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Books Education The Almighty Buck

University of Minnesota Launches Review Project For Open Textbooks 133

New submitter Durinia writes "Minnesota Public Radio is running a story about the University of Minnesota's Open Textbooks project. The goal of the project is to solicit reviews of college-level open source textbooks and collect those that pass muster onto their website. The project will focus first on high-volume introductory classes such as those for Math and Biology, because as David Ernst, director of the project, states in the interview: 'You know the world doesn't need another $150 Algebra One book. Algebra One hasn't changed for centuries, probably.'" Requirements for inclusion include: Open licensing (Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike), complete content (no glorified collections of lecture notes), applicability outside of the author's institution, and print availability.
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University of Minnesota Launches Review Project For Open Textbooks

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  • Well, good. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ShakaUVM ( 157947 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @04:10AM (#39780049) Homepage Journal

    I was talking with a history professor (rljensen) the other day, and he said that free textbook ebooks would never catch on because, quote, "They're all terrible. And if they weren't terrible, they'd be selling them."

    Hopefully sites like this will not only prove him wrong, but bring education, world-wide, to the next level.

    • Re:Well, good. (Score:4, Informative)

      by cheesybagel ( 670288 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @05:31AM (#39780209)
      Uh, I already read stuff like The Prince from Project Guttenberg and it wasn't terrible at all. There is so much literature from the XIXth century or before to read that you would be hard pressed to read it all. Of course they do not sell because they do not cost anything duh.
      • Re:Well, good. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @08:22AM (#39780985) Homepage Journal

        There's historical works, and then there are works meant to be studied and absorbed by students of this century. Yes, you and I would have no trouble at all with an Algebra book written in 1975, laugh at some of the rather dated soviet russia cartoons explaining parabolic arcs, and probably pass the state standardized test as a result, but how well can you comprehend the Harvard 1899 Entrance Exam [nytimes.com] at a glance?
         
        It takes considerable skill and effort to write a text for the appropriate age group, make it engaging, easy to read, yet cover all the material required without losing the 50th percentile students who are struggling to pass so they can stay on the football team (or insert stereotype here).
         
        Tools that modern students can relate to aren't simply slapped together in an afternoon, and require a serious editorial staff.

        • C'mon, you're pretending that current and past textbooks "engage" students and contain content "students can relate to", thus unnecessarily raising the bar for open texts. Truthfully, most modern textbooks suck. Their selling point is that they have great typesetting and pretty diagrams. One publisher I talked to wanted us to use a newer edition of a geometry text because the figures were in color (but black and white in the older edition). It's hard to take these people seriously. Anyway, it's a zilli
        • by Chryana ( 708485 )

          Not only that, but I would like to add that I do not think personally that the few books I have read from project Gutenberg are suitable for educational use... I don't want to slap the project Gutenberg, I like what they do, but the few books I got from their website (mostly French literature) were shock full of spelling mistakes, probably caused by faults in OCR recognition. Maybe schools could run classes where students would have to fix a few chapters during their semester and give back the output of the

      • by azalin ( 67640 )
        That's because their copyright expired and everybody including P.G. is allowed to reproduce them. There are also many commercial reprints available.
        Machiavelli still sells quite well even though it is public domain (or were you talking of another prince?)
    • A lot of supposedly intelligent people who should really know better conflate high price with high quality.

      • by azalin ( 67640 )
        I'm pretty sure there are groups that would happily provide you with free biology textbooks. Not only free of charge but also free of evolution and the other blasphemous stuff.
        • We're seeing groups of instructors come together to create more and more textbooks. They're the people most qualified, a subset of them anyhow.

    • Re:Well, good. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @07:28AM (#39780635) Homepage

      Everybody should read this [textbookleague.org] before commenting on whether school text books are any good...

      • excellent, now I'm absolutely convinced that I must read Feynman's book.

        • That particular story is from: "What do you care what other people think?"

          But yeah, read ANYTHING by Feynman. You'll be a better person afterwards.

    • by ledow ( 319597 )

      It's a short-sighted response, certainly.

      They won't catch on because there are still THOUSANDS of universities across the world and each one serves the end-products of hundreds of other, smaller schools. And yet, every school you go into has a different set of books, every teacher uses different books to teach from, and every one has a different idea about which is the best book.

      So collating that into a single resource that, what? You expect everyone in the world (or a significant majority of people ANYWH

      • > you expect everyone in the world to just pick up and use as the sole source for everything on a particular topic

        You want to tell that to the thiests? :)

        It is absolutely *idiotic* to waste human effort duplicating the same thing. *HOW* many fricken textbooks do you _really_ need on any one subject?? More then 10 is just pure greed.

        The biggest flaw of capitalism is that it encourages people to waste their lives duplicating goods and promotes the mindless archaic concept of competition instead of reward

      • There's a thousand Algebra books because there are a thousand times that number of teachers and all have their own preferences. Throughout school and university, I never viewed a book as anything more than a recommendation and I was forced to buy precisely ONE book (and that because the teacher set exercises by page number, which is nothing to do with the book itself - but it does make you wonder who got the back-hander).

        You were forced to buy one book? That means you were given the responsibility for buying books -- lucky you. I think you'll find that a great many teachers go their entire careers without ever getting a say on the books they use in class.

