Maryland Awards 21 Grants To Prepare 'Open Source' Textbooks (usmd.edu)

"The University System of Maryland has awarded 21 "mini grants" to university faculty to "help them expand open education resources," reports OpenSource.com. Recipients of the grants are also given time off to prepare courses that use open textbooks, and will receive personalized support and training on effective course design. An anonymous reader writes: "Although our faculty view textbooks as essential, some of our students see them as a luxury they cannot afford," said Community College of Baltimore County President Sandra Kurtinitis. "Having access to open educational resources will provide some financial relief for our students as well as contribute to their academic success." The cost of textbooks has risen 812% since 1978, the school system said in an announcement, "outpacing even the cost of medical services and new housing. Nationally, students spend an average of $1,200 a year on textbooks."

The Maryland Open Source Textbook initiative started in 2013 "to provide a state-wide opportunity for faculty to explore the promise of open education resources to reduce students' cost of attendance while maintaining, or perhaps even improving, learning outcomes." Since then it's helped replace traditional textbooks in over 60 different courses at 14 public institutions across the state, resulting in a cumulative cost savings of over $1 million for 3,500 students. "In addition to saving students money, faculty have gained the ability to adapt and customize their instructional materials to ensure they are aligned with their pedagogical methods to best meet their students' needs," the school system reports. "In follow up surveys with students participating in the MOST initiative, 93% reported that the open educational resource content they used was the same or better quality than traditional textbooks."

Comments

Somebody hasn't been paying their bribes

[rsilvergun]

in Maryland. Seriously textbook industry F-. See me after class.

Link to actual article

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the actual article in the diamondback - TFS links to a news aggregator that links to this:

http://www.dbknews.com/2017/04...

I was benefitted from a similar initiative.

[gwolf]

I published in 2015 a textbook about operating systems (http://sistop.org/). Besides working for a university full time, I got a grant from the LATIn Initiative from the European commission. They required me to join other authors (a requisite for participation was having at least threee coauthors, located in three different countries in Latin America), and paid each of us a very decent amount (€1200, particularly good given the wages in our region). There was, of course, a quality requirement - But the second requirement was for the licensing to be CC-BY.
I won on all fronts due to this.

Cheap 1st/2nd year textbooks, expensive years 3+

[StandardCell]

I think this is generally a fantastic idea. Nothing has really changed in subjects such as calculus, linear algebra, chemistry and biology in decades if not centuries for some subjects. Heck, I used my dad's control systems textbook from the 60s to learn. My fear is that publishers will start charging people on the back end of this for more specialized textbooks that are more typical in third and fourth year courses or specialized graduate courses. So, free textbooks for the two-year community college crowd, but $500 textbooks for process control of chemical reactors and digital signal processing.

The real underlying problem here is that student loans are the only type of debt that can't be discharged under bankruptcy, and that has created a moral hazard for post-secondary institutions to accelerate their costs. Tuition has also greatly and disproportionately increased in cost because students can get mortgage-like terms for their student debt, but institutions don't have any responsibility to make sure they graduate or make money. Meanwhile, endowments, perks and expensive buildings keep going up on campuses with little marginal benefit to students. The cherry on top is the IMO bizarre cultural support in this country for post-secondary institutions from alumni and through college sports.

If you really want to solve the textbook crisis, solve the debt crisis in education and allow discharge of student debt in bankruptcy at the same time as you investigate the publishers for any type of RICO or antitrust activity. The system will take a few years to clean out, but the issue will eventually be solved. The best part will be that tuitions will eventually come down to sane levels again, although that will be at the expense of the administrators and faculty who are more concerned about pretty buildings and social justice than they are about academic and human progress.

Re: Buyer's collective for existing textbooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Places of higher learning (including community colleges) should just band together nationally or state level and go after all the primary subjects ...

They are doing exactly that. I give you the Open Education Consortium.

But there are lots of others. The University of Minnesota runs the Open Textbook Network.
Of course Openstax is producing lots of curriculum.

There are so many free textbook programs out there that the real challenge is paring down the list. Openstax seems to be emerging as the big, reliable repository.

My news site, for lack of a better word, about free textbooks.

Here's a table of historical college costs

[Beeftopia]

To get a real feel for the sudden growth since 2000, note that the first two data points span a couple of decades. The rest of the points are year by year:

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76

The article says an 812% increase since 1978. They could have easily cut down the start point to the year 2000 and still produced a startling, and more meaningful result.

