Maybe because I got into the education biz late in life, I tend towards being a bit idealistic… In this regard, I have always had a bit of a prejudice against a lot of the ‘educational software’ I’ve seen over the years…much of it looked like amateur work and the prices for this software always struck me as egregious…
The textbook industry has always had a similarly dark symbiosis with the education industry. The systems involved in how textbooks are written, marketed, and sold strikes ne (now…and then) as a terrible mixture of arbitrary, politically motivated, and strangely enough as a seller’s market (in some ways, once a textbook gets b=past the scrutiny of the Texas markets, everyone other schools district seems to fall in place.
So…while this industry has been pushing cash cows for decades, we are now in the midst of what may ultimately become a transformative implosion of these industries…One of the calls to this upcoming battle is the idea that public education textbooks should be open source…
It certainly is an interesting idea, and one which would take some of the increasingly unbearable financial load off of college students…at the possible expense of some publishers…
The Case for Making Online Textbooks Open Source
http://mashable.com/2011/05/17/open-source-textbooks
As companies compete to digitize the textbook market, there is one approach that shakes the traditional publishing business model: open source textbooks, whose proponents believe online educational tomes should be free.
Many universities, including MIT and Carnegie Mellon, post course lectures online for free use. A New York Times article last year explained some of the barriers to applying the same approach to textbooks.
For one thing, the textbook authors must agree to have them distributed online without charging royalties — something that may work well in the software world, where engineers often work on projects while keeping a day job, but typically avoided by writers who put their sweat equity into one book at a time. Also, books for K-12 classrooms must meet state standards, and most states don’t have procedures in place for approving open source textbooks.
But there’s no arguing that having at least a few open source textbooks (even when purchased through companies like Flat World Knowledge that charge for downloading or printing them) would cut down on the average $900 per year that the average student spends on textbooks. Online School has compiled this infographic to explain the cost savings.
Open Source Textbooks
http://www.onlineschools.org/blog/open-source
