College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
An Insanely Great Week
Regardless of your opinion of Apple’s textbook announcement, plenty of good can come when the world’s second largest (or perhaps largest) for-profit company by market capitalization turns its attention to this tiny market. For starters, it generated a lively discussion in the College Open Textbooks community, which you are welcome to join. With Steve Jobs gone, we do not know if he would have called this announcement “insanely great,” the phrase he used with many other Apple products, and I will withhold judgment myself until I learn more. But with the extraordinary potential for technology to accelerate the adoption of Open Educational Resources, I am ready to declare this an insanely great week.
I hope to write about other aspects of the announcement later, but for now I would like to turn to a critical topic: Apple’s commercial and licensing terms. The following is my understanding; if you think I am wrong on anything, I encourage you to comment.
A number of comments in the announcement discussion pointed out that what you produce with iBook Author cannot be used on non-Apple devices. This is definitely a concern, although in fairness nothing prevents you from using other means to create other versions of your textbook for use on any device (including Apple devices).
Apple is a master at negotiating with content providers, and they did not disappoint. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson joined the announcement, saying they “will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore with most priced at $14.99 or less.” For those like me who have paid up to $200 for a single textbook, this is electrifying. But watch out for the fine print; the publishers intend this to be a per-student charge. At one student per year for, say, five years, a typical lifespan of a physical textbook, that is a cost of $75. Viewed this way, you are not saving much. But for someone buying a new textbook, it is a big drop. And unlike the used textbook market, you are getting the latest version.
Apple keeps 30% of the price, which bothers some people, although I frankly doubt traditional publishers would offer more attractive terms. The main way Apple aspires to make money, in my opinion, is on iPads, iPhones and the like.
From an Open Educational Resources perspective, here is the most important part. Apple iBook Author is free, and you can set whatever price you want for the textbook you produce. If you set a price of zero, students do not pay anything, the author does not pay anything, and, outside of the sale of devices, Apple does not get paid. I cannot argue with that.
I am convinced there is more to come, from Apple, its competitors and other players. There has been a lot of encouraging things happening in Open Educational Resources, and it is about to get a lot more exciting!
How Textbooks Sparked a Charitable Revolution
Guest Post by Brendan Baker of Chegg.com – committed to making education more affordable by offering cheap textbooks for students to buy, rent or sell.
As we look for ways to make education more affordable, what can start as a simple idea can often expand into something bigger. Just as the open textbook cause spawned into a vast network of open textbook organizations and communities, you never know how big an idea can become until you’ve put it into action.
For Chegg.com it started with the idea that all college textbooks could be—rather should be—cheaper for students. But what if you take that belief one step further? What if students had the ability to rent textbooks, which would make them more affordable while helping to save paper?
The idea snowballed from there, and soon enough a partnership with the American Forest Global ReLeaf Foundation was formed. The idea: for every textbook rented or sold through Chegg.com, a tree would be planted. The result? Since the inception of the partnership, over five million trees have been planted around the world—from the San Juan National Forest in Colorado all the way to Pondicherry, India—and the number continues to rise.
Several years later, the trees are still serving their purpose. Whether it’s by repopulating areas that have been damaged by wildfire or through improving the water quality in community rivers, the trees are a much needed presence in their environments.
What’s more, since the start of their partnership with the American Forest Global ReLeaf Foundation, Chegg has picked up a few more partnerships along the way, effectively creating what they now call the Chegg for Good program. Their motto: to encourage and inspire students to become active on their campus in social causes and become philanthropic leaders who make a difference on their campuses, in their communities, and around the world. Beyond tree planting, Chegg wants students be a catalyst for change and help them realize their dreams of making an impact on the world.
Among many of their initiatives, Chegg has even hosted a competition where four student founded non-profit organizations competed for a chance to receive additional financial support towards their cause. Each organization posted their story on the Chegg blog in order to help drive votes (and ultimately more funding), to their respective programs.
And it doesn’t stop there. Chegg has also sponsored two Habitat for Humanity playhouse builds involving the company’s very own employees. In fact, a new employee volunteer program hopes to encourage everyone on the Chegg team to give five days a year, paid by Chegg, to volunteer with organizations that matter to them.
