Budget Bill Boosts Open Textbooks

The $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill signed into law March 23 sets aside $5 million for the Open Textbook Pilot, a program intended to underwrite development and expansion of open educational resources (OER) for higher education. The aim is to trim the cost of course materials for students without diminishing their learning.

While the omnibus bill doesn’t spell out exactly how the Department of Education should distribute the funds, Washington Monthly said it will most likely use the proposed Affordable College Textbook Act (ACTA) as a guideline. The act, which has been introduced in the House and Senate multiple times, most recently in September 2017, calls for establishing a competitive grant program to create or adapt open textbooks.

ACTA also supports assistance for faculty in finding and reviewing open materials, improving access to OER (especially for students with disabilities), assessing OER to ascertain actual cost savings and academic outcomes, and fostering partnerships among higher education institutions and other groups.

ACTA also “highlights several additional considerations for evaluating proposed projects and selecting grantees, including evaluating an institution’s demonstrated capacity to create high-quality resources, focusing on high-enrollment courses at the institution, and making a clear plan for marketing and distributing open textbooks to faculty and students,” Washington Monthly noted.

There’s no timeline for implementation, but $5 million isn’t a lot of money for a national program.

OER by Students for Students

LibreText traces its roots to Delmar Larsen’s frustration that his students had each shelled out $200 for a chemistry textbook that he discovered was riddled with errors. Larsen, an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, didn’t have the funds to assemble a textbook of his own, but what he did have was a valuable creative resource in those students.

Ten years later, the project that began in that class has grown into an extensive library of open course resources, accessible through a Creative Commons license, with much of the content created via crowdsourcing by students, instructors, and topic experts. A dozen subjects are covered, including math, statistics, biology, physics, medicine, and the humanities. Students participate via class assignments to address a specific question or mirror a chapter’s worth of content from an existing resource. Afterward, some continue to contribute as volunteers or paid content developers.

Like a wiki, there is no formal peer-review process for LibreText resources, although certain account-holders can correct errors instantly and anyone else can highlight mistakes through feedback. Larsen noted to EdSurge that even with peer review, traditional textbooks can be full of errors. In print, those persist until the next edition, while most mistakes in the LibreText library can be corrected within a half-hour of being pointed out.

“No textbook or resource is going to be 100% accurate, ever,” an executive of OpenStax, the open course materials provider based at Rice University, told EdSurge. The closest to perfect is content that can be fixed immediately.

In 2014, Larsen conducted an experiment by teaching two chemistry classes, one with a conventional textbook and one with LibreText. At the end of term, the open resource was judged in no way inferior to the traditional content.

Lulu Dives into Academic Publishing

Self-publishing, print-on-demand, and distribution company Lulu Press Inc. recently entered the educational market with its launch of Glasstree, an online publishing platform for academic and scholarly works.

Characterizing current commercial academic publishing as a broken model, Lulu hopes Glasstree will address “critical pain points” in the market by fostering more transparent pricing, speeding up product time to market, and allowing authors to see up to 70% of the profit from sales of their works.

Glasstree offers a menu of services and tools for authors, including traditional peer review and support for open access to works through a partnership with Creative Commons.

Schools See Success from OER Push

Some colleges and universities believe their efforts to switch from commercially published textbooks to open educational resources (OER) are paying off for students as well as faculty.

Higher education institutions are approaching OER in different ways, as a University Business article highlighting five schools shows. Some, like Wiley College in Texas, are moving all courses over to OER while others, such as the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, are offering competitive grants to encourage professors to adopt OER for individual courses. Schools are tapping a mix of resources that include faculty-written materials, readings available online or from the campus library, and materials acquired from organizations such as MERLOT and Lumen Learning.

In every case, though, helping students save significant money was the impetus for OER, not dissatisfaction with the quality of the traditional textbooks available for purchase. However, schools are also seeing a pedagogical bonus as faculty are able to tailor course materials more closely to their instruction.

“The notion that there will no longer be textbooks is implausible,” said Edna Baehre-Kolovani, president of Tidewater Community College in Virginia. “But the reasons OER is growing are student demand and faculty interest.”

