Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Monday October 24 2016, @09:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the open-is-better dept.

Quartz reports

Seven Rhode Island universities, including Brown and Rhode Island College, will move to open-license textbooks [1] in a bid to save students $5 million over the next five years, the governor announced [September 27].

The initiative is meant to put a dent in the exorbitant cost of college and, more specifically, college textbooks. Mark Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan Flint, and a writer at the American Enterprise Institute, estimated last year [Cloudflare protected] that college textbook prices rose 945% between 1978 and 2014, compared to an overall inflation rate of 262% and a 604% rise in the cost of medical care.

That is not the result of a general trend of higher costs in publishing, he notes: the consumer price index for recreational books has been falling relative to overall inflation since 1998.

[...] Open textbooks are defined as "faculty-written, peer-reviewed textbooks that are published under an open license--meaning that they are available free online, they are free to download, and print copies are available at $10-40, or approximately the cost of printing", according to a report by the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) (pdf). They are part of the move toward Open Educational Resources, which has roots in the open-source software movement, it says.

Open licenses allow for content to be shared, unlike traditional textbooks which limit the use of their materials. [Richard Culatta, the chief innovation officer for Rhode Island] remembers teaching and replacing a section of a textbook with more relevant information for his class, only to be informed that he was infringing on international copyright law.

[1] A very bloated (webfonts) all-script-driven page.

Note: If you are thinking of using "begs the question" in the same way the state official did, that is a bad idea.

Our previous discussions of student materials and adoption of openness.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by MikeVDS on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:10AM

    by MikeVDS (1142) on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:10AM (#418324)

    Is that a bad thing? Serious question.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:47AM (#418332)

    Nothing wrong with it, but it's a makeshift arrangement.

    Many of the textbooks I've kept have lists of acknowledgements in the front of the book with lists of dozens and dozens of colleagues who reviewed and submitted suggestions on different portions of the book. But the author(s) retained editorial control.

    When a lecturer posts his/her own course notes online, typically they aren't vetted except by their own students, from the previous year(s)' classes.