Jane Park, via Creative Commons, deliberated on the existing radical changes in the development of textbooks, and featured an interview with Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky who shared their experience about developing the Collaborative Statistics textbook, which is freely available for access and derivation via CC BY on the Connexions platform. Snippets:
One of the most exciting sub-movements within open education is the current revolution regarding the evolution of textbooks. Old-fashioned publishers would often (and still do) rack up prices to hundreds of dollars per textbook, but this business model is rapidly changing to favor vastly cheaper educational resources based on more open licensing policies. One driver is that the information in textbooks becomes outdated the minute it comes out in print, to the point that what is being taught in schools is often inaccurate. Open textbooks better represent the dynamic nature of information because they are themselves dynamic. They can be manufactured collaboratively over the internet, are digital and thereby easily editable, and are openly licensed so that anyone can update the information in the future. The premise is that you should never have to throw out old content—only improve upon it.
How do you envision Collaborative Statistics being used in the classroom?
Collaborative Statistics has been used in the classroom for about 15 years. The book is intended to complement an elementary course in statistics that is collaborative and practical. Students work in groups to apply what they have learned to complete data driven labs and projects. The book was written to accommodate this mode of classroom activity. It was also written with English as a second language (ESL) students in mind and has been used successfully over the years with many ESL students.
From what I understood from your presentation (Susan) at COSL OpenEd ‘08, writing Collaborative Statistics was far from the hardest part. The book was originally published with a commercial publisher under all rights reserved copyright. What triggered the need to open up these rights?
We acquired the rights back from the publisher so that we could lower the cost of the book. We had found that too many of our students struggled to pay for their books especially as the price of books went up (the cost increase has been dramatic over the years). So, when we had the chance to open up the rights to the book and make it free online, we were ready to do it.
Can you tell us a bit about the process you had to go through to convert to an open license? What were the steps you took? What were the roughest bumps in the road?Martha Kanter, Chancellor of the Foofthill-De Anza Community College District, is very interested in open educational resources. She is acquainted with Bob Maxfield of the non-profit Maxfield Foundation (associated with Rice University). She recommended our book to Bob Maxfield who in turn made the book available to the Connexions Project of Rice University. Since we had control of the book (we published it), it was our decision to acquire an open license. The roughest bumps involved the amount of time it took to find the right organization for our book.
If you could give a piece of advice to other textbook authors and/or teachers who wish to publish their work openly, what would it be?
Do it! Think of the many students and faculty who could benefit from your work.
Why did you choose CC BY, as opposed to one of the more restrictive licenses?
We chose the license that Connexions requested for the least restrictions. Plus, the least restrictive license allows for the most freedom of improvement of a product.What would you say to someone who was worried about commercial uses of their work?
Choose an organization like Connexions to publish on the Web. Connexions allows and encourages users to collaboratively develop, freely share and quickly publish content on the Web. Anyone who uses any part of someone else’s content can modify the content but must give attribution to the authors of the content.
Lastly, what is the future of open textbooks? What would you say we have to change in order for open education to be maximally effective?
Open textbooks are here to stay! Connexions has much improved our book with what they have done on the cnx.org site. They have broken down the content into modules that can be linked together and arranged in different ways. We are sure that the other organizations that are involved in open educational resources have done something similar. There has to be some kind of massive ad campaign (similar to what California did with the big propositions in the recent November 2008 election but keep it honest) that shows the great benefits of open educational resources. The ad must target everyone but especially faculty to show them the great educational possibilities that exist, the fact that the resources are easy to use and the fact that the resources are free.
