Mass Collaboration for a Better Education

I found an interesting example of mass collaboration in Wikinomics, a well-researched book whose strength is the power of its real-life anecdotes - and becomes rather dull as soon as the authors stray from said vignettes into analysis, as on page 90 when they comment on Thomas Friedman's legitimate concerns, expressed in The World is Flat, on "how individuals and companies will profit from their creations" [in an open-source environment], by "Like many critics, Friedman is not seeing the forest for the trees. He sees free software, but not the multibillion-dollar ecosystem that surrounds open source. He sees free encyclopedias, but not the rich cultural and educational opportunities that envelope a living, breathing, dynamic repository of knowledge updated by a vast self-organizing community." Oh my. Lyricism in business is always a bad sign. Only when the authors give examples does their argument begin to make sense.

Anyway, the example I have in mind is the California Open Source Textbook Project (or COSTP, page 69). According to the website, the goal is to decrease California's textbook costs, which currently represent over $400M a year, by using open licensing tools and Creative Commons licenses (or, as they call it, "some rights reserved" copyrights). The plan for COSTP is to "leverag[e] free, already-existing and widely available K-12 educational content in the public domain [and] the substantial curriculum-based intellectual capital of California's best K-12 teachers." The project, which was launched only recently, is still in its infancy stages, but you can follow the progress of the pilot on tenth-grade world history on its Wikibooks page ("the open-content textbooks collection"). The Advanced Placement World History, another wikibook on the same topic, is farther along and is available here.

A few months ago, MIT spearheaded an initiative similar to OpenCourseWare for high school students ("Highlights for High School"), but it only gathers bits and pieces from MIT's introductory curriculum and lacks coherence. Furthermore, it is also not clear that college professors are the best suited to provide guidance on the AP exams - it is easy to lose track of what material students haven't seen yet, and of the time high school teachers spend to explain a concept their college counterpart later glosses over. (An aside: if OCW really aimed at being helpful, it would allow users to download the set of lecture notes, on the courses where they are posted, in a single pdf file rather than twenty little files - one for each lecture - but now at least it allows users to download one zip file with all the smaller files in it. That's progress.)

I don't know the cost of high school textbooks, but one thing that has always amazed me is the eye-popping cost of college textbooks in the United States - maybe we'll have open-source ones too in a few years. (Regarding the affordability of college education, I encourage anyone interested to read NPR's "Paving a path for poor students' college dreams" and "Community college only path to higher ed for many". Cheap textbooks should certainly play a role in helping students attend college. "Paving a path..." also raises valid questions on the ascent of merit-based aid at the expense of need-based aid in the race for better rankings, but that will be for another post.) Either way, anything that helps disseminate high-quality teaching materials in an accessible, affordable manner counts as a good thing - to students or anyone who wants to learn without paying hundreds of dollars for books.

Comments

[Ilya K.]

YES about saying NO to expensive textbooks. I know Prof. Eisenberg used Grinstead & Snell's intro to probability to teach Math 310, which was free, yet comprehensive.

I believe my economics professor stated that the prices certainly weren't the result of expensive paper or the hardcover material. I myself wonder why so many textbooks are so sickeningly expensive. Maybe there needs to be a price ceiling of $30 or something on them or maybe professors should have to be responsible for writing up their own "class texts".