Brainstorm in Progress: Flat World Knowledge

Showing posts with label Flat World Knowledge. Show all posts

Monday, January 28, 2013

OER: 12 Sources of Open Textbooks

Brigham Young University faculty survey seeks ...

With the State Department's announcement and posts on twitter about failed business models, I think this is a good time to revisit how to find actual free, openly licensed textbooks. There are many ways to find free, openly licensed textbooks on the internet. I have listed a dozen here, but if you are still not finding what you need, feel free to contact me. I really mean that. I think making education financially accessible to your students is just that important. Some of these resources over lap, but that is okay - you will find some of these sites easier to use than others. There are a lot of things happening in the world of open textbooks. A lot of the criticisms that you may have heard in the past are fading away as sites dedicated to the peer review and vetting of open textbooks become more prevalent. This is not the definitive list - if there is a site that you use or prefer, please post a comment and share.

1. Saylor Foundation
Each of the books listed below is freely available for download, online reading, and sharing, under one of various open licenses.

2. OpenStax
"OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course."

3. MERLOT
"Putting educational innovations into practice. Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education."

4. College Open Textbooks
If you run into any links to Flat World Knowledge textbooks here, be sure to go to the Saylor Foundation website to get free access to those titles. "College Open Textbooks has peer-reviewed more than 100 open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 550: College Open Textbooks has already peer-reviewed several new open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 250 others for consideration. Open textbooks are freely available for use without restriction and can be downloaded or printed from web sites and repositories."

5. Connexions
"Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content. Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month."

6. Textbook Revolution
"Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. We want to get these materials into classrooms. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content."

7. Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources
"The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement encourages the creation and reuse of free, high-quality content and open source learning systems to replace expensive and proprietary systems. By promoting OER, community colleges can create sustainable academic resources for students and provide collaborative professional development opportunities for faculty."

8. Boundless Textbooks
"Boundless is pleased to offer open introductory textbooks in the following subjects. These textbooks are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, which means anyone is welcome to quote, mashup, reuse, and republish any portion of any book, anywhere, so long as proper citation is given."

9. Wikibooks
Wikibooks is an "open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit" with over 2,500 open-content textbooks.

10. Open Culture
A meta-collection of free textbooks.

11. Bookboon
"Online Textbooks for Free Bookboon's free online textbooks for students are focused and to the point. They are all written by highly respected professors from top universities in the world and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science."

12. Directory of Open Access Books
"The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards."

Monday, December 31, 2012

OER: Saylor Foundation's New Bookshelf

Saylor Foundation

The Saylor Foundation is making spirits bright and starting the New Year right by ensuring that openly licensed, free textbooks remain freely available to students. You may have seen their press release. Their "Bookshelf" page is already up and the books that are due to go behind Flat World Knowledge paywall are now freely available. They are saving us the trouble of downloading them and hosting them ourselves.

"Each of the books listed below is freely available for download, online reading, and sharing, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. Please share this link (and the blog post) with your networks to help spread the word!

Like many of you, we have come to rely on the free-to-read versions of the excellent texts at Flat World Knowledge. We’ve woven these books tightly into many of our free online courses, all of which rely on freely-accessible (and preferably openly-licensed) materials. When Flat World Knowledge announced recently that its previously openly-licensed books would not be available for free after January 1st, 2013, we decided to preserve the whole catalog, which we now happily share with you.

We are grateful to Flat World Knowledge for developing such an excellent catalog, and while the versions on the Flat World Knowledge website will no longer be free, the publisher continues to provide its texts at prices significantly lower than standard textbooks and with much added-value in the form of supplementary materials and interactive elements."

The Saylor Foundation certainly warrants all of our support for the coming year. I want to encourage everyone who reads this blog to seriously consider supporting this foundation. As educators, we obviously cannot rely on for-profits to keep the best interests of the students in mind.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

WritingCommons.Org and Community-Based OER Models

Kicking the OERs old school.

I read a great posting at Writing Commons this morning entitled "Flat World Knowledge, Textbook Affordability, and a Call for More Collaborative Efforts" that really echoes my thinking on this. Since Flat World Knowledge is no longer open (as defined by Hewlett and many other definitions of OER), it makes the community efforts around open textbooks all the more important. I have long been a proponent of community developed, vetted, and maintained OERs and open textbooks. Please note that I did not say "I am against business." I am for efforts that are truly open to make open textbooks and other OERs freely available to students. This is not some radical notion - it is a return to the original intent of textbooks which is to support student learning rather than to support "sustainable business models." If someone figures out how to do both, more power to them. In the meantime, we need to support Writing Commons, an online composition textbook.

