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Viewpoint: The Economic Case for Creative Commons Textbooks
10/4/2005
For its part, the UKOU may see a partnership with OpenTextbook to be in its long-term interest. For starters, the coalition would be covering a large percentage of the UKOU's current operating costs (around 40 percent). Of course, some in the UKOU may believe that they would be giving up a strategic asset by placing their content in the creative commons. However, if the UKOU chooses not to partner with the coalition, the coalition may find another partner with similar capabilities. In which case, the UKOU may not only lose the competitive advantage it has now with its proprietary content, but it would also miss out on the revenue stream offered by the coalition. On a more positive note, the goal of providing low cost (virtually free), high quality learning resources to the world would seem to align well with the overall mission of an open university.
In addition to saving money, OpenTextbook's objective would also be to give faculty the freedom to customize creative commons content, and use it as a substitute for mass-produced commercial textbooks. It is also possible for campuses to encourage instructors to use open textbook content by providing faculty stipends as well as paid student and staff support to help customize course content. Some schools might support these costs by establishing a course material customization fee that could be far less than the current cost of commercial textbooks.
To the extent faculty choose to substitute OpenTextbook content, the cost savings for students could be substantial. Even when allowing for the extra expense of customized content, course materials could be substantially less expensive than the traditional textbook model.
Unlike MIT's Open Courseware initiative, this approach focuses on content for the big introductory courses that account for a large percentage of student eyeballs and a substantial portion of the textbook market. To put this in perspective, at Berkeley approximately 120 courses represent nearly half of the undergraduate enrollment.
According to our discussions with faculty, we find that a fair number of those who teach large introductory courses would be willing and able to substitute open content for the commercial textbooks currently in use, especially if the university could support their need to customize the content.
Some argue that faculty might be resistant to losing the potential revenue from authoring textbooks. Our initial findings are that only a very small percentage of faculty actually write textbooks. We also find that of this number only a small percentage report that they make a significant amount of money from their textbooks. On the other hand, we find that faculty who select textbooks for large survey courses are interested in the money that would be generated from a course material customization fee.
For discussion purposes, here is an outline of how a residential university could establish a course material fee to pay for commercial textbooks and/or to pay to customize the OpenTextbook content.
1. Identify 100 target courses (e.g. 100 large courses that use textbooks and that map out well to the course material provided by the OpenTextbook consortium).
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