Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license. The 18 textbooks cover timeless college subjects, such as accounting, biology, chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its resources, and that they expect its number of users to grow.

Boundless has an entire section explaining open educational resources (OER) and how they use them. However, you can easily see how it works for yourself by browsing one of their textbooks directly. For example, see their textbook on Biology. At the end of each chapter, sources are cited as a list of links where you can find the original material:

This chapter on Organismal Interactions references a Wikipedia article and several articles in The Encyclopedia of Earth. If you follow these links, you will find that the original articles are OER governed by the same CC BY-SA license.

From Boundless’ FAQ,

Is it really free? How does Boundless make money?

Absolutely. Boundless books are 100% free with no expiration dates like textbook rentals or buybacks at the bookstore. It starts with Open Educational Resources. In the future, Boundless will implement some awesome optional premium features on top of this free content to help students study faster and smarter.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Boundless is already rolling out some of those premium features, including flashcards, study guides, and quizzes. To access these features Boundless requires a free user account. The textbooks themselves are completely open, without registration required, and are accessible at boundless.com/textbooks/.

For further reading, we recommend Slate’s article entitled, “Never Pay Sticker Price for a Textbook Again – The open educational resources movement that’s terrifying publishers.” It does a fantastic job of placing the company’s aims in the context of the current publishing ecosystem.

$0: cost for reusing educational materials developed by #TAACCCT grantees thanks to @creativecommons licensing. 1.usa.gov/S6ZcqQ

— Hilda L. Solis (@HildaSolisDOL) September 19, 2012

In September, the Obama administration announced $500 million in grants to community colleges around the country for the development of professional training programs under the new Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training initiative (TAA-CCCT), run by the US Department of Labor in coordination with the Department of Education. This is the second round of grants in a four-year initiative totaling $2 billion.

For the first time in a federal initiative of this size, grantees are required to license the training materials they produce under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. In her speech announcing the grants, Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis stressed that the open-licensing requirement will make it easier for education providers to build on each other’s work.

It’s striking that this announcement comes within days of California’s first-of-its-kind open textbook legislation. As more government agencies begin to require publicly funded learning resources to be openly licensed, the more impact those resources will have. As Ms. Solis put it in her speech, “‘We’re stronger when we work together’ [is] not just a statement of American values. It’s also a winning strategy for growth.”

One major venue for the advancement of OER is through the development and support of businesses that levage openly licensed content in support of education. Eric Frank is Founder and President of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of openly-licensed college textbooks. We spoke with Eric about faculty perceptions of open textbooks, customization enabled by open licensing, and the future of “free online and affordable offline” business models.

Eric Frank by Flat World Knowledge / CC BY

Why did you start Flat World Knowledge and how did you decide to approach this business using open content?

My co-founder Jeff Shelstad and I come out of a long history in textbook publishing. We left a major textbook publisher because of what we perceived as exceedingly-high dissatisfaction levels among the primary constituents in that market—students, faculty and authors. These groups were scratching their heads wondering if the print-based business model was going to be able to serve them going forward. When we began thinking about how to build a new business model, we didn’t actually know that much about open educational resources and open licensing. We started to bake a business model based on bringing prices down and increasing access for students; giving faculty more control over the teaching and learning experience; and providing a healthier and more sustainable income stream for authors. And then we started to meet people in the open community. We spoke to Open Education scholar and advocate David Wiley (and Flat World’s Chief Openness Officer) who said, “It’s funny, you sound a lot like me, except we use different words.” This pushed us a little bit further. Ultimately, through a very pragmatic approach to solving real problems that customers were facing, we arrived at this open textbook model.

The cost of textbooks is something that’s very tangible to students. Flat World Knowledge recently released information that 800 colleges will utilize Flat World open textbooks this fall semester, saving 150,000 students $12 million in textbook expenses. And, the Student PIRGs’ recent report A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks Are The Path To Textbook Affordability found that adopting open textbooks could reduce textbook costs by 80%–to $184 per year, compared to the average of $900. Beyond the important outreach on cost savings, what are the primary questions you hear from faculty and students around “open”?

