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Open Textbooks Win Over Publishers In CA
Unequivocal writes "Recently California's Governor announced a free digital textbook competition. The results of that competition were announced today. Many traditional publishers submitted textbooks in this digital textbook competition in CA as well as open publishers. An upstart nonprofit organization named CK-12 contributed a number of textbooks (all free and open source material). 'Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California's standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards.' Three of those recognized as 100% aligned to California standards were from CK-12 and one from H. Jerome Keisler. None of the publisher's submissions were so recognized. CK-12 has a very small staff, so this is a great proof of the power of open textbooks and open educational resources."
The text book industry is such a ridiculous racket it sickens me. Hopefully this becomes a standard thing across the world that colleges eventually adopt. Honestly, the only times I did open a textbook in high school and college was to do the problems out of the book. The Internet resources were more than enough to service my educational needs, in many cases it was actually far better than the crap in the textbooks.
Instructor materials and supplements were not included. So, this is basically a setup/joke.
Traditional textbooks are purchased because of the ancillary material that comes with them. This includes, support, Web sites for both students and instructors, assessment software, assessment preparation material, copious student assignments and solutions, automatic grading software, prepared lecture material, etc.
I have never seen open textbooks work in a subject area that requires frequent updates, such as fundamental computer concepts, or modern application software (office suites...). I do think, however, open can be somewhat successful solid subjects, such as calculus. Note that I bring up these subject area because a LOT of books are sold in these area. But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort.
If you think students are lazy these days, you should see the instructors. They demand new end-of-chapter problems, new quizzes, new tests. And they want it all automatically graded electronically. This can't be delivered by open textbooks.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
I usually buy my textbooks used through Amazon or Half.com or eBay but recently moved out of state and found the textbooks listed on my distance education course confusing -- it appeared to be some kind of bundle of books but didn't list the individual editions. So I opted to order the bundle directly through my college's textbook store and have them mail it out to me. First, they sent me a noticed stating that because they were out of used copies of one of the textbooks in the bundle, they would have to send me a "new" copy and charge the additional cost for it. This bundle of books came out to nearly $150 -- and it turned out the "new" textbook was the 2007 edition of a book that already had a 2010 edition available. I really felt burned -- not only had they shipped me a 2007 version of a book that had had 2008, 2009, and 2010 edition available, but they charged me full price for the book -- and I've discovered that the book is often available (used) on Amazon for less than ONE DOLLAR (plus shipping; search for "Discovering Computers", the Shelly Cashman series). The textbook industry and their relationships with colleges are due to die a slow (well, okay, make it quick) painful death. I'm all for making open and/or digital textbooks acceptable for the classroom.
Harold
Isn't that the truth. And the best scam of all is the professor that requires his own book(s) for class, and changes which ones he uses each year so there is no buy-back at the end of the semester. That's right, Miner, I still think you are a prick 40 years on.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I was checking the comments to see if anybody had mentioned that yet, as I was going to say the same thing myself.
I *highly* recommend that link, as well as the book from whence it came, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. In fact I think that book should be required reading for any self-respecting nerd.
I think it would be great that at the time of graduation a person had an entire electronic library of reference material. This could make it possible, if you are in 8th grade and find that you are rusty on some of the information from last year, just run a search.
No one, for example, takes Gibbon's argument on the Fall of the Roman Empire seriously anymore; similarly, no one takes the argument that Islamic cultures economically failed (in comparison with Europe) because of anti-capitalist religious precepts seriously either. Yet both were a part of serious teaching a few decades ago (the age of some textbooks).
I remember one textbook I had as a child argued that the reason that Lowland Scots prospered in comparison with Highland Scots was due the Protestant work ethic bestowed upon them through Prebyterianism - in comparison, the Highlanders succumbed to their lethargic Catholic proclivities. Hilarious in hindsight, but slightly disturbing as real teaching.
The best "textbook" I ever had in college was in my Multi-variable Calculus class. The instructor had reviewed the available options and came to the conclusion that they were all overpriced junk. So, he (hand) wrote up all of the notes for the semester, with charts, graphs, and everything else. He even had a few sample problems for each lesson. He then bundled the whole thing up and had the bookstore copy it and sell if for $5, basically to cover reproduction costs. The entire thing was loose-leaf paper pre-punched for a standard three ring binder. In the end, that entire book was about $7.
The thing is, without the massive costs which go into textbooks, they can be cheap. And, even better, if my book gets lost, damaged, or stolen who cares? It's five bucks. I also have the option to mark up my book in any way I want, and I am not worried about the resale value at the end of the class (which will be about a tenth of the books original cost to me, unless the school changes editions and the bookstore staff just laughs at me).
For K-12 schools, this will be even better. Instead of handing a kid a $50 book, which he is going to destroy; you give him a $5 reproduction, and require him to put it in his own $2 three ring binder. When he loses it, you just give him another copy. He can even write in the book, and keep it at the end of the year. If your students have computers, you can even go so far as to give them digital copies.
