies of that. There’s no way that you can prevent that. There’s no copyright-based way that you can prevent an AI company from training their model on your content, because even if it’s fully copyrighted, that’s still allowed as long as they get their copy legally. So, there’s no CC license you can use or other copyright license you can use to stop.
QUESTION: What role does AI play in OER-enabled pedagogy?
ANSWER: It used to be when someone wanted to write a new open textbook that they would try to find a grant that they put six months on their calendar, and block out time over this half year, maybe your full year period to try to write. If you’re going to write 500 pages and 15 chapters, it’s going to take you a while to do that and that’s the way it was always done because there wasn’t another option. But one of the other things the court have been pretty consistent in saying is that when you use generative AI, the output, whatever words it gives back to you, those words are not eligible for copyright protection. Those words just go. Immediately into the public domain because US copyright law requires there to be a human author. And in this case, there’s not. There’s a machine. When you go and use generative AI to help you create a table of contents for a book, and then for each chapter an outline, and then for that outline a detailed outline, a then a draft of the entire chapter. You can go from zero to a complete draft of something that looks like an OpenStax[13] (OER textbook) or a Cengage or a Pearson textbook in weeks, instead of in months. And the whole thing is all OER because everything the model creates is ineligible for copyright protection anyway, so you can do all the 5 Rs. I think the most obvious connection between AI and the 5 Rs is it cuts the amount of time it takes to create new OER by a factor of 10, maybe by a factor of 100 depending on how fast you are as a writer. You know 6 months can turn into a week or two pretty easily. Then you’ve got a draft that’s going to have problems. But then guess what you can do, you can turn around with your students and in an OER-enabled pedagogy way you can clean the draft together with students and make them co-authors on it. Have them write new examples. Have them find and fix them out. Engage in some critical reading, critical thinking, reading and rereading, rewriting. And that whole process can just be so much faster and simpler now with AI than it used to be. So that’s pretty awesome. And then you can also create prompts that you can put the Creative Commons license on and then you can send these prompts around to people and people can copy and paste them into their generative AI. Then it can start like just from a prompt that’s just 1000 words long, you can start this very detailed interactive tutorial session that might be last 15 or 20 minutes and be very conversational where you’re interacting and asking questions and getting feedback and being told well this was right, but this part of It was wrong. You know those kinds in the past we thought about OER as being resources, but now we can create these openly licensed prompts that result in actual learning experiences or learning activities. So that’s new and different, and I think is pretty interesting.
QUESTION: Could you talk about Open Tokens and being able to have transparency in putting these Creative Commons licenses on the inner workings of AI?
ANSWER: Yeah. So we talked about the L in the large language model. The model is two things. The first thing is it’s a huge collection, a structured collection of numbers. And I said in the presentation the other day [at the Open Arkansas conference[14] on October 3, 2025] that the way to think about those numbers is like a beta weight you get when you run regression. But instead of getting one or five beta weights, you’re getting a trillion of them in one of these large language models. There’s that whole collection of those values, all those numbers. And then there’s some software that knows how to operate on those to put inputs in and get outputs out. That giant collection of numbers is what we refer to as the model weights. And there are a bunch of people who train large language models and then make the model weights open source. A place to go where everybody is working on that is hugging face web site.[15] It has all of the models that you can download and do things with, and have these open licenses for. So do you want to generate images or generate text or video? Do you want to model? That’s designed specifically like really customized just for translation or for speech synthesis. Or like there’s all these families of models. Here, and if we click on one of them. Then it’ll say, OK, here’s a bunch of models that are in this area. And you’re like, Oh my gosh, there’s so many of them. Like, how would I even choose? There’s an open model weights like leaderboard on the hugging face that will show you across a couple of different kinds of quality benchmarks here, and you can read about each of these tests that get run on these generative AI models, and then there’s a score associated with it. These are all here and you can go get them and you can download them and you can revise and remix them yourself, and then you can re upload them. Got back up here. That’s what all these people have been doing, they download models and they revise and remix them and play with them and upload them again and set some very, very active community of revising and remixing. These open model weights and that’s really great because maybe you want the model that has been trained to behave more like a Socratic tutor, or one that’s been trained to know an awful lot about cultural anthropology or whatever you’re kind of teaching and learning use cases now. This requires some technical expertise, obviously, to retrain, to revise, and to remix open weights on LLM, but it’s absolutely doable.
QUESTION: Are we addressing some of these biases in AI in making them more open?
ANSWER: Yeah, I mean that’s this is something that’s always been a little confusing to me because if you picked a random person off the street. And you, you know, put them in front of a classroom to teach this class for a semester. And don’t say anything biased or offensive or, you know, potentially racist or whatever. That probably wouldn’t go very well. So, you know what we do to all the people that we hire, we require them to do training. Because everybody can be better if they get a little training. Models are exactly the same way. Just you pull a random model out of a hat and it’s going to do a great job most of the time. But it might say something inappropriate sometimes too. But the way you deal with it with models is the same way you deal with people, you have it do some training. If that’s something that you really care about, then that’s something that you can train on and you can reduce the number of offensive or inappropriate or stereotyped or whatever offensive things that that says for sure.
