October 24, 2011

This week I’ll be attending and speaking at an interesting conference on open education resources taking place in Park City, Utah: http://openedconference.org/2011/

Here’s the title and summary of my talk; after the conference, I’ll post the talk itself along with any comments from the discussion that follows.

Is Academic Recognition Sufficient Incentive to Create Open Source Courseware?

One central assumption in the OER movement is that high quality content can be developed without necessarily introducing a financial motivation for academic authors to produce such materials. Such is the view, for example, of the Connexions Consortium. Academic recognition and the ability to establish a professional reputation, the reasoning goes, are sufficient motivation among many faculty to consider contributing to the rapidly expanding pool of OER texts. Some academic institutions, moreover, will consider OER publications in the tenure review process, providing perhaps the greatest incentive to produce first rate work without additional compensation.

To be sure, there are notable exceptions to this OER content model. For-profit companies, such as Flatworld Knowledge and Textbook Media, and non-profit (foundations, government) sponsorship of OER production, provide financial incentives. The for-profit companies, however, are far more restrictive on the use and distribution of their content than is a truly open source platform like Connexions. Non-profit sponsorship of OER materials is in an early stage and it is still unclear the level of sustained backing for such projects. For the entirely unfettered OER content, then, the OER movement assumes that high quality content will be produced much like crowd-sourced projects, such as Wikipedia, with the added difference that primary authors would be recognized as such.

I would like to suggest that this is a mistaken assumption and that the OER movement would benefit by conceiving of an OER content development model that provides for ongoing compensation to its authors while also adhering to the most open form of the Creative Commons license. What’s needed, in other words, is a Connexions Consortium with a revenue component. The organization might still be non-profit but not the authors who are creating the works. The OER movement holds great promise but in order for it to be a sustainable alternative to traditional sources it must insist on the highest possible standards for academic content. In order to do this, it must incent the greatest number of potential contributors to participate.
The “recognition” model certainly inspires some authors to contribute, but if you are an author already with tenure or at an institution that does not consider introductory textbooks for tenure review, then you have to be highly motivated to contribute to the public good as an end in itself.  Of course there are faculty committed to the project in this way but they are a very small group of the available talent. As great as the potential is for OER, it faces two integrally linked obstacles: convincing prospective faculty adopters of these materials on the grounds that they are equal to or better than those from traditional sources, and convincing first-rate faculty authors to produce it. The former, of course, depends on the latter. And unless the OER model is sufficiently broadened to include a financial incentive that would appeal to a large portion of prospective faculty authors, the movement will not realize its extraordinary potential.



The growth of the digital distribution of course materials should be thought of as a development that’s quite distinct from the emergence of digital content as such.  Physical textbooks, after all, begin as digital documents, just as, for instance, a faculty classroom handout might start off as a Word document. And, for the most part, the textbooks that traditional educational publishers offer as “eTextbooks” are really just PDFs of the original production files intended for print production. On the flip side, publishers of digital materials—that is, of materials that are produced initially with the intention that they be viewed on a screen—typically also have a print capability. Our newest partner, Flatworld Knowledge, for instance is an eTextbook publisher that also offers physical books.

The most salient example of this point, however, is the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. OER, a definition of which can be found here, is one of the most exciting areas in digital course materials; to my mind, it will occupy an increasingly large position among these materials and has the prospect of shaping the industry. And yet, for all their promise, the question of whether students and faculty use these materials as digital files or as physical books is, to their producers and supporters, fairly irrelevant. The Connexions Consortium, the leading repository for OER materials, reports that about 50% of students who use these materials request print copies—a fact that the Consortium reports with indifference, since its sole measure of success is the number of people actually using the materials, regardless of their form.

