My point is that openness is the virtue to be pursued (I feel silly making this statement to you – you’ve done more for this “movement” than almost anyone else has). Not sorta-openness. Or sorta-affordable openness. Full openness to download, edit, reuse, add media, etc. is the target. Settling for affordable quasi-openness may sell cheaper textbooks and may delay more foundational change.

I’m not sure how content licensed By-NC-SA can be considered sorta-open, unless we’re heading down the path toward an NC discussion (let’s please not go there). Full openness to download, edit, reuse, add media, etc. is what people have with FWK books because that’s what the license provides. What is the criticism here?

What are our organizational models missing when individuals are not capable of collaborating in writing complex resources (like textbooks)? Is it about incentives?

At least partly, if not primarily, yes.

Could we have networks of educators write textbooks?

With the proper incentives, of course we could. If we paid each faculty member $10,000 I bet we could get them to participate.

Let’s say a group of psychologist profs got together and decided to write a full text for first year students and posted resources in a wiki.

But – and I’m not trying to be thick-headed here – wouldn’t the size of the group of profs need to be rather large before this activity became interesting to you? When you say ‘a group of psychology profs’ I think of a group of 5 plus or minus a few. Is that a network? How is it different from five authors who develop a By-NC-SA textbook for FWK? In theory, one difference might be that anyone outside the core group could contribute to the text, but in practice we see that participation in “wikibook” projects from outside the core group is basically nonexistent.

If FWK is trying “trying to disrupt the status quo as much as we can as quickly as we can” why not experiment in serving as an infrastructure role in openness at this self-organizing level with profs?

(A) Because Wikieducator, Wikibooks, PBWorks, and a hundred other sites already provide the infrastructure necessary for the kind of experiments you’re talking about. (B) Because all the data to date confirm that those experiments fail to result in quality textbooks. In other words, the world doesn’t need FWK to enable these experiments – they’re already sufficiently enabled and they’re already failing to succeed.

Should we still be thinking in textbooks? What is it about textbooks that is so valuable that we transition the concept fully into the digital world? Maybe we should first abandon the textbook model.

We don’t get a clean slate when thinking about changing a system – we have to respond to the realities of the system. Some in the open education community seem to be arriving at a conclusion along the lines of, “the constraints of higher education are too confining, so let’s disconnect ourselves from HE completely and go innovate over there.” I wish them luck.

Does FWK permit one student in a class to download a book and then distribute copies to other classmates without fee? Can an educator download the book, copy and paste into a wiki and then edit it to customize the text?

Yes, full stop. The license FWK uses for all of its books, CC By-NC-SA, allows anyone and everyone to download, adapt, and redistribute the book, students and educators alike.

Collaboratively produced resources, in the wikieducator sense, are better suited for reuse because, in theory at least, no one has a motive – such as profit – other than to produce learning resources… Even the small reading window for reading a text online is an illustration of control exerted to influence purchasing the text. If a group/network collaborates on the text, then (again) in theory, they wouldn’t need to play “soft control” games of this nature.

There’s a lot of “in theory” in this line of thought. (As Firefly’s Jane once said, “I smell a lot of ‘if’ coming off of this plan.”) “In theory” is difficult for me to accept given the rather large amount of actual data and experience available to us to base our judgments on.

Pure openness would be the target.

I actually just finished blogging about this in Feeling Out of Place.

In my view, if it (research, course content) comes from the public purse it belongs to the public. If it’s privately funded, it’s a different matter. FWK is a private entity that is in business to make a profit. Nothing in the world wrong with that. But is it the best way for academics to approach opening up content/curricular resources?

It depends on their goal. To me, openness is a means not an end. So, to answer your question, we must ask what is the faculty member’s goal in being open? If “being open” has become the goal in and unto itself, I would propose that there is a problem.

David, whether you lay claim to the title or not, you are the (or at least “an”) ideological leader of openness in education. Which is why I was a bit surprised to see you accept the FWK model. I’m sure there are considerations I’m not aware of, or philosophical views that are perhaps not as strident as might be expected from a leading figure. To me, it seems to be trying to balance openness with economics… and the economic model has precedence (i.e. charges for downloads of digital versions).