For the most part, when the average faculty member hears “open textbook,” it means nothing to them. In some cases, it has a positive connotation, and in other cases, it’s negative. When it’s negative, the primarily concern is one of basic quality and sustainability. Faculty question the entities making these open textbooks, and wonder whether the textbooks could be worth their salt if they’re available for free under an open license. And of course, they confuse ‘free’ and ‘open’ all the time. “If it’s free,” educators say, “It can’t be good. What author would ever do that?” Sometimes we see the opposite problem, such as when people know a little something about the publishing ecosystem and say, “It’s too good to be true.”

Through our marketing programs, we spend a lot of time educating faculty that we are a professional publisher, and that we focus on well-known scholars and successful textbook authors. We start by talking about what’s not different from the traditional approach: we sign experienced authors to write textbooks for us, and we develop the books by providing editorial resources, peer reviewing, and investment. The end product is a high-quality textbook and teaching package. There’s a real focus and emphasis on quality. What we change is how we distribute, how we price, and how we earn our revenue. We walk faculty through this process and let them know that ‘open’ is just about loosening copyright restrictions so that they can do more with the textbooks. We explain that free access is about getting their students onto a level playing field. We explain that affordable choices is about making sure students get the format and price that works for them. Once faculty understand these things and are reassured that we have a quality process in place, and that we are a real and sustainable enterprise that will be around to support them in the future, then it all starts to come together. We have to overcome either a total void of knowledge, which we prefer, or some other baggage that they carry into the conversation.

Customizability of digital textbooks is a key feature of Flat World Knowledge, enabled by the open license. How do teachers and students use this feature? And, how is Flat World’s approach to remix different than other platforms and services that allow some adaptability of content without actually using open content as the base?

Of course, the license itself carries its own rights and permissions. People are able to do a lot more with open content than they can with all rights reserved materials. We keep building out our technology platform so that it ultimately enables faculty to take full advantage of that open license—to do all the things that educators might want to do to improve the quality of the material for their own purposes. Today, the most popular customization is relatively simple. For example, educators reorganize the table of contents by dragging and dropping textbook chapters into the right order for their class, and delete a few things they don’t cover. This is easy and helps them match the book to their syllabus.

Then you move into exploring other areas. For example, instructors may want to make the textbook more pedagogically aligned with their teaching style. In that case, a teacher might integrate a short case study and a series of questions alongside the textbook content. Teachers may want to make the references and examples more relevant to their students by using the names of local companies. Timeliness is certainly important—something happens in the world and educators want to be able to integrate it into their teaching materials.

Educators have different teaching styles and approaches too. An adopter of one of our economics textbooks swapped out some models for other economic models that he prefers to use. An adopter at the University of New Hampshire added several chapters on sustainability and corporate social responsibility into an introduction to business book. Now, he’s teaching the course through his prism and from his perspective. These are the kinds of things that people want to be able to do. The critical thing for us is to make the platform easy to use so that customizing a book is as effortless as opening up a Word document, making some changes, saving it, and delivering it to students.

Regarding how our approach differs from other platforms and services because we begin with openly-licensed content, at one level, the ability to take something and modify it is largely a technology question. We go further, and allow people to edit text at the word level. You don’t see this sort of framework in other services because most of the time you’re dealing with the all rights reserved mentality. Most authors sign up to write traditional textbooks with the understanding that, “This is my work and you can’t do stuff with it.” I think the first big difference is when the author says, “I want people to be able to do stuff with this.” Having authors enter into a different publishing relationship by using open licenses allows us to go much further with the platform. That said, there’s nothing really stopping another company from doing this with some kind of unique user license.

