College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
Emerging Battles Over Textbooks: Options from Apple to Open Initiatives
Andy Oram, editor at O'Reilly Media
by Andy Oram
The worlds of both education and publishing will be tugged from opposing directions, perhaps to the breaking point, by two recent trends. One is Apple’s well-publicized entry into the textbook market with its iBooks Author app, tied by license to its iBooks store. The other is the movement for open textbooks, on which the state of California recently placed its bets (for the second time).
But let’s slow down for a minute. The iPad, as an entertainment platform, will not morph easily into an educational tool, whereas developing open textbooks raises difficulties beyond the ones that open source software have encountered and surmounted. I recently discussed these topics with Open Doors Group’s Jacky Hood. She is part of a team trying to respond to the California open textbook challenge.
Empowerment versus entertainment
To evaluate Apple’s textbook strategy, compare it to the goals of the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative. The biggest problem with the Apple initiative–missed by most commentators—is that the iPad is an entertainment device, and has many interesting ways to interact with content but not to create it. In contrast, OLPC’s XO system was planned from the start to let children create and share text, video, and other content. It is an empowerment device. (Google claims that its Chromebooks are similarly empowering.)
The same reasoning drove the OLPC decision to distribute all free software on the XO. The use of free software promotes learning and exploration. Numerous other considerations (lower cost, rugged design, and orientation to underdeveloped regions with limited capabilities) also separate the XO from the iPad.
Now the iPad is obviously a beautiful product, so we can assume that its qualities will be put to good use by textbook authors. But authors will need help creating an effective user interface for their own textbooks.
If school districts respond positively to Apple’s textbook initiative, I hope they relinquish some of their zeal for aesthetically superior, expensive hardware and license some cheap device (several options are available) for student use.
The Limits of Open
Do open textbooks present as robust an alternative to the Apple model as open source presents to the Microsoft’s of the software industry? Not in practice. The development model used by Open Doors isn’t as radical as you’d expect when you hear of open textbooks.
Textbooks are extraordinarily detailed and have high standards for correctness in all those details. Good writing values–pacing, selection, the introduction of topics–all have to be top-notch too. Textbooks may be criticized as bland or timid, but they make their points without the nuanced ambiguity that authors can get away with in other settings.
Numerous open source activities exist in education, but they tend to deal not with textbooks but a broader set of material known as “open courseware.” (A survey of available courseware can be found in the appendix of UNESCO’s A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources). It may turn out that, in a collaborative and action-oriented classroom, textbooks will turn out to be an obsolete concept and the pastiche of other courseware will be all that is needed. But this article starts with the premise that a textbook is still useful.
Of all the weapons that free software can wield in its battle for world domination, the heaviest guns are the ease of making and distributing derivative works. But textbooks are not used in a community the same way software is. Textbooks are designed for courses, and are chosen by instructors. Most instructors would need strong assurance that any derivative work was superior to the original before using it.
When I look at the demands made by students and instructors, and the constraints placed on textbook production–whether the Apple model or the open model–I sense there is a place for both and a place for expert authors and publishers to create the experiences that modern educational environments require.
To read more about my viewpoint on these initiatives, look at my in-depth article on O”Reilly Radar.
ABOUT ANDY ORAM:
He is an editor at O’Reilly Media. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in open source technologies and software engineering. His work for O’Reilly includes the first books ever released by a U.S. publisher on Linux, the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer, and the 2007 best-seller Beautiful Code. He can be reached at andyo@oreilly.com.
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.
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