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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

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.

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