Washington State Guarantees Cheap And Open Courses & Courseware For Students
from the market-forces-or-government-interference dept
We've discussed a bunch of times how the lack of market forces in the textbook market has allowed publishers to jack up the prices massively. It's why various textbooks can cost around $200, and students can spend over $1000 a year just to get the textbooks they're required to buy for school. Aaron DeOliveira points us to an interesting story involving Washington State trying to end such practices by setting up an Open Course Library that will make course details and courseware much, much cheaper for students:The goal of the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges project is to boost college completion rates by making higher education more affordable. The online library will house a collection of textbooks, readings, activities, and other educational materials for 81 of the state’s most popular general education and pre-college courses. The texts are available under an open license to other higher education institutions, as well as anyone else who wants to access them.That's quite a program, and should make for quite a difference in terms of costs for students. In his submission, Aaron wonders if this is market forces or market interference. It's an interesting question, and it makes me wonder if there might be a better solution. First, though, it's necessary to recognize that the textbook & courseware market is not an open and competitive market, because the buyers -- students -- aren't given any choice at all. They have to buy what their professors tell them to buy, for the most part. So, the state getting involved to force down prices is definitely a reasonable response to that problem.
The effort has the potential to save students millions of dollars. The average community college student in Washington spends about $1,200 per year on textbooks—about a quarter of the total cost of attending school full-time. Some classes will still require students to purchase a textbook, but for Open Course Library classes, the cost can’t exceed $30 per student. All other materials will be free.
But I do wonder if that solution creates other problems. Suddenly the courses and books chosen for that online library are the only ones likely to be used, which could leave out other courses and sources that may be even better. That leaves some concerns about who chooses what books go into the open library. The library does seem willing to let in other courseware, so long as it's posted online with a Creative Commons license -- so perhaps this concern is solved by that. The fact that this might encourage more courseware and text creators to move to Creative Commons or similar licenses may be a useful side benefit.
Either way, in the end, education is an area where smart government involvement makes sense (though, the "smart" part often isn't evident in education efforts we see). And, on its face, this seems like a good way to drive down costs and share more education information. And I'd guess that the more disruptive education tools providers -- like Flat World Knowledge and Khan Academy -- might appreciate and work with Washington State on this effort, benefiting everyone, and making sure that there really are a wide variety of courseware options that are either free or very cheaply priced.
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Filed Under: courseware, creative commons, education, open, washington state
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But your point about control over curriculum/content is a good one.
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Someone should buy som legislation about that.
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This is something long over due. Can't wait to see what this looks like across the country after it gets a full head of steam.
Thank you for the coverage on this.
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Pressure?
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Blame Student Loans
Government backed school loans from which one can never declare bankruptcy have escalated costs for all aspects of a college education. It's not just that students are forced to use the books professors tell them to, the universities and publishers all know that it will get paid for (mostly) through student loans. The market is so distorted the demand curve is starting to resemble a Picasso painting.
The government needs to get out of the student loan business so that tuition and book prices can reach some sort of real market equilibrium. That would of course mean there are fewer people in college but that's not such a bad thing either.
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Re: Blame Student Loans
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Student Books
Why will they not do this? They are in cahoots with the publishers via the sales at college book stores which have a 35% locked in markup. Some colleges insist that each student show a receipt for the purchase of the mandated course book as a condition to attend classes and even graduate. How can 4 students shares a $250 book with that situation. Students can not even use the library copy - they must buy one. In addition, profs often sell books they print locally to the students at high margins on trapped fish.
Open it all up
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Gritty Books For Gritty Schools.
http://www.imsglobal.org/cc/
Of course, particularly in the state colleges, teaching loads have got quite high. A recent contract in Ohio (Cincinnati State College) gives the unionized faculty a teaching load of eighteen hours (five or six courses) or more, and the situation must be even worse for the adjuncts.
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2011/11/04/labor-accord-reached-cincinnati-sta te
At this point, they are practically at the same level as high-school teachers, only with appreciably bigger classes. It might work out to teaching six hundred students Algebra, with no administrative back-up, no teaching assistants, or anything like that. Under that kind of regime, it is important to be able to automatically pick up a file containing all the homework for the day, and send it off to India to be graded.
