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Brown Signs California Bill For Free Textbooks

Posted by Soulskill on from the all-the-knowledge,-none-of-the-calories dept.

bcrowell writes "California Governor Jerry Brown has signed SB 1052 and 1053, authored by state senator Darrell Steinberg, to create free textbooks for 50 core lower-division college courses. SB 1052 creates a California Open Education Resources Council, made up of faculty from the UC, Cal State, and community college systems. The council is supposed to pick 50 core courses. They are then to establish a 'competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials, meeting specified requirements.' The bill doesn't become operative unless the legislature funds it — a questionable process in California's current political situation. The books could be either newly produced (which seems unlikely, given the 1-year time frame stated) or existing ones that the state would buy or have free access to. Unlike former Gov. Schwarzenegger's failed K-12 free textbook program, this one specifically defines what it means by 'open source,' rather than using the term as a feel-good phrase; books have to be under a CC-BY (or CC-BY-SA?) license, in XML format. They're supposed to be modularized and conform to state and W3C accessibility guidelines. Faculty would not be required to use the free books."

7 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. ..and... by raydobbs · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Faculty would not be required to use the free books"

    With this one phrase, the entire idea is rendered useless. Why bother with free textbooks for college level classes if no college will offer classes that use them for coursework? The state will pay for the development, sure... like California can really pay for anything else...

    1. Re:..and... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm sure lots of community colleges will love to use them, especially since the license allows them to tailor it for their own classes. That will likely translate into the textbooks used at larger schools, since faculty at a big Uni will sometimes moonlight at a community college. Also, the students can download the books for free, which makes it a lot more portable, and cheaper for the students.

      All we need now is an inexpensive printing press so they can be produced on-demand for students that want a paper version

    2. Re:..and... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Okay, so first off, you're saying the government should ban all college textbooks except the ones they write? No potential issues spring to mind?

      And second, why WOULDN'T professors want to use the free texts? Believe it or not they actually don't get kickbacks for choosing a particular book (I say this as a college instructor who chooses textbooks regularly). Do you think they're making kids pay $200 out of spite? No, they're doing it because you need a textbook if you're going to teach something like Intro Calculus, and the big textbook publishers make new editions every year with just enough changes so the answers keys only work for a particular edition, so you either make the whole class buy the newest edition or make the whole class buy an OLD edition by scraping around bookstores and AbeBooks.

    3. Re:..and... by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Informative

      With this one phrase, the entire idea is rendered useless. Why bother with free textbooks for college level classes if no college will offer classes that use them for coursework?

      I think this is a little too pessimistic. A lot of free books already exist, and a lot of faculty are already using them. See my sig for a catalog that includes several hundred examples. The books that are actively in use for instruction tend to highly "top-heavy," i.e., there's a ton of free graduate texts, not as many college ones, few high school ones, and almost no K-8 books.

      The teacher's privilege of choosing what book to use is an important part of academic freedom in higher education. The lack of choice by teachers is part of what makes K-12 textbooks suck so much. K-12 books are written by a committee and sold to a commitee, based on criteria such as whether they show pictures of disabled kids doing math.

      My own experience as the author of some free physics textbooks is that teachers' ability to choose the book they want is a huge positive factor in getting people to use my books. I currently have about 30-40 college adoptions and about 30-40 high school adoptions. (There's no way for me to know exact numbers, because the books are free.) Of those high school adoptions, nearly all are from private schools (mostly Catholic schools). The reason isn't hard to guess. K-12 textbook selection in public schools is highly political and bureaucratic. A high school physics teacher at a public school can't simply choose whatever book he wants.

      --
      Find free books.
  2. Re:Seriously? by AK+Marc · · Score: 1, Informative

    From the savings of lower education costs.

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
  3. Re:why does free have to be funded? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It takes a lot of time to write a good textbook. Why would I, as an expert who's time is in demand, do it for free?

    One would think that an expert would know the difference between who's and whose.

    Bring on the non-experts, I say.

     

  4. Re:Craigslist for textbooks? by suutar · · Score: 3, Informative

    unless the prof requires the new edition, that switches the order of chapters 9 and 10, makes minor changes in the constants in the word problems throughout the book so the answers are different, and adds 10 more bucks to the price over last year's edition.