One of the greatest heartbreaks of my life came when I left USU to come to BYU. For a complexity of reasons, some of which were my own fault, when I left USU the grant funding for many of the “open” projects at USU ended. Within 30 days of my coming to BYU, much of what I had worked to build over a 5 year period was gone. It was personally devastating. I committed to myself then that I would never again waste my effort on projects that can disappear overnight when grant money dries up. This has led me to adopt a keen focus on the sustainability of open education projects (see, for example, the study on making OCW pay for itself we’re conducting at BYU). If open education is to have a long-term impact we have to insure that it will survive over time. So, when you think you see an emphasis on economics in my work you are quite perceptive and absoultely right. However, I’m only interested in the sustainability of open projects – I have no interest in the sustainability of pseudo-open projects.

When Jeff and Eric first approached me about being involved in FWK (I’m not a founder, but am hire number one), my very first thoughts were “Are these guys going to do it right? Are they going to (1) get the openness right and (2) be sustainable enough to make a large-scale, long-lasting difference? Or are they going to take some half-open approach and/or botch the business part of it and be gone three years from now?” I was convinced FWK was going to get the business part of it right, and could sense that they wanted to get the openness part right. That’s why I joined as Chief Openness Officer – my core function is to make sure we get the openness part right. And because FWK produces Creative Commons licensed textbooks that are just as open as any content you will find anywhere, and because we have 40,000 students lined up for fall, I think the openness and the sustainability aspects of our work are going awesomely.

Your work around advancing openness, by nature of this role, will be subject to scrutiny. If you have a view on copyright or commercial reuse, it will be criticized. If you have a view on how to increase the impact of openness at the school or university level, it will be scrutinized. Is it fair? No. But that’s a burden that comes with the role.

No, the increased scrutiny is not fair at all – it is a great blessing that very few people have access to. It is a manifestation of the classic problem of the “rich getting richer” – I think I have some reasonable ideas on the topic of openness and education. These draw scrutiny, which I weigh seriously. Then my reasonable ideas get a little better, which gets them pushed out further, which draws further scrutiny, etc. Its a virtuous cycle that I am deeply grateful for; I actually feel guilty sometimes that other people’s ideas don’t get the “airtime” and the scrutiny that mine do.

And I’m enjoying this specific conversation that we’re having quite a bit.

FWK will succeed for the wrong reasons. It will succeed because it tweaks the existing model of textbooks just enough to disrupt publishers, but not enough to disrupt the industry as a whole. FWK is integrated into the system of education: authors, bookstores, faculty, and students. It uses existing reward metrics (recognition and a little bit of revenue for the author) and addresses the biggest complaint students have about textbooks: costs. Essentially, the existing system is used as the infrastructure for FWK model. And that’s the problem.

I would argue that using the existing system as infrastructure is the most brilliant part of the FWK strategy (disclosure: I am the Chief Openness Officer of FWK). Because FWK recognizes and works within the existing context, it is actually able to affect real change. Over 400 faculty and 40,000 students will use openly licensed, DRM-free FWK textbooks this fall – enabling extensive, legal faculty localization of materials and saving students and their parents over $3 million. No matter how you measure it, FWK will have a larger direct impact on higher education affordability this fall than all of the previous open educational resources projects have had combined.

With regard to educational reform, our thinking should be future-focused. What is the impact of FWK? Is there a better way? Can we reduce costs and promote openness in an anti-textbook model? What could that possibly look like?

There is undoubtedly a better way – no right thinking person or organization will claim that they have discovered the universal best way to do anything that can never be improved upon throughout all eternity. In answer to the question “Can we reduce costs and promote openness in an anti-textbook model?” the answer is also yes. However, there is a very small number of situations in which an anti-textbook model exists. Textbooks are a critical piece of higher education, whether we like it or not. The question is like asking, “Can we improve the speed of race cars in an anti-tire model.” Cars today have tires – they just do. In a future world they may not. And in a future world, where higher education doesn’t rely heavily and extensively on textbooks, there may be an opportunity to affect a large-scale change in affordability of content without working with textbooks. But that future world is not here today. There is a critical need for people like George who are willing to dedicate their energy and resources to decade or multi-decade reforms. And I can confidently say that creating an broad culture of rejecting textbooks in higher education is at least a ten year project, if not a longer one.