On the down side, institutions are aware that creation of OER isn’t a one-and-done deal and they will have to factor in a process for ongoing updates.

“OER is like a free puppy,” said MJ Bishop, director of the University System of Maryland’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation. “There are still costs of maintaining them and keeping them current.”

Rutgers Launches OER Initiative

Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, has joined the growing list of institutions turning to open educational resources (OER) to address the issue of rising costs for course materials. The Open and Affordable Textbook (OAT) project is offering grants to faculty and department groups as an incentive to replace traditional textbooks with free or low-cost alternatives.

The project, funded by the Office of Information Technology and administered by Rutgers University Libraries, will award grants of $1,000 to 12 groups from across the entire system. The university estimates the program will save its students as much as $500,000 in the first year.

A class in aggregate economics has already started putting together an open textbook. The required printed textbook has a new list price of $89.99, with the e-book version available for $69.99. Using the library’s Springer e-book collection, a PDF version of the book can be accessed for free and the paperback copy can be purchased for $24.99.

“We are committed to helping our students succeed, and one of the barriers to their success is the 1,000% increase in textbooks over the last 40 years,” Krisellen Maloney, vice president of information services and university librarian, said in a release. “We look forward to working with grant recipients to help them identify free or low-cost alternatives for their courses.”

New Concept for Digital Textbooks

Concept maps, which represent topics that are connected in a circle or square, are normally used as a study or review tool. An assistant professor of engineering at Pennsylvania State University, Mont Alto, decided to put the map to use as a primary course resource.

Jacob Moore created the Adaptive Map Digital Textbook, which shows the topics covered as points on map. Each topic is connected with related themes and when students click on the point, they are taken to a content page that includes video lectures, example problems, and diagrams.

“A lot of people focus on students making concept maps at the end of semesters to review what they know,” Moore said in an article on Penn State News. “But another way you can use them is as a guide to help students fit smaller topics into the big picture of the course.”

The digital textbook is available on all devices and it’s free. Moore uses a Creative Commons noncommercial license to keep all code and content open-source.

“It’s not uncommon to see students skip buying textbooks just because they don’t have the money, or they split the cost with a roommate and they have to pass it back and forth all the time,” he said. “If you remove those cost barriers, everyone will have better access to these tools. With the Adaptive Map Digital Textbook, as long as students have access to a computer, they have their textbook.”

Unlocking the Potential of OER

Convincing faculty that open educational resource (OER) content is of high quality continues to be a stumbling block for proponents of the alternative course-material model. Providing better tools to find quality material is the next big challenge.

Products are being created to locate independent quality evaluations. More faculty members are using products such as FacultyEnlight from Barnes & Noble College and Hero from Sidewalk and helping to make them better.

“Being able to think about, from a cost perspective, how one textbook compares to another, to be able to see what peers are using the materials, what their reviews are of the materials, and then being able to take those materials and adopt them,” Rich Hershman, NACS vice president of government relations, said in a report on EducationDive, “that’s where I’m really excited about where things are starting to develop in the future.”

The fact that OER content is flexible and can be tailored to fit the needs of individual students should encourage greater acceptance and growth, according to Tom Caswell, director of learning engineering who served as the open education policy associate for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges during the development of its Open Course Library.

“The next step for OER is to get away from flat resources and put OER in personalized spaces that allow students to really benefit individually from those resources,” he said.

NOVA Provides Access to OER Program

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) has developed two zero-textbook-cost degree programs that can be adapted for use by other institutions. The courses use open educational resources (OER) and fulfill all requirements for associate degrees in general studies and social sciences offered by NOVA.

The institution claims it’s the first community college to fully share its OER courses, according to a report in eCampus News. Other colleges can use the program, developed through the NOVA Extended Learning Institute, to fit their own learning outcomes.

NOVA has partnered with Lumen Learning to create the courses, which are available through the Lumen website. For a fee, institutions can access additional services from Lumen, such as faculty training, technical and OER program design support, and help in customizing course materials.

“This step by NOVA goes far towards putting OER degree programs within reach for other colleges,” said TJ Bliss, program officer in the education program at the Hewlett Foundation. “It gives academic leaders a vision of what is now possible in open education, as well as the means to get there. For institutions struggling with affordability and access, OER degree programs can catalyze systemic change towards open education, and colleges can reap the benefits in terms of student success.”