QUESTION: Would you say that’s sort of outside of it because those usually don’t have Creative Commons licenses on those sorts of objects that are out there, let’s say, as open access journals or open access books?
ANSWER: My understanding was that Open Access like the Budapest Declaration on Open Access.[16] That kind of Open Access research article does have an open license on it and I think a lot of them have a no derivatives license. They’re not allowed to make any changes to them, which on the one hand I understand because I wouldn’t want somebody to download one of my articles, change the data in the table, change the results, and then republish it and say, look, you know he made this ridiculous mistake or found this stupid thing or like I understand you don’t want research articles being changed for that reason, but wouldn’t it be great if they could at least be translated into other languages so that scholars from Africa or Latin America, or somewhere it could read them like? But if you just mean like, more broadly, things that might still be fully copyrighted but that are available to access for free…
QUESTION: Yes, that’s what I mean.
ANSWER: Just Open Access happens to be another term that has a specific definition. But yeah, when I used to do a lot of talks kind of explain like OER 101, you know, what is what is an open educational resource. And I had some slides at the beginning of that said OER does not mean that something could be accessed for free. Because if that’s what it meant, that’s the entire Internet. We wouldn’t need a special word for it. That the entire Internet is fully copyrighted, but you can access it all for free. OER means there’s this additional piece there, right? That’s not only free to access, but it has this open license as well. Pages on the New York Times are fully copyrighted, but, depending on the article, might be accessible for free, or CNN or NPR, whatever freely available that traditionally copyrighted, so like if your if your goal thinking about from a pedagogical point of view. If your goal in selecting course materials is just to save students money, then you can select a bunch of TCM that’s freely available from the NPR website or from wherever, but you’re not going to get any of the pedagogical flexibility that you get from OER. I guess If there’s not OER available and for some reason you’re unable to create any with generative AI, or. whatever else, and you’re left choosing between really expensive TCM and freely available TCM, I mean I would choose the freely available, all other things being equal. But I think so many OER initiatives are talked about in financial terms because that’s the piece that that’s easiest to understand. And it’s particularly, like state legislators, that Congress people can wrap their head around the easiest and respond to, you can say: Well, look for every dollar you invested in our pilot program over the last two years, for every dollar you invested, we save students from 27 dollars. So that’s successful and everybody’s like, well, yeah, I understand that. That’s great. Let’s keep doing it. That kind of narrow financial part comes to dominate the entire conversation. In fact, you can talk to Congressmen who write the open textbook language who have no idea about pedagogical flexibility, about all the things you can do, why students are more engaged, how much more they care, like literally, all they know is it saves money. That idea of savings just sucks all the oxygen away from any other conversation you might want to have about OER, so I like talking about it that way because it gets people focused on that and once they grab onto that it seems like they’re incapable of thinking about any other benefits of OER other than just that they save money. Which they do. And it’s awesome when you can save money. You should do that. But to say that OER is about cost savings is l like leaving out two thirds of it. It’s like saying chocolate chip cookies are about flour and butter. It’s like, well, there’s actually a lot more to a cookie than just that.
QUESTION: Just to circle back to the basics of OERs. Is it the fact that we don’t have the 5 Rs, that you were so prominent in defining and explaining early in your career, that makes it OER-engaged pedagogy?
ANSWER: Yeah, if you can do the five Rs to a resource, it’s OER. If you can’t, it’s not. It could be free, but if you can’t do the 5 Rs it’s not an OER. It could be really expensive. But if you can do the 5 Rs, it’s still an OER. It’s not that the OERs is not a function of cost. It’s 100% a function of copyright status and what I’m allowed to do. I’m not allowed to do now — if I’m allowed to make a copy and then I’m allowed to distribute those copies to other people for free. Does it make a lot of sense to try to charge me $150.00 for the OER? Like I don’t know, maybe somebody will pay $150 for it. But the first person who does can just make a perfect copy of it, put it online, and give it away for free. So there’s some kind of self-enforcing mechanism around what happens with the cost of OER. But there’s nothing in the definition of OER that speaks to some requirements around the cost, at least not the definition that I’ve been using for 27 years. Now I know there are other people who like in this congressional language where the only way they know how to think about OER is around pricing. They’ll say it must be actually an OER that has a copyright license that permits free access. And you know what? Access is not something that’s governed by copyright. You can’t have a copyright license that permits free access anymore then you have a driver’s license that permits birthday cake eating.
QUESTION: With government regulations it sounds like in a lot of ways when governments intervene into this space that they do negative things. Do you see any positive role for government regulations in terms of helping to promote OER or OER-enabled pedagogy?
ANSWER: Yeah. I think that the promotional work that they do Is beneficial. I just think that it’s super under-leveraged and that it could do so much more. I guess it’s not that what they’re doing is bad. It’s like driving an airplane down the street. Can you drive an airplane on the road? Yes. You get around like taxiing on the runways. But you’re kind of missing the whole point of an airplane, If you drive it like it’s a car, right? You can have the conversation about it that the way, and only speaks to cost, but in that case it’s kind of like driving the airplane. If you don’t get around to pedagogical flexibility and disposable assignments and all the rest of that stuff, you’re not getting in the air.
