Sources for "Why aren't there Open-Source Textbooks"

Sources for " Why don't State Governments Encourage and Adopt Open-Source Textbooks for their School?"
Online multimedia textbooks: A strategic investment [send this letter to Secretary Spellings, Director Magner, and Congress]

The Honorable Margaret Spellings Secretary United States Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue SW Washington, DC 20202-7100 Dear Secretary Spellings, The United States Department of Education currently administers a budget of approximately $56 billion per year in discretionary monies. I am sending this letter to encourage the Department to make a relatively small, but extremely strategic, investment that would pay enormous dividends for our nation’s elementary and secondary students. For $200 million per year, the Department could create phenomenal, mind-blowing online multimedia textbooks that could be used by students all across the country. Imagine 50 teams, each made up of individuals who took a paid sabbatical for one year, working to create rigorous, standards-based, online textbooks that included text, graphics, electronic presentations, audio, video, simulations, learning games, interactive problem-solving and review activities, etc. The teams could be comprised as follows: 0.	16 expert teachers * $100,000 each = $1,600,000 0.	4 university professors * $100,000 each = $400,000 0.	8 computer / Web programmers * $100,000 each = $800,000 0.	1 assistive technology expert * $100,000 = $100,000 0.	1 national organization representative * $100,000 = $100,000 0.	1 project manager * $200,000 = $200,000 0.	Communication and other software, supplies, travel, etc. = $800,000 Four teachers plus a professor plus two programmers equals a workgroup; four workgroups per team. Each team receives ongoing feedback from a representative from an appropriate national organization (e.g., National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, National Council for Social Studies), has an assistive technology expert to ensure content accessibility by students with disabilities, and has a project manager to keep the workgroups moving along. The workgroups create content; post that content online as they go along for review, comment, and input from others; and, over the course of a year, create several units each that add up to a complete, amazing, deep, rich online multimedia textbook. Each year would see the completion of 50 textbooks. Over three or four years, these Department-sponsored teams would create 150 to 200 textbooks for common, key courses (e.g., Algebra I, Physics I, AP English, United States History, 5th grade reading) that are present in nearly every school district nationwide. Textbook content would be refreshed every three or four years to ensure content relevance and usage of the latest digital technologies. If the textbooks were wiki-based, much of the content could be revised and updated even before their refresh cycle came due. Once created, these textbooks then could be hosted by the Department, state departments of education, and other entities or could be downloaded for hosting on local school district servers. Federal provision of these textbooks would free states and school districts to spend funds on laptops, classroom-level high-speed wireless connectivity, and other technologies necessary to ensure the global competitiveness of our students in the decades to come. All textbook material would be free and openly accessible to our nation’s K-12 students and educators. I hope that you can see the instructional power of teachers and students tapping into expert-created content delivered via the latest interactive, engaging digital technologies. Although a few organizations (e.g., Wikibooks or Curriki) are attempting to create free online textbooks or learning materials, their reliance on volunteers has resulted in relatively little progress. A strategic investment by the Department could make an extremely powerful contribution to the K-12 educational landscape and would be a powerful lever toward ensuring that all students had access to top-quality, engaging learning materials. Please consider instituting a national online textbook initiative. I believe that this is an idea whose time has come and would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further with you. Sincerely, Dr. Scott McLeod Assistant Professor, Department of Educational   Policy and Administration Director, UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of   Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE) Affiliate Faculty, Law School University of Minnesota Email this • Add to del.icio.us • Digg This! • Subscribe to this feed Posted by Scott McLeod on February 20, 2007 in Assistive and Accessible, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Management and Operations, Online Learning, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration, Tech Tools | Permalink Technorati Tags: education, investment, Magner, McLeod, multimedia, online, schools, Spellings, standards, strategic, students, teachers, technology leadership, textbooks, wiki TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/1040165/16263524

Utah Adopts Kinetic Books Digital Physics Textbooks As Primary Physics Texts: Students Will Replace Print Texts With Computer-Based Curriculum

Published: Thu, 19 Jan 2006, 11:39:00 GMT Edited by Christopher Simmons 	Email this article Print this news article Share Content

SEATTLE, WA (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) -- The State of Utah has recently adopted all three levels of Kinetic Books' digital physics textbooks as primary physics textbooks. Now Utah high school students are able to use fully digital texts instead of printed textbooks to learn physics. These new textbooks from Kinetic Books are created from scratch for the new media, and take advantage of digital capabilities such as simulations, computer-guided homework and animated lectures.