As they look to the future, Chegg continues to seek out influential partners that will expose students to some unique and once in a lifetime opportunities in the philanthropic space. And with any luck, the circle of giving will continue to spread from the high-level organizations down to the young and ambitious students of the world. Once again, a small idea has flourished into a worldwide network of positive and influential change.
To learn more about possible charities you can get involved with or to learn more about the Chegg for Good program, click here: http://www.chegg.com/cheggforgood/
Winning Ideas from the Big Ideas Fest
Both Jacky Hood and I along with 150 other leading educators and business executives focused on education convened in Half Moon Bay on December 4-7 for the Big Ideas Fest (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-big-ideas-fest). In addition to listening to 18 speakers (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-speakers-big-ideas-fest) ranging from Martha Kanter, Under Secretary, US Department of Education, to Kaycee Eckhardt, an amazingly giving and passionate Reading Teacher from New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, we ate good food, networked, and worked on some big ideas.
Part of the conference was the facilitation of Action Collabs (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-action-collabs-big-ideas-fest, a great way to brainstorm solutions to core questions. There were nine groups of 15-20 people led by facilitators through the multi-day brain-storming process. Open Educational Resources (OER) were the major focus. Four of the nine groups took on the following question: “How might we leverage open (content, data, and research) to transform teaching and learning?” The groups all followed a six step process: 1) Identify the Opportunity, 2) Design the Solution, 3) Prototype the Solution, 4) Present and get Expert Feedback, 5) Update the Solution based on the feedback and Design if to Scale and Spread, and 6) Present it again. Step 1 included interviewing experts. Former COT director and now Open Courseware Consortium/CCCOER community college outreach manager, Una Daly, was one of the experts. The process was engaging and produced very interesting results. It was fun to see the solutions that 150 bright minds can produce. Strong synergy emerged among educators, business people, foundation managers, and others. The four different groups focused on the same question approached their solutions in very different ways.
Other Action Collab Topics included Assessments and Basic Literacy/Math Skills.
ISKME secured a $50k grant from the Gates Foundation to take the three most promising “big ideas” to the next level. It is a matching grant and ISKME is looking to find another $50k to match the Gates funding, which means that $100k will be used to bring 3 of the 9 ideas presented to the next level. Everyone in the Action Collab I participated in (aka WeLearn) were elated when our idea was paired with another group as one of the winners. WeLearn emphasized vocational life-long learning. Putting tools and knowledge in the hands of those in the workforce to help them learn and grow. In addition to OER and traditional content, we had focused on mentor/mentee matching and close ties to corporations as one of the benefactors of a more skill-based workforce.
This big idea is similar to a concept that the Open Doors Group has been discussing; it is called CHAI (Commerce, Healthcare, Agriculture and Industry) as a potential sharing space for flexible, affordable education/training materials. This is a much larger initiative with a focus on vocational education initiatives utilizing open resources. Very exciting idea that has synergy with the big ideas that surfaced at the Big Ideas Fest. Stay tuned for more ideas.
Mitchell Levy, Co-Director, College Open Textbooks
- 408-257-3000, http://collegeopentextbooks.org
CEO & Author, Happy About
- http://happyabout.com, http://42rules.com, http://thinkaha.com
Related posting: Read move about the Big Ideas Fest from Carol Hedgspeth’s blog post: http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/blog/?p=1845
NOTE: IMAGES ARE CC-BY-SA BY ISKME.
Education Champions Work Together to Find Solutions for Open Education Design Challenge at Big Ideas Fest 2011
By Carol Hedgspeth, Senior Research Associate, ISKME
ISKME’s 3rd annual Big Ideas Fest (www.bigideasfest.org) was held in early December in Half Moon Bay, CA, and as promised, creative doers and thinkers from diverse levels of education gathered to learn from and share with each other. This convening yielded creative, inspirational, and often revolutionary ideas about current educational challenges, while providing the opportunity to interact and engage with a mix of teachers, researchers, administrators, entrepreneurs, education leaders. Central to Big Ideas Fest is the “action” component, called Action Collabs–design-oriented labs where participants brainstormed, prototyped, and ultimately create scalable solutions to major education challenges, such as achieving universal literacy and math competency, and leveraging open education to transform teaching 
and learning.
