At some point in these conversations, the question of the role of traditional publishers arises. For the most part, publishers have not been a part of these discussions, whether by choice or a natural repulsion I’m not sure. Certainly, a concern with the tenets of open-licensed materials has been collectively expressed by their lobbyists, and one can easily understand their apprehension. At the same time though, I hear that a few publishers are also sniffing around the edges with possible interest.

Regardless, their voices are important ones to include in the discussions of the next evolution of instructional materials.

Publishers are important stakeholders and have a wealth of valuable expertises and experiences that can and should be brought to bear on the challenges we all face addressing the achievement and engagement gaps in schools.

Further, OER is not all about “free” in the no cost sense. To be successful and sustainable, OER must include models that bring together free and fee-based, profit and non-profit, public and private, business and academia.

To stretch the thinking about how traditional publishers might engage in new models of OER in K-12, I’ve been thinking about a range of possible collaboration scenarios that go beyond just asking publishers to open-license their work.

(For the purpose of clarity, I’ve used the term “OER provider” to refer to a group primarily involved in producing and distributing open resources and a “publisher” to refer to a traditional commercial publisher. In reality, the roles could overlap or even be reversed.)

• An OER provider might act as a reseller of  selected products or services of a traditional publisher. These products or services would complement the free OER offerings, thereby offering the customer added value and the publisher extra revenue.
• An OER provider who wants to distribute a print version of their content (at some cost) might collaborate with a publisher to do so.
• In a similar vein, an OER provider might partner with a publisher for distribution and sales services. This role could expand considerably for OERs submitted for state adoption, a process with which publishers have unique expertise.
• An OER provider and a publisher might co-develop new product, which could then be open-licensed or sold.
• An OER provider and a publisher could partner on new funding options, from sources such as public or private grants, venture philanthropy, state co-development funds, etc., to do any of the above.
• An OER provider might acquire content or product from a publisher. This could be especially attractive to publishers who have duplicate lines they are not marketing, as is the case for many after the massive consolidation of the industry.

Moodle quick start guide (pdf)

Below is a preliminary list of ideas. What are your ideas for this? Share your thoughts and add comment.

Resources

• Include a wide variety of resources that address different learning styles, reading levels, media types, etc.
• Make sure resources include multimedia.
• Use web resources (web pages, video, simulations, graphic organizers, etc.) – you don’t have to create everything yourself!
• When using web resources, embed instead of linking when possible in order to preserve the course context and avoid potential distractions.
• Ask students to suggest additional resources to include. (This could be an assignment or a forum activity.)

Activities

Assignment

• Using online assignments is a good tool for providing students immediate feedback and also a way to help you manage a large volume of work.
• Give students options! Include not only writing, but PowerPoint slides, audio, video, etc.
• Give students regular feedback on assignments when they are in process (formative assessment), not just at the end.
• Assign students to create regular learning logs to reflect on their own learning.
• Offer assignments that include graphic organizers.
• Use offline assignments to include in-class performance type activities.

Chat

• Use for online study groups.
• Have posted times for drop-in review sessions. Publish the chat logs so others can benefit.
• Have a chat during a real-time event, such as an election debate or a presidential address.
• Use for book talks.
• Use as a back channel area for face-to-face classes. Assign different students roles as needed. Later publish these notes and have students annotate or add to them.

Choice

• Use a quick poll after each lesson to have each learner assess their understanding (great, good, not sure, not good, totally lost).
• Periodically ask students about the pace of the course and the level of difficulty.

Database

• Have students create databases of various information, such as book reviews, story starters (text or picture), study questions, collaborative research, etc.

Forum

• Set up a tutoring forum.
• Create single-student forums to give students a private place to ask you questions or talk about the course. (Messaging can also be used for this if enabled.)
• Have students respond to each other’s forum posts.

Glossary

• Provide glossary support for key vocabulary via glossaries, linked words, and random glossary word boxes.
• Allow students to add to definitions, give examples, translate into another language, or rate helpfulness.
• Include pictures or video and audio pronunciation for words. (These can be supplied by students as well.)
• Glossaries can be used creatively for things other than vocabulary, such as quiz questions, sample math problems, quick tips, memory aids, quotes of the day, etc.

Lesson

• Structure content with branches to provide scaffolding and remediation where needed or to provide enrichment or acceleration when appropriate.
• Allow different paths through content depending on learning interests. (Think about the “Choose Your Own Adventure” idea.)
• Use lessons with branching practice opportunities as a way to divide information into reasonable sized chunks.
• Use lessons to create flash card decks.

