University of Minnesota Creates E-Book in 10 Weeks

The University of Minnesota launched its online open-text catalog at the end of April in an effort to give students access to textbooks online for free, or printed for a small fee. Now, university faculty and staff have created a 317-page e-book in 10 weeks.

Cultivating Change in the Academy: 50+ Stories from the Digital Frontlines at the University of Minnesota in 2012 is a compilation of contributions from 57 faculty members, 51 staffers, 17 graduate students, and five undergrads, all of whom volunteered their work so there would be no cost to producing the title, according to Ann Hill Duin, professor of writing studies at the Twin Cities campus.

The book was released July 9 to the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, which serves the online open-access repository. The conservancy also provided a permanent web address for the book.

“We really want to maintain access just like we do with our print,” said Lisa Johnston, research services librarian at the Twin Cities campus and co-director of the conservancy. She contributed to a chapter on the conservancy’s role in curating digital research. “We are a service that makes information available to the public via the web.”

The book focuses on “ideas for transforming teaching methods, solutions to specific classroom problems, examples of campus leaders providing direction and support for these efforts, and ways the university is spreading innovation off campus,” according to a report in Inside Higher Education.

“The e-book is far greater than the sum of the parts,” said Duin. “It’s connecting people with the innovative, imaginative, creative, collaborative dynamic work under way.”

The book is already attracting a following. Abram Anders, assistant professor of business communications at UM-Duluth’s Labovitz School of Business and Economics, reports more than 4,000 views so far of the chapter he wrote about his work with Google Apps script.

“I can see that we’re getting some people coming to our site from the press release that the school put out, some people coming from e-mail links, some people coming from Facebook,” he said, adding that people are also finding the site through Twitter posts.

Bankrolling Free Textbooks Via Donations

Some see a simple path to affordable college textbooks: Have each professor write their own course materials and distribute them gratis to enrollees (maybe charge a tad for hard copies). A tiny, but slowly growing, number of faculty are willing to do that.

The downside for students is that raw manuscripts aren’t necessarily as readable and user-friendly as traditionally published textbooks buffed by a team of peer reviewers, editors, proofers, graphic designers, technology magicians, and the like. The price might be free, but sometimes you get what you pay for. A prof could hire services to polish a book, but would either have to eat the cost or charge students much more for the end product.

A Canadian professor tapped into crowdsourcing as a way to have his free book and edit it, too. In a post about faculty putting their own books online, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog noted how Brendan Myers, a professor of philosophy and humanities at Heritage College in Quebec, solicited pledges through Kickstarter to cover professional editing, publishing, and peer-review fees for the philosophy textbook he’s writing. He plans to make the finished book available free to anyone through a Creative Commons license.

Kickstarter provides an online fundraising platform for creative projects, such as novels and films. Myers aimed to raise $5,000, but when his pledge drive ended July 7, he had $16,872 from 707 supporters. The extra will pay for a French translation, English and French audio versions, study guides, and a professional cast to record a dramatic reading of classic philosophy works.

Who knows why 707 people chose to donate to a philosophy text? Maybe some are professors who hope to use the book for their own classes, or budget-minded students planning to take Myers’ course next year, or current students sucking up for a better grade. Certainly, it seems unlikely there are enough donors out there to support an open-access textbook for every higher-education class, but contributions might float a few titles.

Compare Myers’ success at textbook fundraising with that of marketing/branding guru Seth Godin, who’s published a passel of books the old-fashioned way and is now also using Kickstarter to fund a retail campaign for his upcoming title. As of July 12, Godin had raised $267,675 from 3,925 contributors, with four days to go before the deadline. More than 1,000 of the donors gave $100 or more.

University of Minnesota Launches Online Open Text Catalog

An issue facing open educational resources (OER) is having a collection of open-content textbooks in one, easy-to-use site. The University of Minnesota is doing its part, recently launching Open Academics textbook catalog that allows students to read textbooks online for free or order a printed version for a nominal fee.

The site has 90 open-license titles available from the school’s largest entry-level courses. It also lists reviewed texts and awards a stipend to faculty members who review or adopt an open book.

“Faculty share student concerns about high textbook costs and are willing to consider high-quality, affordable alternatives like open textbooks,” said Irene Durancyzk, associate professor of the College of Education and Human Development at the university.

The hope of the Minnesota project is to attract not only the tech-savvy instructors, but all faculty members looking to lower the cost of adopted textbooks. OnCampus Research’s Student Watch 2012: Student Attitudes and Perceptions found that 52% of students responding did not buy at least one of their required textbooks for the fall 2011 semester and price was the main reason for the majority of those students.

“High textbook costs are one of the many factors that are contributing to the increasing financial burden that students are facing,” said Lizzy Shay, the undergraduate student body president at Minnesota. “Affordable open textbooks would go a long way in relieving that burden.”

Washington State Program Creates Free Course Materials

The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) recently announced the launch of the Open Course Library.   According to the press release, the Open Course Library is a compilation of educational course materials for 42 of the state’s highest-enrolled college courses. They hope to reach 81 classes by 2013.   Materials will cost $30 or less per student and are available free online for use by any of the 34 public community and technical colleges, four year institutions and anyone else worldwide.