What’s interesting about the move to digital distribution, then, is not whether the materials are actually read as digital or physical documents but rather, to borrow an old-fashioned term, whether this heralds a new means of production. As the incipient rise of the OER movement has already shown, digital distribution has the capacity to change the economics of the industry. Foundations, states, and the federal government now well understand that a dollar contributed toward the production of course materials can save $10, $20, or $50 on the purchase costs of these materials through traditional means. This could make the textbook market far more efficient than it is today and save students and government loan programs billions of dollars. The rise of digital distribution in the form of OER, much more so than digital classroom content itself, is emerging as the most productively disruptive force in the textbook industry.

This is not to minimize, of course, the production of new forms of digital content. There are quite a number of exciting developments of materials that are native to and destined only for the digital medium, and that have no analog as physical texts. App-specific texts for tablets, such as those from Kno and Inkling, are the principal example of this. But their source materials, derived through the traditional production process, still leave them encumbered with the costs and copyright issues of the pre-digital days. It’s likely that, as in so many other areas of technological advances, a new distribution means is creating the possibility of rethinking the entire way (economically, organizationally, legally) that course content is produced. And once this new basis is laid, we can and should expect fantastic new forms of classroom content to emerge.

To contemplate where the market for digital classroom materials may be heading, it’s helpful to consider the recent history of trade books.  As Jason Epstein has recently recounted, the main revenue and profitability for traditional trade publishing—general consumer and professional titles—had long been centered on backlists: for while these older titles individually may not have sold many copies at any given time, the vastness of the backlist titles assured publishers of a steady stream of revenue from the collection in aggregate.

Trade publishing, then, to use a more fashionable term, was largely a “long tail” business. As Epstein points out, this changed rapidly beginning in the 1980s as bookstore chains pushed out small bookshops. The bookstore chains are discounters and often occupy expensive suburban real estate (such as shopping malls). Unlike the small bookshops that they replaced, the chains’ business depends on moving books in high volume. And so while publishers were preoccupied with the tail, the dominant booksellers focused on the head, that is, the bestsellers.  Publishers have likewise adjusted their business to accommodate this new reality and now we find that a very large portion of revenue from the major publishers comes from a relatively small group of hit titles.

Internet sales were, of course, non-existent in the 1980’s and hardly noticeable through the 1990’s when these dramatic shifts took place. Yet it is crucial to recognize, as Epstein does, that online book retailers—beginning with, but no longer limited to, Amazon—stepped in to fill the role of selling the backlist catalog. The vastness of the online retailers’ catalogue (our own includes more than six million titles) meant that publishers would once again have viable channels for backlists. To be sure, the early days of ecommerce still could not return publishing back to the pre-1980’s, if only because, even today, it accounts for a minority of book sales.

The educational publishing business is a crystalline form of the trade publishing industry: while trade book publishing has consolidated and the most profitable titles have narrowed, this is even more strongly the case in educational publishing. After consolidating in the past thirty years, the core textbook business is now dominated by five large publishing houses each competing for adoption of high volume introductory classes of the most popular subjects, with a special focus on the high enrollment institutions—a competition so intense that some, for example Pearson Education, maintain two distinct imprints (Addison Wesley and Prentiss Hall, each with separate management) just so that they can always have at least two dogs in the race in the key adoptions.

Seventy five percent of the roughly 16 million college students in the US attend just 500 colleges and this is the focus of textbook publishers’ efforts. Today, their higher education business depends on the lifecycle of adoption and planned obsolescence (edition changes every two or three years, often primarily to reduce used textbook sales) in introductory classes at 500 schools.

Like trade book publishing, this transformation of educational publishing took place with little regard for ecommerce, much less for a digital “turn.”  For both trade and educational publishing, the forces that shaped them into their present form were “on the ground”—in the shopping malls and on the campuses, respectively, long before they were inscribed with the epitaph “bricks and mortar.”

Ecommerce has enabled backlists to enjoy a revival; there’s little doubt that, as a second phase, digital distribution—ebooks for the trade industry—is furthering this revival. So far, however, the effect of ecommerce on educational publishing has largely been a negative one, for it has made the used book market, rental programs, and textbook exchanges more efficient. And while this has done a lot to lower costs for students this efficiency has come at the cost of forcing publishers factor in ever-greater used book sales when pricing, and planning the production for, their own materials.