"My students are motivated to be active, independent learners," said Douglas Hendricks, physics teacher at the Academy for Math, Engineering, and Science in Salt Lake City. "They have so much fun doing the labs I've assigned them that many students come in on their own during lunchtime to explore the other modules-the ones that I didn't assign them -- without even asking for extra credit for doing so."

"Electronic resources have already replaced printed references, starting with Microsoft Encarta and now with the research capabilities of web engines like Google," said Kinetic Books' CEO Bruce Jacobsen. "The same transition will occur with textbooks in main subjects. Students and teachers tell us every day they prefer a digital physics textbook to a print one. They are more engaging and more efficient to use."

One high school student who used a Kinetic Books textbook remarked: "Beyond making physics enjoyable, the digital textbook made concepts a great deal simpler to understand without forfeiting meaning. My printed textbook, on the other hand, makes me feel like an ESL student in his first day of class."

In addition to covering all the material in printed texts and offering the benefits of interactivity, Kinetic Books digital textbooks cost less to purchase-relieving a major concern for many cash-strapped students, parents and schools. Pricing starts at $24.95, about one-third the cost of a printed textbook, and schools and universities can choose from multiple licensing models to fit their needs. "Digital distribution is much more cost efficient than printing and distributing traditional textbooks. We pass on these cost savings on to our customers," said Jacobsen.

Kinetic Books' software includes the usual text and homework problems, along with multiple opportunities for the students to self-assess. Hours of audio, hundreds of interactive Java simulations, and thousands of animations are designed to present physics concepts in ways that are approachable no matter what a student's learning style might be.

"Digital textbooks mirror the changes happening in education overall, where today's students have come to expect more than a lecture," continued Jacobsen. "Think of a paper textbook like a classroom where students sit quietly and passively in rows. Kinetic Books software is more like a classroom and lab rolled into one, filled with the energy of students interacting, experimenting, and applying concepts to situations they relate to from everyday life and the world around them."

Some states, like Utah, use a state-wide adoption process to approve and purchase physics textbooks. In other states, there is no state-wide process. The three Kinetic Books physics textbooks are currently in use at secondary schools and colleges in ten countries and 38 states.

About Kinetic Books

Kinetic Books Company creates digital curriculum. Experiment with Kinetic Books physics curriculum, or find out more about the company at www.kineticbooks.com. For more information contact Mark Bretl at 206-267-1756 or markb@kbooks.com.

Kinetic Books, 2003 Western Avenue Suite 330, Seattle, WA 98121. Phone: (206) 448-1141, Toll free: (877) 452-6657, Fax: (206) 374-2918.

NEWS SOURCE: Kinetic Books http://www.send2press.com/newswire/2006-01-0119-002.shtml

Online publication of ideas, particularly through blogs and collaborative spaces like “wikis” used by WikiPedia, provide publication mechanisms for people around the planet at almost no cost. The distribution costs of ideas contained in binary computer code of ones and zeros is virtually negligible, as Nicholas Negroponte observed in his book “Being Digital” published (traditionally) in 1995. Digital content published on the public Internet is much more accessible, offers far lower barriers of production, distribution and access, and offers robust potential for language translations unthought-of in the traditional world of analog print. For economic, pedagogic, and moral reasons, educators in the 21st century need to become “open educators” supporting the free, global exchange of ideas and information in our networked world being drawn ever closer together through the magic of technology. http://www.wtvi.com/teks/archive.html

__________________________________________________________________ WHEN school opens this year, nearly a million error-riddled textbooks will yet again be supplied to public schools nationwide.

This was revealed by Antonio Go, the educator who blew the whistle on errors found in a History textbook two years ago, in yesterday’s Senate hearing on the “textbook scam.”

Go, the academic supervisor of the Marian School of Quezon City, said the newly approved public school textbook on Social Studies, Ang Bagong Pilipino, has “more than 100 errors.”

