e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: textbooks

  • Welcome Change: OpenStax using more accurate data on student textbook expenditures

    Welcome Change: OpenStax using more accurate data on student textbook expenditures

    Last week OpenStax, the Rice University-based publisher of open educational resource (OER) materials, announced that according to their data more than 2.2 million students at 48% of colleges in the US and 1,150 outside the US are using OpenStax free textbooks, saving an estimated $177 million.

    This is compelling data in its own right, and we are working on analysis around this organization and its model, but somewhat buried in the press release is another significant statement around what students currently spend on textbooks and what savings are possible with OER.

    “Our community is creating a movement that will make a big impact on college affordability. The success of open textbooks like OpenStax have ignited competition in the textbook market, and textbook prices are actually falling for the first time in 50 years.”

    As a result of the unprecedented downward shift in textbook prices, OpenStax will be decreasing its estimated student savings figure from $98.57 to $79.37 based on federal data. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics published a study in May stating the average undergraduate student spent $555.60 on required course materials for the academic year. Dividing that number by seven courses (the undergraduate average, according to enrollment data) comes out to $79.37 in savings for each student using an OpenStax book.

    I have long argued that OER groups and others arguing for making college more affordable should use baseline numbers based on what students actually pay for textbooks, rather than the all-too-common $1,220 – $1,420 per year numbers from a misuse of College Board budget numbers (see chart at top of page 10 in this document). With OpenStax moving to new federal data showing $556 average expenditures, we should start to see more reliable estimates of student savings. Kudos to them.

    However, this level of student spending should not be a surprise to anyone following the curricular materials market.

    Our 2015 post “How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks?”, as well as a follow-up post, show in detail that we have had data for years showing that students roughly $600 per year on textbooks and related course materials, and that that number has been falling since at least 2008. Using data from the National Association of College Stores (NACS), we knew three years ago about the rough level of spending and the multi-year decline. NACS has continued to release annual updates, with the most recent public release from last summer:

    NACS data showing course material expenditure

    What OpenStax refers to, however, is the new National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) restricted-use data from the US Department of Education’s National Center on Education Statistics, showing $555.60 average student expenditures per year. Which is right in line with the NACS data.

    We plan to explore the NPSAS data in more detail, as it provides rich data for crosstabs and exploration of student expenses. But for now, kudos to OpenStax for this change in student savings estimates, even if it is years overdue. I would hope that other OER advocates would follow their lead.

  • Hawai’i Senate OER Bill Update: Amended language saves the day

    Hawai’i Senate OER Bill Update: Amended language saves the day

    On Friday I reported about SB2328, a bill that passed (with amendments) the Hawai’i Senate Committee on Higher Education and would have mandated open educational resources (OER) for all courses at all 10 University of Hawai’i campuses. And if there were no adequate OER materials for a course? “. . . the faculty member or lecturer responsible with providing instruction for the course shall create the instructional materials and offer those materials free of charge to students through open educational resources.”

    This bill was a disaster in the making. Not only would it have been unworkable in terms of funding and intellectual property ownership, it would also have set back the OER movement by associating OER with unfunded faculty mandates and reduction of academic freedom. All this from good intentions but apparently shallow understanding.

    As mentioned in an update to Friday’s posts, the amendments that resulted from committee hearings removed the mandates. We now have the amended language, and it is a completely different bill.

    Updated language:

    The purpose of this Act is to:

    (1) Establish the University of Hawai‘i open educational resources task force to conduct a comprehensive analysis and evaluation on all general education courses and high attendance courses taught at the University of Hawai‘i system to identify open educational resources for those courses;

    (2) Establish and appropriate funds for an open educational resources pilot project grant program to incentivize faculty that adopt, develop, and implement open educational resources; and

    (3) Require the University of Hawai‘i open educational resources task force to report its findings and recommendation initiatives for supporting and expanding the use of open educational resources at the University of Hawai‘i to the Legislature prior to the Regular Session of 2019.

    During the hearings there were several dozen testimonies shared, and all but two opposed the bill (and one of those two changed positions to oppose). Leading the opposition was the University of Hawai’i Professional Assembly, the local faculty union.

    In short, the bill amendments removed mandates, creates a task force charged with a one-year evaluation of high-enrollment and general ed courses, and creates a $50,000 grant fund to incentivize faculty adoption.

    It is not clear whether the bill will make it through remaining hurdles to become state law, but if it does, we will have a fairly significant move in the state dealing with the costs of curricular materials and OER adoption.

    Billy Meinke, OER Technologist and UH Manoa and a key player within the system (let’s call him Kane OER), was unaware of SB2328 before it came out. This gets to the heart of the problem – the original bill appears to have been written without any input from the people already working on OER adoption within the University of Hawai’i.

