In Shadow Of MOOCs, Open Education Makes Progress - Education -

"Freely downloadable textbooks and other open educational resources (OERs) are starting to have a practical impact, saving college students millions of dollars even as advocates struggle to distinguish the OER movement from the rise of the massive open online courses (MOOCs). By the standards of OER, the MOOCs distributed by the commercial operations Coursera and Udacity as well as the non-profit edX are only partly open. I'll come back to this distinction later. When I moderated a panel discussion on OER last week at the Distance Teaching and Learning Conference held at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, MOOCs were a side issue, but an important one.  OER materials include textbooks, but also shorter content modules and quizzes, software, videos of lectures and anything else made freely available for educational use, typically under a Creative Commons license requiring attribution only.  I'd been introduced to the conference organizers by one of the panelists, Richard Baraniuk, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University who in 1999 founded one of the first OER repositories, Connexions. As director of the Rice Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship, he continues to oversee that project as well as a couple of newer ones,OpenStax College and OpenStax Tutor. I wrote about OpenStax Tutor, an open source software project that aims to apply machine learning techniques to educational software, after seeing Baraniuk present at the SXSWEdu event in March.  OpenStax Tutor is exciting work, but it's OpenStax College, a foundation-funded initiative to create polished and peer reviewed textbooks for a host of introductory-level college classes, that looks likely to have the biggest impact ... OpenStax books are produced on a relatively conventional academic and editorial model, incorporating extensive artwork and three levels of peer review. That means they cost from about $500,000 to $750,000 to create, with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other philanthropic groups. Already OpenStax College reports that students have saved about $3.8 million in the past year, mostly on the basis of the first two textbooks released (Physics and Sociology).  Baraniuk calls that 'a pretty good return on investment under a venture philanthropy model,' where for every dollar donors invest OpenStax will pay back a multiple of that dollar in student savings. This year OpenStax published two biology books (one for majors and one for non-majors), along with Anatomy and Physiology. Next up are Chemistry, Introductory Statistics, Pre-calculus, U.S. History, Principles of Economics, Principles of Macroeconomics, Principles of Microeconomics, and Psychology. The books can be viewed online, downloaded in PDF form, or purchased in print, essentially for the cost of paper and ink. OpenStax Physics, for example, is a 1,200-page book in print and costs about $48, compared to $248 for the commercial equivalent, according to Baraniuk, and inexpensive ebooks are also available.  Students could use some financial relief. According to an American Enterprise Institute analysis, the cost of textbooks has risen 812% since 1978, compared with a 250% increase in the consumer price index. As a point of reference, medical costs (often described as 'spiraling out of control') are up 575% in the same period, according to AEI. The burden is significant enough that 7 in 10 students say they have skipped buying a textbook for a course, trying to make do without it because of the cost ..."