Keeping Education Accessible: How Open Textbooks Can Be Good for Education, Business, and Society

Knowledge is the black gold of the 21st century. In a flat world where workers are competing for access to the global economy, access to that knowledge is critical. As technology reshapes the global landscape, it has opened up access and fueled change, an widening of access consistent with the democratic values of American society and its educational institutions. Yet significant obstacles remain that impede the opening up of educational opportunities, including old models of how content is delivered and how educational resources are published and distributed. While institutions are innovating with new structures that deal with the opportunities and challenges online learning affords, so too must the publishing industry that serves those institutions. Indeed, according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Public Agenda Report, With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them (2009), high text prices are one of the top two reasons student fail to graduate from college. In this time of economic instability, open access to knowledge is more critical than ever. Disruptive new business models are actively challenging the status quo in publishing, returning value to the key stakeholders (student, faculty, institutions, authors) and taking a leadership role in keeping education accessible. This session will discuss the economic, social and technology drivers that are transforming the educational publishing world with new solutions based on open content, enhancing the growth and development of online and blended courses and keeping education accessibile. Specifically, this session will: • Discuss the factors in higher education publishing that impede the growth of online and blended courses with inflexible, high-cost textbooks • Define and overview open content, cited by the 2010 Horizon Report as a top near-term trend to go mainstream this year • Survey the environmental landscape of open content initiatives and open textbooks • Provide a case study of Flat World Knowledge's disruptive publishing model based free and low-cost, remixable and openly licensed content delivered in multi-modal and device agnostic formats. • Investigate the impact of open textbooks on online and distance learning programs and students, including data from Cerritos College on the impact of open textbooks on student retention and industry data on student usage of alternate formats.

 This presentation was selected as Best-in-Track for the Learning, Values and Society track.