For faculty, the use of the Open Course Library is optional and many are moving towards adoption according to the SBCTC. 

Blackboard Allows Sharing of Content

The Chronicle reports that Blackboard will add a “Share” button that will allow faculty to share course materials free and open to nonregistered students.  This is a big win for the Open Education Movement and for schools since they will  not be charged extra for additional viewing.  Blackboard’s “Share” initiative is partnering with Creative Commons where faculty will have the option to attach a Creative Commons license to the content.  Cable Green, director of global learning for Creative Commons, says his “goal is to have this kind of option in every commercial learning-management system and also open-source ones,” according to the article.

Money for New TextBook Authors

While we have not reported on the open source movement much lately, developments continue.  Recently, the Saylor Foundation, a non-profit organization, announced that it would pay new textbook authors up to $20,000 to put their textbooks under a Creative Commons license allowing free use to anyone while keeping copyright protection for the author. Of course, books submitted must meet the Foundation’s set criteria. The foundation currently has more than 200 college textbooks in the collection free to anyone in the globe as part of the Foundation’s mission to drive down cost of education to zero.

OER infographic and accuracy of OER data

The Atlantic recently published a piece which included an interesting infographic that compared Open Source Textbooks to other textbook options. As with much of the media on open source textbooks these days, there is a fair amount of incorrect data being bandied about, which leads to some false conclusions about the benefits. Such items make for good teachable moments, though.

If you scroll past the infographic, you will find among the comments one from our government relation's director, Rich Hershman. Rich and I are both proponents of the open source movement, and together crafted a policy position for our Association's board. That position, in support of the OER/open textbook movement was adopted nearly three years ago and remains in effect. That aside, there is room for constructive criticism of the open textbook movement and a number of the claims used relative to the movement. I think Rich's comments do a great job of capturing some of these perspectives.

Here are Rich's comments from the posting:

While this is an interesting graphic, I would question some of the facts it displays. The National Association of College Stores has been tracking the cost of textbooks and other course materials for years, and our data and that of others in some aspects are quite different.:

1.) According to actual student surveys, the average full time student spends between $600-$700 annually on course materials , not $900. This $600 to $700 includes purchasing new books, used books, rental, and ebooks. It does not factor in financial aid, tax credits, nor if students sell their textbooks back, all of which would further reduce the net costs -in some cases significantly. Student spending on college textbooks has actually been declining in recent years, according to at least two recent national surveys of students.

2.) The $184 average cost estimate of open source textbooks does not factor in the total costs of the content , since the open source textbook community now advocates for and and in some cases receives federal, state, and institutional subsidies (beyond student fees) in order to develop, update, maintain, and support such textbooks. Therefore, some of the costs of open source textbooks would be hidden from students, though they likely would pay for some of these costs indirectly. Also depending on how a fee would be established, if it was a mandatory school-wide fee as some have advocated, students from low-cost content subjects, like literature, would be forced to subsidize students taking higher cost science and math courses.

3.) Switching to open source textbooks would cost states and localities in states like California, Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Illinois hundreds of millions in lost sales tax revenue. This would likely be offset with further cuts to education funding, and result in higher tuition and fees. It would also reduce income tax and eliminate thousands of jobs and employment opportunities for students and recent graduates.

4.) The average price of new course materials, including textbooks, at colleges and universities in 2009-2010 was $62, not $171. Implying that the average cost of all new textbooks actually used in schools is $171 greatly misrepresents the potential savings as you look beyond single title examples and attempt to jump to claims of aggregate savings.

Open source textbooks are a valuable and an important development in the marketplace for courses materials. There are many reasons why institutions should support the development and experimentation of open source textbooks for academic reasons separate from the perceived cost-savings arguments. There are opportunities to make course materials more affordable through the adoption and use of open textbooks. However, the case for open source textbooks from an affordability perspective should be made with a complete understanding of all the direct and indirect costs and benefits to students. This info-graphic, cool as it, seems to fall short of this test.

It would be great to see the infographic updated with correct information, as such graphics can be useful tools for communicating complex data. OER can have a positive effect on education. However, if we fail to measure the effects accurately, we may come to false conclusions and reap some unintended consequences.

As one example, most college stores are independent non-profit businesses today, and even if they are part of one of the contract management chains, they return revenue or provide other services to the academic institution in most cases. Most revenue from course materials goes to support financial aid or student services. While improving textbook affordability via open source textbooks, educational affordabilty can also be affected, and we are hearing more anecdotal examples of this happening on campuses.

I believe that part of Rich's point is that in addition to the inaccuracies in the infographic, there is a larger set of economic implications here connected to textbooks and textbok affordability. The OER movement needs better and more accurate data on "total cost of ownership" at the student, institutional, governmental, and national levels. This would enable us to better support OER initiatives and find models that are true wins for students. A deeper conversation and investigation of the true costs associated with OER should occur -- otherwise we risk taking a positive innovation and turning it into a shell game with educational affordability at stake.