"We at Writing Commons have been working to provide quality open-access articles about writing and research and will continue to do so. While our materials are not yet comprehensive, we are adding new peer-reviewed material every month. We encourage instructors to email us about any gaps in our coverage (suggestions may be sent to jennifer@writingcommons.org), and we can work suggestions into future calls for papers. And while we have not yet made our open textbook customizable, as had Flat World Knowledge, our site does enable instructors looking to incorporate WC articles into their lesson plans to select and assign material as needed. (See http://writingcommons.org///site-map-1 for a table of contents.) Currently, WC editors are developing an instructional video that will guide users through the site; we hope that this video will help teachers efficiently select the material most relevant to their courses."

These kinds of efforts need our support. I used to teach English and I have a lot of teaching materials and workbooks that I have written that I am planning on contributing time and materials to this community. Please pass this on to others you many know who can contribute materials or time for reviewing materials. OERs from an open community of instructors, administrators, instructional designers is going to be the truly sustainable model.

Sunday, November 04, 2012

Premium Free Range OER

Free Range Poultry and Shed, near Seisdon, Staffordshire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don't want Flat World Knowledge to corner the market in charging students for free textbooks. I am announcing here that CainCo EduProducts will also be offering premium free textbooks at a relatively fair and competitive cost. How can we put a price on free textbooks? We are taking a page from the poultry industry. And the definition of "free" is different here. My books will be "free" as in "free range" hence the premium price. Each textbook will be:

Free range
All natural
Clearly labeled GMO free
Fat free
Low sodium
Electronic versions made from only the best AMERICAN MADE electrons

Each lovingly crafted paper version of our textbooks will be made from sustainably harvested, hormone free trees and turned into pulp through non-traumatic, humane Ayurvedic massage process.

How will our textbooks help students save money? To afford these textbooks, students will have to become experts at saving money. The lessons they learn from that they will carry with them the rest of their lives (a lot like their student loans).

Saturday, November 03, 2012

Flat World Knowledge Falls Flat

For use to open - free- education resources. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am very disappointed in Flat World Knowledge's decision to end free access to students as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was always very suspect of this company from the beginning. I am getting sick of businesses saying that they are a part of the open source movement, OER, or for Open Text Books and then coming up with some lame excuse to go back to business as usual - lets make money on the backs of students in the name of "sustainability"! In the article they admit that they are not really committed to the open license.

We should call companies like FWK businesses then and not advocates or proponents of open education resources. The idea behind OER is that faculty would freely develop their textbooks for students to freely use. I am not against business but lets call it business and not OER. I am really not interested in the content reviewers from commercial publishers because they are not in the business of creating, vetting, and customizing for my students or my college in my community with its unique issues - they are interested in packaging their material for a mass market and getting some Phd's name on the box to make it acceptable to colleges who are not quite ready to take the plunge into OER. I almost wrote a book for FWK but I realized that my content would be at the mercy of the market. I knew that at any time they could change their business model and the students would be the ones to suffer. The business of businesses is business. The business of education should be education. There are great textbooks out there with Creative Commons licenses that students do not have to pay for. We have a moral obligation to make education accessible to as many students as possible. OERs and open textbooks are a way to do that. Freedom as in free to charge the students is not the kind of freedom that I am interested in.

And what does this mean for the Creative Commons license? If a text is really CC, shouldn't a student have access to that text under the same license as FWK?

Look at any of the articles below for an alternative model of commercial businesses managing academic content.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

OER Adopter Communities: the Sustainability Factor in Open Education

Open Textbooks from the Open Course Library (Photo credit: caswell_tom)

Una Daly has invited you to the event 'September 25 OER Adopter Communities: the Sustainability Factor in Open Education' on College Open Textbooks Community!

