With all of the talk about the unreasonably high price of college textbooks, the unfulfilled potential of open educational resources (OER), and student difficulty in paying for course materials, it is surprising how little is understood about student textbook expenses. The following two quotes illustrate the most common problem. Atlantic: “According to a recent College Board […]
Textbook
A Weird but True Fact about Textbook Publishers and OER
As I was perusing David Kernohan’s notes on Larry Lessig’s keynote at the OpenEd conference, one statement leapt out at me: Could the department of labour require that new education content commissioned ($100m) be CC-BY? There was a clause (124) that suggested that the government should check that no commercial content should exist in these […]
Links to External Articles and Interviews
Last week I was off the grid (not just lack of Internet but also lack of electricity), but thanks to publishing cycles I managed to stay artificially productive: two blog posts and one interview for an article. Post at 20MM on Textbook Preference Report: It’s Difficult to Prefer What You Can’t Access Last week brought […]
Boundless Is Totally #Winning
I was contacted by Boundless CEO Ariel Diaz regarding a concern he had with my blog post about the lawsuit outcome. This was not entirely surprising, and I was curious to see which aspects of the post concerned him. Was it my characterization of Boundless as not a content company? Was it my speculation that […]
Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube?
Love ’em or hate ’em, it’s hard to dispute that Pearson has an outsized impact on education in America. This huge company—they have a stock market valuation of $18 billion—touches all levels from kindergarten through career education, providing textbooks, homework platforms, high-stakes testing, and even helping to design entire online degree programs. So when they […]
MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact
As Phil mentioned in his last post, he and I had the privilege of participating in a two-day ELI webinar on MOOCs. A majority of the speakers had been involved in implementing MOOCs at their institutions in one way or another. And an interesting thing happened. Over the course of the two days, almost none […]
Is Coursera Facebook, Amazon, or Pets.com?
Before I get started, let me just say that Phil can vouch for the fact that I had already planned to use “Pets.com” in the title of this post before MIT Technology Review used it in their article on Minerva. As we’ll see, there are reasons to reach for that particular analogy at this particular moment […]