From Textbooks to Open Courseware

Instead of transferring our public education funds to the "old model" publishing industry (e.g. textbooks), the government should fund open courseware initiatives which develop world–class, cost–effective, freely–accessible learning materials.

The amount of money that the government spends on buying many copies of the same copyrighted work — for students, teachers, and educational institutions across the whole country — could instead be used to purchase the whole rights to the work and turn them over to the public, so they can be available for the learning needs of all Canadians.

Open courseware can be continuously modified and updated by our country's best educators and professionals. New revisions would be instantly available to learners, to view online or to print copies when it's actually useful to do so. The works could be transformed into formats that are supportive of persons with accessibility needs or learning disabilities. And the works would be available for translation into both official languages.

Canada would become a world leader in a new era of digital education.

Comments

matt.hcg — 2010–05–11 14:15:32 EDT wrote

I can't agree with you more. We need to create or chose a digital format for all
course material. This should be a global standard too.

infzy — 2010–05–12 00:45:06 EDT wrote

I should clarify…. I'm not advocating for the federal (or necessarily even provincial) government to task itself with creating courseware materials. Just that it should fund these initiatives across Canadian education institutions, under the premise that the works are freed to the public. The government could collaborate these developments and promote the ones which are successful. A longer–term strategy would be to phase out textbook funding (where applicable) and move towards Internet–based distribution of learning materials (even if it's to local schools where they can have the works printed, if it suits their learning style better — leave implementation decisions under local control!)

KyleAThompson — 2010–06–16 00:22:36 EDT wrote

Open courseware would benefit Canadians in many ways:

1. It would lower the very considerable cost of textbooks, as well as eliminating the downloading of costs upon students under current ad hoc Open Courseware arrangements
2. It would allow for the dissemination of Open Courseware across Canadian universities, promoting a universally high standard of education.
3. It could be made available for use in the upper levels of the secondary education system, providing up–to–date information to a greater number of Canadians, and reducing secondary school operating costs.
4. Open Courseware Centers could be set up in Canadian universities to assist the professoriate in assembling and editing open courseware. This would lower the burden of work upon the professoriate — allowing them to focus on research and teaching, as well as improve Open Courseware quality. This would likely increase overall university productivity and lower overall university costs.

SimonRuggier — 2010–07–03 01:39:22 EDT wrote

My favorite course material when studying tends to be the free course notes that some professors use, because they are tailored to the courses they are used with, and therefore contain only information that is part of the course curriculum, largely in the order that it was taught. Commercially published textbooks are expensive, the editions are incremented regularly just to screw students, and they're terrible for reference because they tend to be far less concise, containing much more material to search through when one is looking for something specific.

Another key point in favour of OCW style publishing is that it is far more economically efficient to fund the creation of educational material directly instead enabling publishers to extort money from students year after year with each new edition of their textbooks, as happens now.