    I still have a problem with the preamble of the bill that uses the misleading claim that the “average cost for books and supplies for the same academic year at public colleges averaged $1,250.” Students actually pay about half this amount, and this false setup will lead to erroneous estimates of how much any such bill could save for its students. But for now, crisis averted.

  • Hawai’i Senate Bill: Would mandate OER material for all U Hawai’i system courses

    Hawai’i Senate Bill: Would mandate OER material for all U Hawai’i system courses

    Thanks for update from Brent Auernheimer, I found out that the Hawai’i Senate Committee on Higher Education recently debated a bill regarding Open Educational Resources (OER) usage at the University of Hawai’i system of 10 campuses. Introduced on January 19th, SB2328 states:

    Beginning with the 2020-2021 school year, all courses at all campuses within the University of Hawai‘i system that require the use of instructional materials, including textbooks, shall use instructional materials from the open educational resources at the University of Hawai‘i; provided that the use of instructional materials, including textbooks, that requires a student to purchase or pay a subscription for the materials shall be prohibited; provided further that if open educational resources does not have relevant instructional materials available for a course, the faculty member or lecturer responsible with providing instruction for the course shall create the instructional materials and offer those materials free of charge to students through open educational resources.

    Read that carefully – OER for all courses, no commercial services around OER allowed, and if appropriate OER does not exist, the faculty member must create the material themselves, all mandated from the state legislature.

    When I first saw this news, I assumed it was a either a misguided effort that would quietly be killed in committee or a political statement. Predictably, and appropriately, the University of Hawai’i Professional Assembly actively opposed this bill, calling it “legislative overreach” and “infringement on academic judgement”, while also calling out the costs and support needed for faculty to create such materials.

    On January 30 hearings, the vast majority of testimony – much of it from faculty members – opposed the measure with only two statements supporting. Yet on February 6, the Senate Committee unanimously passed the bill on to the full Senate.

    The committee(s) on HRE recommend(s) that the measure be PASSED, WITH AMENDMENTS. The votes in HRE were as follows: 5 Aye(s): Senator(s) K. Kahele, Kim, S. Chang, Keith-Agaran, Kidani; Aye(s) with reservations: none ; 0 No(es): none; and 0 Excused: none.

    I have not been able to determine what the amendments are for the bill (or if that refers to future amendments coming from floor debate), and I also do not know how likely it is to pass the full senate or to become state law. I’ll keep looking for more information.

    Unless I’m missing something, this could be a jump-the-shark moment for portions of the OER movement. Comments appreciated.

    Update: From Twitter stream (sounds like some good changes):

    https://twitter.com/billymeinke/status/962127447171907584

  • Cengage OpenNow: Big news on the OER front hiding in plain sight

    Cengage OpenNow: Big news on the OER front hiding in plain sight

    In the week prior to the OpenEd conference, Cengage Learning made a fairly big announcement with OpenNow, a “suite of digital products for general education courses with open educational resources (OER) content”. In an article from Inside Higher Education, I noted that this news was not out of the blue.

    Phil Hill, the co-publisher of the blog e-Literate and a partner at MindWires Consulting, said he was not surprised by Cengage’s OER announcement. “If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that Cengage has been saying for at least a year that they wanted to get into this space,” he said. Hill says he was surprised, however, at how aggressively Cengage seemed to be promoting OER with this announcement. “We’ve seen other publishers dipping their toes in, but this seems as if it is central to Cengage’s strategy.” He noted that the announcement could cause other publishers to accelerate their OER strategies. “The movement is not going away,” he said.

    Rather than looking at this specific news in isolation, it would be helpful to put this in some historical context showing the interplay of the OER movement and changing strategies from the big textbook publishers. We advise a number of large and small publishers in our role as consultants, and they occasionally ask us to help them to better understand some of the points we’ve been making about OER in our posts over the years. Put another way, here comes a thread of historical e-Literate quotes.

    In response to a 2011 article in the Chronicle titled “Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources”, Michael (then an employee of Cengage) chastised his fellow textbook industry professsionals, writing:

    Many different open source-related business models have been tried with varying degrees of success. Some open source projects have become sustainable as pure volunteer efforts while others have needed commercial support.

    I see no reason to believe that open educational resources will be any different. Right now, we’re in the early days. It’s very hard to predict which sustainability models will work or who the winners and losers will be. But I think it’s reasonable to predict that, five years from now (a) there will still be for-profit textbook publishers (though their all-digital products probably won’t be called textbooks by then) and (b) most or all for-profit textbook publishers will be involved with the production, support, and/or distribution of OERs in some way or other. There will likely be some OER projects that will have achieved long-term sustainability without commercial support and others that will have achieved long-term sustainability because of commercial support.