We see other benefits of open access when we think about outputs. You might be able to go onto a publisher’s site and make modifications to a text, and maybe even integrate something that’s openly-licensed on the Web. But ultimately, it’s going to get subsumed into the all rights reserved framework, and won’t propagate forward, so no one else can change it. And generally, these digital services are expensive and access expires after a few months, so the user no longer can get to the content. Things like digital rights management and charging high prices for print materials are fundamentally business model decisions around dissemination, but they’re important.

I think the other big difference is what can happen away from the Flat World Knowledge site. Somebody could arguably come in and take our content and do something with it somewhere else. We’re not locking it down and saying, “The only thing you can do is work with the content on our site, and only use our technology.” We happen to make it easy to do this sort of thing on the Flat World site, but the open license allows others to use the content away from the original website. This leads to many more options that aren’t possible with content that is all rights reserved or served under a very unique license.

Flat World Knowledge licenses its textbooks under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. What were the considerations in choosing this license? How do you see the role of Creative Commons in open textbook and open education?

One of my pet peeves about this community that we’re a part of is the frequent and sometimes contentious debates over licensing. The principle of enabling a range of licenses recognizes that copyright holders have different objectives for their creations. I have my objectives and you have yours, so we may choose different licenses to reach those objectives. That’s perfectly fine. This is the way the world should be. For us, the choice of a license was very much predicated on building a sustainable commercial model around open. We invest fairly heavily with financial resources, time, and intellectual capital to make these textbooks and related products something that we think can dominate in the marketplace. If we didn’t use the non-commercial condition, in our view, we’d be making all the investment and then someone else could sell the content at a dramatically lower price because they didn’t make the initial and ongoing investment. The non-commercial condition is the piece of the model that enables us to give users far more rights, to provide free points of access, and protect our ability to commercialize the investment we made. The ShareAlike clause ensures that this protection continues forward.

Our decision to use this license also relates to authors. The sustainability and financial success argument starts with the people who have the most value in the market: the authors who create the books. Our discussions with authors always include a financial component. They want to know how we are going to capitalize on this venture. Authors want to do good, but they also want to earn income and be fairly compensated. When we explain our model and how the licensing works, they feel very comfortable.

Last month Hal Plotkin released the paper Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials. That document suggests that community colleges are uniquely positioned to both take advantage of OER opportunities and to become pioneers in teaching through the creative and cost-effective use of OER, including through the adoption of open textbooks. How are Flat World’s approaches different in working with universities as opposed to community colleges? What are the differences in terms of the benefits and challenges to faculty, students, and administration within each institution?

This is a great question, but it’s a little hard to answer, because we must consider another variable—the book itself. Sometimes a book is aimed at a community college course and demographic, and sometimes it’s aimed at a four-year research university. For example, our Exploring Business book has a big community college market, while our Introduction to Economic Analysis title out of Caltech has very much a top-50, Ph.D.-granting institution market. So, this confuses things a little bit. That said, I think it’s fair to say that there is generally a correlation between where the financial pain is greatest (which tends to be at community colleges and state institutions) and where the faculty are closest to that pain (where teaching is their primary emphasis, and they spend more time with students). This is where we see the greatest pull for this solution. There’s less of a pull from wealthier demographics and/or with faculty who spend more time doing research than teaching. While there’s more ideological and intellectual understanding of the value of sharing on the research side, pragmatically, the financial pain tends to be on the community college side.

In the recent First Monday article, A sustainable future for open textbooks: The Flat World Knowledge story, Hilton and Wiley suggest that in testing Flat World’s textbook model (“free online and affordable offline”), nearly 40% of students still purchased a print copy of the textbook. And Nicole Allen mentioned in our interview with her that the research of the Student PIRGs shows that “students are willing to purchase formats they value even in the presence of a free alternative.” So, print materials are not going away overnight, as long as the resources can be tailored in ways that teachers and students want to use them. But, as powerful digital technologies offer so many new ways to interact with educational content, how do you foresee the distant (or near) future in which print-on-demand may no longer be a core part of your business model?

