It begun when I read RIP-OFF 101, a report detailing how the textbook industry is inflating the costs of college textbooks by a variety of means, most of them devious. It goes beyond the "new edition" that differs only in pagination. It's a national scandal. I don't want to be associated with it. I find it embarrassing. I want it to go away. Let me add my voice to those of students demanding that the the $70 composition textbook remain on the shelf. We don't need them that badly and never did. Thankfully, there is something we can do about it. Find out how.
At the time I read this report, I had been working with wikis for some time, mostly in terms of research and experimenting with them to help students build writing portfolios. I had also been using a webtext, Joe Moxley's College Writing Online in my first-year comp courses. I noticed early on that most of my students really liked the online text and remarked on their evals that they wished more teachers would switch to webtexts. Of course, those of us who know anything about the DMCA and copyright law know that the only reason these webtexts are cheap is that the publishers are testing the waters. In the end, they'll be just as expensive if not more so than the print versions were--and there will be many more restrictions, imposed through code, that ought to raise everyone's red flag. The right to read must not become a privilege. It won't in my lifetime.
At the time, CWO was $25, which I felt was a reasonable price to pay for the promised support the publisher was offering for the webtext (monitored forums, suggested links, updates, etc.) Unfortunately, that part fell through, since the publisher ended up removing almost all of the really exciting things Moxley had intended for his book--including critical new media like video blogs and wiki components. So, what I ended up seeing was that the publisher was really offering nothing more than static pages...And CWO wasn't achieving the kind of critical success it deserves. It was about this time I blogged my thoughts on the rhetorical advantages of giving. If students got excited about a $25 wikitext, what about a free one? Bear in mind the ulterior motive: To change the field to fit my ideals. It's that level of intervention that motivates me.
Perhaps the key was to somehow circumvent the stumbling block--the publisher--and go directly to the people. Sounded great. But, the publisher still had one resource we couldn't live without--professional editors, sales force, market clout. Creating a full fledged textbook just isn't something one or even a small group of people can achieve--not if they want to be compete with the big boys. And it's certainly not fair to set up an us/them opposition here. The publishers and the guys working for them aren't the bad guys. It's the way the game is played that's the problem: Let's change the rules.
Earlier this month I blogged about my free wiki textbook project. The idea was to have my students in an upper level course called Computers & English use a wiki to create a free textbook suitable for use in a first-year composition course. I'm happy to say that so far, the project has been moving forward at a successful pace, with students contributing as he or she saw fit. The good thing about wikimedia (the wiki server running wikibooks) is that I can use the "history" feature to clearly see each student's contributions. For instance, on this page I can see at least three of my students hard at work.
But what are the underlying goals of this project? I consider this to be more of a "service learning" project than a tech skills development project. If successful, this wikitext will save kids a lot of money on textbooks. My vision is that students will either use the text as-is on the web, or find a way to have it printed-on-demand by a reasonable publisher, or simply print out the pages they need.
Sometimes I feel like I have a perfectly good rational for bluffing my way through the round, but then I look down and see I've been dealt a great hand. The insight came from one of my students, who pointed out that I was really missing the point about what my wikitext had to offer that no print text could possibly offer: It is being written by students--the same students who successfully made their way through a writing program and know what processes really work for them. She advised me to ditch my original plan to synthesize the best print textbooks and just to push the wikians to rely only on their own experience as college writers. Don't just spit back aphorisms and rules; describe and compare your actual writing strategies. Don't tell us what you learned in school: Tell us what you did in school.
So where are we? Definitely still in the beginning stages. I'm sure I'll be spending some time re-formatting and editing to make the thing look presentable, and maintaining consistency will be a significant challenge. But, I'm not in this alone. Several of my fellow wiki-enthusiasts have been keeping tabs on the project, and I'm sure that more will join once we reach that "critical mass" and success becomes a visible possibility.
Got a few minutes? Become an author at the free rhetoric and composition wikitext.
a collaboration between students and teachers
Composition textbook writers often draw upon student texts in creating textbooks. So I agree. But I think it's better to position it as a collaboration between students and teachers. It's the synthesis of the knowledge of both groups that will produce the ultimate textbook for composition.
