Textbooks: A Value Proposition

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Textbooks: A Value Proposition

11/13/2007

By Stephen R. Acker

Gerry Handley has another model in mind as he and his team lay out plans for California’s Digital Marketplace. He discusses the CDM using the analogy of a farmer’s market, an open and browseable market with wares selectable by the consumer. This large-scope and well-designed approach to sharing digital content should be piloting phase one of a digital marketplace in fall 2007, allowing faculty members to identify and select content appropriate for populating a reading/resource list. These materials can be made available as print or digital, and the CDM will be designed for maximum flexibility and to accommodate commercial, non-commercial and content created by the faculty member. Somewhere down the road, students in the California State University system will be able to create ePortfolios in which to document their learned competencies. These learning outcomes will share metadata with the content used to achieve them and thereby help future faculty identify vetted learning materials.

Starting with the consumer, the Ohio eText Project is focusing on student learning outcomes in the world of digital delivery. With the support of the OhioLINK library consortium, eText Ohio has selected faculty members who teach large, introductory courses in colleges and universities across the state. Working with four leading commercial publishers (Bedford Freeman & Worth, Pearson Publishing, Thomson Publishing, and McGraw-Hill Publishing), the eTextOhio project will work with faculty to expand their repertoire of teaching strategies advantaged by digital texts, work with them to identify materials aligned with those strategies, and then evaluate student learning outcomes in the digitally-supported courses. The goals of eText Ohio are to deliver student materials at less than 50 percent of the cost of a new text, in all cases at a price point below what a student can achieve through used book use or exchange, and improve learning outcomes in the process. The eText Ohio project hopes to meet the California Digital Marketplace somewhere in the middle. CDM is building up from the content selection process and eText Ohio works down, selecting content based on identified learning objectives.

The DRM Dilemma

Commercial content can’t be distributed without mechanisms to collect revenues and preserve the rights of copyright holders. Open courseware projects, initiated under versions of the Creative Commons License, preserve intellectual property rights, but typically do not collect royalties for materials used in noncommercial settings. Three ambitious projects gaining acceptance include the MIT’s OpenCourseware Initiative, now institutionalized and on track to represent teaching materials used in 1,800 courses offered at MIT by 2008;