Will traditional educational publishers reinvent themselves in order to embrace the technological changes that threaten their business model? It’s certainly an opportunity open to them but the history of technology suggests otherwise. As Epstein notes, “Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motor car, and the music industry did not invent the iPod or launch iTunes.”

In Epstein’s view, “A separate, self-financed, digital industry will coexist with and over time replace many functions of the traditional [publishing] firms as the logic and the economies of digital technology increasingly assert themselves.” While it’s unlikely that traditional educational publishers will be replaced on a large scale in the near term, there are abundant opportunities emerging now for new entrants in this market and I believe that some of these—to benefit of all the members of educational institutions—will be successful.

In my next post, I will take up what this digital industry might look like for educational content. Educational institutions—its administrators, faculty, and staff—are not usually early technology adopters. In my view, however, the digital wave now upon us can fundamentally change the perceived value of the content such that considerations for budgets, academic excellence, and student demand will conspire to open an entirely new way of producing, accessing, and using classroom materials.

In a post from last year, I commented on the notion that eTextbooks have been two years away from widespread adoption for the past ten years; that there have been so many proclamations of their arrival over the past decade that one could be forgiven for greeting them with resolute indifference.

In the past year, and indeed even the last several months, there have been significant material changes in the marketplace to suggest that it’s real this time. Not least of this is the fact that in the last nine months of 2010, Apple sold about 15 million iPads and created a new category (a category, to be sure, that Apple dominates today with the iPad and iPad 2, but which may be eclipsed by Google’s own operating system, as has been the case for the smart phone market).

Today, eTextbooks still account for only about three to four percent of all textbook sales, but there’s now increasing evidence that this is changing, or could change, quickly.

The tablet category has finally convinced academic administrators and faculty to begin experimenting with fully digitally distributed materials. Among the schools that we work with, for example, a number (especially private high schools) are testing iPads with students and teachers; some are reporting encouraging results. We expect that early adopter schools will use tablet-based learning materials school-wide within 12 to 18 months.

But what are the catalyst for widespread adoption of the medium?

The availability of an appropriate digital reader, or set of readers, is a necessary but insufficient cause for a large-scale shift. There will have to be more than the equivalent of the “iPod moment,” which rapidly ushered in the age of digitally distributed music. What’s needed for digital educational materials to become dominant is a change in the perceived value of the content itself to prospective adopters, and this has at least two components.

First, the material needs to use the medium in its own right; that is, it needs to make use of the capacities that a networked environment allows—everything from the use of graphical interactivity to social learning communities. For the most part, the classroom materials available today from the major publishers are simply static digital mirror images of the print copies. This is analogous to the early days of cinema, in which the first films were single shots of theater productions. Film would have gone nowhere had it not left the stage; classroom materials will likewise have to leave behind the PDF.

Second, pricing needs to be commensurate with the medium. However much people complain about the high cost of physical textbooks, there’s an understanding that the production, printing, warehousing, and logistics associated with these materials are expensive. And, correspondingly, that a distribution platform that needs none of this would be less so. It will not do to maintain relatively small price differences between digital and print; it smacks of trying to prop up a traditional distribution system with a new one.

It could be that the major textbook publishers are up to the task in addressing both sets of issues, but history suggests otherwise. In periods of revolutionary change, such as we’re experiencing in the area of classroom materials, giants are rarely able to adapt quickly enough and they leave the field open for new, nimbler, and unencumbered entrants.

Digital technology is a leveler: the barriers that alternative providers face in the world of physical distribution will fall away in the fluid, frictionless, inventory-less world.  The rapid ascendance of tablet computing is now engendering, sequentially, the rise of a new way of using course materials. This is great news especially for students: the coming wave of classroom materials will help improve academic outcomes. The new materials make use of a broader range of pedagogical tools that were unimaginable with static texts, while at the same time increasing accessibility and therefore student use, as the cost for this access plummets.