Now one suggestion about all this. I'm not sure how you would incorporate this in a wiki, but somewhere revision/process documentation would be useful to those that come later. Say someone is interested in working on a section of the text that has already been created. They would need access to more than just the text itself, but also any discussions of ideas or authorial intentions that went into creation of the text. This is one of the important aspects of a project management system, that it not only enables production of the thing, but can be an archive of the decision making and thought processes that went into it's production.
Discussion Pages
Well, wikimedia does offer "discussion pages" for each wiki page. Authors typically use these bulletin board style, making suggestions and observations about the progress of a page. it's probably more suited to wikipedia, since the individual pages are more autonomous. It gets a little trickier with a booklength project since it's hard to keep up with all of the discussions.
Commontext
Maybe Dave Munger still has some of the work from the now-defunct Commontext that he could contribute.
CultureCat
economic case for creative commons textbooks
In my article - The Economic Case for Creative Commons Textbooks - I argue that Colleges and universities may be able to significantly reduce textbook costs by creating a coalition for the acquisition and distribution of electronic textbooks.
I propose that an "OpenTextbook" consortium be created, which would consist of 1,000 residential colleges and universities, and would accomplish its mission by forming long-term, strategic partnerships with one or more open universities, such as the British Open University (UKOU). In addition to saving money, OpenTextbook's objective would also be to give faculty the freedom to customize creative commons content, and use it as a substitute for mass-produced commercial textbooks, which would save students' money.
See the Case for Creative Commons Textbooks (Sept 2005):
http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Fall2005/opentextbook.html
Recently, I've been considering the following extensions to the economic case for creative commons textbooks article. They are:
1) consideration of a course material customization fee that schools could establish to provide faculty incentives for using/customizing OpenTextbook content and
2) a discussion of why the UKOU would be interested in partnering with OpenTextbook.
For its part, the UKOU may see a partnership with OpenTextbook to be in its long term interest. For starters, the coalition would be covering a large percentage of the UKOU's current operating costs (around forty percent). Of course, some in the UKOU may believe that they would be giving up a strategic asset by placing their content in the creative commons. However, if the UKOU chooses not to partner with the coalition, the coalition may find another partner with similar capabilities. In which case, the UKOU may not only lose the competitive advantage it has now with its proprietary content, but it would also miss out on the revenue stream offered by the coalition. On a more positive note, the goal of providing low cost (virtually free), high quality learning resources to the world would seem to align well with the overall mission of an open university.
In addition to saving money, OpenTextbook's objective would also be to give faculty the freedom to customize creative commons content, and use it as a substitute for mass-produced commercial textbooks. It is also possible for campuses to encourage instructors to use open textbook content by providing faculty stipends as well as paid student and staff support to help customize course content. Some schools might support these costs by establishing a course material customization fee that could be far less than the current cost of commercial textbooks.
To the extent faculty choose to substitute OpenTextbook content, the cost savings for students could be substantial. Even when allowing for the extra expense of customized content, course materials could be substantially less expensive than the traditional textbook model.
Unlike MIT's Open Courseware initiative, this approach focuses on content for the big introductory courses that account for a large percentage of student eyeballs and a substantial portion of the textbook market. To put this in perspective, at Berkeley approximately 120 courses represent nearly half of the undergraduate enrollment. We teach over 3,500 courses. So, to use the lingo of Wired's Long Tail article, I'm only focusing on the "big hit" courses, not the courses in the "long tail" of higher education.
According to our discussions with faculty, we find that a fair number of those who teach large introductory courses would be willing and able to substitute open content for the commercial textbooks currently in use, especially if the university could support their need to customize the content.
However, some argue that faculty might be resistant to losing the potential revenue from authoring textbooks. But, my initial findings are that only a very small percentage of faculty actually write textbooks. I also find that of this number only a small percentage report that they make a significant amount of money from their textbooks. On the other hand, I find that faculty who select textbooks for large survey courses are interested in the money that would be generated from a course material customization fee.
For discussion purposes, here is an outline of how a residential university could establish a course material fee to pay for commercial textbooks and/or to pay to customize the OpenTextbook content.
1. Identify 100 target courses (e.g. 100 large courses that use textbooks and that map out well to the course material provided by the OpenTextbook consortium).
2. Do a study to determine how much undergraduates currently spend per year on average for these courses. Let's say students spend $500/year on average for these courses.