We agree with the findings in those reports that print is going away more slowly than pundits proclaimed it would. We’re totally committed to what I think of as platform agnosticism. We never want to be in a position of having to guess which technologies or trends will win or lose. Part of our solution was to build a very dynamic publishing engine which could take a book—which is really a series of database objects and computer code that gets pulled together—and transform it through computer software programs to a certain file format. Today, one format goes to a print-on-demand vendor to make a physical book; another is an ePub file to be downloaded to an iPad or other mobile device; another is a .mobi file for a Kindle. We can afford to be on the leading edge and make formats available that may have low penetration today. And if they grow faster, we’ll be there with a salable format for those devices that will proliferate.

The most important improvement we can make to learning outcomes across our society right now is access. People sometimes ask me, “Isn’t the textbook itself a dead paradigm?” I tell them no, because billions of dollars per year are spent on textbooks. Right now you could create a really killer learning product, and I could take the one that’s already being used by millions of people and make it much more accessible. Enabling greater access is going to have much bigger short-term impact. Going forward, improvements in learning outcomes beyond access will come from things that aren’t content. They will come from experiences—whether it’s an assessment I take and get immediate feedback to inform a specific learning path, or whether it’s a social learning experience in which I’m dropped into a community of learners with a challenge and we draw upon each other to come up with solutions. Content supports those things, but isn’t as important in some ways as the experience.

Our view of the world is to get into the market where there’s pain today, establish a large base of users, and then keep evolving the product to be an increasingly better learning tool. That will inevitably take the form of integrating more unique services that can’t be copied. That’s the long-term goal for us, and probably critical for any business operating in the digital medium, to be financially successful. Kevin Kelly, the technology writer and founding executive editor of Wired, said it best: “When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.” I believe that.

What does a successful teaching and learning environment implementing the power of open textbooks and OER “look like”? Do you have any lingering thoughts — worries, hopes, and predictions?

I don’t worry too much because if we keep our finger on the pulse of what people want to do, we’ll figure it out. One potential danger is the expense of providing this abundance of integrated tools, formats and options for users. It’s easy to imagine the expense of systems that incorporate things like an assessment engine built on adaptive learning and artificial intelligence to guide users to the best resource, all the while connecting them to other users to foster a richer learning experience. This has the potential to be very expensive, and ratchets up the imperative for players in the open community to help figure it out.

“The internships, introduced this year by open textbook provider Flat World Knowledge, let sophomore and junior business students earn college credit and a little spending cash if their sales pitch convinces a professor to use web-based texts that can be reorganized and modified by chapter, sentence, or word…

The company has grown in the past year as the open-content movement has gained traction in higher education, buttressed by the Creative Commons license [CC BY-NC-SA]—which doesn’t require permission from authors to change parts of a book—and the rising cost of textbooks.”

The press release states FWK’s intent to change “the college textbook market” by “taking a counter approach to the usual adversarial relationship between textbook publishers and college students.” By using CC licenses, Flat World Knowledge is exploring a business model that builds on open content by offering free digital textbooks via CC BY-NC-SA, but charging for the prints and supplementary materials. Their textbooks have been used at over 400 colleges, and they received $8 million in investments last year.

For more on Flat World Knowledge, swing by CC Salon NYC on March 3 where Eric Frank, the company’s founder and Chief Marketing Officer, will be talking in depth about what they do. If you’re not in the area, stay tuned for some Flip camera action, which I’ll link to here after the event.

All that matters in the news these days is health care, that is, health care and textbooks. The terms “education” and “textbook” go hand in hand, and nobody, at least at the state levels, is keen on separating the two. With California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative recently announcing the approval of some 20 digital textbooks, a futuristic vision of Kindle kids scrolling with razor-like focus floats like bubbles before our eyes.