Tool That Can Write Textbooks

The old notion that machines will someday replace workers may soon apply to academia. A Pennsylvania State University professor used a robot to build a textbook that he claims saved students $16,000 last semester.

Bart Pursel assembled a textbook for his Information, People, and Technology class using BbookX, a technology developed at Penn State that helps faculty use open-source materials to create content according to topics and keywords. Using the technology, Pursel was able to distribute the textbook to his class for free.

BbookX starts with an instructor creating a digital table of contents and assigning each chapter a topic with text or related keywords. The tool then uses matching algorithms to quickly gather content, according to the university release.

The university is also exploring ways to allow the content to be changed and updated. Professors will still have to review the titles, but the goal is to provide instructors choices to build a better book in the same way Netflix bases movie selections on what a viewer has previously watched.

“While building my textbook, I came across subjects and topics I hadn’t known about before,” Pursel said in a blog for The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I was able to learn something new and then pass that along to my students.”

Open E-Textbooks Slammed for Errors

Writing digital textbooks intended for free use by educators may not be as easy as it seems.

A group of Michigan social studies teachers, as part of the Michigan Open Book Project, spent a year developing e-textbooks for four subjects: high school economics, sixth-grade world geography, fourth-grade U.S. regions, and fifth-grade American history. Funded by a $600,000 state education grant, the project’s aim is to create books any Michigan school system can download at no charge.

However, the first four books were released in August to heavy criticism. “Some textbook experts and educators around the state are so disturbed by factual inaccuracies, poor grammar, overgeneralizations, clumsy word choices, and cultural insensitivity, they are recommending teachers not use them in their classrooms,” reported The Detroit News.

One curriculum reviewer said all four books “need significant editing and revision, if not complete rewriting.”

David A. Johnson, director of the Open Book Project, said the teachers selected to write the books were encouraged to create the kind of resource they would want to deploy in their own classrooms. He noted that since the books are solely online, errors can be revised within 48 hours. A tab on the download site includes a fill-in form for submitting errors and the process for evaluating submissions.

The Open Book Project intends to produce more e-books over the next two years. In development during the current school year are books for third-grade Michigan history, seventh-grade ancient world history, eighth- and ninth-grade American history, and high school civics. Planned for development in the 2016-17 academic year are books for K-2 and high school world history.

TSUS to Offer Free Freshman Year

While politicians debate ways to reduce the cost of a college education, the Texas State University System (TSUS) is joining a growing list of institutions trying to do something about it. TSUS will begin participating in the Freshman Year for Free program in 2016 through its partnership with the not-for-profit Modern States Education Alliance.

TSUS is the first public institution in Texas to offer the program, joining Rice University in Dallas and institutions and higher-education organizations in Arizona, Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Tennessee.

“Our goal in partnering with Modern States’ Freshman Year for Free program is to provide students with another option to earn their degree on a timeline and budget that works for them,” said TSUS Chancellor Brian McCall.

Students participating in the program will be able to select freshman-level courses from the Modern States catalog that will apply toward degrees at TSUS institutions. Once the courses are completed, students can take Advanced Placement (AP) or College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests for college credit.

The program will offer more than 30 online college courses being developed by the massive open online course provider edX with no cost for the course or online texts and materials. Modern States is creating a web portal for its course catalog that will also link students to resources such as low-cost or no-cost tutors and information on partner colleges and universities.

States Working on OER Collaborative

Education agencies from 11 states have joined forces to create the K-12 OER Collaborative, a repository of open educational resources. The group is seeking “full-course OER” for English and language arts for all grade levels and mathematics for grades K-11 from developers, which are due by Jan. 9, 2015.

Content is expected to include comprehensive instructional material, activities that allow teachers to differentiate instruction, and assessment capabilities, according to reports. It must align with the Common Core standards and be available for free under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.

“This is a great project for at least two reasons,” said Randy Dorn, superintendent of public instruction for the state of Washington. “First, it’s going to support local control by empowering districts to adapt the materials to their own community needs. Second, it’s a low-cost and high-quality way to help students meet our state’s learning standards.”