        I think the biggest advantage of this project will turn out to be not the price, as everyone would expect, but the academic rigour in the review process. Given the horror stories floating around about the poor standards of review boards for high school textbooks, I can o

    • Re:Well, good. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SecurityGuy ( 217807 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @08:27AM (#39781023)

      Maybe you should have talked to a future professor. :)

      People might have said the same thing about software. Plenty still do, but free software does quite well these days. Some of it is terrible. Some of it is spectacularly good. The bottom line is enough of it is good enough.

      This also ties in with a story last week or so about Florida (I think) not wanting to be bothered with correcting their tests where students were directed to pick the right answer out of four, but in some cases three of them were technically correct. The stuff we pay good money for isn't very good, either.

    • by srobert ( 4099 )

      And was he by chance an author of a history text that was required for the course? I took a chemistry class once where the $200 text was written by six professors, one of whom was teaching the course. On the other end, I also had a math professor who confessed that our 400 page calculus text was a rip-off. He stated that nothing about calculus had changed for decades and a 100 pages would have been more than enough to cover the topic. Unfortunately the choice of text was not up to him.

    • What's funny/sad is the inanity of that professor's statement. Is that representative of educators at-large?

      I mean, I don't have ANY problem paying for textbooks. People that write and edit those things need to live.

      But paying several times the market price for a comparably-sized book, especially when the bulk of that book is regurgitated content functionally identical to what's been produced in the previous 12 editions?

    • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      I was talking with a history professor (rljensen) the other day, and he said that free textbook ebooks would never catch on because, quote, "They're all terrible. And if they weren't terrible, they'd be selling them."

      Hopefully sites like this will not only prove him wrong, but bring education, world-wide, to the next level.

      you should have pointed out that there are plenty of people willing to sell those free books to people who are stupid enough to buy them! (appstores are full of such stuff!!)

    • When I was in university, I used books written by the professor teaching the course itself. That happened with 3 different professors.

      One of them would let us have the .PS file of his book and print it out ourselves (actually, many of us had access to his LaTeX files). A second required us to buy his book or check it out of the library. The third guy was a very senior man, who had already been legally retired but couldn't care less and still taught all sorts of Analysis courses (mostly functional analysis).

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Here we go again, the pirates are at it again!
    Do you know the enormity of the lost revenue for publishing/printing companies when all ancient knowledge would go open source?

    With a lot of struggle, the publishers managed to make wikipedia sound untrustworthy, but now a real university is going to review textbooks. It's the end of the industry.

  • Everybody knows that if you don't open your textbook, it is easier to return as new at the end of the semester. This is just a ploy by the bookstore to foil my plot to save money.
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @06:53AM (#39780463)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It helps the people who currently have to pay $150 for an Algebra book. How is this even in question?

      Let's look at this for a moment: Say there's 100 people in an Intro Algebra class. That's $15,000. Knock off $1000 for paper and ink. That's enough money to write a decent first draft. Let's say the book is used twice. That's enough to edit it. Everything after that is waste.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

          150 bucks buys a lot of potatos, if you don't know it you never were shoe stringing it as a student and what about those shitty schools? it's not like they wouldn't need good books on the cheap.

          here's some ascii art:
          +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3 +3

          that's 5 years, 4500$. a good chunk of money regardless if you spent 38k in 4 years or not.

          the biggest racket is when the professor makes a separate business from his position by hocking books - either for straight up cash, booze or goodwill from someone wh

        • > Maybe a 3% savings on your total school bill? Who cares.

          Creating value equal to 3% of the general education outlay, scaled to the English speaking world, would be kind of a big deal. Particularly when it also creates open courseware that can be freely used by non-enrolled students as a happy externality.
           

        • Astroturfing of a book publisher. Obviously.

  • This kind of peer review is absolutely the most important missing part of the Open Text puzzle. One of the things text publishers still have going for them is the stamp of approval they give simply by publishing a text.
    • Because no one could ever review an open textbook.

      • I think you (and your respondents) are missing the meaning of "peer review". We're not talking about Amazon reviews here ("The font's ugly, lolz") but about academic scrutiny. It's "a peer review" not "a review".
        • Again, how much harder is it to peer review an open textbook than a traditional textbook?

          • It's not -- it just needs to be paid for. Peer review is effectively part of the creative process, so people aren't going to do it for free for a commercial publisher. And people will be particularly unlikely to do it for free if it's going to be rewritten every three years, resulting in the need for re-reviewing.

            Of course, money corrupts, and there will be pressure on paid reviewers to make sure they don't sink a project. Free reviewers can be much more forthright.

            I don't see the open textbook model rep

            • And people will be particularly unlikely to do it for free if it's going to be rewritten every three years, resulting in the need for re-reviewing.

              While specialized texts may need to be rewritten every three years, I'm not sure that would apply to other works.

              • While specialized texts may need to be rewritten every three years, I'm not sure that would apply to other works.

                That's my point -- non-specialist texts don't need to be rewritten every three years, but at present they are. It seems to be specifically designed to stifle the trade in second-hand texts. This wasn't a problem when I studied in Edinburgh, because the lecturers set their own exercises, and were therefore happy to list both old and new edition section numbers in further reading, but I hear a lot of people complaining that under the US system, you need the correct edition of a textbook to follow a course.

  • Man, your records don't back far enough for me, it seems. ;-)

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