Pioneering initiative will tap faculty creativity and develop free digital textbooks for community college students
Representatives of dozens of colleges, universities and other non-profit and academic organizations will meet in California this week to launch a pioneering national project: Creation of high-quality, accessible and culturally relevant textbooks for community college students that will be freely available on the Internet.
Working with respected partners, the Community College Open Textbook Project will evaluate four models for developing and producing open textbooks for community college courses. Each approach will be evaluated for long-term sustainability.
The initial phase of the first-of-a-kind effort is funded by a $530,000 grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The foundation has been a global leader in funding open educational resources (OER), digital learning materials that are freely available to anyone with Internet access. The Hewlett board awarded the one-year grant on March 17.
“This is an unprecedented opportunity to identify self-sustaining models for the creation, production and distribution of open textbooks created by faculty specifically for use in community colleges,’’ said Martha Kanter, chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District.
While a small number of open textbooks are available, almost all are for courses offered in four-year universities and few, if any, are fully accessible to disabled students or culturally relevant to a population as diverse as that found in community colleges. The first open textbooks developed under the grant will be for high-demand community college courses, such as elementary statistics. The project includes designing research to assess whether the use of open textbooks improves student learning.
“Making free and low-cost open textbooks available to community college students will help reduce the escalating costs of higher education,’’ Kanter said. “Supporting faculty in the creation and use of high-quality open textbooks developed for our diverse population of students presents exciting opportunities to improve both teaching and learning in community colleges.’’
Partners whose open textbook models will be reviewed for quality, usability, accessibility and sustainability in the project’s first phase are Connexions, a global repository of open educational content founded at Rice University; Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital textbook publisher; the University of California’s UC College Prep Online, which provides Advanced Placement and other courses via the Internet; and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER), a community of educators committed to promoting and developing OER.
The Hewlett grant will support expansion of the CCCOER, established by Foothill-De Anza in July to bring together faculty from across the country who want to use and develop OER for community college students. The consortium, which is meeting on the Foothill College campus this week, includes representatives from more than 60 colleges and universities and the League for Innovation in the Community College. CCCOER operates a web site devoted to educating faculty about open educational resources and offers online introductory courses and other “getting started” information.
“The consortium offers community college faculty a chance to collaborate in developing open textbooks and other educational materials that can engage their students in new and interactive ways,’’ said Judy Baker, dean of the Global Access program at Foothill College and director of the Community College Open Textbook Project. “The end result will be high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks that can be easily and inexpensively updated or customized to meet particular teaching and learning needs.’’
Because the OER movement is still in its infancy, many faculty members do not yet understand how to find, use or create open materials.
In a national survey conducted by the consortium of 1,200 faculty from 28 colleges, 91 percent of the respondents said they are interested in using OER materials in their classes, but 66 percent were unaware of the availability of open materials in their field. One-third said they were already using OER in their classes and two-thirds said they would be interested in helping to produce or identify OER materials. Eighty-seven percent said they were “likely” or “very likely” to use open materials if they were readily accessible. Consortium members will discuss the survey results at their meeting this week.
Baker said that a wealth of free learning materials already exists online but that finding and evaluating them is difficult because there is no mechanism for the submission of OER material for review by peers against agreed-upon standards for community colleges that meet university articulation requirements. The consortium can fill that void, Baker said, by developing minimum standards for textbooks in partnership with four-year institutions and serving as a clearinghouse for the review of OER material created by and for community college faculty.
The Community College Open Textbook Project has strong support from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. An influential national student-led effort, the Campaign to Reduce College Textbook Costs, recently released a statement signed by 1,000 college professors from 300 colleges in 50 states in support of high-quality open textbooks. And legislators in California and Washington have introduced proposals to encourage open educational resources, including AB 2261 by California Assembly member Ira Ruskin.
The open textbook project includes a number of well-regarded collaborators. Among them are the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, which will serve as the project’s research think tank and evaluator; the High Tech Center Training Unit of the California Community Colleges, which will assist with accessibility standards for students with disabilities; Creative Commons, which will license the open textbooks; and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, which will assist with technical standards, content design and sustainability planning.
In 2004, Foothill-De Anza Community College District adopted what is believed to be the first policy in the nation encouraging the use of learning materials in the public domain. Board member Hal Plotkin, a journalist, is writing a policy guide to introduce community college trustees and other higher education leaders to the benefits of open educational resources.
“A lot of effort and activity has taken place on the supply side of open educational resources,’’ Plotkin said. In addition to establishing standards for quality and accessibility, “this is the first major initiative on the demand side.’’
Studying what it will take to make open textbooks effective substitutes for commercial products “is a venture of potentially enormous success,” Plotkin added. “You can see how over the years it could save students billions of dollars.’’
Foothill-De Anza Community College District is located in Silicon Valley and educates more than 44,000 students at two colleges, Foothill College and
De Anza College.
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More information about open educational resources and organizations mentioned in this press release can be found at:
California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office
www.cccco.edu
Campaign to Reduce College Textbook Costs
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
http://cccoer.wordpress.com
Connexions
http://cnx.org
Creative Commons
http://creativecommoms.org
Flat World Knowledge
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com
Foothill-De Anza Community College District
www.fhda.edu
High Tech center Training Unit of the California Community Colleges
http://www.htctu.net
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
http://www.iskme.org
Monterey Institute for Technology and Education
www.montereyinstitute.org
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER
UC College Prep Online
http://www.uccp.org
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New York Times editorial
Published April 25, 2008
That Book Costs How Much?
College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles.
The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway costs. That means using digital textbooks, which can often be presented online free of charge or in hard copies for as little as one-fifth the cost of traditional books. The digital books can also be easily customized and updated.
Right now, textbook publishers are calling the tune. They add as many bells and whistles as they can and pump out new editions as quickly as possible — as a way of making perfectly good textbooks obsolete. Not every book can be cheap. A specialized text that only a few people know how to write and that reaches a small audience will be costly by definition. But there is no reason for an introductory textbook to carry a price tag of, say, $140 in an area like economics where the information changes little from year to year.
Schools are beginning to balk at outrageous pricing. Rice University offers textbooks for some classes free online and charges a nominal fee for the printed version. A new company called Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, N.Y., plans to offer online textbooks free and hopes to make its profit by selling supplemental materials like study guides and hard copies printed on demand.
A study being carried out by the geographer Ronald Dorn at Arizona State University suggests that students who use free online textbooks perform as well academically as students who buy expensive copies from traditional publishers. Colleges and universities should take advantage of these new developments.
Cash-strapped students and their families need all the relief they can get.
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