Perhaps we should pursue a more visionary approach – one that is tied to high ideals and provides the greatest number of future options.

As I said above, long-term work creating viable future options is something important that desperately needs doing. However, improving affordability and accessibility for students taking courses fall 2009 is important as well. At this point in my career I want to help as many people as I can here and now. When the future scenario becomes the current scenario, I’ll adapt my work for that context to help as many people as I can. This is FWK’s approach as well. You certainly can’t build a sustainable business that makes a large-scale impact on affordability and accessibility if your assumptions about the market won’t be true for another 10 years.

George reviews arguments from Scientific American, myself, and Yochai Benkler, all of which argue empirically (instead of theoretically) based on existing books (and not potential future books), that collaboratively written textbooks fare poorly in comparison with textbooks written by one or a few authors.

Simply stating that collaborative projects have to date not produced the quality of resources that has been produced under the traditional authorship model is not satisfactory… It’s too early to convincingly declare select-authorship models of textbooks to be superior to wiki-created textbooks. Or, if we do make the declaration (as Wiley, Benkler and others have done), we need to focus on understanding why. It seems wrong to declare that connected intelligence is not capable of achieving the same level of quality as individual intelligence.

I don’t think anyone is making a blanket judgment or general statement about what “connected intelligence” is or is not capable of doing. I think we’re saying something very specific about textbooks. We’re saying that all the empirical data indicate that “select-authorship models of textbooks [are] superior to wiki-created textbooks.” Neither George nor anyone else who is unhappy with this conclusion has pointed to counter-examples in their arguments; as far as I know there’s not even a single exception to this rule. The argument is always one of potential, an argument about what could be. I would love to be proven wrong on this point, because the implications for the scalable provisioning of high-quality initial content would be earth-shattering. However, without a single positive example, and with several less than positive examples, I won’t allow myself to be caught up in the hype.

Books on the [FWK] site are primarily confined to business and finance – another drawback: mediators seek areas of highest return first.

This is a simple misunderstanding. FWK started with business textbooks because the company’s two founders both came out of the business textbook division of a major publisher, and this is the world they know best. We’re expanding very quickly into general education areas now that we’re up and running.

The concept is open enough to keep many revolutionaries at bay (isn’t that often the main intent of partial change? provide enough change to satisfy the slightly less peripheral agitators? Staged or transitional change often plays a negative role in this regard. Partial change now pushes substantial change into the future).

I would respectfully disagree. I think taking reasonably-sized steps forward is a great idea. No one in FWK is trying to keep revolutionaries at bay – on the contrary, we’re trying to disrupt the status quo as much as we can as quickly as we can.

Now, if we can just find a way to make the pursuit of highest ideals (open & collaboratively produced textbooks produced by communities/networks of vested participants in this case) as rewarding (or compelling) as the pursuit of ‘good enough’.

It’s unclear to me why a collaboratively produced textbook is more virtuous than one produced by one to four individuals. Also, the conversation quickly devolves into a Sorites paradox: how many individuals need to be involved in writing before the textbook becomes virtuous?

At one point in the article, George draws a distinction between “Convenient Change vs Principled Change.” Another way to frame the difference between the approaches he describes is “Immediately Actionable Change vs Boil the Ocean Change.” On the ground people recognize that the world needs ocean boilers; I hope that on-the-grounders can get some respect as well.

NYACK, N.Y., March 24 /PRNewswire/ — Flat World Knowledge, the world’s first publisher of commercial open-source college textbooks, today announced that it received $8 million in Series A funding from Valhalla Partners, Greenhill SAVP, and High Peaks Venture Partners, with continued participation from several angel investors.

“This is an exciting investment,” said Hooks Johnston, General Partner at Valhalla Partners. “Like MP3′s blew up the delivery model for recorded music, the blogosphere and online news sources blew up the newspaper business, Flat World Knowledge is poised to blow up the college textbook market. We’re backing the perfect team to make it happen.”

