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.
(Score: 2) by e_armadillo on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:30AM
Absolutely agree.
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:05PM
Or, university administrators raise tuition by about the amount that textbook costs dropped. Their pay packages rise accordingly.
I like the move to open textbooks. But I fear that unless we watch very carefully, the savings will be appropriated by others and students won't benefit. Greed is the problem of these times.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:10PM
We need a new moderation, "Sigh". I moderated this interesting, but that's not quite right, and neither is insightful. The real mod should mean something like "unfortunately probable, sigh".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.