Professors Put Textbooks Online to Reduce Costs - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-07-07

Summary:

“The rising cost of textbooks—along with the rise of easy-to-use publishing tools online—has helped drive the popularity of open-source materials and professors’ taking a do-it-yourself approach to textbook publishing. Here are three professors who wrote their own textbooks and are distributing them free. [1] One year ago, students began coming to the philosophy class of Brendan Myers at Heritage College, in Gatineau, Quebec, without the required textbook. I made some remarks, of course, about needing the textbook to pass the class, and they told me that they couldn’t afford it. They needed to spend the money on food, and they would borrow the textbook later from a friend,’ he said. ‘So I decided that one small way that I can help reduce the cost of education without political lobbying work is to write my own textbook, and they wouldn’t have to pay for it.’ After writing said textbook, titled Clear and Present Thinking, Mr. Myers e-mailed the PDF to his students and began using it in class. Then, inspired by a friend who had raised money for a novel through Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing fund-raising Web site, he created a campaign to support the cost of a professional-caliber version of his homemade textbook. The money will pay for additional contributors, designers, and editors, he said, as well as add-ons like a French version and an audiobook... he plans to write to philosophy journals, such as Ethics or Mind, and ask their peer-review boards to critique his work... He is already in contact with other groups interested in using his book; they include a religious-education organization interested in teaching logic, and a video-game business that wants to use it to teach the concept of the prisoner’s dilemma. As of July 6, the Kickstarter campaign had raised nearly $15,000, exceeding the original goal of $5,000. The campaign ends July 7... [2] For Gregory Carey, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, putting textbooks online is more than a helpful gesture for students—it’s an experiment in new ways of disseminating information. ‘Technology is moving so fast that printed books in certain areas can be out of date very readily,’ he said. ‘Having something online allows you to readily update it each year.’ Mr. Carey was originally told by a traditional publisher that his book about quantitative methods in neuroscience could be priced at about $200. He decided not to pursue a publishing deal. Instead, at a Universtiy of Colorado Faculty Council meeting in March, he proposed putting his and other textbooks online and making them free to students. The idea was well-received. ‘The university president has expressed interest in the idea of exploring mechanisms for professors to publish textbooks online, and to receive appropriate academic credit for it,’ Mr. Carey said... the idea is to build a site where professors can have their work peer-reviewed online, with royalties paid to both writer and editor. In this system, students would either have free access to the textbook, or they could download relevant chapters (instead of the entire text), he said. For this fall, his students can download a PDF of his book free from a password-protected Web site. ‘The one thing that I am really hoping to learn by putting my book online is to see how well this can act as a model in the University of Colorado system,” said Mr. Carey...’ Only 40 students were required to use Herbert Hovenkamp’s innovation and competition policy casebook, but the text has been downloaded more than 1,000 times since being posted online this spring. Mr. Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, wrote the casebook a year ago for a new, niche course on antitrust and intellectual-property law. Most casebooks are expensive, he said, but it is especially difficult to find a reasonably priced casebook for a small, specific class like the one he would be teaching. Writing his own book and putting it online seemed like the best solution... The students praised the book’s portability, and that it is very up-to-date. Mr. Hovenkamp agreed that the casebook’s electronic format makes it easy to revise; he is now updating the book for its second edition, to use when he next teaches the course in January 2013. I’m in my 60s, and there’s lots of things I’d rather write than casebooks, so I don’t think I’ll be doing another one online,’ he said. ‘But if I were 25 years younger, I would certainly think more seriously about doing it. It’s a valuable service to students, and there’s different models that could be successful.’”

Link:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professors-put-textbooks-online-to-reduce-costs-for-students/37677?cid=pm

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.comment oa.crowd oa.oer oa.students oa.funding oa.textbooks oa.prices oa.courseware oa.psychology oa.kickstarter oa.law oa.philosophy oa.heritage_college oa.books oa.humanities oa.ssh

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

07/07/2012, 17:31

Date published:

07/09/2012, 13:59