Digital textbooks and open learning are in the news again, just in time for back to school. The New York Times has published an article called “In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History” by Tamar Lewin, who profiles the increasing adoption of digital textbooks by school districts as a way of cutting costs and as a way of updating pedagogical methods in response to technological and social advances. Lewin reports:
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
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In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this summer announced an initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions.
With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Among the article’s interviewees is Neeru Khosla, co-founder of the non-profit group CK-12 Foundation, which develops “flexbooks” that can be adapted to state educational standards. Khosla explains the virtues of the flexbooks:
You can use them online, you can download them onto a disk, you can print them, you can customize them, you can embed video. When people get over the mind-set issue, they’ll see that there’s no reason to pay $100 a pop for a textbook, when you can have the content you want free.
The article uses terms like “digital textbooks,” “free courseware,” “open source,” and “open-content,” but what exactly do these terms mean? While there is reference to the adaptability and customization digital texts, the article does not explicitly mention copyright. Even if digital delivery of educational materials may solve some of the cost barriers of education, without an explicit understanding of terms like “open” and “free,” legal and social barriers to learning remain.
The fact that textbooks are simply “digital” or “available on the Internet” alone is not enough. While there are various terms being used right now such as “digital textbooks” and “free courseware,” they do not necessarily refer to the same thing. Digital and online learning materials are only truly open educational resources when they are licensed under an open license, such as the least restrictive Creative Commons license, CC BY, or released into the public domain. Only then will they be truly available for sharing, collaboration and reuse.
The road to a digital future for education is not without its bumps. Lewin brings up the issue of a the digital divide: “Not every student has access to a computer, a Kindle electronic reader device or a smartphone, and few districts are wealthy enough to provide them. So digital textbooks could widen the gap between rich and poor.”
The real issue at stake is not just about lowering the economic costs of schooling, but instead the need to focus on increasing the accessibility of knowledge. In order for learning resources to be truly accessible, the issue is not just online vs. offline, digital vs. print. To reach their maximum social and educational potential, learning materials in the digital future will need to free from excessive copyright constraints in order to allow teachers and students the maximum freedom to legally share, modify, and improve upon them.
We need to think of Open Educational Resources as more than just textbooks in digital form. More than just delivery mechanisms for one-way knowledge transfer. How can the OER of the future be designed and licensed to maximize participation and collaboration? Open licensing of education resources is part of the solution. What do you envision for the future of open educational resources?
See also: Jane Park’s post from last September, “Back to School: Open Textbooks Gaining in Popularity.”
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