Textbooks

I had a chance to learn more about Boundless last week. Extraordinarily interesting stuff. Boundless is definitely “an OER company.” A Boundless textbook is comprised of 95% or more pre-existing OER, with a very minimal amount of newly written material. Their development model appears to be as follows: take a popular textbook, analyze its structure and organization in order to create an outline, and fill that outline in with OER. The resulting textbook is an aggregation of OER. ...

Boundless’ authoring model appears to be based on “reverse engineering” publishers’ most popular textbooks. The big publishers’ court case comes down to a single question - is reverse engineering the same as creating a “derivative work?” The question is critical because the creation of derivative works is regulated by copyright. If the court finds that Boundless’ textbooks are derivative works of the publishers’ books, then Boundless has violated copyright law. If the court finds that Boundless’ reverse engineering is not the same as creating a derivative, then Boundless lives to fight another day. ...

In describing commercial publishers’ response to the open textbook bill in Washington state, Cable Green hits the nail on the head: Publishers are desperate to maintain the huge profit margins they make for essentially packaging the same content in new wrappers year after year. If their quality is indeed as superior as they claim, they shouldn’t have any trouble competing with open educational resources. This is the key point folks aren’t getting. No one outside the open education movement is impressed by books that are “open.” They don’t even know what it means, let alone care about it. What they’re excited by is a book that offers a better quality to price ratio than whatever they’re currently using. ...

I recently blogged about the Apple announcement and how it amounted to publishers ceding the “traditional” textbook market (whether print or digital) to OER makers. One way to interpret that concession is as a win for open education. And it is a win - temporarily. Another way to interpret the concession by publishers is to see it as electronics companies ending production of VCRs and doubling down on DVD players. In my previous post I asked, “If video-based, multimedia-rich, interactive textbooks are only worth $14.99 to the big publishers, what are relatively static, text-based books with a few photos worth to them?” Think about that for a minute. Sure, there are “traditional” OER textbooks available for free. But when you could have video, multimedia, simulations, and interactive assessments for $15, why would you take a traditional book (whether print or video) even if it is free? ...

Press is starting to kick in on the Utah State Office of Education’s open textbook announcement. Most of the stories are running the AP’s abbreviated version of the press release, including the Huffington Post, Businessweek, and a bunch of local outlets including KSL (NBC), the Daily Herald, KTVX (ABC), the Cache Valley Daily, and Ogden Standard-Examiner. The Sacramento Bee has some additional out of market coverage. KCPW has a podcast interview with Diana Suddreth. Sounds like TIffany Hall will be on the Channel 4 News at 6:00 tonight. ...

A brief history of the impending transformation of post-secondary education, just to clarify where we are, followed by some commentary. Dates are approximate as I’m working from memory on an airplane. Perhaps later I’ll turn this into a proper piece of writing with supporting links, etc., if folks find it interesting. 7x - The internet. Data can be routed from computer to computer. The cost of copying and distributing content begins its drop toward zero. ...

In our Utah Open Textbooks Project we’ve been closely monitoring the costs of deploying open textbooks to see if / how / when they can be less expensive than traditional textbooks. It turns out there are many, many ways to use open textbooks that are actually more expensive than traditional textbooks. We’ve learned several lessons this past year about what contributes to costs, where and how to print, etc. Today we’ve released the first version of a calculator that provides an interactive way to explore the best case scenario under a very specific assumption - that you want to provide a printed book to every student. (Arguments about how much money schools would save using online textbooks almost always omit the cost of the hardware and internet connectivity these models presume.) Even in the best case scenario, there are several ways to waste money. However, when done correctly, it is absolutely possible to provide a printed textbook to every student that they can keep forever, highlight, and take notes in - while still saving over 50% off the cost of buying a traditional textbook. ...

As I read posts about the availability of new open textbooks in a variety of formats, I’m reminded that an open textbooks is much like an iceberg. The textbook itself is the tip that we see above the water. To be more specific, I should say that the student edition is the tip we all see above the water. A tiny fraction of the open textbooks (read: student editions) in the world have a corresponding teacher’s edition that includes problem solutions, lesson plans, teaching tips, and other information teachers and faculty have come to depend on. An even more minuscule number have additional supplementary material available like Powerpoint slides, review flash cards, etc. available. ...