    It’s more than six years later, but (a) note the burgeoning category of courseware, and (b) see Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education, and Cengage initiatives, among others. Put simply, it was apparent that publishers needed OER strategies at least as far back as 2011.

    Fast forward to 2014 when Michael had departed Cengage to enter the joyous world of market analysis and consulting, he offered the observation that many publishers actually like OER:

    For the most part, OER was just not something publishers thought a lot about.

    That has changed in US higher education as it has become clear that textbook profits are collapsing as student find more ways to avoid buying the new books. The traditional textbook business is clearly not viable in the long term, at least in that market, at least at the scale and margins that the bigger publishers are used to making. So these companies want to get out of the textbook business. A few of them will say that publicly, but many of them say it among themselves. They don’t want to be out of business. They just want to be out of the textbook business. They want to sell software and services that are related to educational content, like homework platforms or course redesign consulting services. But they know that somebody has to make the core curricular content in order to for them to “add value” around that content. As David Wiley puts it, content is infrastructure. Increasingly, textbook publishers are starting to think that maybe OER can be their infrastructure. This is why, for example, it makes sense for Wiley (the publisher, not the dude) to strike a licensing deal with OpenStax. They’re OK about not making a lot of money on the books as long as they can sell their WileyPlus software. Which, in turn, is why I think that Wiley (the dude, not the publisher) is not crazy at all when he predicts that “80% of all US general education courses will be using OER instead of publisher materials by 2018.” I won’t be as bold as he is to pick a number, but I think he could very well be directionally correct. I think many of the larger publishers hope to be winding down their traditional textbook businesses by 2018.

    This point is crucial, as OER is not just an opportunity to co-opt a movement but a potential strategy for publishers to solve an existential problem.

    In 2016 Cengage released a survey on OER adoption and attitudes, which to me signaled that they were getting quite serious about figuring out their strategy.

    According to [VP of Content Strategy] Costantini, the reason Cengage did this study is that in their view OER is another type of content, and there are high-level conversations at schools about adoption. Costantini described Cengage as making a move for a while to not be as proprietary, with the MindTap platform as an example where multiple content types – proprietary and OER – can be combined or used individually. Cengage views themselves as excellent curators, and OER content fits into this view. They want to accelerate this shift, and internally they need to better understand the dynamics of OER usage.

    By spring of 2017, Cengage put further meat on the OER bone with the release of a podcast series, where I noted:

    And this new podcast fits in the same mold. Cengage does not fully understand OER, but they seem to like it and see it as a way to help them out of a hole, and while they learn more, the company is sharing their learnings through surveys, resource pages, and podcasts.

    Given some mistakes in how the podcast was released, I suggested that Cengage learn and use David Wiley’s description of the 5 Rs of open (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute) in their material. ((Disclosure: David Wiley’s company Lumen Learning is a client of MindWires.)) With this historical context in mind, let’s turn back to the OpenNow announcement and the next stage of Cengage’s move into OER strategy.

    In an interview with Cheryl Constantini, she described how Cengage released MindTap ACE last year and learned some key lessons about OER. While many people want affordable solutions, the market feedback according to Cengage was that if you’re going to go OER, go all in with OER – mixing with proprietary doesn’t resonate. This led to OpenNow as a pure OER play, unlike MindTap ACE.

    Constantini also described the market feedback on the need for simplicity and that MindTap ACE had too many features. This led to the choice of using Learning Objects, a platform Cengage acquired in 2016, to be the base for OpenNow. The approach is to take OER standard textbooks, realign them as outcomes-based design along with associated assessments and added videos, and release everything with an open license. Nine of the 12 initial courses are from OpenStax, and three are re-licensed courses from Cengage now with CC-BY licenses. The videos use YouTube open licenses.

    For each course Constantini estimates that the modifications take $50k – $100k of internal work, including verifying of licenses for embedded elements. I would note a certain irony here in that OpenStax produces more-or-less traditional digital textbooks requiring publishers or OER services companies like Lumen to break apart and realign to competencies or outcomes.

    Cengage charges $25 per student per course for OpenNow.

    The assessments and instructor manuals raise a “burning issue” about whether they should be accessible by students or not. Initially Cengage is adopting the OpenStax pattern of licensing openly but controlling by passwords; however, this is a subject they need to think through and figure out over time.

    At the OpenEd conference last month, there was significant interest in the OpenNow presentation with people spilling over into the hallway. The movement of publishers into the OER space is real, and this release from Cengage should be viewed as part of a long-term shift in strategy. And one that attempts to fully embrace OER as seen by this interesting description:

    • High-quality, 100% OER narrative and assessment content from Cengage, OpenStax and other third-party sources.
    • CC-BY-licensed (5Rs), so instructors and institutions can adapt and reuse all narrative and assessment content as needed.

