College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
iTextbooks? Continuing the dream – a commentary by Dean Florez, President of 20 Million Minds Foundation
With the passing of Steve Jobs, I had time to reflect on the painful lug of my then newly purchased Apple Macintosh around the UCLA campus during my senior finals week back in 1986. I remember shouting over a blasting boom-box about the futuristic power of personal computing as my classmates skeptically eyed me typing on the glowing box while they frantically hit return on their typewriters amidst bottles of whiteout on desks piled high with expensive textbooks.
Dean Florez
Today, I write this blog from an iPad the size of a composition book while listening to Pandora and watching my email annoyingly pop up as past college friends Tweet the latest gossip or post updates on Facebook. I think few realize that Steve Jobs gave us the future back in the 1980′s. But there is one constant relic that somehow persists as a reminder that we have yet to reach Steve Jobs’ vision for the future. THE EXPENSIVE COLLEGE TEXTBOOK. That book still sits on the desks of over 20 million college students today, right beside their iPods, iPads, and the plethora of e-devices glowing with the social rants pouring out of Facebook and Twitter.
Today we have the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, but what we really need is the iTextbook—and it should cost students under $30. Steve Jobs created NEXT, a great company, but today we need somebody to complete his vision for education by pushing every college and university to make the final transition into what I call the “NextBook” era, removing the unnecessary weight on the wallets and backs of our college students.
I left the California Legislature to head up a new non-profit, the 20 Million Minds Foundation (20MM). Our goal? To completely disrupt a complacent and lucrative textbook publishing industry by asking the simple question: do we really need bounded, heavy, overpriced copy-write protected books in today’s ebook, ibook, and Nextbook environment?
Just days ago, 20MM and powerhouse educational software company Kno, released our answer to that important question by announcing a new digitally enhanced NextBook for college students based on open content. We have our eyes set on producing open source NextBooks for the top 25 undergraduate courses in the nation, starting with general statistics. Why? Consider that in our California Community Colleges, nearly 120,000 students take general statistics EVERY year with an average new book price of $150—that is an estimated cost of $10 to $15 million per year for just one course!
Our next step at 20MM is to empower our faculty. Beyond offering professors NextBooks, 20MM will focus on the reusing, redistributing, revising and remixing capabilities of e-textbook material, utilizing faculty’s unique talents and expertise. Who wouldn’t take quality, customized, and student-centric material enhanced by the instructor over a high-cost, standardized, static, and closed publication?
Clearly, we understand that as we move toward this type of customization, the major issues will be quality and built-in assessment. Our statistics Web 2.0 NextBook is better than statistics books out on the market given it is specifically designed for college students to improve their learning experience and results with built in assessment capacities. We are partnering with assessment companies like BenchPrep so that every open source NextBook in our library of 25 has assessment as its lifeblood.
According to the latest report by the social learning platform Xplana, within the next five years digital textbook sales will surpass 25% of sales for the higher education and career education markets. But even with the changing winds, enhanced academic freedom, creative assessment tools, and a price point under $30, our major challenge remains. Will faculty adopt these books for use in their classrooms? We may have the best free and open general statistics e-book on the market, but will faculty place it on the syllabus the first day of class?
Much like those skeptical past college friends in 1986 who stared at the glowing box during finals week, I am confident that our faculty can get past the incertitude and finish the next chapter of the revolution Steve Jobs helped usher in decades ago. They just need to say yes to the future and embrace it as their own.
—Dean Florez
About 20 Million Minds Foundation
20MM Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to greatly reducing textbook costs. Headed by past California Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez, the foundation is currently leveraging leading edge technologies to create more affordable, engaging, and effective educational materials for college students throughout the nation.
How to Gain Massive Adoption of Open Educational Resources
People love “how to” articles. They simplify things, provide a sense of direction, and decrease ambiguity. Gaining mass adoption of open educational resources, in reality, is not terribly simple, clear, or unambiguous. When we talk to the education community, we have heard that it is a very complex and challenging problem that often puts roadblocks in their way. This motivated us to create NIXTY, our educational technology that empowers education on all levels. This thinking drove us to define what open educational resources should be:
Guest Blogger, NIXTY CEO Glen Moriarity, Psy.D
- Readily Accessible & Customizable – people need to be able to access the materials and tailor them to their local contexts. An educator should be able to quickly grab entire courses, learning modules, videos, and docs from around the Web and remix them to meet his or her students’ needs. Materials should also be accessible to everyone, so Section 508 Compliance should be a priority.
- Research Supported – Education is finally getting empirically supported religion. It has happened in a variety of other fields (medicine, psychology, etc). It is no longer enough to vaguely state learning outcomes and hope that students meet them. That time has passed and some may disagree with it, but it is now a reality and no amount of disagreeing is going to change things. The trend is increasingly towards showing how educational resources result in real learning . The good news is that this is not terribly challenging to accomplish. Once we have research support, coupled with #1 (readily accessible and customizable courses), then it will be very hard to argue with the mass adoption of OER. For example, let’s compare two economics courses:
Economics Course A – Free & Open materials; Research support indicating that students taking this course meet learning outcomes at a higher rate, finish the course several weeks earlier, and have increased semester to semester persistence.
Economics Course B – Expensive Textbook & Closed Materials (cannot be remixed or updated and could cost students up to $1000 per year for all the courses); No research support.
Which course would you choose?
Most of us would choose Course A, because (1) it doesn’t cost the students any money for course materials; (2) it can be readily remixed and updated; and (3) it has research support. In a few years, we will have a catalog of these types of courses/textbooks via the Gates Foundation NGLC (nextgenlearning.com). Researchers are doing great work in this space and making it easier for us to apply this knowledge with less technical know-how.
This research was a catalyst in helping us focus our efforts at NIXTY (http://nixty.com). Our mission is to create and deliver an education technology that seamlessly structures eLearning content, providing students, educators, and institutions with a central place to take, create, and sell online courses.
This means helping to deliver content that is readily accessible and customizable as well as having the research to support the learning outcomes. We started by building 200+ open courses out on NIXTY from MIT and others. We then made these courses “WikiCourses”, which means that anyone can add content (html/text, videos, documents etc.) to the lessons within the courses and customize them. Our goal here is to build scaffolding around the content. The next step is to improve the ability to add test questions in WikiCourses and provide a means of up-voting and down-voting content.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Dr. Ryan Baker (http://users.wpi.edu/~rsbaker/), an expert in Human-Computer Interaction, has partnered with us to design and implement a feature-rich set of tools to help educators receive granular feedback on student performance. These new 
features (scaffolding, hints, embedded testing, self-explanation prompts) are the key to realizing real learning. The trick is to make sure that we don’t over design it. It is critical that we keep it very simple and intuitive to use, so educators readily see the value in and want to utilize the functionality.
We feel that readily accessible and customizable OER coupled with research support will help gain the mass adoption of OER. For more information on NIXTY and our efforts in open education, visit our website or this tutorial on YouTube.
We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below or via email: glen@nixty.com
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