In my next post, I will take a look at how the recent history of traditional publishing has set the stage for the turn toward digital materials.

Lastly, I’d like to alert readers of a great new blog by Jeff Cohen that you can find here.

Today marks a significant step in the evolution of the textbook market. The online retail sales of
new and used textbooks started things off in the late 1990’s and this was followed soon with the
integrated peer-to-peer marketplace in the early 2000’s; Akademos was likely the first company
to offer this (Amazon’s own version came out about six months after our launch).

For a few years now, there has been a lot of buzz about online textbook rentals. This back
to school season promises to be the most heavily marketed period for textbook rentals ever,
despite the fact that one has good reason to wonder, as people often do, whether it is cheaper
to rent or to purchase through a marketplace like TextbookX.com (especially if one takes into
account the re-sale value of a marketplace purchase).

Still, there’s little doubt that renting textbooks is a valuable alternative in many cases. But if
so, why did rental appear now when the possibility for it has existed since the beginning of
internet sales? One of the major reasons for the emergence of textbook rentals today is that,
just like marketplaces before it, this service relies on, and presupposes, the infrastructure of
online textbook sales. The extensive network of vendors who now buy and sell books directly
online form the basis of today’s online rental programs. Instead of warehousing all the books
for such a program, companies that offer this service try to connect buyers and sellers, much
as a marketplace does—but with the added step of shipping the book from the renter/consumer
rather than simply to her.

Today’s online rental programs, then, depend on mature marketplaces. Because of that,
however, two unknowns emerge: The rental service can promise to deliver the book that you’ve
ordered (according to title, ISBN, etc.) but it can’t promise to deliver a specific copy—the extent
of the highlighting, the seller’s notes about condition, and even whether the book is new or used
are all hidden from the renter. Second, and following from this, one also doesn’t know the cost
to buy that particular copy and how close in price it might be to the rental fee. The process, in
other words, is at once dependent on a network of buyers and sellers and yet remains a rather
dark pool.

In launching the first marketplace for textbook rentals, Akademos aims to introduce
transparency into the offering by showing prospective purchasers and renters the descriptions
of the actual books that they select and what the prices for the books would be as both a
purchase and as a rental, side-by-side and for all to see.  Another first.
Akademos is now the only company that offers students and schools the coverage of new,
used, rental, eBook, custom, marketplace purchase, and marketplace rental. Our goal is to
remove the cost of textbooks as an obstacle to students in their educational pursuits; a textbook
rental program is a natural next step toward achieving that.

I remember a conversation with an educational publishing executive I had ten years ago, when I first started Akademos.  At the time, I was enamored with the idea that emerging technologies allow for new ways to customize course materials. Print on demand capabilities, for instance, even back then were at a point where one could imagine each instructor becoming the editor of his or her own anthology—not simply a classroom reader but an actual paper-bound or even hard cover collection. A lot of my enthusiasm stemmed from my experience at Cornell. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently the Cornell bookstore was a pioneer in creating custom course materials (whereas I thought it was available most places). Teaching there both as a grad student and then briefly as a professor, I made good use of the service. So when I approached the publishing executive, I had a lot of excitement about what the latest technology could do in this area.

This executive, though, quickly brought some sobriety to my enthusiasm. “Custom materials,” he said, “make up perhaps 3% of class room materials. And you’d like to grow that to, say, 5% or 6%? It’s a boutique business.”  The vast majority of course materials, he argued, will remain traditional textbooks for organizational rather than technical reasons: most faculty simply want the materials pre-packaged.

I think about that conversation now because, ten years on, we are in the midst of an explosion of course content through all-digital channels. As online and hybrid (online/classroom) teaching increase, the third party resources that support them are multiplying.  Organizations such as MERLOT support this growth through peer-reviewing available academic content from online sources. And beyond just the content, faculty also have an ever-growing collection of widgets and learning “bots” to choose from.