QUESTION: Do you think that the states of New York and California have managed to recognize the potential of airplanes within this metaphor?
ANSWER: I think faculty on the ground, yes. You know, I think there’s been some very effective work done by people who are trying to accomplish these who want to see students save money but are also trying to accomplish pedagogical goals, who understand that their representatives only speak the financial language and speak that language in order to get the funding that they need to do the work that they actually want to, which is changing student outcomes and increased pedagogical flexibility. And they also happen to save money and they report back on the dollar savings and it’s great. Nobody wants to hear the rest of the report back. I don’t think they actually do the report back on the other parts of it, but they’re getting those other parts. The people on the ground are getting those other parts done. If you tried to have that whole conversation with your legislator, you’re going to lose.
QUESTION: Not all OER’s are the same. There may be some instructional designs that make some OERs better than others, a point that you pointed out at your Open Arkansas 2025 keynote. What design principles make better OERs, in terms of accessibility and usefulness?
ANSWER: Yeah, the snarky answer is to say do a graduate degree in educational design and learn like what effective teaching learning principles are and then just go implement this. But as a super concrete example, take a Wikipedia article again, like we were talking about before. Sourced to the nines. Very highly edited, very highly accurate. Great source of information, but I would say it is actually not an educational resource because all it does is present information. At a minimum to be an educational resource you need to provide me with some opportunities to practice and give me some feedback. If all you’ve given me is a clear explication of some topic like encyclopedias they are not textbooks. What’s the difference between encyclopedia and textbook book? Maybe the textbook we don’t order things alphabetically, but like the main difference is that it’s not just a statement of a bunch of facts. Think about this. Ask yourself to do these three practice problems. Here’s what the correct answers were like. If there’s not at a minimum, if there’s not practicing feedback, it’s not even educational, it’s just informational. Information is great and the world needs information. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with informational resources. That if you’re talking about an educational resource, at a minimum, it needs to have practice and feedback. And then if you want it to be effective, then there’s a bunch of other principles that need to be enacted there. But if I start talking about it, it’ll sound like a graduate seminar on instructional design.
QUESTION: What sits on the horizon for OER other than AI? Are there things that are going to dramatically change for OER and OER-enabled pedagogy?
ANSWER: I would say in the medium term, like today, the way that we interact with computers mostly is by reading and then pointing and clicking and then reading more. I really don’t think it’s very long until the primary interface is going to be a voice. Like you’re going talk to it, and it’s going to talk back. When you need to know something, instead of going to Google and typing in the search and looking through three or four different results and finding the thing you’re looking for, you’re just going to ask the question and get an answer. All those intervening steps are just going to not exist anymore. I think the change to conversational interfaces, as opposed to graphical user interfaces, has some real implications for where learning materials in general, including OER, are going to end up going. But that’s not going to happen this year or next year. That’s maybe a four or five-year outcome. I think it will happen much faster than we all expect it will.
QUESTION: In terms of conversational, do you think of H5P?
ANSWER: No, actually not. Not like that. Like I would say, I might sit down at the computer, or I might be on the bus, I might say “it’s week 3. We’re supposed to learn about supply and demand. What do I need to know about supply and demand?” That it just starts talking back to me and it will talk for 30 seconds or a minute and say, “Did that make sense? Let me ask you this question.” And then It’ll answer it. It’ll say, “well, clearly you didn’t understand that. Yeah, let’s talk about it some more.” It’ll be like if your faculty member had infinite office hours and infinite patience. And instead of ever going to lecture, you learned everything just by going to office hours. I’m just talking about them asking probing questions to see if you understand or not. And when you do, going on when you don’t certainly back. But the whole thing is a conversation. I think we’re very close to that. And that has huge implications for the ways that we are going to learn and the kinds of learning materials that we’re going to create.
[2] https://sparcopen.org/our-work/innovator/david-wiley/
[3] https://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3601
[4] https://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3601
[5] https://lumenlearning.com/
[6] https://discover.flatworld.com/
[7] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en
[8] https://creativecommons.org/get-cc-savvy/breaking-cc-licenses/
[9] https://openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy/
[10] https://sites.google.com/umn.edu/oen-openpedportal/home
[11] https://ung.edu/university-press/books/pedagogy-opened-innovative-theory-and-practice.php
[12] https://wikiedu.org/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=10739738833&gbraid=0AAAAACRGv6bqb6Z3As0nHaez5fLDnUW4S&gclid=CjwKCAjwr8LHBhBKEiwAy47uUrl7bc522FXEq9bpqTS_t_Wf5rFCDqD1SM6HbrYtzha08DBTa3XCrBoC2IMQAvD_BwE
[14] https://www.northark.edu/openarkansas/
[16] https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. As part of APSA’s mission to support political science education across the discipline, APSA Educate has republished The Political Science Educator since 2021. Please visit APSA Educate’s Political Science Educator digital collection.
Editor: Matt Evans (Northwest Arkansas Community College)
Assistant Editor: Colin Brown (Northeastern University)
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