These are some possible resources for developing our own textbook and course for anatomy and physiology. I
will use this wiki this summer to sort through some biology textbooks
and OERs for possible use in BIOL 102 Human Biology. Remember that since
these are openly licensed we can mix these materials anyway we want to
meet your course goals and objectives. I will also be looking at
possible lab kits and other solutions.
Open Textbooks
OpenStax - OpenStax textbooks are freely available in .pdf and they also have a low-cost, print-on-demand option.
Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon University) Their textbook is in their class. You can access it as a guest by clicking on the blue "Enter Course" button
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.
Image via WikipediaI have often heard that one of the weaknesses of open source is that is that it is an unstable model. Somehow, open source software is supposedly more buggy, not as robust, not enough people supporting it, or too many people involved, etc. And yet, commercial programs drop like flies as the forces of an unbridled lassez-faire tech economy steam-roll through cyberspace like a nuclear tractor load of mixed metaphors and rampant hyperbole. Last week, I had to say goodbye to a favorite tool: Drop.Io. Free file storage, gave an embed code for what ever you stored up there, and a phone number where you could call in and it would record your message and host it as an embeddable MP3 file. Completely brilliant. As an online instructor, this was an extremely useful tool. They were not open source, but I didn't think they had a plan for making money - until Facebook bought them out. And good for them for getting bought out - the service was so good at the ground level right out of the gate that it was not clear how they would have turned it into "premium ware." So the service goes away and the programmers get absorbed by Facebook's production team.
This happened to Angel Learning and is now happening to Elluminate (quel dommage!) and Wimba Voice Tools (good riddance!). Ironically, the most stable model is going to turn out to be foundation-supported open source tools like Sakai. Sakai will continue to grow and change in some really interesting directions: it is one of the few players in online learning that can't get sued or bought out of existence by Blackboard. Goodbye, Drop.Io, you were the James Dean of free file sharing services.
Image by opensourceway via FlickrFrom Cable Green: An Open Educational Resources guide for higher education governance officials written by long-time OER advocate Hal Plotkin has been released by Creative Commons. Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials provides an introduction to the basics of OER, an OER resource guide and insights from OER providers and institutions who have implemented supportive OER policies.
“Open Educational Resources (OER) offer higher education governance leaders a cost-efficient method of improving the quality of teaching and learning while at the same time reducing costs imposed on students related to the purchase of expensive commercial textbooks and learning materials,” says Plotkin. “Higher education governance officials, particularly boards of trustees and senior academic governance leaders, have a tremendous opportunity to harness the advantages of OER for their institutions.”
A living version of this document, which you may iteratively improve, and a PDF version available for download, can be found at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Free_to_Learn_Guide.
She said that she sees herself as a reporter of generation "Y" and a reporter; a member of the print journalism industry. She gets her "revolutionary cred" from her Yale father who got in to Yale on the strength of his SAT scores.
The revolution in education is being fueled by the growth in the demand in education - there is not enough money to meet that demand. The United States is no longer #1 in education but #10. Will our model translate internationally? No one believes that college is really affordable anymore. The cost of education is outstripping medical care. There is an unprecedented melt-down in access to education. States have defunded education and raising tuition.
She mentions the social problem - "The dumbest rich kids are more likely to attend college than the smartest poor kids." She brought up "Speak: The Miseducation of College Students"
Question: I think she referred to herself as an "outsider." How does graduating from Yale and having two faculty members for parents make one an outsider?
She sees Walmart U and Khan Academy as disruptive technology and included some of the counter-arguments to her book. She does not seem to like online learning much - it has to be hybrid for "socialization" reasons.
She asks about how those who create content are meant to get paid for their work; there is a value in "live performances" that the ipod will not replace.
Currently students cannot get credit for experience, prior learning, or what they know. She thinks that portfolio based assessment is a solution. We still have the problem that employers still consider degrees.
She gave examples of sites like "Koda: The Opportunity Community" - a reputation based network.
We no longer have a linear path through education.
She was at the OER conference in Yale where the Hewlitt Foundation announced their priorities in funding open education projects and access to college.
I like the attention that she is able to give to alternative and collaborative education.
The material in her book is not news to many of those who have been working in education for years. The real news is that this book is coming out of the mainstream press from a writer from an ivy league college. Someone could comfortably read the Chronicle of Higher Education and never really address these questions.
The mark that some kind of transformation has been made will be when the "edupunks" and autodidacts are given the same level of access to the media as those who have followed more traditional and conservative paths.
Are you concerned about the high cost of education for your students?
Have you ever wished that there was something that you could do to bring down that cost?
One of the ways you can do that is to consider choosing an “open” textbook for your class. Open textbooks are free electronically or available to students for the printing cost. These textbooks have been written by instructors but have been released to other educators through public domain, Creative Commons, or other means of flexible copyright. In this presentation, we will look at collections of open source textbooks that have been created by instructors and subject matter experts and made available to schools right here in California and across the country. We will learn about organizations who vet these books for the state of California. We will look at new business models that provide free and low-cost textbooks to students and still manage to compensate instructors for their work.
I was delighted to find that two of our faculty, Dave Arnold and Bruce Wagner, are way ahead of the curve here and have written two Math textbooks (with contributions from other instructors).
From what I understand, this was an individual as well as a dept. effort. I plan on interviewing them and putting that up here in the near future.
We have another faculty member interested in a music theory textbook and a couple who are interested in psychology. This is going to be a good year for the students!
This great interview with Cable Green on OERs and the Open Course Library Project was on CreativeCommons.org. It was on their front page for a while and I wanted to post it here to keep it out a little longer because it makes some important points about open education resources and open texts. Washington From what I know of the grant (I used to work in WA and my wife, Jacqui Cain, is working on the online dev ed module), the developers of these open resources are not only authoring the modules but they have to teach with them as well. This is a very important part of the peer review process that is missing from even commercial textbooks. The real acid test of a textbook is not the credentials of the author, but whether or not it works in a real-life classroom setting: not all textbooks do. Sometimes it is just a matter of the author's teaching style (if, in fact, your author is a real teacher and not just an ivy league name with a bunch of TA's who do the teaching). In that case, one of the real values, as a teacher, in open texts and open education resources in general is that you are able to adapt the materials to your use and for the use of your students. You never have to ask students to pay for materials, chapters, and lessons that they are not going to use.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_t4tbjM4djPM_65Ac0h_kWZiNCqbLy-cw5mJ_u-9qtl5ZJtROuQTAV_-Whxd5ZoYBDMEGiIEXJDloSeDMUHB_HkSEeEcPNz7T8PxfsE7941PLpx4Jowox6JoY9mwPLqs0edkJdYrogLujs-TitH5pUQ=s0-d)