Brainstorm in Progress: Kaleidoscope Project

Showing posts with label Kaleidoscope Project. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Open Textbooks: Community and Sustainability

Redwood Majesty (Photo: MizzD)

In our discussions with faculty and administrators about free, openly licensed textbooks, I still get questions about "sustainability." Those questions really boil down to "who is going to pay for all of that work?" Often the implication is that we some how need to mimic the commercial textbook publishing model in order to get "a quality product." This is in spite of the fact that commercial textbooks only really have the illusion of being quality products (see "The Myth of Commercial Textbook Reliability"). And there are companies out there that will be happy to sell you something not-quite-entirely-unlike-open textbooks to help preserve administrators' and teachers' comfort levels with the past models. It is nice to think that there is this all-knowing mental giant of a subject matter expert who went to all of the right schools who will once and for all explain it all into a single book (okay, maybe with some relatively inexpensive supplements, study guides, and test banks). We have to break out of thinking that a textbook is a course. Teaching and learning does not come out of books but from interaction with one another; with engagement. This interaction is best facilitated in community. Here in the community college, it begins in the local school districts with our dedicated faculty reaching out to the local high schools and learning about the challenges the students face. The engagement comes when experienced faculty begin to assess their students and shape their teaching and teaching materials to the needs of their students. And yes, finding quality textbooks as a community can be part of that. But what if part of the equation, part of the problem is that the students can't afford those textbooks? Or the school districts can no longer afford to pay for those textbooks? Or if the textbooks don't really address the needs of the students? Do we make the students buy more supplements to the textbooks?

Over and over again, I am finding that the answer to these questions is community. The math department at College of the Redwoods is just one of many examples I could point to. The teachers have written their own openly licensed textbooks based on their experience with the local students. They created the textbooks first because they found the current commercial textbooks inadequate for addressing the issues of the local students but then also to save the students money, to lower the cost of education.The math department used money from their budget, faculty meetings, sabbaticals, etc. to work on their textbooks. The books are hosted on the math department server along with the online assessment system that they created to accompany their books.

College of the Redwoods also participated in the Kaleidoscope Project. The Kaleidoscope Project focused on community: the eight partner colleges, and the collaboration of the instructors from these colleges to adopt open course designs for general education courses. Common assessments were encouraged, and materials were iteratively improved based on student results. The project also focused on the adoption and development of existing open textbooks rather than creating new materials. The key to the success of Kaleidoscope was the community, not the money.

True sustainability in open textbooks will not look like the previous models of commercial textbook publishing. We already know that we cannot afford that. It will look more like an on-going seminar with high quality, community based OERs and open textbooks as the result. The Creative Commons licensing model will be important. I believe we will need to put an "NC" - a non-commercial license on open textbooks to prevent commercial businesses from locking openly licensed content behind pay walls.

So how do we make OERs and open textbooks sustainable? Change our thinking on textbooks and their relation to courses. Change our thinking on tenure and publishing. For a start, we can do (and formalize) what many communities are already doing:

Give faculty release time for writing and editing textbooks
Tie writing OERs and textbooks to tenure
Participate in the peer-review of OERs and open textbooks (e.g. MEROT Open Textbook Initiative and the College Open Textbooks Community, etc.)
Leverage the community that already exists (academic senates, student govt., school boards, etc.) to address these problems
Get serious about removing financial barriers to education for students

There are many models of sustainability out there besides the Kaleidoscope Project (such as Open Access Textbooks).

Math Textbooks at College of the Redwoods:

This is from the math department web page at College of the Redwoods. The bookstore once told me that they thought that about 70 percent of the students bought a copy of the book even though a free version was available.

Math 376:

Each Math 376 student will be provided a free textbook and solutions manual on CD.
The textbook and solutions manual are also available online at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/PreAlgText
Many students find that they also want a printed version of the textbook and/or solutions manual.
- You will be able to purchase a new printed version of the textbook from lulu.com for $20 plus shipping, and the solutions manual for $20 plus shipping.
For more information on Math 376 textbooks and other resources, see the department course page at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/mathdept/courses/math376.php

Math 380 options:

Each Math 380 student will be provided a free textbook and solutions manual on CD.
The textbook and solutions manual are also available online at http://mathrev.redwoods.edu/ElemAlgText
Many students find that they also want a printed version of the textbook and/or solutions manual.
- You will be able to purchase a new printed version of the textbook from lulu.com for $20 plus shipping, and the solutions manual for $18 plus shipping.
For more information on Math 380 textbooks and other resources, see the department course page at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/mathdept/courses/math380.php

Math 120:

Each Math 120 student will be provided a free textbook and solutions manual on CD.
The textbook and solutions manual will also be available online at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/IntAlgText
Many students find that they also want a printed version of the textbook and/or solutions manual. You will be able to purchase printed versions from the CR bookstore.
For more information on Math 120 textbooks and other resources, see the course page at http://msenux.redwoods.edu/mathdept/courses/math120.php

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Jerry Brown Unlocks the Nation's Digital Future through Open Source Textbook Innovation

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today, Governor Jerry Brown signed a monumental set of bills that create the nation's first free online textbook library, an effort aimed at alleviating the burden of rising costs to students attending California's public postsecondary institutions. California is now set to become the nation's first state to create a digital textbook library free of charge for the state's most popular college courses, says the 20 Million Minds Foundation.

Introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), SB 1052 provides for the selection, development and administration of free open digital textbooks for the most popular lower-division courses and overseen by the establishment of the "California Open Education Resources Council" (COERC). COERC, established by the legislation, will be comprised of faculty members from the University of California, California State University and Community Colleges to determine which courses merit inclusion. Its companion bill, SB 1053, creates the California Open Source Digital Library to house the open source textbooks and courseware.

