Open Access | Tom's Two Cents

Guns, penguins, and open textbooks

May 23rd, 2011 2 comments

Cable Green likes to say, “When you share your content, good things happen.” I tend to agree, but could one of those “good things” actually be a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars?

PC World just published a blog on Open Source Software called “Is Open Source Up to Par? Just Ask the DoD.” When you add the Department of Defense’s Open Technology Development report to the recent decision by the Department of Labor to require a Creative Commons open license on all educational content produced with the $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College And Career Training (TAACCCT) grants, you can see the start of a trend in the US government towards using open licensing as a way to increase efficiency. The big idea for the field of education is that government has a new, more efficient option for creating and distributing educational materials: competitive grants that carry an open license requirement.

“Old School”
Here’s the old model: College students and K-12 institutions buy textbooks from publishers. Publishers pay authors and editors to develop and maintain the content, so naturally they want to make as much as possible on that investment. The publishers also own the copyright and hold the exclusive rights to distribute, revise, and redistribute the content to schools or college students. Why should government interfere or care? #1) The cost of textbooks has tripled since 1986. #2) Since nearly half of US college students use government grants or loans to pay for their textbooks, rising textbook costs are transferred back to the taxpayer. And by the way, US student loan debt just passed credit card debt, hovering around $830 billion. Yeah, we could use a good idea right about now.

The new model
Since taxpayers end up paying the bill for textbooks either way, why not launch a competitive grant process and require the winners to include a shareable license to the digital learning materials they produce? That’s exactly what the Department of Labor is doing with $2 billion in funding. Because we are talking about open, digital content anyone will be able to access, modify, adapt, and improve the resulting educational materials. The cost of making a million copies of a digital textbook is not much more than the cost of the first copy. And if you want it printed, no problem. Printed and bound versions of open textbooks end up costing between 5 and 20 dollars per book.

Requiring open licenses on digital works created with government grants and contracts allows competition and innovation to continue *after* the educational content is created. This is because anyone can access the digital content, build on it, and improve it. Print-on-demand solutions, assessment tools, and customized versions can be added to the original at relatively low cost. But publishers who enhance and resell the content will have add enough new value to compete with the original, free version and with other innovators. This competition will help keep prices low, which is good for students, schools, and in the long run, good for taxpayers. The “open” model doesn’t put anyone out of business — it actually allows everyone to compete and innovate indefinitely.

So what about the guns and the penguins?
Open licenses create efficiencies. This is as true for software as it is for textbooks, as the Department of Defense has learned. From the PC World article:

As with Rifles, So with Software

The DoD then goes on to provide a nice analogy: “Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. The military often finds itself in this position with taxpayer funded, contractor developed software: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system and control of the software source code.”

That has a familiar ring to it too, doesn’t it?

“This is optimal only for the monopoly contractor,” the document goes on to point out, “but creates inefficiencies and ineffectiveness for the government, reduction of opportunities for the industrial base, severely limits competition for new software upgrades, depletes resources that can be used to better effect and wastes taxpayer-provided funds.”

I don’t think I could have put it better myself.

Open technology, by contrast, offers increased agility and flexibility, faster delivery, increased innovation, reduced risk, lower cost and information assurance and security, the DoD asserts.

There is much more to say on this subject, but I’ll pause here for your comments and critiques. Yes, we should still pay textbook authors fairly to build and maintain learning content, and yes, publishers can still offer useful services. Yet I see no reason for government to directly or indirectly fund proprietary K-12 and college textbook publishing empires when more efficient models and providers are now in place.

The bottom line: One way or another, we (taxpayers) pay for textbooks. Let’s do it more efficiently. Or, as David Wiley puts it, “If you buy one, you should get one.”

Categories: open source, Openness Tags: Creative Commons, OER, Open Access, open licensing, opened11

Setting the Default to “Open”

November 24th, 2010 2 comments

I just started a new job as Open Education Program Manager for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC). My main challenge is getting up to speed with a major project that has been under way for several months. The Open Course Library is taking the top 81 highest enrolling college courses in the state and to creating high quality, openly licensed curriculum for each course. There are dozens of people involved: course developers, designers, librarians, and many other experts. All the challenges of course development come into play, plus some additional things that come with creating a course in the open: content licensing, copyright clearance, and designing for reuse. It’s all there, and it’s a little like trying to grab on to a moving train. But I love it, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.

It’s kind of hard to leave off each day. I kind of want to skip Thanksgiving and keep working. Reminds me of when I taught Computer Science at Redlands High School and let my students create a video game as a class one semester. I had to kick them out of my classroom each day because they didn’t want to stop what they were doing. Some of the other teachers were frustrated at me because my students were so focused on my class. I even found one student hiding in the corner of my room, two hours after class, working on creating his part of the game. That’s how I feel here.

But it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and everyone else has gone home, so I’ll leave with my favorite quotes/ideas of the week from a recent OCW Consortium webinar on open access in education and policy given by Reuven Carlyle, State Representative from the 36th District of Seattle, Washington:

If the public taxpayers fund something, it should be open and accessible.
“If we are successful at nothing else in the next year or two, let’s set a goal to fundamentally change the dynamic so that the expectation is one of complete openness … as opposed to openness being the exception. We have to change the social dynamic to one of openness.”
Position open access as a cost savings and one of the most disruptive new approaches, to say nothing of the increased learning that comes of this.
Have a clear, simple message about this. This is not a techno-gadget. Be clear on the value drivers.
Make the financial case for openness in how it avoids duplication and lack of coordination. We’ll pay for open content once, but we aren’t going to pay for it a thousand times.