. speaker: good morning everyone. i'm sorry. good afternoon for those who are central and eastern time. it is still morning here in the pacific. welcome to our first webinar of the winter spring series. we have an amazing line up of speakers here today to tell you about open textbook publishing and adoption. we hope that you can take this information become to your campuses and help your faculty to select high quality materials and help save your students money in the process.
we are clicking a little slow here today. i want to go through briefly for those that might be new in the black board collaborate system that we use here in the california community college system, the chat window and the participants are on your left-hand side of the screen. please feel free to use that chat window throughout the webinar to ask questions and so forth. we will hold the audio part of the questions until the end. we will try and answer the chat questions as they come on. please use it for presenters. if you have issues during the webinar,
feel free to contact the webinar people. i'll repeat the number. 1760, 744, 1150. at this time it's my pleasure to give you a quick introduction to speakers. i'm u n a daily from the open course work. our first speaker -- on slide. tell us about your job there. speaker: hello everyone. my name is c y r i l. i'm the library director.
finest library staff working with great faculty here and across the world. speaker: thank you very much. thank you for being here today to talk about in a few minutes . one thing for those listening in today welcome and please introduce yourself in the chat window and let us know what institution you are with or organization. next up is david h a r r i s. editor in chief. speaker: my day job is busy. i work with the college and content
development team, department team and community to develop open education resources for our projects. speaker: all right. thank you for being with us today david. our third speaker is david -- chief information officer at university of minnesota. he is at a conference in new orleans today. tell us what you do back at the university of minnesota. speaker: good morning and good afternoon everyone. i'm the chief information officer at one of the colleges the college of education. i'm responsible for the i t services there. i spend vast majority of my time working
on technology issues. i'm executive director. that is what i'll talk about today. speaker: thank you for joining us today. i want to invite you to show us where you are on this globe here. the way you can do that is by picking up one of the little tools that are next to the star here and dropping that on your location on the globe. the star is in the little vertical tool bar in the middle. i got a mile face on the west coast. we have east coast folks. lovely. it looks like we have folks from florida and up in northwest. some folks
in canada i'm guessing. any folks in the center. down in texas. we have a pretty good -- it doesn't look like we have global folks today. maybe they will watch the archive. it should be available in about a week. before we get to the speed of the show today, our clicker is slow today. here is our agenda. i'll give you a brief introduction and we'll here from c y r i l first and
david on the open text library in university of minnesota. we'll hold or audio q and a until the end. for those new, our mission is promoting adoption o e r to promote teaching and learning. supporting professional develop ment and they can select high quality materials and expand access to education. our focus remains at the community college although two of our speakers are from the four year colleges and universities. many of our students move only to those. there is a lot of overlap between our goals.
the consortium continues to grow. we have over 240 colleges now that participate. we are in 16 states and. and provinces now. i need to update that slide. finally getting to the content for today, i don't think any of this is a surprise to you. textbook prices have been rising. actually 82 percent since 2002 at two to 3 times the inflation rate. on slide. average student over thousand dollars textbook wise. this is a significant issue for
our students. particularly at the community college that are less able to afford education. research was done in florida a couple of years ago that showed 60 percent of students do not purchase text books at least at some point due to cost. those paying attention to the news there was a recent report that reported 60 percent of students often don't purchase textbook currently due to cost. we know this is a decision we don't want students to have to make. it can impact not only their success in the course. as you can see here 35 percent of students take fewer courses due to textbook costs. it increases time to graduation as well. the folks we have talking
with you today will tell about some alternatives that your faculty or yourself if you are teaching can use in your classroom to help students be able to afford education more easily. now i'd like to turn this over. director of library services. he is going to tell us about the open s u n y textbook project. speaker: thank you all for wanting to listen to this. i think you all see there is a great benefit to reducing the cost of text books and certainly the cost of education. the s u n y open textbook initiative is an effort
to think about saving the cost not only at campuses a cross new york but making an effort globely to make our text books useful across the world. it is library led . on slide. let's start with the problem. you have seen some of it. we look at cost of text books a problem for students. we thought there was a big business in textbooks. on slide. in florida textbook survey surveyed 22 thousand students found students didn't buy text books.
the majority would take that strategy. a lot of times we focus on the idea we are trying to get faculty to adopt open text books. one of the major concerns that faculty are concerned about is their student might not be a dopting their textbook. i would like to add one more graph. on slide. there is a severe problem we have to deal with. how do we do it? libraries are interested in this problem specifically because we want to help learning and we are paying money for the cost of textbooks as well. sometimes we are buying textbooks
and borrowing text books from other libraries which costs money especially because students keep them for the whole semester and we get lots of problems . parents and students are starting to perceive library and higher education as a problem the cost of it. we thought as opportunity to /tkpwrae ate create win win, we have an opportunity by thinking of it as not just textbooks but thinking it of it as the larger picture. these are learning assets way to engage teachers and learners. we think can we have a role as cure ate ors. we think of opportunity to create win win.