In a major shift from traditional educational conferences, the event is designed to bring together kindred spirits on a level playing field, where a person’s work or role becomes less important than how they share and collaborate within their group. In this way, the mix of students, teachers, administrators, researchers, inventors, and executives operate as peers in solving a common problem. These common problems are referred to as “design challenges” at the Big Ideas Fest.
One of the design challenges that was taken on by the Action Collabs was to create solutions around leveraging open content, data, and research to transform teaching and learning. During the Action Collabs, teachers, administrators, and students worked alongside noted leaders and policy makers in the field of open education. The Action Collab process facilitates moving from brainstorming ideas to creating tangible manifestations of those ideas (using pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and other craft items), in a rapid low-investment way, and results in a visual representation of a solution that helps to see the idea in the real world.
Many of the Big Ideas Fest’s rapid-fire speakers were full participants in the Action Collabs as well. Speakers on open education included Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive; Martha Kanter, the U.S. Under Secretary of Education; Neeru Kholsa, Co-Founder of CK-12 Foundation and pioneer in the OER movement; and Barbara Chow, Education Program Director at Hewlett and champion of open education resources. Additional speakers included Jody Lewen, the Executive Director of the Prison University Project; Kaycee Eckhardt, an award-winning charter school teacher whose science and math academy is housed in a FEMA trailer in the 9th ward of New Orleans; and Adora Svitak, the 13-year old recipient of NEA Foundation’s Award for Outstanding Service to Public Education.
THE ACTION COLLAB
The Action Collab groups that were focused on “open” provided innovative and inspired prototype solutions to the question “How might we leverage open (content, research, data) to transform teaching and learning?” One solution, “Pandora for Learning”, was designed to connect students to content that students are passionate about and that they have curated. A second solution to the open education design challenge focused on creating a virtual learning experience that is learner- and teacher-curated, linking the end user to open content about the arts.
ISKME is committed to support the further development of these and other design solutions on the soon-to-launch online Action Collab Network.
MEDICAL OER’s and OPEN TEXTBOOKS
Developing Open Educational Resources for Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health Education
The cost of developing medical education resources can be quite high and is duplicated across institutions. Enabling national and global access to medical open educational resources (OERs), including open textbooks, has the potential for improving health education and delivery, reducing cost for development, and expanding access to instructional content. After discussions with other repository providers and Florida State University College of Medicine (FSU COM), it is clear that there is an interest in setting up a meeting to discuss the creation of a sustainable OER partnership among medical schools, institutions providing healthcare programs (i.e., 2 and 4 year institutions), and repository providers.
The Orange Grove Repository and the Open Access Textbooks project has offered to facilitate this meeting with the assistance of FSU COM. The first step is to see what our common interests and goals would be. Please complete the Contact Information Form and the Meeting Time Poll if you are interested in participating in an online discussion about a sustainable OER partnership between accredited medical and healthcare educational institutions/programs. If there is indeed a group that is interested in collaborating on medical OERs, taking it one step forward and forming a medical OER consortium would not only provide institutions with a means for sharing and collaborating on medical OERs and reduce the cost of curriculum development but could also lead to the acceptance of medical OERs in promotion and tenure reviews. The FSU College of Medicine Open Educational Resources Task Force Final Report may be helpful to your medical community in understanding medical OERs.
Using the information you provide, The Orange Grove will work with the FSU Medical School to create the agenda and email it to you as soon as we determine the best time for our first meeting. We would like to schedule this meeting before the winter holidays.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Robin Donaldson, Ph.D
Project Director, Open Access Textbook Project
Project Manager, The Orange Grove, Florida’s Digital Repository
Florida Distance Learning Consortium
http://rdonaldson.com
rdonaldson@distancelearn.org
David W. Nelson
Project Manager, Open Access Textbook Project
Florida Distance Learning Consortium
dnelson@distancelearn.org
The Open Access Textbook project is supported by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE Grant No. P116Y090040).
Washington State Open Course Library hits 10,000 visitors in 11 Days
Tom Caswell, Program Manager for the Open Course Library, reported 10, 000 visitors to their site since its official launch of the first 42 courses on October 31, 2011. He sums up the project which will contain 81 open courses targeted at the highest-enrolled general education classes for lower division college students as thus:
1. High-Quality
“The Open Course Library is a collection of expertly developed educational materials designed by faculty and openly shared with the world. It includes textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments for 81 high-enrollment college courses.”