4. The institution establishes a course material fee for these courses, which is some percentage of the current textbook cost (e.g. a 100% fee would be $500/year for first-time, full-year students). Obviously, a lower percentage fee would save students money; a higher percentage would give the university more money to work with. Schools with diffent financial models and objectives could set their fees accordingly. For example, Ivy League schools may want to add value for their students, and for their students a 100% fee would be a small part of the overall cost of their education. On the other hand, community colleges or schools in developing countries may want to have a 0% fee to hold down costs for their students. Of course, with a 0% fee, faculty and students would have to use OpenTextbook content because there would be no fee revenues for purchasing commercial textbooks.
5. Students would not be required to purchase textbooks for the 100 courses covered by the fee.
6. Faculty are free to assign commercial textbooks for these courses, but if they do the cost will be covered with revenue from the course material fee.
7. If faculty use OpenTextbook content, then the money that would otherwise be spent on textbooks could go towards customizing the OpenTextbook content (e.g. it could go for faculty stipends, student support, and paid staff support, etc.).
8. Some schools may also want to establish a policy where the materials developed with the fee would also go into the creative commons. If schools do this, then the content developers back at the Open University would be able to select from the locally developed materials to upgrade the course materials they create/manage on an on going basis.
OpenTextbook has yet to take hold as a formal consortium. Rather, we are in an exploratory phase, introducing the concept to stimulate discussion of a number of different but interrelated cost savings issues, each representing a different lever that policy makers could move separately or together. Some schools, for example, may want to treat the open textbook content simply as a library resource. Others may want to provide faculty with financial incentives and resources to customize the coalition's content. Also, any specific policy proposal would need to address licensing issues governing how said customized content would be owned. And, finally, different means of distribution (electronic vs. print) would entail different costs that would have to be addressed. The main point, however, is that a creative commons textbook initiative may not only save students money, it could also give faculty more freedom to customize the content of their courses.
I know that the wikipedia people are trying to extend their model to the domain of textbooks, and I heard a lot about the wikibooks initiative at the Open Education conference (http://cosl.usu.edu/conference) where I presented my paper on the economic case for creative commons textbooks.
It may be that someday the wiki content development model (i.e. one which relies on the pro bono work of individuals) will produce something that could be used as an effective substitute for today's commercial textbooks (and tomorrow's electronic versions of commercial textbooks). We know the wiki approach works well for encyclopedia entries, but it's not clear that it will work content the grain size of a textbook.
In my opinion, there are certain kinds of work that need a deliberate plan. So, I doubt that the wiki approach will ever create a novel like War and Peace.
However, I do think the wiki approach could be used to customize a textbook created either by an individual author or a team of content developers who have a financial incentive to work together (i.e. the UK Open University approach).
My OpenTextbook model assumes that traditional residential universities could be persuaded to pay membership dues (on the order of $75K/year) to pay to have content developed in an institutional context (i.e. the British Open University).
To borrow a phrase from George Lucas, I want to turn the UKOU towards the "creative commons" side of the force. :-)
In any event, I don't think these two approaches are in conflict. In fact, they may complement each other nicely. For example, the content distributed by an OpenTextbook initiative could certainly be contributed to a wikitextbook system for further revision and customization.
Open Text Books and Wikibooks
I wish you luck in getting the OU to do this. I am not at all confident that it will happen though. There have been several proposals to create open text books and as far as I can tell all have faded away. Wikibooks at least is producing something. I won't claim that anything on Wikibooks counts as a textbook yet but with the help of some of the academics who might use such books perhaps we might manage it. At the moment there are a number of books that look promising but most are written by people who have little or no experience in writing books of any kind.
One reason why I am sceptical of attempts to create open text books inside the educational system is that the opportunity to do so has existed as long as schools and univeristies have existed, namely for a state department of education to commission a book an acquire the copyright. The books could then be printed at cost and updates added as needed without creating a whole new work that would have to be paid for all over again. No one seems to do this yet it seems an obvious thing to do. Printing a book costs only a few Euros. With children in senior high school I have a vested interest in this, having spent about 500 Euros on this year's books.
In conclusion: please contribute to Wikibooks even if you think that the OU way is the best because it could be years before they even get started. If you know of an author who has written an approved textbook, perhaps they could be encouraged to relicense it under a free license or perhaps even add it to Wikibooks.