California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation

https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/34288

by drostie • 14 years ago

283 73 14 years ago

creativecommons.org

rorrr• 14 years ago

Fucking finally.

I hope the rest of the country follows.

p.s.

It's pretty sad this obvious move is considered "groundbreaking". All it took is a pair of balls.

damirkotoric• 14 years ago

I love his response in the video. Seems like it took the guy only a couple of seconds to realise how much sense the idea makes. He would have done his research prior to the meeting but his attitude toward it is great.

jonny_eh• 14 years ago

So which textbooks will this include? Do they need the publishers' permission to redistribute their existing work under a CC BY license?

waterlesscloud3• 14 years ago

Quoting from the linked text of SB 1052

"The council shall establish a competitive request for proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties may apply for funds to produce the 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials in 2013.

Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to limit or restrict the council from developing or acquiring, either for a charge or for free, existing high-quality digital open source textbooks and related materials that otherwise meet the specifications of this section."

So it looks like next year there will be a RFP for funds for developing the texts (assuming they don't use existing digital open source texts). And anyone (including folks here) could apply to that RFP, though I assume people used to the process will have a distinct advantage.

An earlier section of the bill establishes a committee to determine exactly which 50 books will be developed.

waterlesscloud3• 14 years ago

I am hugely in favor of this move. It's a tiny first step to decreasing the cost of education and further opening educational access to truly everyone.

But, if I may indulge in a cynical moment, I note that one of the touted benefits of CC-BY in the article is that commercial companies can develop tutorials from these tax-payer funded books.

What if the tutorials then become the required texts? Are there any safeguards from this? If not, it's inevitable that it will be done.

eric-hu• 14 years ago

As I see it, commercial companies already develop learning tools--high school and college textbooks. These coursebooks are already required reading in classes. There already exist companies that profit off of universal education.

That's not to say that there should be, but I think the situation will get better. With higher quality free educational texts, the for-profit companies will have to produce much better material or lower their prices to keep sales up. Either way, it seems like the learners benefit.

rmc3• 14 years ago

It would be better if they choose CC-BY-SA, which requires that derived works be under that licence aswell.

(Neither CC-BY nor CC-BY-SA block commerical use, and that's fine IMO)

duskwuff• 14 years ago

Indeed, one example of commercial use that's possible (and desirable!) under these licenses is printing the books and selling them. Blocking that would make it harder to get the books into students' hands.

simonbrown• 14 years ago

If it was share-alike, why would companies develop tutorials, since they could be re-published by other companies at close to cost price?

wmf2• 14 years ago

Yeah, this is the BSD vs. GPL issue. If you want to ship BSD/Apache-licensed stuff you better have good marketing so that someone doesn't use your own software to crush you (BSDI-style, if anyone remembers that).

Evbn5• 14 years ago

Government has no profit motive and so no concern of being crushed by commercial competition.

justindocanto• 14 years ago

Curious if any fellow HN'ers know when these textbooks would be made available. Dont see any info on the linked page.

maxerickson• 14 years ago

One of the bills establishes a committee to select the courses, so presumably it will be a little while.

tingletech• 14 years ago

I work for the California Digital Library, and most of my work involves using or writing open source code; and this establishes the California Open Source Digital Library.

Ironically, we launched a textbook site (only for UC) this week http://licensed.cdlib.org

manishsp• 14 years ago

Great step from california. Hoping that some `indian` politician read this :-)

gosub• 14 years ago

There is something I don't understand. From the article it seems that this only provides for the creation of free/affordable textbooks, but does not force the use of them in colleges. Am I wrong thinking that affordable textbooks are already available? What is being done to prevent colleges and professors from using 150$, annual, nth edition of the same old textbooks?

hermannj314• 14 years ago

Exactly. Directly from the bill "Nothing in this section shall be construed to mandate faculty use of any particular textbook or related materials."

Western civilization, calculus, algebra, 19th century American literature. Yeah, you are going to need the up-to-date 30th-Anniversary collector's edition with never-before-read author's commentary and over 15 pages of deleted problem sets.

brador• 14 years ago

What if courses were required to show the total cost of the progam including the cost of mandatory textbooks?