However, last month, the New York Times reported, “In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History,” that textbooks may be “supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.” The article pointed to Beyond Textbooks, an initiative that “encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.” Beyond Textbooks disassociates itself from “canned curriculum”, or “vanilla curriculum,” reproaching the linear nature of textbooks– “No longer is instruction limited by the resources in one building, or even one district. Beyond Textbooks gives you the whole world!”

My own post on OnOpen.net follows a similar train of thought, and is aptly named, “Beyond the Textbook: I. The Illusion of Quality in K-12 Education“. In it, I challenge the public perception that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, and talk about whether textbooks really need saving.

Other news sources are also skeptical. The Scientific American prefaces its article, “Open-Source Textbooks a Mixed Bag in California,” with the caveat, “Downloadable and free, maybe–but the schoolhouse Wiki revolution will have to wait.” Granted, SA seems to be conflating “open-source” and “digital” here (open-source is generally associated with openly licensed textbooks, otherwise known as open textbooks, while digital is, well, digital like everything else we come across in today’s world) and it is unclear if they are skeptical of simply digitizing the “Bulky, hefty and downright expensive, conventional school textbooks” that have been persisting for years, or if they are averse to the digital revolution in education generally.

Still, the ReadWriteWeb is more optimistic, pointing out initiatives like Flat World Knowledge which focus on gaining revenue through the sale of supplementary materials surrounding their textbooks, which are themselves openly available via CC BY-NC-SA, and are therefore not only freely accessible, but adaptable, derivable, and even republishable, though for noncommercial purposes and under the same license. Co-founder Eric Frank distinguishes between traditional textbooks and open textbooks, emphasizing that open textbooks creates more options: “Traditional textbooks have clearly failed students and instructors. Similarly, digital textbook trials that force a single format, device, or price point will also fail. No single e-reading format or device will ever satisfy all students. Our commercial open-source textbook approach puts control and the power of choice in the hands of students and instructors.”

However, you can’t help but wonder if all this hooplah around textbooks is “[falling] flat.” Is the power of choice really in the hands of teachers and students? If traditional textbooks “have clearly failed” them, but that traditional textbook adoption process is not about to budge, are we simply arguing about which direction to steer the Titanic after we have already hit the iceberg?

CC BY-SA by the CK12 Foundation

Below, we get to the bottom of the origins of CK-12, Neeru’s own personal tie to the cause, and some insights into what may lie ahead for both the foundation and ccLearn.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? You are widely known as the founder of CK-12; what is your official role and how did you come to found this nonprofit?

First of all, I just want to set the record straight, I am one of the co-founders along with Murugan Pal, who is the other co-founder of CK-12.  I serve as the Executive Director and Murugan as the President.

I am the mother of four children; I have a master’s degree in molecular biology and a degree in education.   After my degree I worked for a year and a half at Stanford at the Children’s Hospital working on Insulin-like Growth Factors that were being implicated in cancer.  It was at that point that I got pregnant with my first child and decided not to be around radioactive elements.   As I continued raising my children I asked myself the question – other than a safe and loving home, what can I give my children that will be of value to them and society for the rest of their lives? Perhaps all the sacrifices that my parents made so that their kids could have a good education had definitely proved that point.

When I found the school, The Nueva School, I knew that they were on the right track – focusing on learning, critical thinking, emotional intelligence as well as learning to learn in this day of information.  I soon became involved with the organization through my involvement with their board and becoming the Head of the Education Committee.  When my children started going to high school and college I knew I had to find something for myself to do and decided to go back to school and did another masters at Stanford in Education.  It was here that I realized that most children did not have the same experience as I thought they should have.  This is the United States of America!  I knew that I had to bring access to information at the same level for all students in K-12 in the USA.  The idea came out when my husband asked me to look at the “Textbook issues”.

What about open education appeals to you? Can you say a few words about what you think truly open education is, or should be?

