Textbooks

Our latest article on open texts has been published! The Cost and Quality of Open Textbooks: Perceptions of Community College Faculty and Students (CC BY open access). Abstract: Proponents of open educational resources (OER) claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the college classroom. We investigated student and faculty perceptions of OER used in a community college context. Over 125 students and 11 faculty from seven colleges responded to an online questionnaire about the cost and quality of the open textbooks used in their classrooms. Results showed that the majority of students and faculty had a positive experience using the open textbooks, appreciated the lower costs, and perceived the texts as being of high quality. The potential implications for OER initiatives at the college level seem large. If primary instructional materials can in fact be made available to students at no or very low cost, without harming learning outcomes, there appears to be a significant opportunity for disruption and innovation in higher education. ...

December 21, 2012 was supposed to be the day the world was going to end. Instead, it ended up being the day the Saylor Foundation saved a major portion of the educational Commons from disappearing. As described in a blog post this morning, Saylor.org now hosts free and open versions of Flat World Knowledge texts. Saylor has done a Herculean job, backing up and providing free and permanent access to Word and PDF formats of every Flat World Knowledge textbook - with ePub versions coming in Q1 2013. They’re also inviting anyone who has remixed FWK books to contribute links to their remixes for Saylor’s new Bookshelf. ...

In fall of 2011, I took a new approach to the Project Management course I teach each year. I wanted my students to gain hands on experience managing a project, I wanted them to feel the pressure of hitting deliverables, I wanted them to feel the nausea of having things fall through, I wanted them to learn to navigate managing people, and most of all I wanted them to feel the joy of completing a piece of work that blesses people lives. So I asked my students to engage in a very large scale revise / remix project that would benefit them and many others. ...

More response to the interesting discussion happening on the (closed) oer-community list. Brian Lamb asks: Finally, can somebody tell me if an NC license forbids reuse by non-profit public education institutions that charge tuition? Seems like a fairly simple question, but I’ve heard authoritative responses that wholly contradict each other on that point. The extremely misguided thinking Brian is referring to (and not personally guilty of) goes, “If someone is charges tuition for a course that uses a NC textbook, that violates the terms of the license.” This line of thinking is completely wrong. Full stop. Here’s why. ...

FWK recently announced a change in their business model. I’m disappointed by this decision, but understand from an economic perspective why it is being made. The license issues involved are complicated. I am continuing to advise FWK, as is Creative Commons, on the licensing options that allow for maximum openness while ensuring that FWK has a sustainable business model. More will follow on that topic as decisions are made.

Here are the things that stood out to me most during the three day meeting. Sorry for the brain dump format. Moorseville, NC moved graduation rates 68% to 90% since the move to devices and all digital content Two professional development release days PER MONTH for faculty to skill up on digital and using data Small group differentiated instruction, almost no whole-class instruction Superintendent visits every classroom in the district multiple times each year, primarily to say thank you to the teachers. Funding model - $1 / day / student ($200/year) pays for devices and content. Average cost for online content was $35/student across all subjects. ...

I’ve been thinking about what’s next for OER… With the current set of MOOCs - which aren’t even open - grabbing attention away from the real movement, we need an exciting idea to get behind. Something that can inspire another decade of work across the nation and around the world. (When was the last time you heard about a new OpenCourseWare initiative launching in the US? When was the last time you personally thought of OCW as being really innovative?) We need something that can capture the imagination, something that can inspire both faculty and institutional leaders, something that will bring another 100 US post-secondary schools into the open education movement. Most of all, we need something that will significantly bless the lives of millions of students, providing them access to educational opportunities that can radically transform their lives for good. ...

Our new article is out in IRRODL! Abstract below; read the whole article here: A Preliminary Examination of the Cost Savings and Learning Impacts of Using Open Textbooks in Middle and High School Science Classes. Proponents of open educational resources claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the classroom. Over a period of two years, we worked with 20 middle and high school science teachers (collectively teaching approximately 3,900 students) who adopted open textbooks to understand the process and determine the overall cost of such an adoption. The teachers deployed open textbooks in multiple ways. Some of these methods cost more than traditional textbooks; however, we did identify and implement a successful model of open textbook adoption that reduces costs by over 50% compared to the cost of adopting traditional textbooks. In addition, we examined the standardized test scores of students using the open textbooks and found no apparent differences in the results of students who used open textbooks compared with previous years when the same teachers’ students used traditional textbooks. However, given the limited sample of participating teachers, further investigation is needed.

You can stream just about any kind of content on demand now. Rather than purchasing a single DVD or CD, companies like Netflix and Spotify have popularized a business model where customers pay a monthly fee and get on-demand access to a huge library of content. Now, everyone knows that the college textbook market is horrifically broken. But just how “there’s no way that can possibly be true” broken is it? Here’s a quick comparison between major media types that shows how INSANELY EXPENSIVE textbooks are. ...

According to Reuters: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers Inc has reached a deal with more than 70 percent of its creditors to cut $3.1 billion in debt as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding. The publisher said it plans to restructure through a pre-packaged, court-supervised Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The HMH bankruptcy is not just about decreases in education funding, of course. We must give some credit to Kaleidoscope, Open Course Library, the Utah Open Textbook Project, Flat World Knowledge, and others around the world for showing that freely available OER and open textbooks can completely replace breathtakingly overpriced publisher textbooks - and that students learn the same amount regardless. If you could get the same grade using a $175 commercial textbook or a free online (and $30 or less to print) textbook, which would you choose? ...