That way, at least the students know the full price of what they're in for.

VSerge2• 14 years ago

At first glance it would seem only logical that the use of these textbooks be made mandatory. On the whole I agree, that this first step is necessary but insufficient, an that without teeth its effect will be much weaker.

However, imposing at the state level one particular textbook per subject matter would be foolish - imagine just 10% of the textbooks are badly done and you have 5 classes out of 50 that would be required to be taught with poor textbooks, which doesn't make much sense.

That doesn't mean that nothing can be done. These textbooks are open and allow other textbooks to be made from them, so what could be done is telling colleges today that they will be mandated to use cc textbooks in classes 2 years after these textbooks are first published. This creates an incentive for variations on the textbooks to be made, gives teachers time to test out the materials and modify it if need be, and ensures that when the mandate comes into force: a) teachers can choose from different options of cc textbooks for each class b) no class is taught with a badly written though mandated textbook

nathan_long3• 14 years ago

I'd suggest a series of deadlines for rising use: 10% of textbooks should be open by date X, 20% by date Y, etc.

This would give time for early-adopting professors to try things out, for the textbook creators to iterate, and those who don't like the books to create their own if they prefer.

Steuard4• 14 years ago

Speaking as a professor, I'd be furious if some legislator told me exactly which textbook to use. I'm concerned about book prices, certainly, but mandating a specific text would immediately shut down the few attempts at innovation in textbooks or curriculum that do exist.

If the new books are of comparable quality to the current market leaders in a given discipline (and especially if we eventually get some competition between free texts), then all that will be necessary will be an education campaign to make sure faculty know what's available. We do care about this stuff! (Or at least, a lot of us do.)

brazzy3• 14 years ago

And some care about the kickbacks from forcing students to buy $150 textbooks that cannot be bought used because there's a new "edition" every year that shuffles the practice problems.

That's what needs to be prevented in some way.

rmc3• 14 years ago

But since they are CC you can update/change the "official book" with your changes. You can even sell it yourself. The one thing you cannot do is prevent your edition being copied or improved on.

Mandating books be CC licenced would give great freedom to eductors and protect students.

ChristianMarks• 14 years ago

Speaking as another professor, I quote from SB 1053, section 2, paragraph (c): "Nothing in this section shall be construed to mandate faculty use of any particular textbook or related materials."

waterlesscloud3• 14 years ago

My guess is that if state-funded open source CC-BY textbooks are known to exist, substantial social and administrative pressure can be brought to bear on anyone who does not use them. Fine if you don't think it's good enough, but you'd better be able to justify it.

Also, once they exist, if they're CC, then they can be updated to include whatever "innovations" come along in other texts.

dorkrawk• 14 years ago

A bit of a tangent, but whenever I hear people complaining about greedy professors scamming students into buying their books I think about how much more money many of these highly educated people (particularly STEM people) could be making if they chose not to teach. Most people didn't become professors for the money.

No, it's not good if educators price students out of education, no it's not simple to find funding for education, but we shouldn't expect our educators to be martyrs and then bemoan our declining global education rankings.

Evbn5• 14 years ago

They became professors because they enjoy the freedom to self-direct their work and draw a full salary while working on a textbook.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

It is called breaking the problem apart into manageable pieces.

As I recall the first time this came up the proposal was to give every 10 yr old (usually their 5th year of school) an e-book that each year would get copies of the textbooks loaded on to, the schools wouldn't need to buy text books and they would always have enough for the students.

It got bogged down (as in tossed out) by the interconnections of various special interests both in the publishing industry and the education system.

This is simpler, allow for the existence of a 'free' textbook. And we can work on making those text books as good as they can be, then allow schools to choose them or not, and then require schools use them once we've got evidence having those textbooks doesn't lower the test scores of students who only have the 'free' textbooks.

zanny• 14 years ago

I really think this is the proper stop-gap until we get rid of the traditional brick and mortar public schooling all together with something more Khan-esque.

It doesn't hurt that the bottom in the tablet market is falling out, you can put something together that can easily read documents for $50 now.

