Last spring, The Community College Humanist
reprinted an article from Inside Higher Education
describing a grant that the Foothill-De Anza Community College
District in California received from the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation to train instructors to develop on-line, or
“open access” textbooks. As an invited response, this article
will condense remarks this author recently presented at the
Eighth International Conference of MERLOT: the Multimedia
Educational Resources for Student Learning and Online Teaching
in August, 2008.
There are currently a variety of titles that can be described as
“online” or “e-textbooks.” In English, there are easily more
than 500,000, and closer to twice that number that are available
as html pages, or pdf or “downloadable” files.
These texts range in type from publisher-supplied online
versions of textbooks available in print, sometimes offering
enhanced features, to texts available exclusively on line; to
texts authored or edited by instructors available in on-line
form; to texts co-authored by instructors and students; to
open-access texts authored by entire communities through the use
of wikibooks, established in 2003 as part of Wikiuniversity.
The explosion in the availability of these resources may be
attributed to a number of contemporary trends, from the
expansion of the internet itself, the declining cost of access
to such technology and the increasing number of individuals
comfortable making use of it. One factor, however, stands out
in the expanding interest in e-texts: the realization among
higher education faculty and text book publishers that e-texts
maybe in the best interests of students. Although many of these
texts are still being offered in a for-profit setting by such
companies as Flat World Knowledge,
over 1,200 instructors across the United States have expressed
support for on-line texts in an effort to “Make Textbooks
Affordable,” an initiative supported by Student Public Interest
Groups that is seen as favorable to college students and their
families, who struggle with the soaring cost of printed texts.
The “Make Textbooks Affordable” movement pushes back at
efforts some publishers have made to offer digital versions of
their print texts only to maintain their revenues. For-profit
e-texts may be offered at an ostensible discount, but no real
savings to students who have to pay to download and print out
the texts, and then cannot resell them as they would a print
version. The Federal Government and some states—particularly the
state of California—are considering legislation that would seek
to control the rising price of college textbooks
through a
variety of alternatives
including e-textbooks. In
August of 2008 two laws were passed relating to college
textbooks: the Federal "College Textbook Affordability Act" and
the "NY State Textbook Access Act". These measures "encourage
all faculty, students, administrators, institutions of higher
education, bookstores, distributors, and publishers to work
together to identify ways to decrease the cost of college
textbooks and supplemental materials for students while
supporting the academic freedom of faculty members to select
high quality course materials for students." The effective
dates are July 1, 2009 for New York State law and July 1, 2010
for the Federal law . Amongst possible responses would
be faculty-authored textbooks and e-textbooks.
Many instructors, including this author, would moreover argue
that e-texts—particularly open-access texts-- can be useful to
students with varied learning styles and a predisposition to
respond positively to visually-presented information. Over many
years of teaching online, this author has followed the Open
Access model for publication, making all work and texts
available to students at no additional cost via the internet.
In addition to the “practical” Learner-Centered advantages of
such open-access, online texts used in this instructor’s
philosophy courses allow both students and faculty to take
advantage of a new approach in textbook writing: collaborative
authorship. In such a model, faculty members organize and
author a text that may include
works of past and present philosophers as well as
interpretations supplied by the instructor, but students, users,
and other readers supply critiques and suggestions that the
faculty author immediately integrates into the text through an
ongoing revision process. In some cases, the instructor may
even invite students to write portions of the text—effectively
revising it so that fellow students can profit from peer
interpretations of assigned readings, from original
philosophical texts to interpretative literature, as well as
peer recommendations and references to existing on-line learner
resources.
Collaborative models of text authorship capitalize
on the internet culture familiar to many students coming of age
over the last two decades, for whom internet communication is a
constant, interactive experience. Students gain a greater sense
of ownership and engagement in the learning process, in which
even an assigned textbook can be modified through collaboration
with the instructor. Instructors are, meanwhile, able to
capitalize upon the multi-media capacities of the internet.
There can be disadvantages to such an approach. Some students
are infelicitously prodded past the comfortable world of pages
and highlighters, while others crave the bells and whistles of
electronic learning as entertainment, rather than education.
Faculty can be held to a time-consuming schedule of website
maintenance. A full comparison of learning outcomes when
electronic texts are used instead of traditional texts has yet
to be made, and such a study would be valuable. Yet, based upon
the personal experience of this instructor, it seems like the
rewards of such a system can often be as substantial, or
greater, than those an instructor might find in a traditional,
text-based, talk-and-chalk classroom. The world has changed
since the internet and so has publication and ideas of
authorship. What is possible now was unimagined ten years ago,
and one can only guess at what might be possible ten years
hence. For now, however, instructors can find new, exciting
opportunities in new mechanisms for gathering and presenting
text to their students via technology.