Brian Hirsch from Greenhill SAVP is also blogging about their investment today. Full speed ahead, FWK!!!

As a quick recap, FWK textbooks are much like traditional textbooks in that they are:

• beautiful looking printed books,
• written by world-class authors,
• supported with all the supplementals and teaching aids (like an instructor manual, slides, and assessments) teachers expect, and
• available as review copies (for teachers),

FWK textbooks are UNLIKE traditional textbooks in that they are:

• licensed CC BY-NC-SA,
• always available in full-text online for free,
• offered in a variety of additional, affordable formats (paperback black-and-white ($30), full-color ($60), audio book ($30), individual book chapters as audio ($3), etc.),
• supported by a variety of study aids available at the student’s option (NOT forcibly bundled with the book)

I’m SO excited about FWK because we’re going to show the world that extremely high quality open educational resources can be produced and disseminated in a way that is sustainable over the long term. Jump over to the Catalog page, choose a book with a Feb 2009 publication date, and click “Start Reading” to see what I’m talking about.

i had a mtg with a company today & one of their execs had the title ‘Chief Openness Officer’

What company is so committed to openness that it has someone like this? Flat World Knowledge of course!

• The first 1,000 responders are guaranteed a $15 Amazon Gift Card;
• Every responder is entered to win $1k;
• For each Friend you “Tell” in Facebook you get one entry in a drawing to win a $100 Amazon Gift
  Card.

Please pass along to any students you know. Thanks!

The short version: FWK textbooks will be licensed CC By-NC-SA Plus.

The long version:

Historical Lessons Of The OPL
Once upon a time (a decade now!) I collaborated with several folks on the Open Publication License. Many of the concerns collaborator Tim O’Reilly originally had all those years ago are still relevant now. The first has to do with author incentives, the second with the sustainability of the publishing operation. They’re actually easier to explain in the other order, though.

Publisher A makes a significant investment in a book, including finding authors, upfront payments to authors, content editing, content layout, and marketing (among other costs). Why would Publisher A make all this investment and then openly license their book when nothing prevents Publisher B from undercutting them with a cheaper version of the book in which they didn’t have to invest anything? Obviously, this could only happen a handful of times before Publisher A would lose the financial capacity to contribute open content to the world, as ‘lots of money would go out and only a little would come in.’ (In other words, it would be like a grant-funded project, where you work and work and eventually run out of money and have to shut things down.)

Financial incentives for authors also become a large problem when Publisher B can undercut Publisher A, because the author has entered into an agreement with Publisher A that says they will receive a portion of the receipts for sales of their book. However, when Publisher B steps in and undercuts Publisher A, the author receives no portion of the receipts on Publisher B’s sales. This, obviously, provides less of a financial incentive to the author to produce additional open content.

These concerns led us, back in 98-99, to create OPL option B, which is the ancestor of the NC clause in today’s CC licenses:

B. To prohibit any publication of this work or derivative works in whole or in part in standard (paper) book form for commercial purposes unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder.

(For those following along at home, note that OPL Option B only prohibits commercial use in print form, not all commercial uses. The CC NC clause is much broader in that it precludes all commercial uses.)

O’Reilly went on to publish several books with the OPL and Option B, including the book version of Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and The Bazaar (Eric also collaborated on the license), which is available online for free. I published my own book The Instructional Use of Learning Objects (which is available online for free) with the OPL and Option B. There are several examples we can point to where this approach has worked very well. OPL + Option B is equivalent in its high-level intent to the CC By-NC-SA.

What FWK Is Trying To Do
Now, you may argue that authors don’t need financial incentives to write books and that the world doesn’t need publishers to distribute books. You may also argue that we don’t need books at all, or universities for that matter. If you want to make these arguments, you may, but I won’t engage in them.

If we want to improve learning ~today~, we have to meet learners where they are ~today~. And today and for the foreseeable future the overwhelming majority of learners will be going to schools and universities where their teachers will adopt textbooks based on things like the name recognition of the author(s), the quality of the textbook, supporting instructional materials like test item banks and PPT notes, and the availability (and marketing!) of review copies.

