College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
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
Global Open Access Project Launch – Don't miss it live!
Open Access Logo
Ms. Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO will be officiating the launch of “Global Open Access Platform” (usually called the Global Open Access Portal) along with the launch of the UNESCO OER Platform, the re-designed Open Training Platform, and the OER policy Guidelines. The Launch is scheduled for November 1, 2011 at 6:30pm Paris time (GMT-1) and 10:30 am PDT and will be live-streamed in:
English – mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_en.wmv
Français – mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_fr.wmv
http://www.wsis-community.org/pg/event_calendar/view/423737
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.
Hats off to the Global Text Project!
Everyone knows how expensive textbooks are in the United States, but the cost of textbooks in developing 
countries is exorbitant for students and their families who make a few dollars or less per day. For many around the world, the cost of buying textbooks is unrealistic and limits students’ opportunities to learn.
The Global Text Project (globaltext.org) seeks to solve this problem by engaging academic communities to help build a library of free online textbooks. Co-directors, Doctors Richard Watson from the University of Georgia and Donald McCubbrey from University of Denver, established the non-profit organization in 2006.
The project uses an open-source infrastructure to publish free electronic textbooks online with a Creative Commons 3.0 BY license. This type of licensing gives professors the opportunity to remix the material so that it can be made country-centric. Also, anyone can reproduce the material and even charge a small fee for the cost of copying if needed.
With a grant from the Jacobs foundation awarded in 2008, the project ramped up book production. In 2010, the project created a competitive
Interns Hard at Work on the GTP (Photo Image: CC-BY)
internship program for students interested in learning about electronic publishing at the University of Georgia.
Today, university students and professors can work remotely around the world to create or enhance a GTP textbook. Under the supervision of a textbook’s author or the project’s
editor, professors or students may create additional material for the textbooks such as a new chapter or case study.
In the Global Text office, students work in all areas of production or help meet the organization’s needs in public relations, web design, database management, and business modeling. Student interns are gaining real-world experience while producing free textbooks and building a non-profit that directly benefits students in other countries.
The project intends to engage many for the benefit of many more. Students and professors that work with project are creating resources for their peers today and leaving a legacy of a freely accessible education for future generations to come.
Hats off to the Global Text Project! by Marisa Drexel Ulrich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Call for Proposals – Text and Academic Authors Association's 2012 Annual Conference
Don’t miss the opportunity to share your expertise on Academic and Textbook Authoring. Submit a proposal to TAA and you could be a speaker at their 2012 Conference.
Academic & Textbook Authoring—Evolving Arts is the theme of the Text and Academic Authors Association’s 2012 Annual Conference in New Orleans, June 8-9, which will feature dozens of interactive sessions, posters and workshops, as well as several networking opportunities.
The 2012 Annual Conference Committee is seeking proposals for informative sessions that encourage opportunities for learner engagement. Session proposals should stimulate and provoke discussion on a topic related to authoring or publishing textbooks, academic books or academic journal articles. The committee is especially interested in proposals that feature non-traditional publishing formats, such as ebooks and open access. Proposal types include presentation, poster session, open discussion, roundtable discussion, learning lab and workshop.
For full proposal details visit http://www.taaonline.net/2012TAAConference
Deadline for proposals is November 15, 2011.
The Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA) provides professional development resources, industry news and networking opportunities for textbook authors and authors of scholarly journal articles and books. Learn more about the TAA community at http://www.taaonline.net
If you have any questions, please contact Kim Pawlak at kim.pawlak@taaonline.net
Submit your proposal online at http://www.taaonline.net/2012TAAConference/ProposalForm.html
Hats Off to California! (Part 4) – Weaving Open Resources into a Content Tapestry
Arguably, the open educational resource (OER) movement developed as a response to a strong desire to not only expand the free and open learning materials available to faculty, but also to reduce or perhaps eliminate the students’ costs for textbooks and supplementary tools. These basic problems have led to a wide variety of attempted solutions. Most notably, organizations such as College Open Textbooks, Connexions, Orange Grove Texts Plus, and others have worked diligently to create and collect complete open textbooks. This is absolutely wonderful for today’s students and even rings as a louder success for future students.