“Why had this been allowed to happen?” said Go, who has been reviewing “defective textbooks” for 10 years now. “This is the biggest error, teaching children things that are wrong.”

Department of Education (DepEd) officials who attended the inquiry said they will look into the errors. http://www.pcij.org/blog/?p=1423

That something new is called Connexions. As described in one of the many documents Baraniuk and the team he leads have used to raise funding, it’s “an experimental, open-source/open content project. . . that gives a learner. . . free access to educational materials that can be readily manipulated to suite her individual learning style. . . . The free software tools also foster the development, manipulation, and continuous refinement of educational material by diverse communities of authors and teachers.”

What does that mean, exactly? When it’s up and running, Connexions will offer an online library of networked content that will allow instructors to pick and choose best-of-breed instructional materials. Experts around the world will develop and contribute modules of information specific to their own expertise. These modules — which may take the form of individual chapters, or even smaller sections of chapters — will act as a giant, constantly evolving library of information that can be tweaked to any given instructor’s satisfaction.

By selecting specific modules and then using Connexion’s free, XML-based editing tools to modify the emphasis of a given course, instructors will be able to create custom textbooks. Students could then go to Kinko’s and order a custom text incorporating the latest research, the best pedagogy — tailored to match their professor’s teaching style and the specific goals of the course at hand. Theoretically, the library will function across disciplines, and will aid teachers and students from kindergarten through graduate school. So far, more than 1000 modules now form the basis for nine electrical and computer engineering courses at Rice.

If that sounds ambitious, think about this: Connexions isn’t just about creating a collection of bite-sized informational chunks. It’s also about fostering a quantum leap in the evolution of literacy — something akin to the development of the first written language or the creation of the printing press. “My perspective about this,” says Burrus, “is not that it’s a just a product of one teacher’s frustrations. I think what we’re doing truly has the potential to change the way people think.”

http://creativecommons.org/education/connexions

Free the Curriculum!

August 3, 2005 3:40 PM - comments (36)

The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.

http://lessig.org/blog/2005/08/free_the_curriculum.html

The Case for Creative Commons Textbooks Fred M. Beshears, U.C. Berkeley April 07, 2005

According to a recent survey, University of California students now spend 40 percent more on textbooks than they did six years ago. We argue that colleges and universities may be able to significantly reduce these costs by creating a coalition for the acquisition and distribution of electronic textbooks.

The survey, taken in the Fall of 2003, found that University of California students now spend an average of $898 per year on new and used textbooks, compared to $642 in 1996-97 [ 1 ]. By pooling the acquisition of electronic textbooks, and distributing them under a creative commons licence [ 2 ], we could lighten the load on these students' already tight budgets.

It should be noted that there are initiatives underway to bring electronic textbooks to market [ 3 ] [ 4 ], and there are projects intent on improving access to and utilization of existing library resources [ 5 ]. Also, a number of well known creative commons initiatives are seeking to supplement, but not replace, textbooks [ 6 ] [ 7 ].

Yet, though all of these efforts are innovative in their own way, none seek to fundamentally transform the textbook industry.

While the textbook market seems rather tranquil for the time being, the same cannot be said for vendors of Learning Management Systems. One significant proposal that could disrupt the learning software market has been put forward by Ira Fuchs, VP for Research at the Mellon Foundation. In a recent article, he proposes the creation of Educore - an organization dedicated to the development of open source educational software. According to Fuchs, Educore "...might involve more than 1000 colleges and universities around the world. Each member institution would be asked to contribute between $5,000 and $25,000 per year, based on size ..." [ 8 ]

Inspired by Fuchs' vision, this paper explores the idea of establishing a global coalition of similar size that would acquire and distribute high quality creative commons content that could be used in any of the following combinations: a) as the basis of an online course, b) as an electronic textbook, or c) as a customized printed textbook for use in a traditional college course.