our students recognize this problem as well. students put in a proposal to students saying we would like you to address the textbook afford ability problem. they made a resolution that recognized our efforts. students want answers and systems -- on slide are trying to find good answers to their questions. it is not just student who are looking for answers or who want to change things. this is an article about open textbook in academics the publishers have
money based on his content. what gives him control over content is to release it under creative commons license. our own faculty member wrote a book literature -- on slide. he said his profession in english has served a role of not making books as accessible as they need to be. he wrote a wonderful book. he is contributing making it available to everyone because he feels the professor is making a difference to the student and everyone else that wants to read literature. if you haven't taken a
look, take a look at this one. we know there is a problem. how do we do it? in july 2012-libraries granted grant. offered on november 2012, 3,000 dollars for authors to contribute proposal. if selected -- incentive. we also paid for peer reviews. in two weeks we got 38 proposals. they said yes to four. many library pitched in additional funds.
on slide. we have two more up this month. we are looking forward. libraries are managing an editorial work flow. they receive the manuscript proposals and review them and select them and do peer reviews and send it out and scale the information back. participating libraries but other libraries wanted to help. in addition to that we do the text layout. on slide. we hire free lance on occasion. we don't always have the resources to go through all those steps.
what do we accomplish? we are putting all our pope open text in open source software that was developed by the project. u r l here for free e books. go ahead and take a look if you want. we have minnesota textbook catalog. we are offering the authors a print on demand option. we help them put it in amazon. it is added incentive for faculty to offer textbook and make them open available for you online. also print because many people want them in print as well.
what else do we do? we have in every book a peer review. also wrote public review embedded in each book. everyone can read a statement by the peer reviewer about what is the strength of this book and target audience and benefit. this is to help people evaluating open text books. why should i read this or assign it to the class or evaluate this? it is important to really read the peer reviewers statement. 15 books in one and a half years is pretty ambitious but we got a second chance. we got a
60 thousand dollar grant. type of publication and participating -- one thing to mention there are 8 participating libraries but having support from others. we also it is great to collaborate with university press. finished with, initial call for authors. had deadline of january 31. we received 46 propose als. we are going to fund 15 of them. this year we are trying a different selection review process that is a way of thinking about
adoption. it is really important. what we are doing is we have an abstract with some of the details of the textbook that we are sending out to different faculty across the 64 campuses. teaching the same course the textbook is designed for to evaluate it how likely would you select this textbook if published. what are it's strengths? very important features you want to see in this textbook. last question was really interesting. would you be will be to serve as a peer reviewer. important thing we want librarians and teaching faculty to
discuss proposals because it is a way of doing market analysis and communicate what is the nature of open educational resources today and what is interest level on faculty and how do we really -- for the market that are the teaching faculty. compile all the scores so we have some idea of what comprehensive colleges want. in a sense it is a selection review that is distributed across. background noise. this is the overall map. it gives you the impression
-- authors proposal and author writing. you do enhance the authors librarian support and instructional designers input and better to help the author deliver a high quality product. peer review -- two peer reviews per textbook at least. there is author revision and text a pproval. delivering 31 high quality text books. i expect we will be doing more. libraries tend to want to produce and help their faculty
publish these books because they know it makes a big difference. overall long term this is an important point about our program is we are not just to publish open text books. we are looking at how text books are used for learning objects and digital to integrate in the courses. really get the students to look at it and work with them and with faculty. text books are one dimension of the learning environment. we are trying to build a more robust one . this is a lot to take in at the last slide. if there are any questions we'll save them for the end. it is a way of
saying to open textbook initiative is more of an exploration about how do i bridge faculty and students work together to make a rich and affordable learning environment that can be shared globely. thank you very much. speaker: thank you. i think that is a real inspiration to other systems that would like to foster this kind of creativity among their faculty to expand access to education among their students. thank you for sharing that. next up is david h a r r i s editor and chief of open
s t a x college. david is going to tell us about some of their current work that they are developing but also adoption of the open text books they have already released. we are going to be excited to hear about how well they are doing. speaker: thank you so much for having me chat with the audience today. i would like i thought what we would do today is give you an overview of how technology and e o e r are a perfect combination together and talk about what we are doing with open s t a x college and open licensing and we'll talk about adoption.
