[Osdc-edu-authors] e-text licensing

[Sanford Forte]

This is an interesting discussion. Practical and ideological differences can be claimed, and defended, within the spectrum of argument presented by both sides.

Having been on both sides of these arguments within different (commercial, foundation-funded, non-profit, etc.) environments leads me to conclude that a fundamental diseconomy has evolved. It's an ideological diseconomy, relative to the main goal of Open, as it applies to education and educational content.

For nearly a decade, non-profit academic and academic-related institutions have been funded and charged with the task of creating Open courseware and Open textbooks. The reason for this is that the for-profit publishing sector has largely failed to innovate, and taken advantage of an oligopolistic market and pricing model in ways that have caused real pain for students. In a market economy, the latter behavior is largely the norm, so I'm not going to characterize the commercial publishers as bad players, in terms of intention (other than to say that market forces work both ways, with commercial publishers beginning to realize that in ways that they could hardly have imagined even 5 years ago).

Thus, for-profit courseware and textbook publishers have been doing what markets and their customers have encouraged them to do - raise prices, because in spite of all the work-arounds by students to get their content cheaper, curtailing the high cost of textbooks remains an uphill battle. The result has been too-high priced educational materials that decreases access to education, and cripples human futures - a tragedy. There is now a mountain of evidence about the problems caused by too-expensive textbooks; no need to repeat that here.

That said, it's not in doubt that commercial publishing companies have the infrastructure and market savvy to create very high quality content with rich media inputs that are interoperable on multiple devices and delivery platforms. It takes a massive infrastructure, capital, and *specialized intellectual capital* to make this happen. That's what commercial publishers bring to the table.

On the other hand, the most prolific source of content has traditionally been academia. Academics have traditionally been the creator of textbook content. Commercial publishers filter, professionally develop, distribute, keep current, and make technologically interoperable instructional content "market ready" (sometimes even deploying the platforms that content is distributed from (e.g. Pearson's eCollege). Over the last 10-15 years, a small evolution toward private contractors - away from the university - has been deployed to create content. I expect this trend to continue, but the primary source for content creation will lie within the halls of academia, for quite some time to come.

What has evolved over the last decade, as a result of the almost exclusive funding of academic institutions re: the development of Open content, has been a growing sense from the academic side of the equation "that we (academia) can be publishers, too".  This has created a huge diseconomy. Out of this funding rather rigid ideological preferences that argue for and against certain flavors of Open license have evolved, tending to delay the optimal market *result* that we're all looking for - i.e. *affordable, universally accessible, interoperable, easily updatable academic textbooks (for college, and K-12). 

What we have evolved is a discussion about quality of Open license that there is virtually no end to. Reams have been written about this conundrum. 

What's tragic is that there are extremely high quality, commercially available "NC" licensed materials that are available to students for free, online, 24/7. These commercial materials are professionally developed and supported, with very cool editing tools that are a cinch to use. Can we say the same for most Open textbooks that have been created and published by institutions that rigidly adhere to "CC-BY-SA" status? I don't think we can. In fairness, the latter groups are evolving, but the sustainability issues are huge, not to mention the skill sets necessary to make textbooks and courseware that truly engages and stimulates the user's imagination; that is fully interoperable and supported in a variety of ways - similar to the support array offered by commercial publishers, and that lives within a sustainable fiscal model.

I've spent a good part of the last 10 years of my life dealing with these issues. I am passionately dedicated to reducing the cost of college (and K-12) textbooks, and making education far more affordable and real-time relevant than it currently is. I've thought long and hard about these issues - alone, in dialogue, and within organizations devoted to these problems - looking for ways solve the current confusion and ideological impasse that has evolved between the commercial publishers of high-quality content, and the academic and academic related institutions that deploy this content.

My current stance is that we have to come to agreement that this effort is more about *affordability* than it is about Open. We must remain agnostic re: the deployment and permission differences dictated by one Open license, or another. Again, the aim is *affordability* (acknowledging that there are *always* unrealized costs - often massive costs - associated with "free")

I think we need to create and evolve new models of cooperation between the two camps - i/e/ commercial publishers and academic institutions. We need new private/public enterprise models that deploy in ways that create wins for everyone. This is not to say that these changes will be pain-free, because they won't (subject of another post, perhaps). How can we accomplish this? 

First, we need - at the federal, state, and local (District) policy level - to bring the full weight and leverage of academic institutional buying power to bear on commercial textbook pricing outcomes. In short, working together, we can compel commercial publishers to lower prices in the very same way that for-profit, proprietary institutions compel deep discounts with those same commercial publishers. Why aren't we doing this, for starters? I will not get into pricing details in this post, but suffice it to say that there is a lot of room for negotiation here. There are many other things that we can do, as well, if we want to accomplish the twin goals of affordability and the other, necessary qualities inherent in a *sustainable* affordable educational materials model.

What will all this mean to commercial publishers? They are going to have to restructure parts of their operations, period. That's the bottom line. It's normal that they're resisting the inevitable, but there's no stopping the juggernaut of coming new solutions and new content providers who will deploy all sorts of innovations - licensing and otherwise, to realize the black gold value that education represents for all world citizens in the 21st century. It's clear that new commercial models (deploying "NC" licenses) are here to stay; they will continue to evolve. There will also be a growing phalanx of new publishers coming forward. So, it's all good news for the end-user, the student, and professional educators - even the publishers who will learn new ways to deliver on the real promise of technology - i.e. "more, for less".