I see open education as education that is supported by open educational resources.  These resources make it possible to have content that is not just the voice of an individual but is the result of the community involvement, i.e. wisdom of many.  In fact, open resources are not driven by any artificial or self-serving motives such as profits, sales, marketing, etc.   Fundamentally, education cannot be “open” in the same sense as open software.  In fact, if you look at history we used to pass our collective knowledge as stories.  With the advancement of technologies, paper, print media, digital media and personal computing, that passage of stories has taken on other formats – primarily textbooks for education.   Unfortunately, these books have become the ownership of a select few rather than the effort of many.  We have lost the dialogue that can enhance the quality. Additionally, K-12 education is more controlled and contextualized, particularly public education.  The following three tenets have to have the following characteristics:

1. Content
   a. Content is free to all to use
   b. Content is created by many people – voice of many over ownership of a few
2. Access is provided to all equally
   a. Providing the ability to access, hence multiple ways to providing education – text,
online, multimedia, and other media for all students
   b. Cost of access is covered for all students
3. Commitment to quality even though it is free

I believe that education should be free to all students, particularly in the USA.  How can we even try to educate students if they don’t have access to information?  Younger students particularly need material from which they can take off for learning.  They have to be provided scaffolding for learning – a Vygotskian Concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky).  There is a focus on the wrong notion that only higher education needs to be free and open hence more effort is being put into that area.  However, the problem becomes crucial to elementary students as lack of content availability erodes these young students’ ability to learn, as they are not able to have a strong base of knowledge to rely on.

Open education is one way that we can provide access – the “rip, mix, and burn” metaphor allows for the ability to customize content as needed by each student.  At this point schools are provided with information that is delivered in a very old format – a textbook.  Textbooks, especially their physical nature, are hard for students at that age – weight, monolithic nature, arising from 50 states having different requirements, hard to change the content of the book, etc.

CK-12′s mission is very clear on its site—”to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context.” How is CK-12 currently carrying out this mission?

We are carrying out this mission by providing textbooks, particularly for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) books.  These books have been produced the way that publishers produce their books.  There is no charge from CK-12 for using these books online through our online reader, downloading, or customizing them to your own needs.  As we like to say, “Rip, mix and burn”.  The cost of the printing is the only cost that users have to carry.  This cost will go to your own choice of printing company or for better you can print them using  your home printer.

CK-12 and the Commonwealth of Virginia just released the beta version of the first Physics FlexBook to be aligned with state standards. Can you say a few words about this project and how it came to fruition?

The Commonwealth of Virginia did a study with NASA. This two-year study pointed out that the curriculum as well as the textbook that the Commonwealth was using was outdated and did not have any of the contemporary topics in physics such as LCD, LED, Nanotechnology, Biomedical Imaging, String Theory etc.  Their textbooks stopped at Cathode ray tubes.  That technology was really outdated resulting in no time left for the schools to teach other concepts if they continued to teach these outdated concepts.  The report also pointed out that the Commonwealth should look into open educational resources.

When the Commonwealth talked to the publishers the answer was not satisfactory both from financial and time to market perspectives.  At the same time the CTO of the Governor found out about CK-12 from the web and approached us.  The rest is history!  Governor Tim Kaine sent out a RFP (Request for Proposal) and we had 13 people comprised of scientists, teachers, and professors – volunteering to write the book with CK-12 supporting them.  In addition, CK-12 redrew all the diagrams to make them higher resolution.  We also provide all our diagrams in a repository so that others can use these diagrams, keeping in line with the philosophy of open content. We wrote that book in 2½ months with another two weeks for quality assurance.

Do you see CK-12′s goals evolving as more and more institutions and persons use CK-12′s open textbook technologies (specifically the Flexbook)? For instance, could you see expanding the scope of your mission to encompass more than open textbooks?

At this point we do not see our mission moving from OER books.  The overall goals of the project have not changed.  We are constantly being asked whether we are going to be catering other domains.  Wherever I am going, people ask what about history, economics, or…..  I think, that at some point we will have to answer that question.  Perhaps that will be the only thing we will have to add to our goals.  We are also asked by higher ed people if they can use our tools.  The good thing about that is we don’t have to tell people what they can do or cannot do.  The power of the system is that it is useable under any condition.  All you have to do is use it.

