Textbooks

Occasionally an initial concern for institutions considering a major OER initiative is, “What will happen to the revenue the college has traditionally received from the bookstore?” In 2011, NACS (the National Association of College Stores) released this infographic showing where the money students spend on textbooks goes (click the image to link to the original): According to NACS, the average college bookstore’s pre-tax income on textbooks is 3.7% of the price of the book. In other words, when a student spends $150 on a biology textbook, the college “makes” $5.55. ...

EdWeek has a nice writeup of the recent conference organized by the Association of Educational Publishers and the Association of American Publishers’ school division. The article, Ed Publishers Adjust to Changing Market, New Resources, includes this interesting bit about publishers’ current thinking about OER: Publishers are also trying to gauge how the rise of free K-12 educational materials, often called “open- education resources,” will affect their businesses. Many education publishers today are assuming that school districts and other buyers of curriculum and other products will recognize the value of products that publishers have poured money into developing, and will be willing to pay more for products the industry believes is of higher quality. It’s a shaky assumption, Goff said. ...

I’ve been fairly quiet recently about Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded earlier this year with Kim Thanos. Lumen (for short) is where I’m spending my Shuttleworth Fellowship time, with the goal of drastically increasing the use of OER in formal educational settings in order to lower the cost and improve the quality of education. Today Lumen released its first six Open Course Frameworks. Open Course Frameworks are an idea I am very excited about, because they greatly simplify the process of adopting OER for the average teacher or institution. Open Course Frameworks are: ...

The Salt Lake Tribune has published a great article on Utah’s transition to open textbooks. But perhaps the most enlightening part of the article isn’t in the article at all - it’s this comment: The books are open source, meaning that the person who wrote the book is doing it for the goodness of mankind and expects no compensation. I know that’s hard to believe, but I’m a teacher and have been working on some of the science books mentioned. Other than the State Office covering the price of my substitute for two days I haven’t been paid a thing (same for the other 20-30 teachers on the project). The books are now done and FREE for the world to use. The best part about these books is a year from now after using them in our classrooms we’ll get back together (USOE covering our subs) and fix the issues we have found and make them even better to again be posted for the world to use for FREE. ...

The Utah State Office of Education has posted their open science textbooks for grades 7 - 12 for the coming school year. Here are some of the highlights: Based on the CK-12 Foundation’s open science textbooks Customized specifically for Utah students by Utah teachers Each book’s Table of Contents is the Utah Science Core Standards Professionally designed Print copies available from Amazon’s CreateSpace for an average cost of $5 per book (for schools that need a print option) And here are the links to the free and open PDF versions of the books: ...

The Perfect Storm Much of the education technology world - and many of the foundations and venture firms that provide the funding for it - are obsessed with adaptive learning. The Gates Foundation’s Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Program RFP is the most recent evidence of this trend. The fascination largely stems from the fact that, because these systems are completely automated, they can scale. Scale matters to foundations because it means broader impacts for the work they fund. And, of course, scale matters to investors because it means more customers and, consequently better returns. ...

Excellent coverage by Ronald Mann over on the SCOTUS Blog of an even more excellent decision by the court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. While the whole analysis is worth a read, here is the good news in plain English: The Court at last seems to have reached a consensus on a seemingly intractable problem of copyright law: whether a U.S. copyright holder can prevent the importation of “gray-market” products manufactured for overseas markets…. ...

Last week I wrote about the many goals I have for the open education movement, and how a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation is enabling me to spend focused time pursuing them. While I tried to lay out a compelling vision of what I want to accomplish last week, I didn’t discuss the how. Clearly, accomplishing a set of goals of that scope and magnitude requires more energy and productive capacity than any one person could ever muster. ...

Sometimes it helps to look backwards and figure out where you’ve been to get a clearer picture of where you’re going. As today is the first official day of my Shuttleworth Fellowship, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Upon reflection, it feels like I have some really strong momentum behind my work in open education. But where is that momentum carrying me? How can I leverage it thoughtfully to be more useful? (This thinking fortuitously coincides with a recent article titled Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education to which I have included a paragraph response to below. Spolier alert: we see the world very differently.) ...

My unpaid leave from BYU started January 1. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder than I have during this past month. It’s been exhilarating and exhausting and exciting and challenging and I’m loving it. For anyone who’s interested, here’s an update on what I’ve been doing: Textbook Zero I spent two days early in January visiting with our partner community college working on the first Textbook Zero Associates degree program. This involved two full days of hands-on training with faculty, providing a very hands-on and high touch workshop experience focused on redesigning courses around OER. We started with learning outcomes, moved up through assessments, and finally looked at the open educational resources that will best support teachers in facilitating the specific types of learning they want to see happen with their students. This program, which is an Associates degree in business administration, will open this fall. The Textbook Zero approach (moving the entire degree off of textbooks and onto OER) knocks 30% off the cost of completing this degree. I am super excited about this. (And I have to say that, given the abuse the term “open” has taken recently, I’m going to take steps to make sure that the phrase “Textbook Zero” retains the meaning I meant for it to have when I coined it.) ...