Faculty, Admins Take Mixed View of OERs

Chief academic officers (CAOs) at U.S. colleges and universities agree that open educational resources (OERs) offer the potential to reduce the cost of course development, especially for online courses, but concede it has been left to individual faculty members to decide whether to adopt OERs for their classes.

That’s among the findings in a new report, Growing theCurriculum: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education, produced by the Babson Survey Research Group, Hewlett Foundation, and Pearson. The report is based on a series of surveys in 2009-11 with higher education faculty and academic technology administrators.

About half of the CAOs admitted none of the courses at their institutions used any OERs, at least to their knowledge. These CAOs were, overall, less aware of the range of open sources available to instructors; for instance, some defined “open source” as just the materials accessible in their school’s learning management system. Many expressed concerns about the amount of time and effort faculty had to expend in finding appropriate open resources.

Faculty respondents, on the other hand, view OERs in a much more optimistic light. Approximately 83% reported using some sort of openly available digital content for at least one of their class lectures, though most said this wasn’t a regular practice.

But professors do have their own concerns about OERs, including how faculty are compensated or acknowledged for their contributions to open-source content. Like CAOs, they are also wary of the amount of time it takes to find and vet content for courses.

Although faculty have been criticized in the past for choosing reading materials without regard for their students’ budgets or needs, in the Babson surveys faculty said their main criteria for selecting an online resource were ease of use and minimal or no cost.

Pearson, McGraw-Hill Launch Learning Initiatives

Pearson and McGraw-Hill Education recently unveiled new approaches designed to help college students learn more efficiently.

Pearson launched its Project Blue Sky search engine, which is intended to make it easier for instructors to find electronic course materials. Pearson hopes its search engine will fill a need demanded by faculty, while making sure its own content catalog is in front of educators searching for open educational resources (OER).

“We clearly believe our content is superior to OER content, but we recognize there is a place for OER in the current environment,” said Don Kilburn, vice chairman of Pearson’s higher education division, in an Inside Higher Education article. “If we can’t compete effectively there, we have a bigger problem.”

Then, McGraw-Hill Education unveiled its Digital Learning Partnership Program, which will be available for implementation by fall 2013. The program is an extension of the pilot program being used this fall at 25 colleges and universities across the country. Instructors can choose materials from McGraw-Hill’s e-textbook partners and institutions are able to select e-book vendor, price structure, and length of subscription.

“Finding new ways to make course materials more affordable to students is a core focus of this program, but the ultimate goal is helping universities and students transition to digital in ways that encourage deeper learning, better pass rates, and higher rates of retention,” said Tom Malek, vice president of learning solutions and services, in a press release. “Over the last few years, we’ve collaborated on several pilot programs that have enabled us to learn a lot about digital readiness, preferences, and needs of institutions and students.”

Flat World to Charge for Course Materials

The decision by Flat World Knowledge to stop providing free versions of its textbooks brings to mind the old adage, “Nothing in life is free.” Flat World plans to continue providing course materials at a price well below the cost of most textbooks, but the move will help make “our business healthier,” according to Flat World co-founder Jeff Shelstad in an interview with Inside Higher Education.

Flat World educational content was produced by paid authors to ensure high quality and marketed to professors to assign in their classrooms. The plan called for the company to make money by charging students for printed versions of the free and open educational content it created, and for enhanced study aids and other add-ons.

While those premium services did not sell as well as hoped, moving away from completely free content was also a matter of fairness, according to Shelstad. Some institutional partners paid licensing fees for every student using the materials and others paid less. Establishing a minimum price of $19.95 is fairer to all while still making it affordable to students, he says.

Flat World continues to be an affordable textbook solution, just not free, according to Cable Green, director of global learning at Creative Commons. It may also open the door for other free textbook providers, such as Boundless Learning, which markets its textbook alternatives directly to students.

“This reinforces the notion that sustainable business models are hard to find, and I don’t think that’s a surprise,” said Ariel Diaz, co-founder and CEO of Boundless. “We still see an opportunity to make the case that we’re better because we’re free and open, in that we can leverage the eyeballs and error-finding that we got from our community to lead to a better product as a result.”