many many years before the internet age life was simpler. you had a professor and selected text and 30 students. it was a closed system. the internet really changed everything. what we are seeing is formation of knowledge network a community of learning that are beginning to fan the globe. this is having a tremendous i impact on many many industries. you look at the computer industry, the open software movement how innovation has sped up. you look at transformation in music industry and newspaper. wholesale. down the left side you see the textbook industry. that really hasn't changed that much. yet it probably should have integrated
technology. the same cycles exist the same higher prices exist and it is very controlled distribution of content. economics are beginning to drive significant change in the market. let's talk about the licenses for a second. the audience is pretty versed on this. creative commons has various licenses. you can take your content and adapt it and use as is and re distribute it for free to the community. as we move
down, more restrictions are imposed. we look at last one. that means there is no commercial use, no derivative a llowed. all the open you can take the resources and use as little or as much as you want and re distribute them without permission. this also allows friction less re mixing in the connection platform. the connection platform is really the platform to runs open s t a x college. we have over 20 thousand. just for today's discussion, you are free to take these materials and do with them as you wish.
the next point we would like to discuss is really how o e r can enhance academic freedom. the reason we point this out -- will talk about how o e r limits and how it will be mandated. we want to put that to rest. o e r provides /tpabg faculty with more choices in their courses. you have options what traditional publishers will provide you. if you have o e r resources, you are free to edit and adapt them and distribute them. on slide. i'm surprised at the number of
faculty i like the homework system but i don't like the book but i'm locked. with o e r you don't have to be locked in any more. o e r should never be legislated or mandated. it needs to be made at the local level at the faculty level and o e r needs to stand on it's own. faculty and coordinators will determine what is best for that course. another important component is students and digital right management. this is an important issue in the way students interact with content. cost is paramount. we think this is too. digital rights
management when you adopt e book limit your right what you can do. it limits access. with open license students have limited access. they go download our book -- textbook will expire after 180 days. there is unlimited printing. probably the most significant aspect of an open license is it encourages students to share this information and this content in their informal learning network. we know students are on facebook all the time. being able to share that content in those informal learning
groups is important. they do that with traditional content they are violating copyright law. open lives where students live today. what are the goals of open s t a x college. to increase access to high quality open education content and provide students with financial relief. there were some limitations of the o the e r 1.0 model. generally you hear objectives there were inconsistent quality standards. some materials were exceptional and others weren't up to par. we have made it very difficult for faculty to find solutions. if
if you have physics you might hit a thousand pieces of content. that takes a lot of work for faculty to piece together. for profit providers. we need to work with them to improve access and lower costs. there needs to be sustainable reward structure. rewarded for intellectual work and reviewers need to be paid. they put a lot of time into evaluating manuscripts. finally -- this was brought up in the last session. learning not free must be the priority. determine what is the
learning outcome taking place. are these materials helping students learn more effectively. we wanted to meet these challenges. if you go to open s t a x college dot o r g it is easy to /tpaoeupbld the find the materials. imposed rigorous development standards. we realize free is not enough. text are offered by scholars. biology text had hundred reviewers on it. they are professionally illustrated. these books meet quality.
third is scope and sequence. we work closely with the community to make sure text meets scope and sequence of a course. if you are teaching physics or biology you see it will map up to all courses. if you want to adapt it to your specific course, you can do that too. we have the tools to do it. the first six books we published there are already 70 derivatives. there are solution manuals free for students. it would be 100 dollars from publisher. we partner with organizations that provide online homework.