One thing to consider, however, is the overall role and importance of the whole textbook in, say, five or ten years. As our student population changes, and as information becomes so widely accessible with pervasive computing resources, so much time and effort goes into research and practice with different methods for reaching the student in the classroom. Salman Khan, creator of the Khan Academy (a collection of short tutorials for math, sciences, and other subjects), recently presented a TED talk entitled “Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education.” Loosely speaking, he proposed the idea of using the classroom for homework and activities, and having students watch or experience “lectures” at home. One might wonder where the traditional textbook fits in.
Ideas and considerations such as these motivated us at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, Calif., to apply for a U.S. Department of Education FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education) Special Focus grant through the College Course Materials Rental Initiative. And though textbook rental was a significant component of our grant, our primary focus was to create academic content “playlists” of material to augment or replace existing textbooks. With so much traction already in place to create full open textbooks, we wanted to develop a means by which existing galleries and collections of open educational resources could be put to effective use.
Our goals and plan are not entirely unique. Already in place are tools such as OERGlue, which provides an assembly mechanism for OERs. As such, we are mainly focused on the padding, of sorts, that needs to go between many of these objects. After all, if learning objects for a given topic are all created and prepared by different authors, one misses out on the common “voice” that exists in a traditional textbook.
We have created several modules (approximating chapters of traditional textbooks) that bring together common learning objects, but also employ the efforts of a single author to narrate the collection. As students view and interact with the materials, they are guided through the process. We are currently assessing the student response to the use of these tools, but anecdotal evidence thus far indicates high levels of satisfaction and engagement with the learning materials. And though work is required on the part of faculty to author the transition materials between learning objects, there is much less heavy lifting than creating a full textbook. In addition, educators want to participate! It becomes an opportunity to be published, while maintaining a manageable workload.
And so our work continues. We continue to evaluate the feedback from students and faculty, and we are creating a guideline, or template, for the process. If the work speaks for itself, as we hope and expect it will, then projects such as these are likely self-sustaining and can only help in the continued fueling of OER efforts worldwide.
OCW People's Choice Award: Most Open! And the winner is College Open Textbooks!
Great News!
Education-Portal.com just announced the winners of their first annual OCW People’s Choice Awards, which honor the best of the Open Education Movement. Over 4000 people voted for their best educational resources in this inaugural contest.
College Open Textbooks was recognized as the OCW People’s Choice Winner for Most Open. According to Education-Portal.com, “Openness is a key part of any OCW – after all, it’s in the name. But what providers excel at giving their users a wealth of material to access and lots of different ways to do it? The nominees in this category all understand that to make courseware truly open, variety and depth are key.” The finalists included Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and UC Irvine OCW.
Other winners included Open Course Library, FGV Online, African Virtual University OER, Open Study, MIT Physics and more. For more information on the complete list of winners, go to http://education-portal.com/articles/OCW_Peoples_Choice_Award_Winners_Final_List.html
Saylor Foundation to Launch Multi-Million Dollar Open Textbook Challenge!
Writing about the rising costs of textbooks here would be a classic case of preaching to the choir. So I will not waste time rehashing what you all know and will instead jump right to what we hope will be a valuable contribution to the efforts of this site and the OER community to provide cost-free textbook alternatives to students: the Saylor Open Textbook Challenge.
The challenge aims to license open texts for over 200 courses currently residing on Saylor.org used in twelve of the most popular college majors enrolled in by U.S. students. Before we delve into some details of the Challenge, let me give you some background on our Foundation.
Our Mission:
The Saylor Foundation is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization working to drive the cost of higher education to zero. Working with over 150+ credentialed professors and peer-reviewers from higher-education institutions, we are compiling open-licensed course content styled after a traditional academic program.
In deciding which courses to offer, Saylor first devoted resources to develop courses that would fit under traditional college majors in popular, high-enrollment areas of study. We then engaged professor consultants to build course blueprints to fill out the majors. These courses are designed to route a student through the material he or she would need to know in order to earn credit from an accredited institution in the U.S.
The Saylor OER Approach:
We decided that we could best make a unique contribution to the OER movement by developing a structured content aggregation and curation process, by which our professor consultants seek, vet, frame, and—where appropriate—add to existing resources in order to yield complete courses, hosted on a central site and tied to user outcomes, assessments, and predefined learning taxonomies. Each course is also peer reviewed for further fine tuning.