That’s possible, but Flat World isn’t going away either. Shelstad reports that most of the company’s partners and faculty users have been supportive of the change, understanding that it allows Flat World to continue to produce course materials that have been popular with students.

University of Minnesota Creates E-Book in 10 Weeks

The University of Minnesota launched its online open-text catalog at the end of April in an effort to give students access to textbooks online for free, or printed for a small fee. Now, university faculty and staff have created a 317-page e-book in 10 weeks.

Cultivating Change in the Academy: 50+ Stories from the Digital Frontlines at the University of Minnesota in 2012 is a compilation of contributions from 57 faculty members, 51 staffers, 17 graduate students, and five undergrads, all of whom volunteered their work so there would be no cost to producing the title, according to Ann Hill Duin, professor of writing studies at the Twin Cities campus.

The book was released July 9 to the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, which serves the online open-access repository. The conservancy also provided a permanent web address for the book.

“We really want to maintain access just like we do with our print,” said Lisa Johnston, research services librarian at the Twin Cities campus and co-director of the conservancy. She contributed to a chapter on the conservancy’s role in curating digital research. “We are a service that makes information available to the public via the web.”

The book focuses on “ideas for transforming teaching methods, solutions to specific classroom problems, examples of campus leaders providing direction and support for these efforts, and ways the university is spreading innovation off campus,” according to a report in Inside Higher Education.

“The e-book is far greater than the sum of the parts,” said Duin. “It’s connecting people with the innovative, imaginative, creative, collaborative dynamic work under way.”

The book is already attracting a following. Abram Anders, assistant professor of business communications at UM-Duluth’s Labovitz School of Business and Economics, reports more than 4,000 views so far of the chapter he wrote about his work with Google Apps script.

“I can see that we’re getting some people coming to our site from the press release that the school put out, some people coming from e-mail links, some people coming from Facebook,” he said, adding that people are also finding the site through Twitter posts.

Bankrolling Free Textbooks Via Donations

Some see a simple path to affordable college textbooks: Have each professor write their own course materials and distribute them gratis to enrollees (maybe charge a tad for hard copies). A tiny, but slowly growing, number of faculty are willing to do that.

The downside for students is that raw manuscripts aren’t necessarily as readable and user-friendly as traditionally published textbooks buffed by a team of peer reviewers, editors, proofers, graphic designers, technology magicians, and the like. The price might be free, but sometimes you get what you pay for. A prof could hire services to polish a book, but would either have to eat the cost or charge students much more for the end product.

A Canadian professor tapped into crowdsourcing as a way to have his free book and edit it, too. In a post about faculty putting their own books online, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog noted how Brendan Myers, a professor of philosophy and humanities at Heritage College in Quebec, solicited pledges through Kickstarter to cover professional editing, publishing, and peer-review fees for the philosophy textbook he’s writing. He plans to make the finished book available free to anyone through a Creative Commons license.

Kickstarter provides an online fundraising platform for creative projects, such as novels and films. Myers aimed to raise $5,000, but when his pledge drive ended July 7, he had $16,872 from 707 supporters. The extra will pay for a French translation, English and French audio versions, study guides, and a professional cast to record a dramatic reading of classic philosophy works.

Who knows why 707 people chose to donate to a philosophy text? Maybe some are professors who hope to use the book for their own classes, or budget-minded students planning to take Myers’ course next year, or current students sucking up for a better grade. Certainly, it seems unlikely there are enough donors out there to support an open-access textbook for every higher-education class, but contributions might float a few titles.

Compare Myers’ success at textbook fundraising with that of marketing/branding guru Seth Godin, who’s published a passel of books the old-fashioned way and is now also using Kickstarter to fund a retail campaign for his upcoming title. As of July 12, Godin had raised $267,675 from 3,925 contributors, with four days to go before the deadline. More than 1,000 of the donors gave $100 or more.