Saylor Foundation Awards Prizes To Free College Textbooks

Brad Lucier writes "The Saylor Foundation has a vision: Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education. To that end, they've announced the first winners in their Open Textbook Challenge: Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book. See the blog entries and the accompanying press releases for details. The second wave of submissions will be accepted until May 31, 2012."

It would be nice, admittedly

[elrous0]

Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education.

I love that vision, but I don't think Houghton Mifflin and all those universities that make money off their bookstores are going down without a fight.

BTW, on a related note, has anyone else noticed that a lot of universities now are requiring students to not only buy books, but also access codes to course websites? My niece is taking undergrad classes and had to spend about $200 extra on these course codes during her first semester to access MANDATORY class websites (one of them was "MyMathPlus," I remember). Seems like a pretty sleazy way to make even more money for someone.

Re:It would be nice, admittedly

[avandesande]

Time for someone to start an open source college/university

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[Samantha Wright]

It's interesting how you're saying this is not good at a large-sum, high-scale level, but in general Slashdotters think that doing it on a smaller scale, with donations to musicians, is a good one. As an IP discussion: when does the 'non-guaranteed pay' model work and when is it toxic?

Re:Free?

[vlm]

Free textbooks?! This is madness; pure socialist madness. What's next? Free college tuition?

Maybe we should steal the model of tuition funding and research funding, for textbook funding. If everyone in our culture benefits from freely available textbooks, either directly or indirectly, have the govt underwrite them and release them under a completely open license. You wanna sell paper textbooks? Fine, but you better sell them cheaper than a laserprinter cost per page. Don't like the govt issue? Fine, its CC license, so replace the sections you don't like with your own.

One killer problem is $20K is way too little to develop a completely new 400 page textbook. Its gonna take at least 1, maybe 2 years of fairly concentrated effort. And $20K/yr is probably way too much to keep it up to date. The solution is not to award money for new books but to award money to pull a currently project gutenberg free public domain book up to current standards.

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[semi-extrinsic]

The race to the bottom is complete, in the sense that these books were being given away free of charge long before any reward was offered. This is also the case with many more text books, and not only in undergraduate education. See e.g. Mark Srednicki's Quantum Field Theory book: http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/qft.html [ucsb.edu]

Sure, it's a preprint version with a few minor errors, but it was immensely useful when I took QFT 1. (Tony Zee's QFT in a Nutshell was the approved course book, and that is a good book as well, but completely opposite of Srednicki in terms of how detailed calculations they do, etc., so it was useful to have both.)

Re:It would be nice, admittedly

[donaggie03]

We require MML for our algebra classes. The upside is that the textbook is recommended, so the student is free to choose their own algebra text, new or used, current edition or old, etc). So the total cost to the student is less than $50 for the code, plus however much they want to spend at half price books or online for any decent algebra textbook (international editions are godawful cheap). That's usually far cheaper than the cost of a new textbook, even without the access code.

I agree though; forcing the student to pay for the access code AND a new textbook is just being greedy/lazy.