Check out the entire Fall 2012 CCCOER Webinar Lineup

Time: September 25, 2012 from 10am to 11am
Location: online Pacific TIme zone
Organized By: Una Daly Event

Description: Please join CCCOER September 25, 1:00 pm Eastern to hear how three successful OER adoption projects built sustainable communities of faculty and staff to customize open textbooks and open educational resources to lower costs and better meet the needs of students at their colleges. Presenters from the Kaleidoscope Project at College of the Redwoods, Cuyahoga Community College, and Scottsdale Community College will talk about their challenges and achievements in finding, evaluating, and adapting high-quality OER to replace high cost publisher textbooks.

• Danielle Budzick, Interim Director of Faculty Development, Adjunct Business Instructor & Linda Glassburn, Assistant Professor Business & IT at Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio. Danielle and Linda worked with the other Business Communications instructors at Cuyahoga college to adopt an open textbook from Flat World Knowledge and revise it to meet college learning outcomes.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• Geoff Cain, Director of Distance Education at College of the Redwoods in California and an instructional designer on the Kaleidoscope Next Generation Learning Grant. Geoff worked with Biology Instructor Wendy Riggs to find and adapt open educational resources to improve student learning outcomes and replace publisher textbooks.

• Dr Donna Gaudet, Developmental Math Professor at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona. Donna and her colleagues in the Math Department have been finding and adapting open textbooks and open educational resources for over two year to improve student understanding of developmental math and replace their former expensive curriculum.

PARTICIPANT DETAILS
No pre-registration necessary. On the day of the webinar, please click here to login and then press the Connect button. You may use a headset or dial-in to speak live: (888) 886-3951
Enter your passcode: 918603

PARTICIPANT CONFERENCE FEATURE
*0 – Contact the operator for audio assistance
*6 – Mute/unmute your individual line

PRIOR TO YOUR FIRST CCC CONFER MEETING, it is recommended that you:
Test Your Computer Readiness

FOR ASSISTANCE: CCC Confer Client Services – Monday – Friday between 8:00 am – 4:00 pm See more details and RSVP on College Open Textbooks Community:

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Open Ed Conference: Are commercial publishers friend or foe of open education?

Image by matthileo via FlickrSpeakers: Eric Frank and Nicole Allen

Are commercial publishers friend or foe of open education? This session will challenge five common assumptions about the role of commercial publishers in the open education movement. The presenter will share lessons learned from the frontlines of the $8 billion college textbook industry, and demonstrate why profit motives and financial incentives can be critical elements in fostering a healthy open education ecosystem that helps increase the mainstream popularity, usage and long-term financial sustainability of OER.

This session will begin with a brief overview of the disruptive business model of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of free and open textbooks. The presenter will then challenge five common assumptions about the private sector and open textbooks.

Specifically:

1. Commercial activity is counter to the goals of the open education movement. Widespread use of high-quality OER is a shared goal within the open community. The presenter will discuss how a commercial publisher can play a central role in the creation, distribution and usage of OER that helps move it from the fringes to the center of the national conversation on higher education.

2. If you build open content they will come. While a few open content sites attract thousands of users, most do not. For many faculty, open educational content is regarded as ancillary to their primary textbook. The presenter will walk through the adoption process to illustrate why it takes a publisher with a demonstrated track record in developing and marketing textbooks, along with a significant investment, to compete with the vast commercial catalogs and sales and marketing operations of large academic publishers,

3. The non-commercial clause is not in the spirit of true openness.Copyright holders have different objectives for their creations. While the non-commercial clause isn't suitable for all, for a professional publisher to reach scale and build a sustainable model around open, the non-commercial clause may be not only appropriate, but necessary for long-term survival.

4. There's already more than enough open content out there. Supply, not demand, remains a hurdle for the mainstream adoption of OER. There is a distinction between open content and adoptable open content. The presenter will provide examples of the kind of support and supplemental teaching materials faculty expect from a textbook publisher, and the resources required to change the perception, among many faculty, that free comes at the expense of quality.

5. Authors shouldn't profit from writing openly-licensed textbooks. There are many motivations for writing open textbooks. For academic authors seeking to do the right thing for students and be fairly compensated for their work, the commercial open textbook model makes sense. The presenter will share examples of both first-time and market-leading authors who have embraced the commercial open textbook model as a way to improve textbook affordability and enjoy a more sustainable income stream for years to come.

