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Bayanihan Books, an Open Textbook Initiative
Bayanihan is a Tagalog term originating from the root word Bayani, or hero. Today, Bayanihan represents an heroic effort on the part of the community, or the actions of a group of people that result in a common good. Greg Moreno’s new initiative, Bayanihan Books, is aptly named.
With 17.5 million public school students in the Philippines, affordable access to textbooks is not a simple matter. Textbook companies can monopolize the market, upping prices for students and schools that can’t always afford them. Moreno’s plan is to compete with these companies by shifting the control of textbook content from a few to many—the community. Textbook making will be a collaborative project, a sort of wiki-style peer editing and review consisting of volunteers. The content will be published under a Creative Commons license specific to the Philippines that allows it to be shared. But the ultimate goal is to have the content be in print and distributed widely to public schools. That’s where the publishing companies come in.
The publishing companies will bid on the content, and because they don’t have to deal with doling out royalty fees to a community of volunteers, they will only have to shoulder the costs of the actual printing. Then they can distribute the books at minimal cost to schools around the country, while still making quite a profit for themselves. Everyone wins.
Currently, they are working on these two books.
Make Textbooks Affordable campaign launched
It was a busy day yesterday for campaigns to open up educational access and opportunities. In addition to the Cape Town Declaration, the Student PIRGs in the United States just launched a major campaign to encourage faculty to adopt open educational resources in their classrooms, which will provide significant benefit to students in making college education more affordable. ccLearn and members of the Creative Commons board have been advising on this campaign, and of course the texts being recommended would carry a CC license.
A press release is below:
January 22, 2008: Textbook costs can be a huge financial burden on students, and considering new low-cost options can help keep higher education affordable and accessible.
Although most of the textbooks on the existing market are expensive, an emerging number of free, online, open-access textbooks presents one of our best hopes for more affordable, comparable options. While the supply of these textbooks is still small, existing open textbooks have already won adoptions at some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions, including Harvard and Caltech. Instructors who use open textbooks have affirmed that high-quality textbooks are not necessarily expensive textbooks.
The statement below is an effort to build faculty interest and demand for affordable and still comparable course materials, including open textbooks.
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/statement
Signers state their intent to consider open textbooks in the search for the most appropriate course materials, and their preference to adopt an open textbook in place of an expensive, commercial textbook, if the open textbook is the best option.
Please consider signing it!
For more information, to view a list of signatories, and to submit your signature, visit the Make Textbooks Affordable campaign website.
No Comments »Teachers, Students, Web Gurus, and Foundations Launch Campaign to Transform Education, Call for Free, Adaptable Learning Materials Online
ccLearn, the education division of Creative Commons, was one of the core participants in the drafting of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, publicly launched yesterday. Creative Commons’ CEO, Lawrence Lessig, is a leading signatory, as are many CC friends and affiliates the world over. We encourage you to share the news and to sign on yourself. The press release is below.
Cape Town, January 22nd, 2008—A coalition of educators, foundations, and internet pioneers today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet.
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location. It encourages teachers and students around the world to join a growing movement and use the web to share, remix and translate classroom materials to make education more accessible, effective, and flexible.
“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia and one of the authors of the Declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”
According to the Declaration, teachers, students and communities would benefit if publishers and governments made publicly-funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students unlimited access to high quality, constantly improving course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials.
Open education makes the link between teaching, learning and the collaborative culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge together. These new practices promise to provide students with educational materials that are individually tailored to their learning style. There are already over 100,000 such open educational resources available on the Internet.
The Declaration is the result of a meeting of thirty open education leaders in Cape Town, South Africa, organized late last year by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. Participants identified key strategies for developing open education. They encourage others to join and sign the Declaration.
“Open sourcing education doesn’t just make learning more accessible, it makes it more collaborative, flexible and locally relevant,” said Linux Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who also recorded a video press briefing (http://capetowndeclaration.blip.tv/). “Linux is succeeding exactly because of this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open education.”
Open education is of particular relevance in developing and emerging economies, creating the potential for affordable textbooks and learning materials. It opens the door to small-scale, local content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses.
“Cultural diversity and local knowledge are a critical part of open education,” said Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. “Countries like South Africa need to start producing and sharing educational materials built on their own diverse cultural heritage. Open education promises to make this kind of diverse publishing possible.”
The Declaration has already been translated into over a dozen languages and the growing list of signatories includes: Jimmy Wales; Mark Shuttleworth; Peter Gabriel, musician and founder of Real World Studios; Sir John Daniel, President of Commonwealth of Learning; Thomas Alexander, former Director for Education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and former Provost, University of Michigan; Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons; Andrey Kortunov, President of the New Eurasia Foundation; and Yehuda Elkana, Rector of the Central European University. Organizations endorsing the Declaration include: Wikimedia Foundation; Public Library of Science; Commonwealth of Learning; Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; Canonical Ltd.; Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning; Open Society Institute; and Shuttleworth Foundation.
To read or sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, please visit: http://www.capetowndeclaration.org.
No Comments »2008 Science Video Collection and Remix Challenge
If you have access to educational science videos for kids (or if you even want to make your own), ccLearn encourages you to participate in the 2008 Science Video Collection and Remix Challenge! Check out the website for official details, but here’s the important stuff. Deadline is March 31, 2008. The grand prize includes:
- $2,000
- an OLPC laptop
- winning producer material featured on laptops and press materials worldwide
Photo by Venkatesh Harihara / CC BY-NC-SA
One Laptop Per Child and Intelligent Television are working to bring educational video to kids (namely 8 to 16 year-olds) who don’t have it. Your submissions will help to increase the amount of great educational video content available as part of the Open Education movement.
Basically, anyone can enter—kids, students, teachers, filmmakers, working people with time on their hands… The aim is to gather as much existing scientific video material as we can; this is the first stage of the competition. All contributed video material must be openly licensed (CC BY, CC BY-SA ), which means it can be copied, distributed, transmitted, and adapted by others.
There are other prizes too, which will be awarded by an international panel of judges. After you submit the prime material, the remixing stage will be announced. Remember, it’s all about the best science archives. Happy gathering!
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