The only thing which needs to be checked is the quality and accuracy of the information. But, the State (at least California) is already doing that. And, like many Open Source projects, you can have the advantage of lots of people looking at it before hand. There just isn't a downside to having Open Source books, unless you are a textbook publisher, in which case they suck. But, as far as I care, they can join the buggy whip manufacturers on the sidelines of history.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
It's actually kind of funny, but my experience as the author of some free physics textbooks as been almost exactly the opposite of the situation you have in mind. My books are written for use at the college level, but I have quite a few high school users as well, and the vast majority of these high schools are religious high schools, mostly Catholic schools. The reason is simply that state education bureaucracies make it impossible in most cases for public schools to adopt open-source books, so the ones who can adopt them are mostly private schools, and a lot of private schools are religious. I have one book that's written for the type of course that biology majors usually take, and I've taken tons of opportunities to work in mentions of evolution, e.g., in the chapter that discusses refraction I start off with the evolution of the eye. Doesn't seem to have bothered thes folks a bit. Of course the Catholic Church doesn't have any issues with evolution anyway.
There have been plenty of fairly successful attempts, on the other hand, to get ID into schools through the traditional setup of public school bureaucracies, state legislatures, and textbook publishers. A lot of publishers water down the discussion of evolution in their K-12 texts in an effort to make them more salable in places like Texas.
Find free books.
Ben,
Thanks for the clarification and your efforts in the free books arena.
I took some time to look through a bit of what CK12 has available on their website and it's clear who the real champion of these free textbook successes is... Jimmy Wales and the work of Millions of dedicated people who have contributed to the Wikipedia project.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
Someone else criticized the typography of the C-12 textbooks. The graphs are worse. I'm reading their "Calculus" book. The axis scales on the graphs tend to be very tiny. You have to zoom way, way in using a PDF viewer to read the axes. At which point the graph lines show serious jaggies. Tables of numeric values are left-aligned, which makes it hard to compare values.
There's very little motivation. The text just jumps right in, throwing formulas at the kids.
The language is painful. "Recall that a particular pair of numbers is a solution if direct substitution of the X and Y values into the original equation yields a true equation statement." This is formally correct, but it uses the concept of evaluating an equation as a truth-valued Boolean statement, which is beyond the scope of this text.
On pages 15-16, the book discusses depreciation. One problem says "Assuming the rate of depreciation of the car is constant..." What they mean is that the price declines linearly (into negative territory?). A "constant rate of depreciation" is usually understood as a constant percentage rate. (The financial community uses "straight line depreciation" to refer to linear depreciation.) This also could have led to a useful discussion of exponentials, compound interest, decay, and inflation, but they don't go there. They change the subject and go on.
The text assumes that the student has some specific model of graphing calculator, but doesn't say what it is. (Incidentally, the whole course is a PDF file formatted for printing, not HTML with applets, which might be more useful.)
There's a section on fitting a curve to a set of data. It tells the student what buttons to push on the calculator, but says nothing about what's going on inside.
The terms "open interval" and "closed interval" are used, but not defined before use. The text also uses capital letters like N to indicate sets of pairs of reals on page 68. This is a confusing usage from more advanced math. I think that some of the theorems were cut and pasted from another source, and don't quite fit the text.
When the text finally gets to integrals and derivatives, it doesn't start by pointing out that they're inverse operations. Both are presented separately. The text would be better if it started off with a completely graphical presentation of what's going on, instead of starting with derivations.
This text has all the stuff on the checklist, but presents them incoherently. This is not a good textbook.
When I took Differential Equations in college (2005), I paid about $150 for my textbook (brand new edition, so no used copy to be found). Two years later, I found a copy of this textbook from 1974 at a garage sale for $1. Since I had my shiny new copy still, I bought the old one to do a comparison.
Sure enough, other than a few small changes (slight changes to the end-of-chapter questions), probably 99% of the text was completely unchanged, other than a few typos being fixed.
My favorite professors were the ones who said "f*** the books". My Psych 101 prof actually wrote his own book that the bookstore printed up for $25. When I took Physical Geography, my professor went a step further. He took all the Powerpoint slides, replaced key words with blanks, and took the lot to Kinkos. $20 a pop for 400 pages of Powerpoint slides instead of paying $140 for the textbook.
Science texts are the worst. I had some expensive engineering courses ($300-ish for books), but my roommate had by far the worst I've ever seen. His O-Chem class cost him almost $800.
Several of the PGDP projects of maths books are meant to be marked up with LaTeX, e.g. this one in round F1:
Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées (1838) (ed. Joseph Liouville) (warning, PGDP membership required)
Now this is probably not a really suitable example for school use, but e.g. a book like Elementary Algebra for Schools, by H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight (1885) (warning, PGDP membership required) sounds about right.
That book has already been checked and formatted but needs to be checked again and post-processed, afterwards it's public domain for anyone (including California schools) to download. In a few years time at most.
This page (public) might be helpful if you want to help out making (old) public domain maths texts available as LaTeX e-books: PGDP LaTeX resources, especially Distributed Proofreaders LaTeX formatting manual
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