There's probably a book that could be written about this, as the issues are complex, but if we keep the bottom line of affordability as a first goal, then a lot of the other problems disappear. I've thought about that, but time spent in making these goals happen always interferes. Once we come back to the place where we see affordability as the primary issue, we can devise policy and negotiation approaches to procuring content that have real leverage with those entities that create the most sustainable, current, interoperable, and easy-to-customize content - i.e. commercial publishers.

Ideological arguments around the various flavors of Open have been, in my opinion, a deterrent to accomplishing the primary goal of affordability (and thus, access). We can put to rest most of those ideological constraints by coming back to the large question that began this effort, in the first place - i.e. how do we create and deploy high-quality, interoperable, universally accessible, easily updatable, academic instructional content that is affordable (including free, as one option), and do all that within a fiscally sustainable model. This is possible, right now. It's no longer about licenses; it's about political and private institutional will. One way or another, all of the foregoing is going to happen - the question remains how long we're going to have to wait,, and how long we will continue to miss the key goals that we've been aiming for (stated above), all along, because we let ideological differences that in the end don't mater very much, get in the way.

-Sanford










On Jan 17, 2011, at 9:53 AM, Matthew Jadud wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 12:36, Mike Shumake <teacherthinking at gmail.com> wrote:
>> According to the link above, we have free license with flexbooks to share
>> and adapt the work.  I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that
>> noncommercial use means that we could not take their flexbooks, adapt them,
> 
> Sadly, you aren't entirely right. The NC term is not well defined (see
> the link Karsten provided). It is up to the licensor to define the
> meaning of NC, and I doubt Flexbooks has done so. Therefore, it is
> legally ambiguous what NC means.
> 
> Is a private or charter school a "non-commercial" entity? What about a
> college that is privately funded? Is that a "commercial" enterprise?
> The NC clause is ambiguous, and really should not be applied unless
> your goal is ambiguity for your users.
> 
>> think buying printed textbooks over and over is a waste of money.  We spend
>> about $650 per high school student every 4 years on textbooks.  I think we
> 
> I agree with you completely; I was simply saying that your most
> powerful arguments are probably economic, as you have data for that.
> Trying to make claims about educational efficacy will likely leave you
> open to partisan attack.
> 
>> the teaching profession need to adapt and evolve, and that technology is an
>> important part of 21st century learning... and the 21st century work force.
> 
> We might disagree on that point. I believe pedagogy might need to
> evolve, but I don't necessarily believe that technology drives
> education. Whatever helps students learn best is what should drive
> decisions about technology, and those decisions should be informed, as
> much as possible, by evidence, not hope and speculation.
> 
>>   Does anyone else have any thoughts on the educational value of e-texts?  I
>> can think of access being an advantage; it's more likely a student will be
>> able to access an e-text on his/her mobile when carrying a pack full of
>> books around isn't realistic.  I think that interactivity is also an
>> advantage; it's likely that an e-text solution will contain formative
>> assessment within the actual text.  Also, e-texts can be written with
>> flexibility that will better meet iep's, multiple intelligences, and student
>> learning styles.  Last, e-texts will contain multi-media that is high
>> quality and engaging; students can listen to an audio book for English while
>> they mow the lawn, and they can watch high quality productions from national
>> geographic to connection in World Geogrpahy classes... any other ideas?
> 
> I think these are all "what if" scenarios that have never been played
> out in the real world in a manner that lets us assess their general
> effectiveness.
> 
> This, again, was my point: I do not believe you can make sound claims
> about educational value in this space. The verdict is still out on the
> value of every student having a laptop in the classroom, let alone an
> ebook reader. I don't know that content has to be multimedia to
> produce "better" learning, because (frankly) you haven't defined what
> is good or bad about the current learning in a way that can be
> reliably and repeatably assessed.
> 
> For the last year, I've been part of a committee at Allegheny that
> discussed exactly these issues. It is easy for 2000 college students
> to spend over $1,000,000 per year on books. It is likely we can cut
> into that using ebooks -- but because we have little idea,
> semester-to-semester, what books we might use, it is *very* hard to
> prescribe a technological solution. And so, we leave a significant
> line-item for our students in the hands of the publishers. That's not
> really good business sense, but its the space we're in.
> 
> If I could make a convincing argument to my colleagues that ebooks
> were better educational value, we'd do it in a heartbeat, even if it
> cost a bit more in the short term. However, I can't. And, in my
> situation, I can't make a sound financial argument, either: we don't
> know if all the materials we want are available, and we can't ramp up
> the production of quality materials in less than 5 years. (That is,
> for me to write an excellent text for use in my classes is going to
> take a year or two. Multiply that by several hundred classes.) In your
> case, you might have a limited corpus that changes slowly; therefore,
> you can make a sound economic argument that ebooks solve your current
> financial problem as well as enabling additional, open content to be
> leveraged. However, you can't make an argument that books with
> embedded video are *necessarily* better than a book with only text;
> or, if you find research that supports that claim, then yes, you can.
> 
> Perhaps that helps explain my thoughts on e-vs-p. There's no evidence.
> 
> Cheers,
> Matt
> 
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