OpenTextbook, as I'll call it, would also consist of around 1,000 residential colleges and universities, but it would accomplish its mission by forming long term, strategic partnerships with one or more open universities, such as the British Open University (UKOU).[ 9 ]

Unlike MIT's Open Courseware initiative, OpenTextbook would focus on content for the big introductory courses that account for a large percentage of student eyeballs, and a substantial portion of the textbook market. According to my own research, around 120 large introductory courses account for around 50% of Berkeley's undergraduate enrollment. For community colleges, this figure may be as low as 25 courses. [ 10 ]

OpenTextbook's business model would be simple: traditional colleges and universities would agree to pay membership dues to purchase content from the open universities. OpenTextbook would not develop the content; it would purchase content in bulk. In this sense, OpenTextbook would be similar to consumer cooperatives and buying clubs that pool member resources to gain purchasing power in the market.

In addition to saving money, OpenTextbook's objective would also be to give faculty the freedom to customize creative commons content, and use it as a substitute for mass produced commercial textbooks. To the extent faculty choose to do so, the cost savings for students could be substantial.

To see if this would be economically feasible, I'll start by determining how much UKOU spends on content development. I'll then look at how much it would cost OpenTextbook members to buy UKOU's content on an ongoing basis. And finally, I'll divide a single school's membership fee by the number of students at the school to see how this cost compares with the current cost of textbooks.

At present, the UKOU spends on average $3 million dollars (US) per course on content development, and they have over 200 undergraduate courses in their inventory, which comes to a total investment of over $600 million. They also keep their content updated on a regular basis, which, among other things, means replacing each course from scratch after eight years. In other words, the UKOU currently spends around $75 million per year on content development, which amounts to around forty percent of their budget. [ 11 ]

If OpenTextbook distributed these costs equally to each member, the annual membership fee would be on the order of $75,000. This would be comparable to what Berkeley's library pays for an annual subscription to one of the more expensive journals. If we assume that students can choose to avoid printing costs by accessing the content on-line, then for a school the size of Berkeley (23,000 undergraduates) this would come out to an annual per student cost of $3.25.

In my view, a fair number of faculty who teach Berkeley's large introductory courses would be willing and able to substitute OpenTextbook content for the commercial textbooks currently in use. But even if most instructors continued to use commercial textbooks, it may still be that enough students would be able to use OpenTextbook's content to justify the small per student cost.

Even if we take the most pessimistic scenario (OpenTextbook fails completely and the content goes unused), the $75,000 annual cost of joining the coalition would be rather small - especially when compared with the best case scenario where textbook costs can be reduced to $3.25 per year. In the latter case, the cost savings for a school the size of Berkeley would be extraordinary: $898 less $3.25 times 23,000 undergraduates, or $20,579,250 per year!

In conclusion, it should be noted that what has been presented is not a specific business proposal. The purpose of this paper is simply to stimulate discussion, and to show that given a coalition of 1000 schools OpenTextbook would be economically feasible.

Resources

[ 1 ] Merriah Fairchild, Rip-off 101: How the Current Practices of the Textbook Industry Drive up the Cost of College Textbooks, http://calpirg.org/CA.asp?id2=11987&id3=CA, (CalPirg Education Fund, 2004).

[ 2 ] Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org

[ 3 ] A Strategy and Vision for the Future of Electronic Textbooks in UK Further and Higher Education, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Annex_E_E_Textbooks_Strategy_final_report.pdf, (Education for Change LTD, 2003).

[ 4 ] Michael H. Granof, A New Model for Textbook Pricing, (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 2004).

[ 5 ] Diane Harley, The Use of Digital Resources in Humanities/Social Sciences Undergraduate Education, http://digitalresourcestudy.berkeley.edu/docs.html, (Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley, 2004).

[ 6 ] MIT Open Courseware Initiative, http://ocw.mit.edu/.

[ 7 ] Merlot, http://www.merlot.org/

[ 8 ] Ira Fuchs, Needed: and 'Educore' to Aid Collaboration, (Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2004).

[ 9 ] British Open University, http://www.ouw.co.uk/

[ 10 ] Carol A. Twigg, The One Percent Solution, Vol. 30, Number 6, http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/review/reviewArticles/30616.html, (Educom Review, 1995).

