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Saylor Foundation Awards Prizes To Free College Textbooks
Brad Lucier writes "The Saylor Foundation has a vision: Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education. To that end, they've announced the first winners in their Open Textbook Challenge: Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book. See the blog entries and the accompanying press releases for details. The second wave of submissions will be accepted until May 31, 2012."
Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education.
I love that vision, but I don't think Houghton Mifflin and all those universities that make money off their bookstores are going down without a fight.
BTW, on a related note, has anyone else noticed that a lot of universities now are requiring students to not only buy books, but also access codes to course websites? My niece is taking undergrad classes and had to spend about $200 extra on these course codes during her first semester to access MANDATORY class websites (one of them was "MyMathPlus," I remember). Seems like a pretty sleazy way to make even more money for someone.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Look this is an admirable goal, an effort to bring down the cost of undergraduate education (and make materials more readily available to the public). But this trend of offering small prizes in exchange for creative/academic work is a race to the bottom. How long until the private sector tries this with more and more jobs? Its taking the 99designs approach to academia.
Do you have to be a graduate of the Khan Academy before taking college level course at Saylor.org, or can you skip ahead if you have a note from Sal Kahn?
Free textbooks?! This is madness; pure socialist madness. What's next? Free college tuition?
While looking at the copyright page for the real analysis book that "won" I found this ...
"Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license made
possible by funding from The Saylor Foundation’s Open Textbook Challenge..."
I'm not saying there's foul play afoot, but it seems odd.
Cool none the less. I wonder if the books are any good.
The free market argument for making school books as cheap as B&N books would go something like so:
Remove the ability for public schools to form long binding, exclusive contracts with book publishers. They'll have to compete on each book, each year.
This would also open up, more easily, the option of online books. If someone wants to create a business that operates along the lines of Khan Academy, they should have as much incentive to do so as H-F, etc.
On the one hand I really like the idea of keeping incidental costs of education down by doing things like making textbooks available for free. On the other hand I'm mature enough to realize that nobody is going to create a (quality) textbook for free*.
So my concern for the long-term sustainability of this model is this:
1) One-time grant money is made available to create a free textbook
2) The free textbook reduces the profitability of the proprietary books, which then leave the market
3) Since the money in step #1 is one-time, and since grantors looooooooooove to fund New Awesome Advances but hate to fund Ongoing Operating Expenses, Maintenance and Upkeep the free textbook languishes
3.1) Making non-trivial changes to the textbook is a huge undertaking, so the already-overworked teachers using the book won't be making wholesale revisions to it regularly
3.1.1) Maybe I"m wrong on 3.1, and I've love to see links to projects that contradict 3.1
4) The textbook market is now gone but the free textbooks aren't being maintained either.
I'd love to hear discussion on this, but I'd particularly like to see established, free textbooks that are genuinely self-supporting.
* Yes, yes please do feel free to reply to this post with whatever online, free books you know about. I look forwards to seeing your list
BTW, on a related note, has anyone else noticed that a lot of universities now are requiring students to not only buy books, but also access codes to course websites?
Yes - it has been noted and commented on by faculty who are the ones making the decisions on textbooks. On the plus side these resources have a lot of work put into them by the publishers but, because of the extra, mandatory fee, I have always avoided them and use my own online questions for assignments. The downside with this approach is that, at least for the first time, it is a LOT more work for the prof and the feedback to wrong answers is not as good because the publishers have huge student statistics to draw on. On the plus side it is free to students, the questions are more current, closely related to the course material (and more challenging) than the publisher ones and there are no stupid medieval unit questions which publishers insist on including because of the US market.
It's not a race to the bottom when all of the open source cars aren't allowed on the racetrack. In the current system, the car manufacturers, the racetrack owner, and the racing sponsors are all in collusion with each other to keep the system just like it is. The open source racers aren't even in the game yet, though they're starting to build the own cars to race on their own tracks.
When you can get actual course credits from an accredited university using open source materials, then the race will really begin, but even then, this is not competition for the textbook churning mills.
Are there any economics texts available from the Foundation? http://www.freakalytics.com/2011/07/13/mstr-microstrategy-stock-price-relative-to-ipo-and-historic-low-point/
Their they're doing there hair.
Somebody in a third-world country.
Seriously. I am an academician in UNAM (Mexico; largest Spanish-speaking university in the world). A beginning academician as myself earns about US$1500 a month, and the best payed academicians in UNAM will get... Up to 10 times as much. I published a book this year (granted, a book of research results on Free Software and similar communities, not a textbook), and it took me approx. ¼ of my time for 18 months. The university does not pay me royalties on sold copies (and that's part of the reason I negotiated for it to be a free CC-BY-SA book).
If the prize is not too distant from a year worth of qualified job income... Hell, it's a very interesting job to take!
Free textbooks are obviously a great idea so why hasn't it been done already? I know some have said the publishers, but we have open source software with M$ around so it can be done.
The best solution would be community edited books and curriculum, similar to how wikipedia works.
All teachers and professors could contribute and the material would be accessible to everyone over the internet. The content would be always up to date and unbiased with an editor structure similar to wikipedia's.
The material would also be of the highest quality, because most of the contributions will come from teachers who actually care about teaching.
I love this idea ... but the implementation is awful. In the chemistry book there are dead links, bad formatting, numerous typos. I know it's a work in progress, but there needs to be a great deal of progress before any school will conceive of using these.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
parts of technology need a apprenticeship system as well. CS is poor vs tech schools and learning on the job for a lot tech jobs.
And that can free up room in college for the higher levels of CS and let others get real skills that they need to do a tech job.
Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of software that make it suitable for open sourcing. There's software like OpenOffice/LibreOffice and most of the open source games that are little more than direct reimplementation of existing, mature software models. "Reimplementing" a textbook in the same way would probably be hit as plagiarism. Most modern software makes at least some use of reusable components (libraries and OS functions). This is only possible thanks to encapsulation and low coupling. A process takes a couple of inputs, and gives an output -- it shouldn't care what the rest of the software package does with it. However, a good textbook will exhibit extremely high coupling. Domain knowledge is inter-related, so no chapter in a textbook truly stands alone. To use a trivial example, we can't teach printf in C effectively without knowing whether the student already knows what \n means or not. Those reusable components take little reworking. Maybe you'll need to alter the bubblesort comparison step if you're using a custom datatype, but that's a simple change that doesn't break anything, but there's no analogous "minor change" in text -- change one thing, and the sentence needs rewritten: reusable text components effectively take more time than just writing new text.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'