2. Affordable
“42 courses have been completed so far, providing faculty with a high-quality, affordable option that will cost students no more than $30 for course materials.”
3. Adaptable
“Faculty (anywhere) can modify and build on some or all of the course materials. There are no strings attached. We only ask that faculty cite the Open Course Library in their course and fill out our short adoption form.”
Preview or download courses now.
Read the full blog posting here and press release available here.
Image Credit: Timothy Valentine & Leo Reynolds CC-BY-NC-SA
MyOpenMath.com, a free and open online homework system for mathematics, now available online!
In the last several years, we’ve seen the release of many excellent open textbooks, yet adoption still remains a challenge. From my perspective as a math instructor, I see two major barriers: discovery and ancillaries.
The first challenge for adoption of open textbooks is an instructor finding one. There are many instructors who are not even aware that open textbooks exist. Second, if an instructor is interested in open textbooks, even the reasonably well-culled listing at collegeopentextbooks.org can be daunting, and very few listed books resemble complete, ready-to-adopt textbooks. For a busy instructor, the prospect of having to remix resources from multiple sources is often more effort than they’re willing to put in.
To start addressing the second part of the discovery challenge, I built OpenTextBookStore.com. This site lists a subset of open textbooks I felt are really ready-to-adopt without requiring remixing or supplementing, and that are available in printed form. I’ve started with math books, but I hope to expand the listing with recommendations from subject matter experts in other fields. The site recreates the experience of browsing a publisher’s website; each listing shows a summary of the book, license information, the available formats, a table of contents, and a list of any available ancillaries.
David Lippman
Instructors have become accustomed to publishers providing extensive ancillary materials for textbooks, providing the second challenge for adoption of open textbooks. Many excellent efforts are contributing to addressing the ancillary challenge, including open courseware efforts like the Washington Open Course Library (which I was part of). In mathematics, online homework has become commonplace, and for a majority of faculty is a key part of their textbook adoption decision.
To help address this, I’m happy to announce MyOpenMath.com, a free and open online homework system for mathematics. It is built on open-source software I’ve been developing for six years, and that has been used by tens of thousands of students. It provides randomized, algorithmically generated homework with automated grading of numerical and algebraic answers, similar to WebAssign and other publisher products. It also provides a course management system with gradebook, file posting, discussion forums, etc. (To their credit, WebAssign has produced online homework for several open textbooks, but this comes with a cost to students and is not open.) MyOpenMath has homework aligned with open textbooks in pre-algebra, beginning and intermediate algebra, pre-calculus, and trigonometry. The courses can easily be copied and modified by an instructor and used with students as graded homework. Many courses include video lessons, classroom activities, or other supplements as well. These courses are also available to students for self-study, review purposes, or as ungraded practice. These courses were contributed by faculty in Washington and Arizona; please see our “About us” page for credits.
Increased adoptions of open textbooks will only come by making it easy for faculty to find open textbooks, having open textbooks that can easily replace traditional textbooks, and providing ancillaries that instructors rely on. I hope OpenTextBookStore.com and MyOpenMath.com can contribute to that effort.
–David Lippman
COT Adopter Community Grant Awards Announcement
It is with great pleasure that I announce the 8 winners of our Adopter Communities’ Small Grant program. Each community proposed an outstanding project that uses open textbooks or open educational resources to improve teaching and learning for their students. Disciplines ranged from the highly enrolled general education subjects of Chemistry, Physics, and Math to American Government and Developmental Reading & Composition. Professional and career disciplines were also represented with Business Communications, Advanced Water Mathematics, and pre-teacher Educational Psychology. Overall 27 faculty members are participating from 17 colleges and 4 universities with approximately 3200 students anticipated to be positively impacted during the grant period alone.
- 3-D Molecular Models in ChemWiki: Dr. Ron Rusay and colleagues, Diablo Valley Community College
- Educational Psychology: Dr. Brian Beitzel, State University of New York, Oneonta with other colleagues in Florida, Illinois, New York, and Manitoba, Canada.