We are finding that we have to focus on more feature sets.  As my cofounder Murugan said to me, that software is a bottomless pit.

What do you see as the future of the textbook? Does the current economy affect this vision at all?

If we are to move to Textbook 2.0 or even 3.0, we have to think about the textbook aligning with other capabilities that are provided by eLearning such as multimedia and other kinds of interactive abilities.  Textbooks have to move from a static format to an interactive format.  This is where our tools will really be useful.  I think this is going to be a very exciting development in general in education.

Sure the current economy will affect the vision mostly positively.  Districts are now going to have to think more creatively about how to provide good content to their students yet at the same time be able to operate with same budgets.  No matter how you look at it, $600 MM is a lot of money to spend for California alone, especially if you can avail better options and cut the spending down.  If we provide quality content we should be able to attract users.

Your Flexbooks are licensed BY-SA. What is the importance of open licensing in the textbook’s future? Why did CK-12 choose the BY-SA license, specifically?

Content has been a closed entity forever.  All the scientific and mathematical advancements were built upon improving an already existing work (standing upon the giant’s shoulders) thus leading to better achievements in an open fashion.  It is now time to provide educational materials under a different model.  A model where people can use it the way they want and need to use it.  We have seen that one-size-does-not-fit-all in education.  Once we move to that model we will see progress.  Even though we have protective clauses such as the Williams Act for providing textbooks for all students we still are not able to provide content that every student has access to.  Even though students have books you can see the difference in rich districts vs. poorer districts.  Charter Schools or Home schooled students have problems with accessing good content.  It costs too much.

When we started this project we went to India and told them about saving cost – their laughter was kind of piercing because their books only cost pennies compared to ours and the Government owns their national curriculum.  The textbook industry needs course correction.  One of the biggest problems is lack of rigorous universal standards for 50 states.  So, if we can provide FlexBooks such that states can adapt the content to their own requirements, that will help a lot with course correction.

The reason we chose to go with CC-BY-SA was because we wanted to make a statement about openness.  We believe that the Creative Commons spirit is about openness.  However, we are also thinking about donations from teachers and writers who have done a tremendous amount of work in producing or writing lesson plans or textbooks.  When we approached these teachers or writers their concern was, how would they protect their work if a publisher takes their work with only attribution?  They wanted to see the improvements made to their original contribution “back in the commons”.  This is when we realized that we had to respect this genuine perspective and make them feel comfortable.  Hence the choice of license!  One thing we have continued to advise and educate our Author Donors is to stay out of the Non-Commercial clause.  This is in the spirit that the non-commercial clause makes the content stale and obsolete over a period of time.

CK-12 and ccLearn have been in informal contact for some time. How do you see us working together in the future?

ccLearn can help organizations such as CK-12 to work together in a “federated” fashion.  It is high time we need mutual understanding and agreements for licensing policies, canonical representation format, and interchangeable metadata across OER organizations.  We have been partnering with ccLearn and Creative Commons in general in promoting these common agendas.

Is there a specific issue you would like us to tackle? Or another organization you would love to see us partnering with?

It will be good for ccLearn to host a summit for all OER sites to understand the importance of common standards to federate our contents across.  For example, my co-founder Murugan Pal has been working with Wikipedia, WikiEducator, OLPC etc. to forge these common standards.

Finally, what is in CK-12′s own future? What other partnerships or plans do you have in the pipeline? What are you most excited about?

We are very excited about the opportunity that the OER community has in this financially stressed out time.  To quote Paul Romer, “Crisis is a terrible thing to waste”; this is the time for us to bring OER into the main stream.  We typically don’t talk about our future plans; as we believe in getting it done, rather than talk about it.Our Virginia FlexBook project is the first stepping-stone, and we are working with various governmental agencies both in Federal and different State levels to make our mission successful.

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.