Zenst• 14 years ago

Sound brilliant with one small question "So, in addition to making the digital textbooks available to students free of cost, the legislation requires that print copies of textbooks will cost about $20. ". Small question about biasing for those students who have access to a device that can read the free open source version, for many a hardcopy is also more suitable. So to legaly control a price saying "about $20" does somewhat raise questions as to the definition of "about" as a fiscal term and more so. Who do you pay to print out your own copy? Becasue as it reads, if you print it out then you should be paying "about $20" for it and this is completely unclear. Least to me it is.

Still motives are good and anything moving in the right common sence direction has to be applauded.

nathan_long3• 14 years ago

Yeah, the $20-to-print requirement will get tricky. Imagine a biology textbook with detailed color pictures. Do you have to remove some because color printing is expensive? Is it acceptable if you can print a text-only version of the book for $20 and look at the pictures online? Is it acceptable to sell a supplementary illustrations book?

The real win here is for students to be able to download the whole book for free. In principle, your entire textbook budget for college could be the price of an e-book reader.

Steuard4• 14 years ago

I wonder if they'll use the existing CC-BY textbooks produced by OpenStax (or others) for some of these courses? http://openstaxcollege.org/

jug6ernaut• 14 years ago

I do not know enough about this to be for or against it. But as a recent college grad it leaves me with two obvious questions.

1. This litigation doesn't address the issue of overpriced textbox, simply bypasses it all together. Is there anyone out there saying that the current selection of textbooks is bad in some way other then there price? I find it astounding that they would pass litigation in an attempt bypassing a whole industry instead of actually addressing the issue.

2. Why can these textbooks be made without this ligation?

sageikosa• 14 years ago

Probably trying to bypass Texas, which usually decides text book standards based on market consumption.

Not sure how subsidies are going to make anything "better". I would think it would be a way for a lot of low quality producers to flood the market. Now, rather than competitive pressure potentially keeping quality in place, the state will need to provide oversight functions, either in awarding subsidies, or in mandating (and deciding) what goes into the textbooks, either of which will be another great place for patronage jobs.

odin1415• 14 years ago

I think you are confusing litigation with legislation

jimhefferon• 14 years ago

I offer a Linear Algebra that is Free. Some years ago I was contacted by some people in California and prompted to apply to become some kind of official Free source in that state; it involved filling out some forms on some web sites. That I can tell, nothing ever came of it. So I'm a bit dubious about this initiative.

albemuth• 14 years ago

Feynman would be happy.

emehrkay2• 14 years ago

As a non-California resident, Jerry Brown seems to be doing a pretty impressive job. He seems to talk about the real issues, especially when Cali's budget, and puts good legislation through.

Evbn5• 14 years ago

Brown is a California resident.

emehrkay2• 14 years ago

I meant to say "from the perspective of a non-California resident"

flexie• 14 years ago

Alright, textbooks are expensive and it's a step in the right direction. But with average costs for textbooks around $1,200 per year it's not much compared to the cost of tuition.

mmt• 14 years ago

Consider community colleges. At least in California, their tuition is still low enough that textbooks are a significant portion of the cost.

Evbn5• 14 years ago

http://students.ucsd.edu/finances/financial-aid/budgeting/un...

justincpollard• 14 years ago

So now textbook authors are forced to license their books in such a manner? Or is this a choice that certain authors can make?

If it's the former, financial incentives for textbook authors have fallen precipitously. So, the question is, who's going to write these "free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges"? Might the authors receive government subsidies? If this is true, then we're simply shifting from a market mechanism to a government funded model. Either the cost of writing a textbook won't actually change, the quality will go down, or we'll have many fewer options to choose from.

sentientbicycle• 14 years ago

"So now textbook authors are forced to license their books in such a manner?" No. This would be much bigger news if that were the case. This is who would make them from the council digest: "The bill would require the council to establish a competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials, meeting specified requirements." This will enable the exact opposite of your last three conjectures. It will decrease the cost of textbooks, the quality will go up, and we'll have even more options to choose from. Plus this is a big win for other educational enterprises. Under the CC BY license outside industries will be able to utilize the material for commercial endeavors.

gscott• 14 years ago

The idea is great but the textbook companies just will tack on manditory $85 software while not having to pay book royalties... the insanity shall continue.

California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation

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