The general environment seems to be rather grittier than that which produced a lot of the existing free textbooks. The other side of the coin is that if you start studying for college admission at the age of twelve instead of fourteen, using freely available Khan Academy modules, and collect a bunch of AP or CLEP certificates, you will secure exemption from nearly all of the courses in the Open Course Library program.
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It's a set of open standards, freely available and without royalty, developed by a global industry consortium with over 80 voting members. These standards, if followed by content developers and learning platforms, enable strict interoperability between content and systems. They also support great flexibility in the type of digital content supported (content can actually be applications) and where such content is located (content and applications in a Common Cartridge can be distributed). (See a diagram of Common Cartridge )
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To: Bill Jackson, Nov 5th, 2011 @ 12:02pm, Re: Common Cartridges.
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Re: To: Bill Jackson, Nov 5th, 2011 @ 12:02pm, Re: Common Cartridges.
The method is not as good in drama, or music, or the many softer subjects.
We are far beyond the original teaching applications that emerged in the middle 80's which were not re-entrant and were hobbled both by processor power and lack of proper programming.
Back in the middle80's (I retired in 1998) the teaching union, of which I was a member, was very much against any degree of computers used to seemingly replace teachers in classes. Teachers were mixed on this, some thought it had potential. The union brass saw job losses and lower wages and have opposed on this basis alone ever since, as far as I can see.
We are now at the point where computers can help enormously and try to bring all the students forward as well as their ability - which varies widely, some can open a book and progress in grade 10 as well as a College student - others not.
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Re: Re: To: Bill Jackson, Nov 5th, 2011 @ 12:02pm, Re: Common Cartridges.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090210/0617533719.shtml#c997
Similarly, one major weakness of the "pen pal" system of language learning was simply the delays involved in exchange of postal letters, and the inherent lack of spontaneity in formal writing. These can obviously be rectified by electronic means. There can be webcam-pals or whatever. Of course, it would have to be organized on a school-to-school basis to be practical. Again, there might be problems in the case of the Spanish language, because Americans who want to learn Spanish tend to want to do so for all the wrong reasons, in a colonial mentality. They do not envision visiting Spain, so much as employing Mexicans.
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Re: Re: Re: To: Bill Jackson, Nov 5th, 2011 @ 12:02pm, Re: Common Cartridges.
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Why are text books so costly.
There is no incentive for this to change, except for the open text idea, which is being fought hammer and tongs by the publishers, the SChools(most of them) and the profs(who like the gravy)
So change must be imposed
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it is only partly lack of market forces
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm
better than I ever could. Thor v. IRS is responsible for dramatically reducing print runs (thereby losing economies of scale) and dramatically shrinking editorial cycles (thereby increasing costs in a major way). Both of these, in turn, almost killed the used book market, which is a ghost of its former self.
I lived through that change. My intro physics book, Halliday and Resnick, cost $22 in 1977. It was the second edition. The first had been published in 1963. Today, physics texts are on a three year revision cycle, and fast changing fields like astronomy are revised every two years. Mostly, these revisions involve changing problem numbers and other trivia.
Mass market books changed in a similar way at the same time for the same reasons. Back lists essentially disappeared. Prices jumped from an average 75 cents for a mass market paperback to around $3. You can't plausibly attribute that to market forces since it preceded the mergers and acquisitions of the 90's.
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Re: it is only partly lack of market forces--Technological Factors.
The "big money" courses tend to contain students whom the professors feel a difficulty in identifying with. For example, in mathematics, the single biggest course, by a wide margin, is College Algebra, which is just another name for High-School Trigonometry or Pre-Calculus. If you did AP Calculus, you were running two years ahead of the kind of people who take College Algebra, and tended not to feel very much common ground with them. Of course, under modern conditions, with computers and the internet, people who are really good at math, say at the 95th percentile or so, can be expected to polish off ordinary differential equations and vector calculus before they get to college. The tendency of progress is to reach a state where any math course taught to someone who is not a math major is, by definition, remedial. It takes a certain mental leap to start worrying about whether "those people" are paying too much for their textbooks.
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MIT OpenCourseWare
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