Venture Capital and the Future of Open Education: FWK and MOOCs | Inside Higher Ed

"News broke on Friday (via The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on a blurb from the National Association of College Stores’s newsletter) that the open textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge would be ending access to free versions of its textbook as of the new year....All told, it’s been a pretty interesting year for digital textbooks, openly licensed or not...A quick recap: 2012 has seen a digital textbook announcement by Apple, open textbook initiatives in California and British Columbia, a lawsuit against the open textbook startup Boundless, and plenty of proclamations by federal and state government officials alike that it’s time to ditch paper. But even with all the supposed changes to textbook publishing...it doesn’t appear that things have changed fast enough. Not fast enough for a company like Flat World Knowledge to maintain its old business model. And not fast enough to keep up with the changing ways in which the Internet can deliver educational content, and deliver it free and openly. After all The New York Times just crowned 2012 the year of the MOOC, not the year of the digital textbook. It’s worth noting here that the “open” in many of these new MOOCs simply means “open enrollment” and doesn’t mean “open educational resources,” something that prompted Creative Commons’ Timothy Vollmer to pen a call to “keep MOOCs open” — freely accessibly and openly licensed."