This explosion of choices, though, presupposes that faculty are willing and able to customize the courses. If custom course materials are a “boutique” enterprise, why should we expect faculty suddenly to embrace customization through online resources and content?

Moreover, while learning resources multiply, there is another trend—one that’s been long in the making, to be sure—toward hiring part-time adjunct instructors that seems to me to be somewhat in tension with this multiplicity of content choice.

Ten years ago about half of faculty were full time—either tenured or tenure track;(in 1960 it was about 75%). Today it’s about 27%. As a Times article from earlier this year makes clear, this is a trend that has only accelerated because of the economic downturn. The vast majority of higher education teaching, then, is by adjuncts, lecturers, graduate students, and the like. They are paid by the course and often have workloads that bring them to multiple institutions in a teaching week. As result, the preparation time part time faculty have is often less than that of full timers. If there were a single reason why one ought to look dimly on custom course materials, this would be it.

While one can always debate the relative merits of part-time versus full time faculty, what’s clear is that a market shift has occurred that is no less inexorable than the rise of digital resources. A pressing question, for administrators especially, is how to negotiate these shifts in such a way that the school can benefit from the multiplicity of choice and do so in a context that fits the needs of the school.

No doubt the market will recognize these needs and it could be that the next wave of innovation in this area will focus on assimilating and returning in digestible, usable form compilations of these materials and sources—perhaps, that is, we’re on the threshold of realizing a custom course content shop where choices are not limited to a collection of imprints available from a single publisher but which is truly open to the world. A boutique, in other words, that is of quite a different order.

In a follow up post, I will discuss other ways of navigating through these issues and look at the opportunities the emerging resources create for faculty and administrators alike.

If you’re a college student or the parent of one who pays for her books, here’s a reason to celebrate with fireworks a little early: Today marks the day that the Higher Education Equal Opportunity Act goes into effect. While the federal legislation covers a range of issues associated with the costs of post secondary education, what’s particularly noteworthy is the requirement that higher ed. institutions of all kinds are required to publish course book lists (including the ISBNs) in their course catalogs and registration in order to help students and parents shop around for the best purchasing options.

Non-compliance puts in jeopardy federal funding of any type the school or its students receive, and so these institutions have scrambled right up until today’s deadline to meet the requirements. (Schools that we work with are already in compliance because our service includes an integrated course catalog and book list with all the required information).

While this important legislation is a significant boon to students and parents, one ought also to view it as a reflection on how much the textbook industry has changed recently because of the internet.

These changes started years ago and have been catalyzed by a weak economy. With about a third of students not buying books because of cost, with the cost of textbook rising for more than a decade at about twice the rate of inflation, with greater numbers of students—especially those seeking second careers—struggling to finance an education, the pressure has been building for some time. And, aided by enterprising online companies, students have taken matters into their own hands—they, and not the traditional vendors, have been driving the textbook marketplace.

And so when we think of HEOA we should really view it, as much as anything, as the triumph of alternative ways of accessing course materials—alternatives that, as such, reduce costs, make education more affordable, and facilitate pedagogy by helping to ensure that students are able to come to class with the required materials. The law is meaningful, important, therefore, because the old textbook model is broken and is quickly being replaced. Indeed, if the successes of the alternative were not so impressive, there would be little point to the law.

Amazon's Kindle DX

“E-books in college,” said Frank Lyman, EVP of eTextbook company CourseSmart, “have been 2 years away for 10 years…” That was two years ago, as reported by Inside Higher Ed. Tellingly, that article from January 2008 was entitled, “E-Textbooks—for real this time?”

While the moment wasn’t quite then either, many more people would now hold that the prospect of a widespread adoption of eTextbooks is, if not imminent, then perhaps just two years away—“for real this time.” The supporting evidence seems overwhelming. Several eReaders have since hit the market, generating significant sales—not only the Kindle, and the Kindle DX (specifically designed for newspapers and textbooks), but also Sony’s Reader and Barnes & Nobles’ Nook. The Entourage eDGe, with its dual screens (e-Ink and LCD) is a hybrid tablet/netbook designed specifically for student use. And there are a number of others either available or on their way.