- Introduction to American Government: Dr. Mirya Holman and colleague at Florida Atlantic University
- Business Communications: Professor Danielle Budzick and colleagues at Cuyahoga Community College, OH
- Physwiki Dynamic Textbook project: Professor Erik Christensen at South Florida Community College and colleague at Monroe Community College, NY
- Developmental Algebra: Dr. April Strom and colleagues at Scottsdale Community College, AZ
- Advanced Water Mathematics: Dr. Regina Blasberg & colleagues at Community College of the Canyons, CA
- Indigenous People’s Reader: Professor Jacqui Cain & colleague at Community College of the Redwoods on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation.
For the purpose of this program, an adopter community had to contain at least two college or university instructors who have adopted or commit to adopting an open textbook(s) or open educational resources as the primary text for a course they teach or plan to teach in the 2011-2012 timeframe. Collaboration between multiple colleges and inclusion of peer reviewers, staff, and students as community members was highly encouraged. In addition, all enhancements, new materials, and ancillaries produced by the community in the grant period (2011-2012) must be made available to other educators using a Creative Commons license that allows further modifications such as CC-BY.
A huge thanks goes to our panel of judges who read all 17 grant application and finalized their results with conference call on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Using a rubric to help ensure inter-rater reliability, the panel included a community college dean, a higher education program manager, and the technology director for a large OER project.
Finally, I want to commend all the adopter communities who applied for their thoughtful projects that used open textbooks and open educational resources to improve teaching and student learning at their colleges. In the end, we were limited by our overall budget and not the inspiring visions of all of the applicants.
Please check out our College Open Textbooks community site for more details on these amazing Adopter Communities and to watch their progress over the next year. Webinar with grantees scheduled for November 17 at 1:00 PM (Pacific).
Image:Some rights reserved (CC-BY-NC) by EpicFireworks
Invitation: Let us ask your students, faculty, and administrators about OER
The Florida Distance Learning Consortium will administer two surveys. One is for college and university students on textbooks, open textbooks, and OpenCourseWare (OCW). The other survey is for faculty and administrators on digital textbooks, open textbooks, open educational resources (OERs), and OCW. These will be administered to all of Florida’s 28 public colleges and 11 state universities. This is our second round of these surveys, and we used the data from the first round (download the student survey report) to improve the items for this round.
We would be pleased to administer the same survey to other states, countries, or institutions so our community could gain a global, national, and state understanding of the awareness and use of OERs and OCW. In the interest of openness and free sharing of research data, we would make the raw data available for other researchers, as well as the analysis of the aggregated data for a national or worldwide perspective. Participating institutions would be provided with their raw data and our analysis methodology. Our goal is to administer these surveys annually, worldwide.
We are currently working on the process for making the surveys available to other institutions. To
accommodate the schedules of various institutions and our grant deadlines, our goal is to enable other institutions to administer the surveys as early as December 2011 and as late as the end of March 2012. The surveys are part of our Open Access Textbook project, supported by the Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), to develop a national model for open access textbooks with the eventual goal of making open textbooks available for the 50 most attended general education courses. We are working with the University Press of Florida and an international group of over 20 university presses toward that goal. Institution representatives who would like to take part in these surveys or interested university presses are welcome to contact us.
David W. Nelson is the Project Manager (dnelson@distancelearn.org) and I, Robin Donaldson (rdonaldson@distancelearn.org) am the Project Director. We look forward to working with
anyone who wants to take us up on our offer to administer the surveys.
Robin Donaldson, Ph.D
Florida Distance Learning Consortium
http://rdonaldson.com
The Orange Grove, Florida’s Digital Repository
http://florida.theorangegrove.org/
Don't Miss ISKME's Big Idea Fest! Register Today!
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.iskme.org) is hosting its annual Big Ideas Fest in December 2011 in Half Moon Bay, CA. This three-day gathering of the nation’s most creative makers and doers in education brings together champions across K-12, higher education, and informal learning, to participate in a truly unique interactive experience.
This is the one place each year where education change agents find each other at what one participant describes as “like TED on Steroids!” You’llhear from inspiring speakers.
Take part in Action Collabs.designed to incubate solutions to address education’s most pressing challenges. If you are looking for an opportunity to be recharged with new perspectives and learn how to use collaborative tools to prototype innovative ideas, add yourself to the list of those who have the desire and passion necessary to break down silos and call for real change in education.
Register today and use the invitation code = bif3022
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