Importantly, in addition to utilizing OER materials, we decided to include and link to copyrighted materials in our content aggregation process. Through our Permissions Initiative, many copyright holders are allowing us to host their materials on the site within the relevant course context. When permission to host is NOT granted (and when OERs do not exist), we work to paper over the gaps in each course and/or replace the linked resources by stimulating the development of original content and the Creative Commons re-licensing of complete and newly open texts.
Back to the Open Text Book Challenge:
To spur authors to openly license their work, the Saylor Foundation will offer a $20,000 award for submitted textbooks accepted for use in our course materials after a round of peer reviews. To be eligible for the award, the author(s) must agree to license the text under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY) license. We plan to formally launch the Challenge just after Labor Day so please visit our site at that time and keep your eyes out for more information. If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below – we would love to hear your thoughts!
Mozilla Badges – Following and Starting Grand Traditions
In his keynote address at the 2011 Connexions Conference, U.S. Department of Education senior policy advisor Hal Plotkin envisioned a world in which many great achievers had received their educational credentials by way of Mozilla Badges.
For decades badges have represented achievement in children’s and youth associations and in some professions. Religious pilgrims receive badges for their journeys.
Becket-pilgrim-badge open licensed by Wikipedia
Recently computer games have awarded badges for skill and success. Judd Antin and Elizabeth Churchill examine the psychology of the use of badges to encourage interaction in social media in this well-researched and well-written paper: Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective.
Badges reward the knowledge and skill required to demonstrate achievement.
The Mozilla Foundation badge program seeks to open education by replacing the current system of limited admissions, high costs, and sometimes artificial demonstrations of learning with recognition of evidence-based learning open to all learners. The issuing of badges will also be open to organizations of many types. Rigorous criteria and solid evidence will be encouraged. Ultimately employers and established educational institutions will recognize those badges and badge-holders that demonstrate value. The Mozilla Foundation will provide the infrastructure to automate issuing and earning badges. The initial pilot of Mozilla Badges is now in operation with the Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) School of Webcraft. Additional pilots will occur this Fall and the system will go live in 2012.
College Open Textbooks (COT) is honored to be among the pilot badge issuers. COT will recognize knowledge and skill in peer-reviewing, accessibility-reviewing, OER advocacy/training, and OER creation. The 2011 pilot will focus on issuing badges for learning to peer review textbooks. COT has sponsored nearly 150 peer reviews of open textbooks from more than 50 educators. We have established criteria for evaluating textbooks chapter-by-chapter, developed a multi-sheet spreadsheet for peer reviewers, created a peer-reviewer training course available as both synchronous online training and COT reviews must be done by persons who have taught the subject at college level, preferable community college or lower division. Most of the 50+ COT reviewers far exceed this criterion.
The COT peer reviewer badge will differ from the standard COT peer reviewer criteria in removing the experience barrier. It would violate the spirit of globable open educatin to restrict admission to the badge process based on a US/Canada education system. Instead the peer reviewer badge will rely entirely on rigorous criteria applied to one or more peer reviews created by the badge seeker. In addition, the peer reviewer badge will require successful completion of the COT peer reviewer training course.
COT will use a sustainable business model for all badges. Each badge will cost 1/1000th the GDP of the country in which the badge-earner resides. This is about 1/3 of a day’s pay. A badge for a resident of a developed country will cost about US$40. In an underdeveloped country, the cost would be less than US$1. Foundations and other donors will be encouraged to donate the cost of badges and COT will award badges without cost in special circumstances, e.g. to a person in a country not served by PayPal. Basic educational materials and evaluation of badge requests will be cost-free. Additional assistance such as one-on-one tutoring or elaborate feedback will incur a cost to the badge-seeker or a sponsor.
badges open licensed by Tim Takamoto
Badges represent a battering ram to tear down the walls of the educational fortress. Mozilla Foundation is building an infrastructure for badge issuers and earners worldwide. College Open Textbooks will pilot its plans to issue four categories of badges. The pilot badges for peer reviewers include open admission, open training materials, rigorous evidence requirements, and a sustainable business model. 
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