Quiz

• Use a variety of types and styles of questions and questions at various levels of depth.
• Ask multiple questions for each important objective or idea.
• Include quizzes that are not graded.
• Use quizzes not only for formal assessment, but for self-assessment and formative assessment. Frequent practice opportunities improve learning.
• Use the feedback option in quizzes to remediate, for example, by showing how a math problem can be solved.

Survey

• Use surveys to ask students how their learning is going.
• Ask students what topics they would like additional help or coverage on.

Wikis

• Have students work collaboratively to record class notes. You can make this a guided notetaking activity by supplying a topic outline in advance.
• Have students create end of unit study guides.
• Broaden your use of wikis by having students contribute to a public wiki such as Wikipedia.

General

• Use various grouping tools in Moodle with flexible groupings of students.
• Use logs and reports to monitor student activity. Watch for students who are inactive and offer help. Monitor areas of very high or low activity and consider this in terms of additional support or course redesign.

Here’s a new tool to make your use of Moodle glossaries even easier. The Kids Open Dictionary glossary builder now has an auto-export to Moodle! (And this resource is completely public domain.)

Here are the quick instructions.

1. In the dictionary, click Glossary builder.
2. Enter your list of glossary words separated by commas. Click build.
3. Check the resulting definitions. If there is more than one definition for a word, put a check mark next to the definition you want to include. If a word has no definition, you will need to add it. When you are done, click the Moodle button.
   
4. Right-click the “Click here to download your glossary button” link, and save the file somewhere (e.g. your desktop).
5. Go to your Moodle course. If you haven’t already, turn editing on and create a glossary by selecting Glossary from the “Add an activity” drop-down menu. (More on Moodle glossaries here.)
6. Select the glossary and select “Import entries.”
   
7. Browse to select the file saved in step #4.

That’s it! If you have suggestions on how to make this tool more useful or if you have a list of words that you’d like to have prioritized for definitions, shoot us an email.

As a result of that forum, NASBE published the policy update “Rethinking the State Role in Instructional Materials Adoption: Opportunities for Innovation and Cost Savings.”

This report provides a good overview of the opportunities for OER in K-12, as well as summaries of what states like Indiana, California, and Texas are doing in this area. It is a valuable piece to share with policymakers, public officials, school administrators, educators, and others who could benefit from knowledge about OER in K-12 education.

The conclusions and recommendations in this report are insightful. Leadership attention to them bodes well for the potential of OER to bring real innovation to our schools.

This is another episode in the infamous “math wars,” which have pitted the traditional approach, which views math as a body of facts and emphasizes specific skills, rules, memorization and practice against a reform approach, which takes a more inquiry-based approach, viewing math as a series of connected ideas that should be understood conceptually first, with fluency following. Those who have been through phonics vs. whole language or a host of other similar debates in education will be familiar with the vehemence with which sides are chosen in these battles. While a balanced approach is in vogue in many districts, apparently many are still picking and defending sides.

I’ll leave aside for now my pent-up tirade about whether it is really the role of the courts to choose textbooks and focus instead on another issue. Textbooks are not the curriculum (or if they are, as one astute reader points out, you have a poor curriculum).

The view that any single textbook is the “curriculum” sadly ignores the role of teachers (as well as students) in the learning process.

There are many dynamics that affect learning in a classroom. Textbooks are not the most important of these. Teachers and the learning process they create and nurture have everything to do with how students learn.

Every student learns differently, has different skills, varies in language proficiency, has different interests, etc. That’s why differentiation of instruction is so important. No textbook, whether it be the “Discovering series,” Holt, or any one of many others is the answer for all students. Any teacher worth putting in a classroom knows this and uses a variety of resources, processes, products, activities, and projects to stimulate learning in a variety way.

Let’s give our schools and our teachers more credit than this court ruling does.

Recently, I have become a huge advocate for OER. Have I lost my business sense or decided that my interests lie outside of the commercial arena? No, I believe that OER can be good business. Here’s why.

