anyone around the world.
Over the last decade the technical, legal, and social puzzle pieces have come
together so that anyone, anywhere can
now author, assemble, customize, distribute, have reviewed, and publish
their own textbook in very little time
and at zero or very low cost. The key enablers are:
˲Technologies like the Internet,
which enables virtually free digital content distribution; XML, which turns
a monolithic textbook into a rapidly
reconfigurable construction of small,
reusable “modules,” much as building
with Lego blocks; Web 2.0 tools like wikis and semantic tagging systems, which
enable real-time distributed global collaboration; advanced visualization and
graphics tools, which enable immersive
simulation environments; and print-on-demand systems, which enable the production of inexpensive paper books for
those who prefer or need them.
˲ Open copyright licenses like the
Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation licenses, which turn once
closed and static educational materials
into living objects that can be continuously developed, remixed, and maintained by a worldwide community of
authors and editors.
Several OER projects are already attracting millions of users per month (as
of July 2008). Some, like the MIT Open-CourseWare project ( mit.edu/ocw) and
its OCW consortium (ocwconsortium.
org), are top-down organized institutional repositories that showcase their institutions’ curricula. Others, like Connexions ( cnx.org), are grassroots organized
and encourage contributions from all
comers. Still others, like the Open University’s OpenLearn project (openlearn.
open.ac.uk), combine aspects of both.
Wikipedia ( wikipedia.org) is regularly
referenced by students, teachers, and
faculty and is increasingly used directly
as a learning tool. A consortium of community colleges throughout California
and around the U.S. is developing a suite
of free, open textbooks. 2 Governments
like Vietnam’s are committing to OERs
to help reinvent their educational systems ( vocw.vn). Professional societies
like the IEEE are getting involved as a
way to bolster their global educational
outreach ( ieeecnx.org). And the Student PIRGS Open Textbooks campaign
( maketextbooksaffordable.org) is work-
ing to raise awareness of both textbook
costs and this new avenue to reduce
them. As a sign of the maturation of the
movement, delegates from around the
world met in Cape Town, South Africa
to develop the eponymous Declaration
that was officially released in January
2008 and has already garnered signatures from more than 1,600 individuals
and 165 organizations to date (see cape-towndeclaration.org).
free and open
are Just the Beginning
The most exciting thing about OERs is
that free access is just the beginning.
OERs will increasingly blur the lines
between courses, grade levels, labs, and
textbooks, turning the current textbook
production pipeline into a vast dynamic knowledge ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse, and
improvement. OERs also promise to
provide each child with his or her own
textbook that’s tailored to the student’s
background and learning style (not “off
the rack” as they are today) and to the
institution’s goals.
OERs enable the development of
tighter feedback loops that immerse
students in interactive learning environments and couple learning outcomes
more directly into textbook development and improvement. A key online
ingredient will be “Web 3.0/Semantic
Web” technologies based on natural
language processing, data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence,
and semantic markup languages like
MathML, MusicXML, and CML (
Chemical Markup Language). The result will
be “textbooks” that not only deliver
open content to students but also moni-
the buzz surrounding
the high cost, limited
access, static
nature, and often
low quality of the
world’s textbooks has
reached a crescendo.
tor their interactions with them, analyze those interactions, and then send
rich feedback to the student about their
learning, as well as to the communities
of curriculum builders, authors, and
instructors to drive iterative improvement of the learning materials. An early
example that currently focuses more on
student feedback than continuous iterative content improvement is Carnegie
Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative ( cmu.edu/oli).
free and open as a Business model
OERs are not at odds with the for-profit
world. Indeed, we contend that the new
development and distribution models
promoted by the OER movement represent the natural and inevitable evolution
of the educational publishing industry
in a way that parallels the evolution of
the software industry (the now-main-stream Linux, Apache, and Firefox), the
music industry (Radiohead’s recent “pay
what you like” digital album download),
and the scholarly publishing industry
(the U.S. government’s recent mandating of free online access to all journal
articles stemming from NIH-funded research). The key enabler in all of these is
free Internet-based digital distribution.
Chris Anderson, in his Wired article
“Free: Why $0.00 is the Future of Business,” argues that while free was once a
marketing gimmick, it is now emerging
as a full-fledged economic model.
This economy provides many avenues for financially sustaining myriad
different OER projects. Just as for-profit
companies like Red Hat, IBM, Oracle,
and others charge customers for the value they add to open source software and
then in turn give back to the open source
community through direct financial
support, programming personnel, and
free marketing, value-adding for-profit
organizations are emerging in the OER
space. For example, non-profit Connexions’ partnership with for-profit QOOP
( qoop.com) enables the production of
print-on-demand paper textbooks that
sell for a fraction of the price of a conventional commercial publisher ($20
for a 300-page engineering textbook in
regular use at Rice University; $29 for a
500-page statistics textbook in use at a
number of California community colleges starting in fall 2008). A three-way
revenue-sharing arrangement benefits
QOOP, Connexions, and the author (if