Both bills place California first in the nation among states to combat higher education's growing price tag with open source software and Creative Commons open licenses so that students can access sophisticated tools and college-level information at no or low cost, allowing them to mitigate escalating college fee increases and save their money for student housing.

With the Governor's signature, California is set to create a competitive "Request for Proposals" (RFP) process inviting faculty, publishers, and others to develop high quality digital open source textbooks and related courseware. The materials will be placed under a "Creative Commons" licensing structure that allows students and faculty free access, and allows instructors to create customized materials from these textbooks and other courseware. Materials must also meet the rigorous standards of college core curricula, and will be reviewed and approved by subject matter experts. "This is a great victory for students and middle class families struggling with the ever-increasing costs of higher education," said Steinberg. "This is a major step toward using technology to cut costs for students while enhancing the quality of higher education in California."

"At a time when the cost of attending California's public colleges and universities is skyrocketing, Governor Jerry Brown recognized that by embracing our digital future with innovative technological advancements like open source textbooks we can save college students in California millions of dollars in escalating book costs," said 20 Million Minds Foundation President Dean Florez. The foundation has been supportive of policy measures to create quality open source textbooks for college students throughout the nation. "This is the first time government has come in with substantial dollars that match philanthropic efforts to create a library where students can access free textbooks and faculty can utilize their skills to remix, revise, and repurpose these textbooks for their students."

Funding for the bills also signed by the governor (SB 1028), appropriates five million dollars for the project from the state public college savings plan ScholarShare Trust fund to be matched by private entities and philanthropy.

Dr. Larry Green, Mathematics Co-Chair of Lake Tahoe Community College, who has been utilizing a free open source textbook for his students, praised the governor. "From the instructors' perspective, having access to a wealth of professional course materials to edit, use and share frees up time for pursuing more one-on-one interaction with students and more personalized learning," said Green. "Choosing to adopt an enhanced digital open textbook for my students spares them several thousands of dollars in combined textbook expenses and increases student success. I thank the Governor for recognizing the need to provide faculty with the tools necessary for remixing curriculum while preserving academic freedom by providing free quality textbook choices for college professors and their students."

The open source library will allow students to download textbooks for free or pay around $20 for a hard copy, and was the principle reason the signed bills received approval by the University of California.

SOURCE The 20 Million Minds Foundation

OERs at College of the Redwoods

These are the slides from my part of presentation "OER Adopter Communities: the Sustainability Factor in Open Education":

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Keeping Open Education Resources Open

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What does the "open" in "open education resources" mean? What it should mean is free to reuse, remix and share. If your open education resources are locked up with a proprietary platform, they are no longer open. If they are converted into "supplements" for a "free" text, they are no longer open. This is the fear behind those who choose a license that says "not for commercial use." That does not make it less open because you are not free to lock down someone else's work and make a profit off of it.

The reason I release materials to the wild with an open license is so that other educators can use them and benefit from them; maybe even modify them (and hey, feel free send me a copy back). I want to contribute to the education community. My intention is not to enrich some business who will repackage and "improve" on my work by locking it down into a closed system and then charging for access. The claim that I am making my work less open because it is not free for commercial use is ridiculous! That is like saying animals are only free if they are also free to be in a zoo. And the only ones who really benefit from the corporate lock-down of OERs and open textbooks are the corporations.

The Creative Commons license warning that an OER is not part of a "free culture" is an unnecessary distraction. FreedomDefined. org is not helping:
"Licenses which only allow non-commercial use are not considered Free Culture licenses. This is because in practice there are many ways that Cultural works can be used and reused which would be considered commercial. Another problem is that there is no generally agreed definition of where the border line is between Commercial and Non Commercial uses with very many cases falling in the undefined area in between. In practice Share Alike or Copyleft clauses provide a restriction on commercial profits since any reuse making excessive profits will soon stimulate a bunch of copycats which will bring prices down while encouraging even wider distribution of the works - which is the objective of the free culture licenses."
That phrase "which will bring down prices" is the funny bit here. My goal is not to keep down the prices of my work but to remove the cost barrier altogether from my work! I want it free as in free of cost to any student, now and in the future.

The claim that OERs will not benefit from corporate modification and promotion is really missing the point. That is not the only way that OERs are adapted, developed, and distributed. OERs belong to the community of teachers and learners. They should remain there. The real work being done in the OER community is by communities of educators

So why do school districts go after corporate materials that are almost, but not quite entirely, unlike open? Because they are still clinging to the old paradigm that says that if it didn't get "vetted" by a corporate press, it lacks quality, legitimacy, the imprimatur and nihil obstat of a "reputable" press. We need to redefine this legitimacy. The corporate presses have not done education any favors: the price of education is outstripping the cost of inflation and healthcare. Each semester, publishers come up with new and interesting ways to justify their $280 dollar textbooks. And the sad truth is that the instructors know these subjects better than the project managers at corporate education publishing houses. The books are not more accurate because they went through their vetting process (see OER: The Myth of Textbook Reliability). Every open textbook that I have encountered that was created in-house or by a community of scholars has been hands down superior in every way to a corporate textbook because it addresses the needs of the teachers who created it and the students who are using it, it is lower in price and more accessible.

There are new models emerging for the development and implementation of OERs and open textbooks. There are a number of models suggested by Stephen Downes in his article "Models for Sustainable Open Education Resources" that I feel have yet to be fully explored. There is also the implementation model suggested by the Kaleidoscope Project that begins with a community of scholars working on shared student learning outcomes and assessments and only then do they adopt OERs or open textbooks. In other words, open textbooks are an opportunity to have education content driven by the SLOs of the local schools, not by commercial interests.

Fretting over whether or not an OER is free to be exploited by a corporation is a huge step backward and a great disservice to the students.