Representatives from Washington, Utah, and Idaho were on the first committee for the initiative. Education agencies from Arizona, California, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon, and Wisconsin are also involved with the project.

Applications for developers are available at http://goo.gl/forms/gohdUxE5Gw.

NDUS Makes Free Online Textbook Pitch

Students in the North Dakota University System (NDUS) pay an average of $1,100 each year for course materials. A new plan presented to the state legislature may bring that amount down.

The proposal would provide funds to train faculty members in the system to learn about using free online textbooks in place of traditional textbooks. The North Dakota Board of Higher Education approved a budget of $500,000, which includes incentives to attract faculty members to participate in open-textbook training.

“I’m giving them training and the opportunity to learn about it and faculty who are not interested at all in doing open textbooks don’t have to, so it’s purely self-selective,” said Tanya Spilovoy, NDUS director of distance education and state authorization, who proposed the open-textbook plan to the state legislature.

A partnership with the University of Minnesota , which created its own free online textbook library in 2012, will allow NDUS instructors to get accustomed to educational videos and interactive online tools that have already gone through a vetting process at Minnesota. Becoming comfortable with digital course material is an important part of the process, according to David Ernst, chief information officer at the Minnesota College of Education and Human Development.

“In higher education, faculty’s academic freedom is probably the most important thing they have,” Ernst said. “Their right to choose their course material, basically anything academic, is their call and all we can do and all that’s appropriate to do is educate them about open education resources, specifically open textbooks. You answer questions and help remove barriers.”

Maryland Starts Open-Source Pilot

Students at the University of Maryland took their complaints about the costs of textbooks online, and they caught the attention of school officials.

They posted photos of whiteboard messages spelling out the amount each spent on books. That led to the University System of Maryland launching a pilot program this semester that makes course materials available as open-source digital content.

The pilot is part of a partnership with Lumen Learning, a company that helps instructors locate content used in creating open-source electronic books. The school estimates the program will save the 1,100 students participating a combined $130,000 in textbook costs.

Even with the partnership, compiling content requires a time commitment from professors. Scott Roberts, who teaches an introductory psychology course on the College Park campus, told the Baltimore Sun it took about 80 hours to write the open-source textbook he created for a class in 2010.

“Maybe one of the bigger issues is in certain academic circles, the rigor of a course is judged by the textbook you use. If you stray from that, you might be met by some furrowed brows,” said Robert Javonillo, a biology professor from Coppin State participating in the pilot. He added that the open-source material he has used has been high quality and that his students are relieved when they find out their assigned course materials are free instead of the $158 textbook he used to assign for this class.

Librarian Develops Open Text Project

In an effort to reduce the cost of textbooks, Cyril Oberlander, director of the library at State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo, devised a grant program called SUNY Open Textbooks that asked SUNY professors to write their own textbooks.

Professors apply for grants to write textbooks that are peer-reviewed by other faculty members. If the work is accepted, the university publishes the title and grants students free access to it.

The project started with a $25,000 grant to publish four textbooks, but then spread to other SUNY libraries, which added another $40,000 to the coffers and increased the number of textbooks to 15. Oberlander received 38 proposals from professors and has already published four titles, with the remaining 11 expected to be released in June.

Oberlander received a further $60,000 in funding for the project and 46 manuscripts have been proposed. This second batch of proposals will undergo a new review process that provides professors with blind abstracts that are evaluated on whether the content can be used by the entire SUNY system.

Oberlander is now considering ways to integrate texts with different learning styles, such as embedding audio into electronic versions or adding analytics to allow professors to track how well students are learning.

Baraniuk Bullish on Future of Free Content

You might think there wouldn't be much room for traditional publishing in the world of open and free educational content. However, Richard Baraniuk, director of the Connexions and OpenStax initiatives at Rice University, would disagree.

Baraniuk is already using open educational resources (OER) to create free learning materials through his nonprofit organization, OpenStax College. If traditional publishers can build on the material, he's all for it.

"We're trying to provide better access to all high-quality learning experiences," he told University Business. "If what we offer saves traditional publishers money, they're able to lower their costs and that will help advance education."

