Open-Source Textbooks a Mixed Bag in California

Downloadable and free, maybe–but the schoolhouse Wiki revolution will have to wait

As California moves forward with the first open-source digital textbook program in the nation this fall, the best content seems a lot less like Wikipedia and a lot more like traditional publishing.

Bulky, hefty and downright expensive, conventional school textbooks may rank as the most outdated part of our nation’s public education system. Many observers, including Chris Anderson, author of Free, have speculated that crowd sourcing could help bring down the cost of textbooks and improve their quality–but chipping away at the publishing industry’s last profit center has proven more challenging in practice. In 2002, the California Open-Source Textbook Project aimed to produce a history textbook via Wikibooks that it estimated could save California $200 million per year. To date, the project has never cobbled together a complete book.

The open-source dream got a new boost in May, when Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, responding to his state’s budget crisis, asked content developers to submit their “open-source digital textbooks” to California Learning Resource Network (CLRN), a 10-year-old project established by the Board of Education that has long hosted supplemental electronic resources for the state.

Schwartzenegger’s call sent three nonprofit organizations and forward-thinking textbook company Pearson scrambling to get their course materials up to snuff and to demonstrate how well they met the California content standards that align with standardized tests. CLRN had asked organizations to “freeze” their content for two years and make it available as a PDF—a move that director Brian Bridges admits may seem anachronistic in a Web 2.0 world, but in the future he hopes to review updates more frequently. Earlier this week, CLRN released reviews from the 16 science and mathematics books submitted, revealing their adherence to the content standards—and providing a first peek into the progress of the textbook 2.0 revolution.

While the real power of open-source textbooks, Bridges and others say, is being able to tap into the knowledge of the nation’s 3 million schoolteachers, a look at the recent crop of books suggests that’s not an accurate reflection of how educational content is being created. So far, the front-runners were typically written by just one or several authors, and the one major organization that has fully embraced a Wiki approach failed to impress CLRN reviewers.

Take the case of Connexions, which is based at Rice University in Houston, Texas and has amassed 14,000 “modules” from teachers around the country that can be shuffled in and out to assemble into hundreds of textbooks, known as collections. “We welcome everybody to contribute,” says Connexions’ community development specialist Jonathan Emmons. “We are not putting a restriction on who can use our content.”

Read more . . .

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Tags: content developers, digital textbook, digital textbooks, history textbook, Innovation, learning resource network, mathematics books, open source, public education system, school textbooks, textbook company, textbook program, textbook project, traditional publishing

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Innovation, Innovation Needed, Scientific American, economics, learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.