94 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2022
    1. Émile flew offthe shelves in 18th-century Paris. In fact, booksellers found it more profitable torent it out by the hour than to sell it. Ultimately the excitement got too much forthe authorities and Émile was banned in Paris and burned in Geneva

      Émile: or On Education was so popular that it was rented out by the hour for additional profit instead of being sold outright. [summary]


      When did book rental in education spaces become a business model? What has it looked like historically?

  2. Oct 2020
    1. If OER is free, what hidden costs exist in its production? Making these textbooks is taking me a chunk of time in the off-season.  Thanks to my salaried position, I feel ok about putting in the overtime, but it’s a privilege my colleagues who teach under year-to-year part-time non-contracts can’t afford. Who should be funding OER creation? Institutions? Students? For-profit start-ups? How will you invest time in this project without obscuring the true costs of academic labor? Right now, we pass the corruptly high cost of academic publishing onto the backs of academia’s most vulnerable members: students. But as OER gains steam, we need to come up with funding models that don’t land us back in the same quagmire of exploitation that we were trying to get out of.

      This is a nearly perfect question and something to watch in the coming years.

    2. Most of the actual texts in the Heath were public domain texts, freely available and not under any copyright restrictions.  As the Heath produced new editions (of literature from roughly 1400-1800!), forcing students to buy new textbooks or be irritatingly out of sync with page numbers, and as students turned to rental markets that necessitated them giving their books back at the end of the semester, I began to look in earnest for an alternative.

      Repackaging public domain texts and charging a steep markup too much above and beyond the cost of the paper is just highway robbery. Unless a publisher is adding some actual annotative or analytical value, they shouldn't be charging outrageous prices for textbooks of this nature.

  3. Jul 2020
  4. Sep 2019
    1. students taking classes in the classroom report significantly higher rates of underutilized textbooks than those taking classes online

      Seems to hint to me that on-campus students may be receiving (or perceiving) a superior level of instructor support (thereby making the textbook less relevant). Interesting responsibility for F2F faculty and interesting possible criticism of the level of instructor support provided to online students.

    2. and students assigned an open textbook reported a significantly higher percentage of underutilized textbooks (M = 52.20, SE = 1.38) than those assigned a traditional textbook (M = 48.44, SE = 1.21)

      Students who have been primed with the knowledge that this course uses a lower-cost OER text are more critical of textbook price vs use in other courses?

  5. Aug 2019
    1. As far as I can tell, open educational practice captures the true potential of OER to improve teaching and learning. Now that adoption of OER has been maturing and expanding, more people are interested in how to use OER more effectively. In other words, they’re asking what can OER do that traditional textbooks cannot?

      Replacing text books with open resources does push teachers out of their comfort zones!

  6. Dec 2018
    1. Today, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society’s Annual Conference with representatives of two open education projects that depend on Creative Commons licenses to do their work. One is the OER publisher Siyavula, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Among other things, they publish textbooks for use in primary and secondary school in math and science. After high school students in the country protested about the conditions of their education – singling out textbook prices as a barrier to their learning – the South African government relied on the Creative Commons license used by Siyavula to print and distribute 10 million Siyavula textbooks to school children, some of whom had never had their own textbook before. The other are the related teacher education projects, TESSA, and TESS-India, which use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license on teacher training materials. Created first in English, the projects and their teachers rely on the reuse rights granted by the Creative Commons license to translate and localize these training materials to make them authentic for teachers in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings of sub-Saharan Africa and India. (Both projects are linked to and supported by the Open University in the UK, http://www.open.ac.uk/, which uses Creative Commons-licensed materials as well.) If one wakes up hoping to feel that one’s work in the world is useful, then an experience like this makes it a good day.

      I think contextualizing Creative Commons material as a component in global justice and thinking of fair distribution of resources and knowledge as an antidote to imperialism is a provocative concept.This blog, infojusticeorg offers perspectives on social justice and Creative Commons by many authors.

  7. Sep 2018
  8. Aug 2018
    1. YouTube Lectures by Kevin

      If you hold down the CMD or CTRL key while clicking the video links, the video will open up in a new tab. Otherwise, when you go "back" to the book from the video, you'll be sent back to the beginning of the book. Not great.

  9. May 2018
  10. Apr 2018
  11. Mar 2018
  12. Feb 2018
  13. Jan 2018
  14. Dec 2017
  15. Nov 2017
    1. This is certainly how the debate about licensing has played out.

      In fact, Rory McGreal adamantly argues that CC-BY-NC material is too restrictive to be called “OER”. We had a short exchange about this. In Quebec’s Cégep system, NC was the rule for reasons which are probably easy to understand. So the focus is on licenses, in this scene, not on practices. Hence the whole thing about Open Textbooks. Often made me wonder if any of these people had compared textbook-based teaching to any of the other modalities. In my teaching, textbooks are a problem, even when they’re open. Sure, some of those problems can be solved when you have access to the code and can produce your own textbook from that. That’s the typical solution offered in the GitHub sphere:

      Just Fork It!

      But the core problem remains: if you’re teaching with a textbook, you may not really be building knowledge with learners.

      (Should probably move this here.)