But one would might excused for thinking that that these devices too will not quite inspire the digital transition. Kindles are mostly purchased by folks middle-aged or older—in fact, they’re especially popular with retirees looking to change font sizes and port around lots of novels and travel guides.

One might be so excused, that is, until Apple introduced its iPad last month. Publishers of all kinds, including the largest textbook producers—Pearson, Cengage, McGraw Hill—are lining up to add their content to the iPad. And these largest publishers are working with app maker ScrollMotion in order to make the digital texts as compelling as possible to students.

Their attractiveness to students is tied, though, as much as anything, to their relative costs (the saving they would bring over the physical texts). And that may be the rub here. Publishers (in general) are running to the iPad partly because they face nothing like the pricing pressure they do with Amazon’s Kindle. In fact, just the announcement of the iPad was enough to inspire publishers, beginning with Macmillan, to rebel against Amazon’s low pricing model and we’re now starting to see eBook prices rising, to the consternation of many readers. While this concerns popular trade books at the moment, there’s little reason to think that pricing will not be a major issue for the widespread adoption of eTextbooks. The Student PIRGs, a national student research and advocacy group, sums up the opening move on iPad based textbooks: “the iPad is cool but it won’t make textbooks affordable.”

Still, few would seriously doubt that we are nonetheless moving inexorably toward the digital distribution of classroom learn materials–we are, after all, just two years away from widespread adoption.

Welcome to a new blog about course materials in general, textbooks in particular, and the transitions currently underway in the way that faculty adopt and students purchase these materials for their classes.

As a former academic with now ten years of experience growing a successful business helping schools effectively manage such transition, I’m hopeful that this blog can provide some useful guidance in thinking through the myriad issues that educational administrators and faculty face. I hope too that interested readers will post their own thoughts and questions, and that we’ll have a lively ongoing discussion.

Textbooks, or course materials generally (in the near future we’ll need new terms for these), occupy an odd position. By virtue of their content, they are fundamental to a school’s pedagogical mission—they are the stuff of scholars to scholars (or teachers) and their students; they represent the body of ideas and information that allows one generation to pass to the next foundational knowledge of a discipline or profession. In this sense, they’re part of the “noble” profession of teaching itself. At the same time, however, this content is produced, distributed, and redistributed (in the case of used materials) through commercial enterprises whose mission and purpose are usually quite different than those of the institution. This is perhaps best illustrated by the unusual separation between the adopter of the materials (the faculty, typically) and the actual purchasers of them (usually students).

The faculty consider, as they should, a text’s content, its quality, suitability, etc., before making an adoption choice; historically, the cost of the texts, the availability of used, and so on, have been of at best a secondary importance. Students too make determinations of value, but these are much more closely associated with the cash they need to make the purchases. “Do I need all the books?” “Could I share or photocopy what I need?” And all too often students forgo these purchases altogether—millions of them do, actually, each term.

Now, of course, students have far more purchasing choices than ever. The internet has not only allowed students to buy new and used books through third parties at lower costs, but it has introduced exciting new business models, most recently rental programs and eTextbooks.There is also a general feeling that eventually eReaders or tablets will be the devices that hold a student’s entire set of course materials. And it’s all moving pretty rapidly. These will be among the first set of topics, which I’ll post soon.

This blog, then, takes as its starting point both the contents of textbooks, and the many ways that students access them now and in the future, and the frustrations (especially over costs) that are propelling many of the new models.  Discontent is the spur of change, and both are evident in not-so-equal measure regarding textbooks as we begin a new decade. What’s clear, though, is that innovation now provides some welcome relief. The challenge is to determine what makes the most sense for one’s institution. Hopefully these posts will help.