The real solution..

[thesupraman]

While this is a good step, the REAL solution is to stop requiring a new edition of the textbook almost annually.

THIS is the huge scam that has created this trap for students. There is almost zero reason for these new additions, however courses often REQUIRE and actually check for them (and often have included coursework, its own scam..).

The problem? This means there is no market for the books second hand!
By allowing a collusion between publishers and courses to effectively kill second hand use of the books, we end up in this situation.

So, just REQUIRE textbooks to have a minimum 5 year life (could easily be 10 years in many subjects).
Refuse any textbooks that are 'licensed' (including non-transferable electronic versions).
Problem solved!

Wont ever happen, people are making too much money screwing over the students, who are too young and green to avoid it.

Re: The real solution..

[AthanasiusKircher]

If this is the reason students are spending $1200 pa, why don't community colleges design their courses around last year's textbooks (which are presumably available for much less)? Very few fields of study change significantly from year to year.

As someone who has taught at the college level, I can tell you that most professors would be thrilled to do this. Unfortunately, it only really works for a year or two. The first year after a new edition comes out, there may be sufficient stock left to source a decent amount of textbooks (though they'll still be nearly full price).

The second year, you're down to mostly used copies. But the used textbook market is unreliable. You can probably get away with using the old edition for that second year, because used textbook stocks may be reliable enough. But after that, it gets harder -- the bookstore may not be able to reliably source a lot of copies. If you go on Amazon or whatever, you'll end up buying from 3rd-party sellers who often don't pay detailed attention to textbooks... resulting in inaccuracies for listings. You'll get the student who comes in and says, "I know the current edition is 7th, and you want to use 6th -- I ordered a 6th from a used seller, but they sent me the 5th edition! Can I use it?"

A large number of students don't sell textbooks back, particularly if they already bought them used and it's an old edition that they won't make much money off of. So the used market dries up after a couple years.

And most textbooks (except in very active fields) aren't actually releasing new editions EVERY year. Instead, it's often every 3 or 4 or 5 years, which is long enough to "dry up" any used market and force everyone to upgrade.

Believe me -- I know there are always plenty of stories of professors who teach from their own books and want to make loads of money. But the majority of professors don't write textbooks, and they're often happy to stay on a consistent edition (and save students money). Who wants to update course materials to take into account all the exercise numbers changing from edition to edition, the minor rearrangements of text, etc., etc.?

Payola in universities

[CrankyOldEngineer]

The problem is not availability of economical textbooks. It's publishers paying off administrators. Our local community college uses nearly 100% Pearson textbooks. Many of them are custom printed in binders specifically for that school and are required. Supposedly they are custom designed for the requirements of that school. But there is nothing unique about them and in fact they are practically identical to other community college textbooks except for numbering and questions/problems. They cost around $200, and they change every year so students can't buy&sell or borrow. I would love to meet the the asshat responsible.

Re:You need a bit of critical thinking here

[swb]

I think you're pretty much dead on. I'd only differ in that I think student loan debt should be dischargeable, but inversely proportional to the time since the education was obtained. All assets depreciate in value and an education isn't really all that different, and inverse proportion depreciation prevents short-term discharge after graduation without the punishment that would be inflicted on someone whose finances otherwise allow them to declare bankruptcy. I think part of the escalating college cost/loan cycle needs some negative feedback loop -- lending should have risk, without it they lend irresponsibly and all it ends up being is inflationary.

But you're absolutely right about the "everyone doesn't need a degree" stuff. Most people go to college because they don't know better and are only in it for the signaling value that a degree supposedly has to employers.

College loans are basically a subsidy to corporations who would otherwise have to provide training and education to their employees and even if it provides some vocational value, it's a horribly inefficient -- the overlap between what's learned in school and what has vocational value to employers is really small.

Smoke and Mirrors

[chill]

Open source textbooks, reference material, and study guides are plentiful. Used textbooks are cheap. Amazon has a great service providing them.

Colleges and Universities frequently require the use of online, "digital learning systems", like Cengage. Access to that site, where the homework is, requires a subscription code that can be hundreds of dollars. A textbook without the "online access code" is a doorstop.

If schools are serious about this, they need to start pushing the use of Moodle instead of Blackboard, and providing high quality open source content including lesson plans, homework, and textbooks.