Slashdot Mirror
Univ. of Minnesota Compiles Database of Peer-Reviewed, Open-Access Textbooks
First time accepted submitter BigVig209 writes "Univ. of MN is cataloging open-access textbooks and enticing faculty to review the texts by offering $500 per review. From the article: 'The project is meant to address two faculty critiques of open-source texts: they are hard to locate and they are of indeterminate quality. By building up a peer-reviewed collection of textbooks, available to instructors anywhere, Minnesota officials hope to provide some of the same quality control that historically has come from publishers of traditional textbooks.'"
This book sucked. Where's my $500?
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
There is only one sacred thing to the US government, corporate profits. You can accurately determine their reaction to any proposal based on whether it benefits corporations or not. The point is if it's seen to harm corporate profits then expect government funding to get cut. Open sourced doesn't make the rich richer so expect the government to be against it. Government of the people and by the people died 200 years ago. Now we have government of the corporations and by the corporations. Oil companies are consulted on the clean air act so what is they likelihood of the government supporting open sourced text books? Don't hold your breath.
Its is nearly impossible to have a book in that field published and selling under $40. Specialty and Sub-specialty books usually sell for several hundred dollars and some above $500 each. e.g. http://goo.gl/DKGXa or http://goo.gl/BOI4D
It would be good to have a set of peer reviewed books that covers education all the way up to 16 years old. Maths, languages, etc. This way no child will have to pay for books ever again. Children can get a Nook loaded with every book they will ever need the day they start school, so advanced students are able read ahead. A developing country could then simply localise a selection to create its own curriculum. Those deciding which modules to do can read the books they will be studying for that subject before choosing. Children moving country can download the new set in advance and familiarise themselves so they don't start their new school at a disadvantage.
So many countries are bitching about ThePirateBay which is an international repository of arts and culture, but can't be bothered to create an international repository of where people can learn basic reading, writing and math skills.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
There was a story about this posted here in April:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/04/24/0240223/university-of-minnesota-launches-review-project-for-open-textbooks
Find free books.
They need to think outside the box. Professors may only a assign a chapter or two of a textbook as it is (one of the bones I had to pick about buying some in business school). Wikipedia is being built paragraph by paragraph with a kind of "open source" peer review. Khan Academy, RepairFAQ.org, and IFIXIT.org are other instructional models. I was relieved when Raytheon (military sales) exited the USA school textbook market (sold out DC Heath in 1995) and am not sure I want their textbooks back, by the way.
Gently reply
I hope the open access books don't have the same quality control as from traditional publishers. My daughter's in high school and has some pretty atrocious text books. In her AP history class, the teacher dislikes the book so much (for organizational and content reasons) that she has supplied alternative materials as much as possible, mostly at her own expense. She still has to "teach the book" to meet state requirements, but that doesn't mean the text is beyond reproach (and perhaps just the opposite, given the politicized lobby-driven nature of text book selection these days; I live in Texas so it's a bit of a sore point with me).
I think the Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach holds tremendous promise, especially if there is an active feedback mechanism where kids and parents can be involved as well as educators. The power of many, many people each providing a little bit of the work is staggering and inspiring. As long as the publishing lobby doesn't buy any protective legislation, this is an experiment I'm looking forward to.
Acceptance of textbooks - verification of quality and being usable in courses - is a big hurdle. It's the equalivent to the problems open access journals are currently striving to overcome - building a reputation takes time, and without it viability in education/academia is a difficult proposition. Hopefully this is a useful way to start building momentum - I think it would be an excellent way to get more educational value for the dollar.
If the idea can gain broader acceptance, there are a number of interesting ideas for open source textbooks that can be tried. I like the idea of developing a K-12 and college educational plans in an "open source" fashion, identifying the resources needed, and mapping out the missing pieces as a guide for where to concentrate efforts to create open source teaching materials. I suppose there is only so much you can do to "solve" the problem of what constitutes good teaching materials, since that will vary with learning style, cultural and linguistic background, etc. but it would be nice to have a systematic framework and forum within which to try, evaluate, and evolve ideas. It will be interesting to see whether, as open source devs age and start having families, interest in open source educational materials also grows - that's when the question becomes directly relevant and worthy of resource commitment for a lot of people.
Ideally, open source materials could be managed for "dependency satisfaction" - i.e. mastery of the material in grade 6 materials associated with a project provides the necessary and sufficient foundation to learn grade 7 materials, and so on. That was sometimes a frustration for me growing up - structured resources with fine-grained pointers like "understanding of this concept requires understanding of X, Y and Z" from previous years would have been nice. Sort of "knowledge building a.l.a math proof."
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
bank fee -10
tax at 6% -30
processing fee -10
admin fee -100
pay us to work fee -200
30% cut fee -150
AUX fee -20
500 - 500 = 0 have a nice day
I got into academia after tinkering with open source applications as a teenagers since the early 90s. Whenever I publish content, it has always been an obvious thing for me to also publish the source code for it. I have many colleagues that publish lecture notes online in PDF and PS form for their students to download. For some reason publishing the underlying LaTeX code never crosses their mind and when asked to do it they usually refuse.
To me the lack of source code level access to written works is the biggest individual thing preventing us from innovating when it comes to teaching. For example, I've always had trouble to learn exact definitions, so my solution has been to plug them into a flashcard program like Anki, Mnemosyne etc. Having the source code, it would be extremely easy to parse it for \begin \end tags for the definition environment and so turn this into an automated process. Typing stuff into these programs actually take lots of time.
I'm sure that other people would find similar transformations of the textbook to be useful for their individual methods of learning. Since, I never see the LaTeX code published online ever for any lecture notes on course websites, I wonder why fellow people in academia does not value this?
My first thought was this is a great resource for me as a reader. I went out, scanned the list, and downloaded a couple of books right away because I'm very excited about free textbooks on topics I wanted to learn more about. I've bookmarked the site and will be going back regularly to see what else gets added.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
From what I've seen that $500 will go to the profs, who will give a TA a $100 stipend to submit between 1 and 5 corrections and a review of the quality of the material. The TA will look for misuse of "its" and "it's", and submit one correction per week for a semester, in hopes of getting a bit more than $100, then find a generic review of the text that someone else has done (in another school possibly, or at least from another prof) and wordsmith the review to submit their own review.
Profs really don't have the time needed to review the books. Unless they are getting publish credit for the review, their time is almost completely committed to the publish or perish grind.
At the very least though, compiling a collection of text books that state school boards can look to and see what offerings are available, and compare them with the texts that they can allocate funds from their budgets for (meaning that their budgets do get to keep growing, when the idea of the Open Textbook is to save the community money) them to justify their position. And it's not like the publishers of the Open Textbooks are going to bey plying those board members to get them to commit to using the Open Textbooks as the commercial textbook publishers will.
You never know...