Course Design Should Cost Zero...or not.

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A bit of a kerfulle happened a few weeks ago, and it's just indicative of how the rest of life is  going what I've had this post in draft form for almost a month while I've plugged away at it...

Annnyyywhoooo🙄

The kerfuffle was kicked off by Wiley's Open Educational Language Models initial post describes OELM as bring together a collection of openly licensed components that allow an openly licensed language model to be used easily and effectively in support of teaching and learning.  In his follow up post, Wiley is open pondering/brainstorming about OELMs, Wiley discusses a separation of form from content, similar to how text on the web is separated from the formatting CSS layer.

Wiley's original posts are intersting and do provide some points to ponder. I don't necessarily agree in whole with what  he proposes, but I can see a grain of something interesting there, and certainly worth pondering and discussing. Maybe I've gotten a bit more "get off my lawn" these days having seen at least five major hype-cycles since 2010🧑‍🏫, and I think GenAI is not sustainable, it seems to be reaching a plateau, and it just doesn't really produce useful things. At least MOOCs opened up education a bit. But I digress. Moving on...

Where it gets interesting is with a follow up by Siemens, in his somewhat-weekly roundout of AI news, linked to Wiley's post and left the following zinger "I’m thinking course design should cost about zero." Here, Downes follows up with "My thought too" in his own sharing and brief analysis of things in the EduSphere. This brings us Crosslin's rebuttle on the point that "course design should cost about zero."  I don't want to summarize Wiley's and Crosslin's posts, I think it's worthwhile reading them (and subscribing via RSS)

Siemens used to blog (before he nuked the site and barely does anything these days) so you could get a bit more than a soundbite. The whole "I’m thinking course design should cost about zero" feels very much like a Musk-esque provocation than anything else. I don't know if Siemens meant to drop a stinkbomb and run, or what, but it's a shit take. It doesn't  matter if you are an instructional designer, learning engineer (🤮), course developer, or faculty member creating courses, the course creation process is part curation, part creation, and part experimenation. Based on the defined outcomes of a  course, and the expected student demographic, you re-use what you can, you create what you don't  have available, and you experiment with new ways of engaging, assessing, and communicating with the learners in the classroom. That creative process isn't something that a machine can do (at least not yet?) because everything that is extruded from an LLM comes from something that already exists. Replicating teaching practices that we've experienced mindlessly is one of the reasons many critique things like mindlessly replicated Chalk & Talk approaches; so why would we accept the equivalent from any sort of automated technology? Sure, you can create things faster, but is faster always better? You can massify things, but is massification always better?

In the end, no. Course creation should not cost zero. If you want someone to take care and effort in creating something useful, pay for it. Digitally Extruded materials seems to be a new reality (e.g., the image I asked Dall-E to make for me for this post, which is dumb, but you're not reading this post because of the image, are you?)

As an aside, along with "Better Practices," which I already use, I think I will adopt "Current Best Thinking" into my vocabulary.

Your thoughts?

PS: maybe in a subsequent post I can talk about how the HTML/CSS analogy doesn't work for learning content, but maybe at this pace you'll read about it in July 😂

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