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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 14 2017, @11:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the information-wants-to-be-libre dept.

The Diamondback student-run newspaper at the University of Maryland reports:

The Textbook Cost Savings Act of 2017, sponsored by Maryland state Sen. Jim Rosapepe, could help students save a lot of [...] money.

The bill would provide a $100,000 grant to the University System of Maryland's William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation to promote the use of open [knowledge] materials in place of traditional textbooks. The money would be used to foster the use of open education resources, or OERs, among the system's 12 institutions, said MJ Bishop, director of the Kirwan Center.

[...] If passed, the act would provide funding for the center to scale up the Maryland Open Source Textbook Initiative, a project that began in 2013 to promote OER use in classrooms. Between spring 2014 and fall 2016, the initiative has involved faculty teaching more than 60 courses at 14 public institutions in Maryland, saving students an estimated $1 million since the project's inception, according to the system website.

[...] Bishop said the grant will be used to create a central OER repository to share with all system institutions, as well as provide mini grants to universities to promote adoption of OERs in classrooms. The grant will also help to fund project management and instructional design staff, allowing faculty to create their own open source textbooks and design their courses around OERs.

[...] Some professors at this university have already made the switch to OERs. Lecturer Scott Roberts made an online textbook for PSYC100: Introduction to Psychology in 2010 after he became annoyed with new editions of the published textbook--which he said essentially contained the same content with different page numbers.

[...] Bishop admitted the $100,000 grant is not enough to accomplish all the center's goals at such a large scale; however, she said the act would be a sign of support from the Maryland legislature and be helpful when the initiative tries to get funding from national foundations, such as the Hewlett Foundation or the Gates Foundation.

Nonprofit MarylandReporter adds:

Open [Knowledge] Textbooks Could Save Students a Bundle

"The state is moving rapidly towards free textbooks online", said the bill's sponsor Sen. Jim Rosapepe (D-Prince George's) in an interview. "If the bill passes, it will be state policy that we want to move in that direction as much as possible."

The bill, SB424,[1] passed the Senate in an overwhelming 44-2 vote [March 9], with only two Republicans voting against it. The House version, HB967, cleared the Appropriations Committee, 23-2 [March 9], and heads to the full chamber for a vote.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2015 that textbooks prices had jumped over 1000% since 1977.

[1] Incorrect link in TFA corrected.


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:41PM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:41PM (#479052) Journal

    it's time for textbooks to be replaced with e-versions, whether free or not

    While I agree that electronic versions are helpful, they pose a few significant problems. The first is that e-readers often deal poorly with layout for graphics-intensive books, and many publishers haven't figured out reasonable ways to deal with graphics either. A lot of textbooks in a lot of disciplines require significant amounts of graphics, images, etc. Heck, a year ago I ended up buying an e-book edition of an 18th-century science book (well, actually a 20th century English translation of an 18th century book, so the translation wasn't public domain) which had very infrequent figures, and even that was basically rendered unusable because of the inability to read the text and consult the figures at the same time in a reasonable fashion.

    I'm not saying it can't be done -- but a lot of publishers don't yet do a good job at it. And that's the professionals. Ask an amateur to make an e-book that incorporates graphics in a reasonable and useful way, and it could be daunting.

    Another practical issue for college use is that electronic devices are often a significant classroom distraction. It's often hard enough to get students to take an hour away from checking social media and participate in class without their phone, tablet, etc. If you use the textbook in class at all, now you have the difficulty of dealing with students whose academic material is frequently on the same device as Facebook or whatever. The temptation to just "check in" becomes greater.

    And before someone comes along and complains about "useless lectures" or whatever so students are bored and not listening anyway, note that the above is potentially an even greater problem in a non-standard college classroom where students are doing other in-class activities rather than listening passively to a lecture.

    Again, I'm not saying there aren't really good things about electronic textbooks, but there are some obstacles too.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 14 2017, @10:50PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday March 14 2017, @10:50PM (#479180)

    As Bill Gates once said: paper has several hundred years of development, computers are still playing catch-up.

    As for layout of graphics, that's all done on computer, the problem is formatting for small screens, and some content just doesn't lend itself that well to small screen display. As for that, it shouldn't be long before every dorm room comes equipped with a standard 4K 36" screen... and as for in-classroom distractions, that's a maturity and respect problem - something we're not teaching as well as we used to.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]