1. There are viable business models built on open licensing.
   Many of these revolve around services and customization (both things the K-12 ed market is badly in need of). Look at Red Hat, the new IBM, and Flat World Knowledge. Read Wikinomics.
2. It serves customers well.
   Open is about letting the customer decide what best suits their needs and helping them customize products and services to meet those needs. The K-12 textbook market (and arguably the whole educational system) has been about prescribing what schools need, often in a one-size-fits-all way. Most of these models don’t allow for much differentiation of learning, which is sorely needed to address the achievement and engagement gaps in schools. OER, on the other hand, is all about differentiation and customization.
3. It serves non-customers well, which may turn them into customers or prompt them to become advocates.
   Even those who don’t buy your product or service will be able to experience it and tell others about their good experience.
4. Giving customers what they want is good business.
   I often hear schools say that they want a new way to do things. They want differentiation. They want modular content. They want to be able to remix their curriculum.
5. Not giving customers what they want is bad business.
   Ask a teacher or school administrator what they think about their textbooks or the commercial textbook publishing business.
6. It better allows customers to spend money for things of value to them.
   The K-12 ed market has many mechanisms to restrict free choice in curriculum purchases. Just a few are pricing that ties textbook and ancillary package purchases together, rules that every student must have a paper textbook (regardless of if they’re used), inclusion of (often sub-standard) professional development in book pricing, and packaging of content in enormous 800+ page bundles. OER pulls that all apart so that money can flow to targeted needs.
7. The first to market with smart open models will have a big competitive advantage.
   
8. State and federal policymakers are lining up behind OER.
   Funding and new business models will follow.
9. It’s a better use of public funds.
   Millions of public dollars go toward curriculum development and licensing. Most directly, this happens through competitive grants (something that is being emphasized increasingly by the feds). Public funds should go to serve the public good.
   
10. Publishers, schools, and learners need new models.
    It’s a fast changing world with many challenges for all of us. Open is a real way to address many of these challenges.
11. (bonus) It’s good karma.
    Sharing is good. You may argue that this isn’t “good business,” but in my experience, it is.

Please comment and share your additional thoughts.

In part 1, I established that the cost of print was not a very significant cost savings. (A bit more on that below.) In part 2, I looked at the development costs of multiple publishers and the savings that could result if just one program were purchased by all schools (which brings up many more questions.) In this final part 3, I’ll look at some other possible areas of cost savings.

Print vs. electronic distribution – At somewhere between $100 and $200 for a student computing device, the economics become feasible to do one-to-one implementations in K-12 schools. This would enable printed versions of textbooks to be replaced electronic ones, thereby eliminating printing and distribution costs. Some have maintained that over a several year period, this would save considerable amounts of money. I think that the costs might break even, but given obsolescence and other costs like support, it is doubtful that money would be saved.

Another option would be to allow students to use computing devices that they already have, namely cell phones. While this could save money and improve educational opportunities for students, it is unlikely to be embraced by schools for policy and control reasons.

Ancillaries – Currently, the model most textbook publishers follow is to give away extensive ancillary packages with a textbook sale. Many states, such as Texas, encourage this by specifying a set maximum price for textbooks but allowing additional ancillary components to be given away. Of course, nothing is “free” though, and the cost of these increasingly expensive ancillaries must be factored into student textbook prices. This problem is exacerbated by schools who, enticed by glitzy and voluminous ancillaries, tend to “buy by the pound,” thereby encouraging publishers to produce more and more, driving book prices up and up.

In many classrooms, it is easy to find boxes and boxes of unused and even unopened ancillary components. Conversely, I have talked to many other teachers and administrators who have wanted to buy only the ancillaries (especially electronic ones), but have been “forced” to take the textbooks as well.

The answer to this problem is for states to ask publishers to uncouple the pricing of student textbooks and ancillaries and to prompt schools to choose what they want to purchase based on real costs. The state of Florida is doing just that. It will be interesting to see what results, but I would predict lower prices for purchases that are more educationally appropriate (and actually used).

Materials that could be marketed across states – Textbooks for the largest states, e.g. Texas, California, and Florida, are developed for those states’ specific standards and adoption requirements. Another “national edition” is then produced for other non-adoption and smaller states. If one version were able to be sold to a larger market, costs for everyone would be lower. The much-maligned Common Standards initiative could be one path to this. However, even with this, states have considerable latitude to include their own unique standards (up to 20%). Also, not all states have signed onto Common Standards, with one of the largest textbook-purchasing states, Texas, being a notable holdout.

Another way to accomplish savings in this area would be for states to collaborate on developing common specifications for a reduced price textbook that could be used by all. See below for more on this.

Another potential approach would be to create materials that are more modular and can be remixed at a state, district, school, or classroom to address different standards or different student needs. This is what OER is all about, and in addition to improving instruction, it could save money.

Closer participation of states in the development process – Currently, adoption states issue a call for textbooks to which publishers respond. The call may or may not reflect the needs or preferences of the actual school districts who will be making the final purchase decision. The calls often leave publishers with many questions about what will be acceptable or desirable in the state’s adoption committee’s eyes. Publishers spend a huge amount of money just to submit an offering to be considered; this offering may or may not be accepted. Even if it is, it is possible that no schools may ever purchase it.