    Update: Added description of pricing model.

  • About The New Florida Virtual Campus Survey On Textbooks

    As long-time readers know, I strongly believe that the national discussion about the costs of textbooks and course materials is more productive when we focus on actual student behaviors and impacts, rather than artificial numbers used by many organizations. There may be short-term benefit from claiming or implying that the average college student spends $1200 or more per year on textbooks, but the reality is closer to $650. See “How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks?” for more details, thanks in particular to information from NACS.

    The second-best source available on actual student expenditures on textbooks and course materials is the bi-annual survey from the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC), which serves Florida’s state colleges, universities, and K-12 districts. Two weeks ago they released the third survey “2016 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey”, a study of more than 22,000 students in the public colleges and universities. This report is particularly informative for asking questions about the impact of textbook costs – what do students end up doing. That is the interesting question.

    The whole report is worth reading, but I’d like to highlight two key points. The first is confirmation that the average actual spending on college textbooks is in the $600 – $650 per year range. In the FLVC survey, students spend just over $300 in one semester on textbooks. (more…)

  • The Great Unbundling of Textbook Publishers

    When we hear the phrase “unbundling” in education, it usually refers to one of two things. Either it’s about unbundling the university into component parts like separating courses from certification or it’s about unbundling content from textbooks or courses into discrete learning objects. On the spectrum from “figment of the imagination” to “the one and only future,” both of these types of unbundling fall closer to the figment side into some version of “real in some significant sense but highly overrated.” But there is a different kind of unbundling that is beginning to happen that I feel confident is going to be very real: The unbundling of textbook publishers from content.

    (more…)

  • Greg Mankiw Thinks Greg Mankiw’s Textbook Is Fairly Priced

    This is kind of hilarious.

    Greg Mankiw has written a blog post expressing his perplexity ((Hat tip to Stephen Downes for the link.)) with The New York Times’ position that textbooks are overpriced:

    To me, this reaction seems strange. After all, the Times is a for-profit company in the business of providing information. If it really thought that some type of information (that is, textbooks) was vastly overpriced, wouldn’t the Times view this as a great business opportunity? Instead of merely editorializing, why not enter the market and offer a better product at a lower price? The Times knows how to hire writers, editors, printers, etc. There are no barriers to entry in the textbook market, and the Times starts with a pretty good brand name.

    My guess is that the Times business managers would not view starting a new textbook publisher as an exceptionally profitable business opportunity, which if true only goes to undermine the premise of its editorial writers.

    It’s worth noting that Mankiw received a $1.4 million advance for his economics textbook from his original publisher Harcourt Southwestern, which was later acquired by the company now known as Cengage Learning. That was in 1997. Now in its seventh edition, Mankiw has five different versions of his book published by Cengage (not counting the five versions of the previous edition, which is still on the market). That said, he is probably right that NYT would not view the textbook industry as a profitable business opportunity. But think about that. A newspaper finds the textbook industry unattractive economically. The textbook industry is imploding. Mankiw’s publisher just emerged from bankruptcy, and textbook sales are down and still dropping across the board.

    One reason that textbook prices have not been responsive to market forces is that most faculty do not have strong incentives to search for less expensive textbooks and, to the contrary, have high switching costs. They have to both find an alternative that fits their curriculum and teaching approach—a non-trivial investment in itself—and then rejigger their course design to fit with the new book. A second part of the problem is that the publishers really can’t afford to lower the textbook prices at this point without speeding up their slow-motion train crash because their unit sales keep dropping as students find more creative ways to avoid buying the book. Their way of dealing with falling sales is to raise the price on each book that they sell. It’s a vicious cycle—one that could potentially be broken by the market forces that Mankiw seems so sure are providing fair pricing if only the people making the adoption decisions had motivations that were aligned with the people making the purchasing decisions. The high cost of switching for faculty, coupled with their relative personal immunity to pricing increases, translate into a barrier to entry for potential competitors looking to underbid the established players. Which brings me to the third reason. There are plenty of faculty who would like to believe that they could make money writing a textbook someday and that doing so would generate enough income to make a difference in their lives. Not all, not most, and probably not even the majority, but enough to matter. As long as faculty can potentially get compensated for sales, there will be motivation for them to see high textbook prices that they don’t have to pay themselves as “fair” or, at least, tolerable. It’s a conflict of interest. And Greg Mankiw, as a guy who’s made the big score, has the biggest conflict of interest of all and the least motivation of anyone to admit that textbook prices are out of hand, and that the textbook “market” he wants to believe in probably doesn’t even properly qualify as a market, never mind an efficient one.