  16. Jul 2017
    1. I continue to believe that every time we use the word “textbook” to describe the work we’re doing with OER we paint ourselves a little further into the corner of traditional thinking about teaching and learning resources.
  17. Jun 2017
  18. May 2017
    1. ne critical element in the effectiveness of these networks is “working in the open.” This includes a number of simple practices commonly associated with open source software: making curriculum and tools easy for others to discover; publishing using an editable format that allows others to freely use and adapt them; using an open license like Creative Commons. It also includes a set of work practices that make it easy for people to collaborate across organizations and locations: collaborative writing in shared online documents; shared public plans on wiki or other editable documents; progress reports and insights shared in real time and posted on blogs. These simple practices are the grease that lubricates the network, allowing ideas to flow and innovations to spread. More importantly, they make it possible for people to genuinely build things together—and learn along the way. This point cannot be emphasized strongly enough: when people build things together they tend to own them emotionally and want to roll them out after they are created. If the people building together are from different institutions, then the innovations spread more quickly to more institutions.

      These are all important aspects of open pedagogy, imo. Transparent, network practices that connect, but also create space and opportunities for particiaption by those on the edges. Working in the open is an invitation to particiaption to others.

  19. Apr 2017
    1. an invaluable resource for getting started in understanding what “open” is, as well as how it has been applied and practiced across multiple types of institutions, disciplines, and educational settings.
  20. Mar 2017
  21. Feb 2017
    1. Framing OER as free, digital versions of expense, print textbooks also risks playing directly into the hands of commercial textbook publishers who are in the midst of a pivot away from a business model based on selling “new editions” of print textbooks every three years to one based on leasing 180-day access to digital content delivery platforms.

      Exactly, although part of me wonders if OER hasn't had a hand in this pivot. If there were no OER's or open textbooks, would the industry be pivoting? Or are the pivoting as a response to the rising use of open textbooks and OER?

  22. May 2016
    1. After hundreds of emails with developers and peer-reviewers, his open-source book will be ready for use at UConn. Neth began planning for the second version of the book in January and the project has taken more than four months.
  23. Apr 2016
    1. what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost.

      And it's not just equality of access to "required" materials (though that's important too). It's more about the pedagogical process.

    2. Those students that bought the cheap version of the text back in 1991? They were pill-splitters. And they failed at pill-splitting (and maybe at the course). Do we own that failure? What we’ve learned over the past five years or so in OER is that what we sell in the Open Textbook movement is not just reduced cost. It’s the simplicity that you can get when you’re not working with an industry trying to milk every last dollar out of students. It’s every student having their materials on day one, for as long as they like, without having to navigate “simple” questions of what to buy, what to rent, and when-is-the-book-on-the-syllabus-that’s-required-not-really-required.
  24. Mar 2016
    1. As of fall 2015, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) no longer expects any undergraduate to spend money on textbooks.
    1. Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions
    2. If the average college student spends approximately $1000 per year on textbooks and yet performs scholastically no better than the student who utilizes free OER, what exactly is being purchased with that $1000?

      Supplemental materials?

  25. Feb 2016
    1. REBUS Open Web Textbooks - A new project to build a collaborative system for open source textbooks.

      https://twitter.com/hughmcguire<br> https://twitter.com/Bopuc

  26. Jan 2016
  27. Dec 2015
    1. The EDUPUB Initiative VitalSource regularly collaborates with independent consultants and industry experts including the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), Tech For All, JISC, Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC), and others. With the help of these experts, VitalSource strives to ensure its platform conforms to applicable accessibility standards including Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Accessibility Guidelines established by the Worldwide Web Consortium known as WCAG 2.0. The state of the platform's conformance with Section 508 at any point in time is made available through publication of Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs).  VitalSource continues to support industry standards for accessibility by conducting conformance testing on all Bookshelf platforms – offline on Windows and Macs; online on Windows and Macs using standard browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari); and on mobile devices for iOS and Android. All Bookshelf platforms are evaluated using industry-leading screen reading programs available for the platform including JAWS and NVDA for Windows, VoiceOver for Mac and iOS, and TalkBack for Android. To ensure a comprehensive reading experience, all Bookshelf platforms have been evaluated using EPUB® and enhanced PDF books.

      Could see a lot of potential for Open Standards, including annotations. What’s not so clear is how they can manage to produce such ePub while maintaining their DRM-focused practice. Heard about LCP (Lightweight Content Protection). But have yet to get a fully-accessible ePub which is also DRMed in such a way.

  28. Nov 2015
    1. if free textbooks or OER offer learners free access to good quality knowledge

      Big “if”. And it’s one of those cases where defining those terms (“access”, “knowledge”, “free”, “good quality”, even “learners”…) is important but risky. We don’t want sterile debates, but we need to acknowledge that we may not be talking about the same things.

    2. The real problem with textbooks, though, is that focusing on them is focusing on content. When learning, and open education, should focus more on process (a conversation on this from a year ago across my blog, Jim Groom’s, Mike Caulfield’s and David Wiley’s).
    3. “why textbooks?”
    1. Northern Virginia Community College’s Extended Learning Institute (ELI) and open courseware provider Lumen Learning announced a collaboration to publish 24 online college courses for two complete degree programs. All courses were developed for zero student cost using open educational resources (OER)
    1. This article included an estimate from the system that further backs up the $530 – $640 figures. [Hanley’s] rough estimate: As of a few years ago, learners at the 23-campus, 460,200-student university system were spending $300 million a year on course materials — about $651 per student per school year.

      This graph is the kicker. It is NOT about textbook costs, it's about how much students can afford to spend. The amount hasn't changed, or has gone down, since '02!

  29. Oct 2015
  30. Sep 2015
  31. Aug 2015
    1. 77 cents of every dollar spent on textbooks go to publishers. Of those 77 cents, the publishing company makes about 18 cents in pure profit, while spending 15 cents on marketing, and roughly 32 percent to cover costs (paper, printing, employee salaries, etc). At the same time, the author - the person who dedicated hundreds of hours of research to write the book – only gets about 12 cents on the dollar on average.
  32. Jun 2015