While to some extent, this is the peril of competing in an open market in textbook publishing, it is very expensive and very risky to compete. The result is that smaller players are effectively prohibited from taking part, and larger players must charge a premium to cover their risk. (Another result is that schools often report not having access to the kind of instructional materials they really want.) This is not cost effective for end users or for the taxpayers who fund textbook purchases. If the states were to take a bigger role in helping publishers to understand what they really want AND to lower the risk to smaller players, the market would benefit.

Some specific examples of how the former might take place would be through state co-development projects or state and district participation in the actual development of materials. Examples of the latter would be to eliminate high performance bonds that must be paid before the adoption and to ease the burden of sampling and use of textbook depositories.

Improvement the first time around instead of expensive interventions – Hundreds of millions of dollars are going into costly interventions to remedy the achievement crises in schools today. Beyond that, it is impossible to calculate the financial burden of high school drop-out rates. If instruction were more effective and engaging, a lot of this expenditure could be avoided. While the challenges our schools face are certainly too large to be solved by differentiation and OER alone, their effective use could certainly make a huge difference.

In the last post, we established that the printing costs of a program like this are a relatively small percentage of the total cost, so that doesn’t account for a huge savings (ignoring the costs of technology to replace print…but that’s another  post).

If you haven’t figured it out already, one significant cost issue is related to how many different programs are produced.

In the last literature adoption in Texas, there were between six and eight successfully adopted programs for each grade level. (There is significant, but not perfect, overlap in the publishers from grade to grade.) This doesn’t take into account the programs that were submitted, but not adopted.

So instead of the $15 million that was estimated for development of such a program, the actual cost was something in the neighborhood of $15 million times more than eight publishers. Even if this number was only 10, that makes up most of the $200 million in possible savings.

If, when Texas funds the development of its own curriculum (presumably  under the recent RFO for “state-developed open-source textbooks”), it were adopted by 100% of the schools, the full amount of savings mentioned above could be realized. However, there is a parallel process for adopting conventional commercial textbooks in the traditional manner, some of which will undoubtedly be chosen by some schools. Assuming that roughly the same number of programs are adopted, the total development cost will be roughly the same. The question of whether these costs are ultimately borne by the state depends on which textbooks are chosen by how many districts.

To the extent that the state-developed program is chosen by a large number of schools, the state could save considerable amounts of money. If the state-developed program is not chosen by many schools, the state will not save money. Of course, Texas’ recent change in legislation that incentivizes schools to choose less expensive programs may influence this.

That brings up many interesting questions. First, is it in our schools’ (and ultimately our students’) interests to have choice among various textbooks? And how much “choice” is provided given the current adoption process? What is the ideal number (economically? pedagogically?) of programs to have? Beyond this, who (state board, ed commissioner, state ed agency, districts, schools, teachers, students, John Q Public) should be determining the direction of which parts of this agenda (standards, format, curriculum, etc.)?

All questions that probably deserve their own post. But in the meantime, at least we’ve solved a big part of the conundrum of where this savings might or might not come from.

In the final post in this series, I’ll look at a few more ways that OER might help save states money and improve education.

They say, “The purpose of this offer is to identify and acquire state-developed/state owned open-source textbooks that are available for downloading from the internet at no charge to a student and without requiring the purchase of an unlock code, membership, or other access or use charge, except for a charge to order an optional printed copy of all or part of the textbook.”

In reading some (though admittedly not all yet) of the 73 page bid package, this appears to follow previously published Texas definitions of “open source textbooks” as owned by the state and licensed to Texas schools without charge. They say that “a state-developed open-source textbook is the property of the state.”

No apparent mention of any requirement that the material actually be open licensed.

I’d say the open ed movement has some education and awareness-building work to do.

“A state-developed open-source textbook must be irrevocably owned by or licensed by the state, and the state must have unlimited authority to modify, delete, combine and/or add content to the textbook after purchase….

A state-developed open-source textbook is the property of the state. The COE shall provide a license to each public school in the state, including a school district, and open enrollment charter school, and a state or local agency educating students in any grade from prekindergarten through high school, to use and reproduce a state-developed open source textbook.

The COE may provide a license to use a state-developed open source textbook to an entity not listed. In determining the cost of the license, the COE shall seek, to the extent feasible to recover costs of developing, revising, and distributing state-developed/state owned open-source textbooks.”

So this really seems to be a work-for-hire arrangement in which the state owns the content. (Not that this doesn’t have merit of its own, but it isn’t “open.”) The state could then sell licenses to other entities (e.g. out-of-state schools) to recover costs.

This seems to be very similar to the state co-development projects of the ’90s. Having led one of these projects myself, I’m familiar with the dynamics.