Very few faculty members would give greater weight to the “openness” of a textbook than they would to its quality (and if they did, they would be doing their students a disservice). Students deserve the very best quality materials available, and faculty deserve the very best instructional support materials available. Simply producing open textbooks isn’t enough; we have to produce absolutely top-quality textbooks and supporting materials that faculty would select on their own merits – regardless of their open status.

Now, having said that, there are some additional, very practical benefits of an open textbook for the faculty member who has to make the adoption decision. For example, when the license and the technology allow the faculty member to remove chapters from the book, change the order of chapters in the book, or even edit chapters in the book directly (e.g., adding locally relevant examples) BEFORE her/his students ever see the books online or in print, this gives the faculty member much greater control over the instructional experience. Most faculty members couldn’t care less about “open” for openness sake, but give them greater control over the instructional experience, and suddenly openness is translated into a concrete benefit – a difference beyond “openness for openness sake.”

And, of course, open textbooks are a miracle for students as they drastically increase students’ access to materials online (the online version of the text is 100% complete, and sometimes better than the printed version due to embedded videos and interactives) and drastically increase the affordability of printed versions of the books.

CC Plus
Now, what’s this “Plus” in our license? If you’re not familiar with CC Plus, the CC Wiki says:

CC+ is CC license + Another agreement.

It is NOT a new license, but a facilitation of morePermissions beyond ANY standard CC licenses.

The Plus in our CC By-NC-SA Plus will indeed be More Permissions – it will grant blanket permissions for anyone and everyone to make Commercial Use of FWK-published textbook materials in the context of the FWK Marketplace. The Marketplace will be an area of the FWK site where people can post and sell their own study guides, audio chapters, flash cards, videos, case studies, and other study materials related to FWK textbooks at whatever price they set (of course, they can alternately choose to openly license the things they put in the Marketplace, too). The Marketplace will be an “eBay for study materials,” and like eBay when somone sells material through the Marketplace, a small portion of the sale will come back to FWK and be shared with the textbook author whose work has been derived from or augmented by the new material.

Pre-Response to Stephen
Stephen is fond of criticizing me because I advocate CC licenses that eschew the NonCommercial clause. He recently suggested that my anti-NC perspective is actually a self-serving one, geared to help me achieve fame, fortune, and world domination by appropriating and selling other people’s material via FWK. This is so absurd it’s not even worth rebutting. Iterating Toward Openness readers can make their own judgments of my character.

I’m not sure where Stephen gets the idea that I make “assertions that everyone should use licenses that allow commercial use” (emphasis in original). I have certainly written about the technical difficulties I see with the NC. But rather than demanding that people stop using it, well over a year ago I wrote:

Nowhere have I said that the NC clause is evil, or that it should be done away with. I am by no means on a mission to destroy the NC clause. The NC clause is terribly important and I believe we desperately need it. However, it is in desperate need of clarification before it can become the innovation it was intended to be. Please, someone in a position to do so, fix NC.

I have also written at length about why institutions choose the NC clause, and why the free culture zealots should refrain from criticizing them. (It pains me to no end that I have to say “We should try to create a culture of tolerance in the open education world.”)

Sustainability is a very different thing for institutions of higher education. I see no sustainability argument for the use of the NC clause in the higher education context (the primary context in which I try to – very gently – discourage the use of the NC clause), but FWK is in a very different situation – FWK doesn’t have the benefit of being supported by tax-payers or a multi-billion dollar endowment. So while while I will continue to kindly discourage the use of the NC clause by universities, the sustainability context of private organizations like FWK or record labels like Magnatune is very different, and use of the NC clause here is completely appropriate.

Response to Ben
In his Slashdot post, Ben points out a problem with the CC By-NC-SA:

Mashups and customizations are encouraged, but the NC license is incompatible with strong copyleft licenses such as the GFDL used by Wikipedia.