[ 11 ] David Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, (Harvard University Press, 2003), p185.

http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20050407015813

Texas carried out several pilot projects that examined the effectiveness of laptop integration in select school districts. While several successes were reported a series of problems arose that led Texas Board of Educaton officials to postpone the laptop project. First, pilot projects depended on donations from private computing vendors. While some were forthcoming, others failed to deliver hardware on time and provided only minimal technical support. Second, teachers resisted laptop integration due to the extensive investment of time required to appropriate computing skills and the difficulty of modifying existing curricula and teaching styles to accomodate laptop hardware and software. Third, at that time the available educational software, such as digitalized textbooks, was expensive, inadequately developed, and narrowly focused on curricular areas such as writing and math practice. Teachers also began to develop more comprehensive and philosophical criticisms of laptop use. Education specialist, Larry Cuban, argued that while laptops provided good support for a vocational education, they failed to deliver on other educational goals such as teaching children how to interact with their peers and teachers and teaching children the civic virtues necessary to become active participants in a democratic form of government. Studies began to appear that argued that skills developed through computer use came at the expense of other, more social skills.

http://cnx.org/content/m14257/latest/

___________________________________________________

Textbooks are a technology that has had an enormously deleterious affect on learning. They are filled with homogenized factoids, written by anonymous committees possessing dubious qualifications and are designed to enforce a uniform teaching experience regardless of individual student differences. Textbooks are by definition one-size-fits-all approaches to teaching in which learning is at best an accidental side effect.

I’ve seen countless cases where a school district has gone to extraordinary lengths in order to fund new textbook purchases. In one case, science teachers were fired so the district could afford new science textbooks. Politicians get elected promising new textbooks and under-funded schools beg for textbook money.

This is the golden age of (real) publishing. I like to take teachers to the local bookstore and demonstrate that there are better trade paperbacks on any subject at every conceivable developmental level than a textbook. Yet, states spend billion on such backpack ballast and add insult to injury by requiring that the books not be updated for five, or in some cases, ten years.

3) It is fantastically naïve to suggest that teachers sharing worksheets online endangers the textbook industry in any way. They are a multi-billion dollar industry most Americans (and certainly politicians) equate with education. They’re as American as spelling tests and handwriting instruction. The textbook industry is not going to roll over and play dead just because some teachers are blogging.

The keys to success in textbook publishing are simplicity, uniformity and compliance. Textbooks are about control (real or imagined) of the public school system. The companies make it very easy for school districts to buy and rollout new textbooks like clockwork. Nobody buys a textbook because it’s good. They do it because it’s quick, easy and asks nothing of teachers while promoting a public image of progress.

Recent trends like the Open Court Coaches (snitches) employed in Los Angeles and other districts; along with scripted curricula like “Success for All” demonstrate the destructive power textbooks hold over classroom instruction. These models also demonstrate how willing decision-makers are to enforce compliance and homogeneity on their teachers.

In too many cases, textbooks are weapons used against learners. It hardly matters if the weapon pointed at children is created by teachers for free on the web or by multinational conglomerates adroit at separating taxpayers from their treasure.

Textbook companies are incredibly nimble. Emphasize authentic literature and the next textbook series will have literature included. The problem is that the 32 page Sarah Plain and Tall will be abridged and each paragraph will be followed by a multiple-choice comprehension question that destroys the narrative and distracts the reader.

The Zelig-like shape-changing ability of the textbook industry has found a way to wreck every new technology that may render it obsolete. Now students can be bored with incomplete misinformation not only by reading a hardcover text, but on their iPod and laptop as well. Yippee!

Throw a new technology at textbook publishers and they’ll turn it into a textbook.

Underestimate the power of the textbook industry at your peril. Where do large district superintendents work after they retire? Textbook companies. Why? They are hired for their rolodex and access to other superintendents (re: customers) Visit Austin, Texas and see the textbook publishing offices walking distance from the state capital. Coincidence? Hardly!

Three foreign conglomerates control the vast majority of American textbooks. Why isn’t Tom Friedman or the Congress upset about turning our educational system over to foreigners? These same companies control standardized testing and test-prep. Their dominance is formidable and likely to be with us for a very long time.http://www.stager.org/blog/2007/07/creative-commons-free.html

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I am willing to take risks, and willing to tolerate failure as long as we admit it, can learn from it and keep moving forward. Christine Gregoire http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/christine_gregoire.html

Kristy Bloxham