Textbooks will be modular, allowing instructors to choose multiple sources for each class. They will then be able to modify the difference sources of content to suit each student, who will also be able to collaborate on developing the text, according to Baraniuk.

"There's nothing stopping students from becoming authors," he said. "The students in my engineering class conduct a research project every year and then archive their results in Connexions, so they're published authors. These projects get used by people around the world and they get referenced and built on by others." 

Bill to Expand Use of Open Textbooks

Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX) introduced legislation that would create a grant program for colleges and universities to create and expand the use of open-access  textbooks. The Affordable College Textbook Act would give the public the right to access, customize, and distribute the online content in an effort to curb the rising costs of supplies and course materials.

Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Al Franken (D-MN) have introduced similar legislation in the Senate.

If passed, the law would establish a grant program to support efforts to create and expand the use of open-access textbooks with priority placed on those pilots that achieve the highest savings. It would also guarantee that open educational material would be easily accessible and require institutions to report on the effectiveness of any funded program.

“Simply put, this is about making college more accessible and more affordable for students who are eager to earn their college degree,” Hinojosa wrote in a guest column for a South Texas newspaper.

New Ways to Search Online Content

While there are plenty of open-source course materials available to students and faculty, finding them remains a challenge. It’s also troublesome for content creators to be noticed.

However, solutions are beginning to pop up, such as Education Marketplace, launched recently by the education platform StudySoup. Education Marketplace is a one-stop location where instructors can find, create, and sell digital content.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Why is all this content decentralized?” Sieva Kozinsky, who founded StudySoup with Jeff Silverman, told eCampus News. “You have notes in your notebook, readings in your textbooks, content on an LMS. There are great resources out there, but there’s no systemized way of finding, using, and learning from all this material.”

In July, Pearson launched a searchable catalog of nearly 700,000 open educational resources that included video and content from Open Course Library though the expansion of its OpenClass Exchange. Education Marketplace is different because it allows content to be created and sold through the StudySoup online tools, which are already being used at more than 40 campuses across the United States.

“Really it allows anybody to create interactive content,” Kozinsky said. “You don’t even have to be tied to a university. Anyone can come into the platform and create material which can then be compiled into what we call a ‘course,’ and delivered to potential students.”

StudySoup has different pricing plans available and intends to keep 15% of the royalties from any course purchased. The company is also working on a peer-review and user rating system to ensure course quality.

Open Course Library Expands Free Content

Advocates of the Open Course Library (OCL) estimate it has saved students about $5 million on course materials in just a few years. Now, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges has expanded the library’s offerings to include 81 of the most common community college classes.

The OCL project, funded by the state legislature and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brought together state community college faculty to create online textbooks and course materials that are freely accessible and open to any student across the nation, not just those in Washington.

At Pierce College, Lakewood, WA, 500 students have used OCL text in precalculus and other math courses and achieved similar success rates to students using traditional textbooks, while saving about $50,000 in textbook costs, according to David Lippman, a Pierce College math instructor who helped develop the open material.

“I was fearful about taking a strictly online course, especially one dealing with math since I haven’t taken a math course in over 30 years and the online option was very new to me,” Terri Questi, a Pierce College student who took a Lippman math course using OCL content, said in a release. “The course was well organized with clear requirements and grading system, helpful videos to supplement the text, and responsive instructors who replied quickly.”

Survey Charts New Ed-Tech Trends

Smartphones, social media, game-based learning, and open textbooks will all be part of the education technology landscape for 2013, according to a survey conducted by the ed-tech web site Edudemic.

The Edudemic survey results are presented in a graphic that predicts more focus on text messaging as a way to connect with students on everything from class assignment deadlines to upcoming campus events. Already, 93% of responding students say they send text messages and 89% of the institutions use text messaging for emergency communications.

While it may not be surprising that the use of social media on campus will continue to grow, it is eye-opening that every responding school reported having a Facebook page and 80% have a Twitter account. Eighty-three percent of the schools report using social media to connect with alumni and 38% use it to reach the local community.

The survey forecasts more institutions will make use of online educational resources, such as massive open online courses and open digital course materials. Affordable 3-D printers will become more accessible and may someday be a fixture in every classroom, while the use of game-based learning and e-books will become more accepted.