Notes:
Eric Frank is a founder of Flat World Knowledge and begins with a discussion of what FWK is all about - commercial publication of open texts. They want to create great textbooks, give faculty and students control, give students choices, and ultimately to dramatically lower the cost. They choose authors, the books are professionally developed, and developed a platform for distributing texts. They give electronic access to students for free and charge for POD versions of the book and for learning supplements. He is solving the issues around maintaining the "original" in a sea of derivatives and formats. 44% of the students take advantage of the free versions. The students, according to Frank, are saving about $80 using FWK. Large media companies like Random House are investing in FWK. He is saying that users of Flatworld textbooks are showing increases in course completion and grades. He says that they are not just a repository but that they do a lot of marketing around their books including conferences, direct mail, and review copies. They also provide support for students and teachers. They are 3% of the market share. He talked about the "stages of grief" that publishers and some institutions go through with open software or textbooks.

It is 2:30, where is Nicole Allen!?

Okay, Nicole Allen did not speak here today, quel dommage. I would have liked to see this as a debate.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Open Textbooks: A Diversity of Voices in Open Learning

Image via WikipediaOpen textbooks are textbooks that are released with an open license, preferably with a Creative Commons "attribution" license. The textbooks under that license should be free to students and free to instructors to download, reuse, and remix. In other words, the least restrictive license possible. If an author spends years of hard work developing ideas, why should he or she just give them away? There are a lot of reasons why , but they do not have to just give it away. There are a number of compensation models including grants, stipends, release time, tenure, etc. There is still a paradigm in this culture where corporations will be happy to pay for your ideas, repackage them, and sell them to others for a high price, and yes, you may even see some of that money. The problem is that the corporate business model is no longer sustainable. It will be for a while, but at one point, you have to accept that fact that by participating in that model, we are participating in a model that is more and more exclusive. Students have to walk away from the table because of the costs of education in general and the cost of textbooks in particular. There are ways to compensate authors for their work and cutting out most of the middle-man. There are commercial models for open textbooks but unless they are, in the words of the Open Textbook bill "made available free of charge to, and may be downloaded, redistributed, changed, revised, or otherwise altered by, any member of the general public" then they are only kind of open. Commercial corporations will still be screening the content, screening the authors, controlling the access, and setting the price. Why should an academic community give that much power to the book trade? There is too much concern about making the model sustainable for corporations and not enough concern for making education open for students.

I can give you numerous examples of people embracing a new idea but attempting to solve a problem using the old paradigm. My favorite is a boss I used to have who would ask me to post information on the internet and then look at the webpage and say, "that is great, now print off 60 copies and distribute it out to the other departments." And we are this kind of cross-roads - we have a perfect storm of technology, ideas, and people, and we are ready for a change. As an instructional designer, I am interested in bringing instructors together to share their work and experiences and letting "textbooks" or OERs be the natural outcome of those communities. Instead of working on a single expensive book that benefits one person (the book publisher), lets foster a community of open scholarship that sustains the on-going work. Maybe we can even mentor students into the process.

The real value to the authors of open texts is that they are not drawing on their own work alone but they are getting access to a community of authors, revisers, practitioners, researchers, and adapters; a community of scholarship that will support the work of the textbook. A commercial textbook cannot take into account the social conditions of your community. A traditional commercial college textbook cannot be adapted to the deficiencies or advantages of the local high school. You can, for a price, however, buy "supplements" which is the commercial publisher of not-quite-entirely-unlike open textbooks hole card. Why let book printers in another state determine the needs of your community? I believe that a community of scholars can support an online English grammar better than any book publisher trapped in the two-year publishing cycle model. These conversations and decisions should be happening in colleges, not corporate boardrooms. Grammar, for instance, should not depend on a single authority, but should be recognized as the dynamic and living voice of the language. A community of open scholarship can take into account the evolution of language that is always going on around us.

We need to recognize the value of having a diversity of opinions working on these problems. Characterizing these kinds of discussions as "bickering about licenses" is just the kind of attitude that does not foster critical academic inquiry which is exactly what is needed for the sustainability and credibility of open textbooks. Critical thinking, apparently, is bad for business. I am not interested in stopping businesses or starting some revolution, but I think this is a great time to bring teachers together as communities of open scholarship (we have the technology, grants, and people) and not allow ourselves to be blinded by the pittance that corporations will offer us to look backwards.