Short of this type of investigation, why not just take the billions of dollars going into developing open access textbooks and give it to the current textbook publishers to make their content free for the students with greatest need? Or use it to subsidize the top 20 percent of titles from publishers, or the top X percent of most widely used textbooks, making the current high quality products free to students rather spending money to reinvent an industry that already exists? Sure, this would have unintended consequences as well, but we might start with a higher bar and have an immediate affordabilty impact across the widest possible range of students.

My comment here is meant to be somewhat flippant or extreme -- the point being that we cannot throw money at OER and just expect that it will produce high quality, affordable results. There are reasons to support OER and the OER movement beyond affordability. The movement would be well served to make more of those arguments, and fact-check some of their current assumptions related to affordability.

BGSU Open Source Textbook Webinar

Bowling Green State University (BGSU) hosted Eric Frank from Flat World for a presentation on textbook affordability and the open source textbook model. Here is the session description:

How can new open textbook models reduce costs by an average of 80% or more, keeping education accessible and affordable at a critical time in Ohio? Join us for this workshop, featuring Eric Frank, President and Co-Founder of Flat World Knowledge, as we discuss:

• How we've reached the era of the $200 textbook: a look at the root causes


• The impact of high prices on students including data on course completion rates


• A survey of emerging solutions with a focus on open textbooks and case study of Flat World Knowledge


• An overview of the partnership and pilot between the Ohio Board of Regents and Flat World Knowledge, including information for faculty interested in participating in the program.

WBGU recorded the broadcast “Textbook Affordability & Open Source Textbooks” event that was held yesterday and that archive video is available to the public for anyone who wasn’t able to participate directly.

Easiest access is via the BGSU Textbook Affordability web site and appears below.

The Myth of Commercial Textbook Reliability

There was an interesting opinion piece on the College Open Textbook Blog this week. A former commercial textbook publishers talks about the quality standards, perceptions and motivations around textbooks--from both the OER and commercial perspectives.

An appropriate analogy which came to mind when reading the piece is the Encylopedia Brittanica versus Wikipedia. Many questioned the credibility and accuracy of Wikipedia (an open source encyclopedia) at first. I think the last stats I saw (some time ago) was that there are now fewer than three errors in Wikipedia for every error in Encyclopedia Brittanica -- and errors in the former tend to get corrected more quickly than errors in the latter.

I think the concern -- both with Wikipedia and open textbooks -- is not so much about small errors. It is more about authoritative voices and the vetting of content by authoritative voices. There is a fear (real or perceived) that content that is not vetted by field experts runs the risk of being inaccurate in fundamental ways -- e.g., excluding evolution as a valid scientific theory over or along side creationism in a biology textbook. Conventional wisdom (which is often wrong) or political agendas can more easily be embedded into texts if there is not a vetting process by trained or experienced experts within a field. Of course, some in the scientific or academic community might say this happens with traditional texts as well, because new, novel, or as yet unproven theories often have great difficulty getting published. Certainly there are examples in the open source space which address this concern around vetting content -- Flat World Knowledge and Connexions being two very positive examples.

Maybe we have to come to some agreement what we mean by "quality." That said, the opinion piece raises some interesting ideas and perspectives. Should open textbooks be held to a different standard? Probably not. One could ask if for-profit universities should be held to a different standard too -- with an equal amount of debate to follow. For a new technology to prove itself and be adopted in the marketplace is not an entitlement -- it must be earned. For open textbooks that means being held to a higher standard until perceptions and reality are aligned at a point favorable to the technology.

The open textbook community should welcome and embrace that higher bar as a challenge to create even better products -- exceeding the products produced by traditional sources. That in turn forces those traditional products to either improve or exit the marketplace. Remember that it is not always the best technology that wins--but often the technology that is able to capture the greatest amount of market share. For open source to be successful in the long term, the movement must focus on continuing to build market share. Part of that will happen by demonstrating open source meets a higher standard than traditional textbooks, if such is the case.

Smarthistory interactive art history textbook

The Chronicle recently featured an article about an interactive online art-history textbook that we discussed in a posting last year. The online textbook is called Smarthistory and it is an ongoing effort by Beth Harris, professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Steven Zuker, Chairperson of History of Art and Design at the Pratt Institute.

The project began in 2005 and has evolved into an intuitive reference website that features an interactive timeline with images that link to videos. The site also includes links, maps, and photos to engage the users. According to the article, the project has been winning honors and more than 70 universities and colleges either use or recommend Smarthistory. A listing of the institutions can be found here.

In the future, similar websites for other disciplines could be modeled after this idea.

Free e-books and textbooks on iTunes U

Apple’s iTunes U currently offers free lectures and courses, and now it will also offer free digital textbooks and e-books. According to an article from Wired Campus, The Open University has added 100 interactive e-books to iTunes U and plans to add an additional 200 e-books before the end of the year. Rice University has also added 18 free textbooks from its open education project called Connexions. Joel Thierstein, executive director of Connexions, pointed out that adding the textbooks to iTunes U could help institutions become more familiar with open-education content.