[Oer-community] Is MIT thinking of putting its OCW material behind a pay wall?

[Fred Beshears]

Stephen and Tim,

Thank you for your thoughtful exchange of views. Since I started this
thread, I thought I might chip in my two bits.

First I would like to recast Stephen's outline of options and add what I
hope will be a clarifying distinction - i.e. whether or not the OERs are
produced on a work for hire basis

1. Non-Work-for-Hire Publisher Models - the private sector [publishers]
create [and sell] OERs [textbooks], but retain ownership of the work

   1a. Library Purchase: [copies of] OERs are purchased by public
institutions and distributed for free to students [in that students can
        check out copies of the textbook from the library]

   1b. Charity Purchase : [copies of] OERs are purchased by charities and
distributed for free to students [charities buy textbooks and
         give them away to students, but the publishers retain ownership of
the work]

2. Work for Hire Models -  the public sector (ie., governments, colleges and
universities) produces OERs directly [and authors create
    the work on a work-for-hire basis. So, the entity that pays their
salaries owns the work and has the right to distribute it

   2a. and then they [the public sector entity] distribute them for free to
students

   2b. and then distribute they [the public sector entity] them to both
commercial and non-commercial education
        providers [with an appropriate creative commons license]

3. the world wide web - a Non-Work-for-Hire personal publishing model

   - the production of OERs is crowd-sourced. for example, faculty
members create webpages and retain ownership of their work

   - public institutions [universities] provide policies, resources and
tools to support this production (including support staff
     who, unlike faculty, retain no ownership of the work)

   - resources are vetted and selected through a society-wide network-filter
process (which is the natural point at which qualified and
     expert review takes place) - in other words, faculty decide which OERs
[webpages] to use in their class

  - distributed through the educational process itself - in other words,
faculty post copies of the OERs [webpage content] they
    find to their LMS course site and claim fair use


Perhaps I've been unfair in my interpretation of option 3, but as I've
interpreted it it sounds a lot like the model that has existed at
universities since the rise of the world wide web. When I worked at
Berkeley, I established the first campus wide LMS service, which I still
think is a small improvement over what went before, but it did little to
reduce the use of commercial textbooks on campus.

As I mentioned in my initial post to this thread, I have testified before
congress and blogged about a model for producing creative commons textbooks
that could compete with the commercial alternative.

The Case for Creative Commons Textbooks
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2010/09/case-for-creative-commons-textbooks.html

This alternative would fit under option 2a or 2b in the outline above.

One advantage of developing content in this fashion is that you have a
budget to pay people to do the quality control work that most faculty
authors don't want to be bothered with (e.g. checking for copyright
clearance) and to do the work that entails skills that faculty may lack
(e.g. creating high quality graphics). In other words, the creation of high
quality open textbooks will require a team effort, and some members of the
team may have to be paid.

Once you create high quality open textbooks, you need to find a way to get
faculty to select them for their classes. So, I've blogged on how one does
this as well.
<http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2010/09/persuading-faculty-to-select-open.html>

Persuading Faculty to Select Open Textbooks
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2010/09/persuading-faculty-to-select-open.html


I don't see where this problem [getting faculty to switch to open textbooks
to save students money] is addressed in the outline above. It may be that
you could use the jawbone, stick or carrot models [described in my blog
post] with any of the options in the outline above. But, in any case, you
need to offer faculty open alternatives that can realistically be used as
substitutes for commercial textbooks.

Finally, the OER movement could use a textbook substitution metric as a
measure of its success. In other words, we now know how much students spend
for commercial textbooks (around $900 a year according to the GAO). So, the
OER movement could use this as a benchmark for determining how much OER
resources are actually saving students by periodically doing a similar GAO
study to assess the cost of textbooks.

Best,
Fred Beshears

Now retired, but formerly with UC Berkeley's Instructional Technology
Program

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