In my response on the post, I completely agree that this is a problem. However, the problem is much larger than it appears as framed by Ben:

Ben makes an excellent point in saying that “the NC license is incompatible with strong copyleft licenses such as the GFDL used by Wikipedia,” because this is true. And the Wikipedia’s GFDL is incompatible with the CC By-SA license used by Wikieducator. And Wikieducator’s CC By-SA license is incompatible with the CC By-NC-SA used by MIT OpenCourseWare. And MIT OCW’s CC By-NC-SA is incompatible with GFDL used by Wikiversity. And Wikiversity’s GFDL is incompatible with the CC By-SA licensed images on Flickr. The higher-level point is that “copyleft” clauses (which require that derivatives be licensed with ~exactly~ the same license) are the biggest legal problem with open textbooks and open educational resources generally. Every copylefted open educational resource is incompatible with every other copylefted open educational resource with a different license.

Every “strong copyleft” license is incompatible with every other, so I don’t think Ben’s criticism applies to the NC clause – it is a criticism of the idea of strong copyleft and the current context of license proliferation. I’ve written about the sad state of current affairs previously in OER Nebula and Galaxies and Noncommercial Isn’t the Problem, ShareAlike Is. Take special note of the graphic toward the bottom of the latter, in which it is demonstrated that when you table out CC’s 10 licenses in a 10×10 grid, there are only 33 little smiley faces indicating that the licenses are compatible for remixing.

Flat World Knowledge will be licensing it’s first books CC By-NC-SA Plus, with copyright held by the authors. Despite technical difficulties with the NC clause, and remixing difficulties created by strong copyleft statements like the SA clause, CC By-NC-SA Plus is still far and away the best license for what FWK is trying to do. What would a superior alternative be? A one-off boutique license that further isolates FWK content from remixing? I don’t think so.

Closing Thoughts
To summarize, there are huge problems with the textbook industry right now. I mean, how often to your customers band together to raise awareness about the problems in your market? FWK isn’t doing open textbooks because we think things should be open on principle – although we’re all huge fans of openness. We’re doing open textbooks because they provide the best, most pragmatic, most effective response to the problems in the market – particularly the crises of access and affordability.

Openness isn’t a cult religion to be followed blindly to death or bankruptcy. Openness is a path to very practical solutions to very hard problems, like access and affordability.

I’ll have another post coming on Monday explaining more about the FWK business model for those of you who are interested.

The funny thing is, Michael Edwards seems to think that the commons and business are at odds. “The problem is that these approaches are absent from the philanthrocapitalist menu”, he says. The facts say otherwise. Who are the top funders of Wikipedia? Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite. Who funds the creative commons? Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook as well as a number of foundations created with newly minted high-tech wealth. The commons is clearly on the philanthrocapitalist menu.

More importantly: collaborative, non-market peer-production was born from a world that lives on the fuzzy edge between public and private benefit. In his 1999 essay “”The Magic Cauldron”, Eric S Raymond offered a taxonomy of open- source business models that still left the code in the commons: cost-sharing; giving away things that have use value but no sale value; selling technical support or services. His point was this: business and the commons are not only compatible but, in many cases, actually interdependent.

Yes, business and the commons are actually interdependent.

Everyone loves the peer-production model of Wikipedia and its sister projects, which are generally held up as a model of purity, set apart from business models that involve “money.” But it shouldn’t surprise you at all to see that the “Costs of providing the Organization’s various projects” were over $2,000,000 USD for fiscal 2006-2007, including the $400k they spent on hosting (Wikimedia Financials). $2,000,000 is serious cash… Just showing that the more successful an open project is, the more it will cost to host manage and run ($2M/year for Wikipedia, the project ‘run entirely by volunteers’), and the more critical a partnership with the business world becomes for successful open projects.

Of course, if you want to have a small-scale, low impact open project, no partnership with the business world is necessary.

It’s this interdependency between business and the commons that we’re exploring with Flat World Knowledge. And Stephen completely misses the point when he comments:

I guess that when you were arguing in front of all those international bodies that open content ought to be commercializable, I should have known that all the while you were setting up in stealth mode a commercial operation to use just this sort of content.

FWK isn’t a commercial operation to use someone else’s existing open content. We’re a commercial operation to produce, share, and use our own open content. Because we want to have a large, ongoing, sustainable impact around the world, we understand the importance of having a business model that will actually let us do that. When other projects’ grant funding or government support has run out and they’ve closed the doors, we’ll still be producing and sharing open content for a long, long time.