thank you to the foundation support we have been able to build these libraries. we will be up to 25 text books when we are done. thank you to foundations -- on slide who really supported the development of the books. the titles below here -- on slide -- barbara is on today. she is one of the authors. these are available today for students to use. economics will be coming out in two weeks. i did see a question. is open s t a x college really provide course work? no we don't. we aren't a
loop and we don't plan on being one. what happens when you go to the website? it is very simple. student or professor selects discipline they want. there is no password required and no registration required. they can select one of the browsers they like. we offer books in low cost print. very inexpensive. biology book is 28 or 29 dollars. we offer i book version. the vast majority of our user get p d f they can download. they can read it on the web or offer in e books and mobile devices. our goal is clear. access anywhere at any time on any device in any format. you select the text
and then you download your textbook. this is an example of the biology text which is 47 chapters. this will is just example. it gives you sense of quality. what most people tell me after they look at this, they like it is attractive. they like we integrate in teractive elements. in the biology book we have medical institute. what is the difference between this and 300 dollar textbook. i say about 250 dollars. one last thing. it is a great opportunity. this is terrific. how are we doing? are faculty responding and
adopting. overwhelmingly we say yes. if you look on the number on physicianics here, ^ oh ^ -- on slide. save students with physics alone over 2, 600, 000 dollars. we have four year state schools. we are seeing the need across the market. we also think the books provide the right level. a lot of community colleges are concerned
about m a t r i c u l a t i o n. it is just the beginning. if you look at our total, the usage is growing every six months. on slide. this year we estimate the impact on students enrolled in courses -- there are a lot of students using it that aren't enrolled in courses -- will be 58,000. we have 14 e c o system partners. let's talk about that. we know a great book is not enough. people need more advance technology. incidentally all the books are adapted for
learning platform. we have partnerships. on slide. they are providing extra services and product to go with these resources. you can find out more about them on the website. some of these are for sale. if you sign up with w i l y plus price will be approximately 50 dollars. that is saving students over a hundred dollars. some partners also provide support feed back. market will shift from publisher to market that is much more distributed and efficient and good for everyone. diagram -- network
around o e r 2.0. let me briefly wrap up with f a qs. on slide. catch -- none. if you like what we are doing tell a friend. we don't have a sales force. no book is not perfect. our books aren't perfect. they can be adapted simply. we will work with you on that. do we have single sign on? in a way we do. instructors take file and embed them in courses. do you have comp copies? yes we do. we don't like to give them out. if mandatory to get adoption, we will provide
one. how do i get service? go to website. revisions? don't subjects don't need revisions but publishers do. some do and we will provide it. what if i find an error. we are the only publisher that publishes are e r r a t a. can book stores -- yes. in conclusion together we can build a sustain able future. i love
this quote. on slide. where are we? somewhere probably getting toward the fighting stage. thank you for your time. speaker: thank you david. lots of exciting conversation going on in the chat window. we'll get back to some of that at the end here. excellent presentation. onto our last presenter who has some great information for us. this is david -- chief information officer at university of minnesota. he is going to talk about the open text library which is a listing site for high quality open text books. his focus is on getting faculty to adopt. many of us who work with faculty and administrators know that /tpabg you will you will
faculty need a lot of information before they are ready to adopt. speaker: thank you. before i start i want to tell you i see in my introduction i'm in new orleans right now. i'm bringing this up because i'm finding open text books are all over this conference. you have university of texas systems and he was talking about innovations that would change higher education by 2015. talking about open text books. there have been a number of presentations. it is clear this is a movement if you want to call it that that gaining momentum. i agree with david. we are
getting closer to the winning stage. i'd like to talk about the textbook library but in context and the work we have been doing which is answering this one question. for the last two and a half years this has been our focus. college of education -- on the ground job. i'm with faculty every day helping them and supporting them. that combination of asking your question and having access to /tpabg faculty who ask really good questions who have real problems they need to get through and questions and miss understanding. that is at the core of where we are in solving those.
they gave a really great background on issues and licenses. i'm not going to get into that and talk about the barriers we have discovered and tried to overcome with our faculty and other faculty we have talked with. number one, in some ways there isn't an option. not clear. one thing that we spend a lot of time we created some faculty development that works well here. you saw stats earlier about financial situation of students. this is in minnesota. funding higher education. this
is state funding in red versus tuition in the green. the load is being put on the students. you saw a graph earlier student loan debt and credit card debt is in red. national numbers. students are more than ever in a pinch. this is from the florida survey that was mentioned earlier. impact of cost of text books on academic success of students. after we pretended our faculty -- this is how many adoptions we had. 0. we new
text books were out there. why weren't faculty adopting them. they don't understand what open textbooks are or concept of open. oftentimes they confuse it with free text books or electronic text books. of course open text books are can be free. they live in the electronic world but it isn't the same. publishers create electronic books and they are filled with adds. understanding creative commons license and understanding open redefined. we defined the problem for them and now we are saying here is the solution we think is possible for you and your students.
what we developed is program that put together those two pieces. urgency part is making them aware of the issue. the open part is explaining some solution that is possible. after that we still had 0 adoption. there must be a barrier. next we learned quickly that faculty don't know where to find the text books. that is why we developed this open textbook library. we realized they needed to be pulled together in one place. we looked around the internet and pulled them in one place so we are /aed easy to look at and use. the
u r l is there. open dot -- i think we are up between 140 and 150 text books of various content areas. making people aware of this and creating this and had 0 adoptions. what is next? faculty are concerned about quality. what we did was made sure in the catalog we had the opportunity for faculty to read through this. we learned a lot about -- we don't have a lot of reviews in there but the next two years we should pick up hundreds of them. long story but we are excited that will come
soon. we have some in there. most of them thanks to our friends. faculty trust each other with academic resources like this as far as quality. i'm not qualified to judge the quality but they are. on the slide here, quality -- they make the false assumption that something that is free can't be good. saw from other presentations that process is very similar if not better than what some commercial publishers as far as peer review goes. i met the author of the upcoming open s t a x economics book this morning. he basically said how he was impressed how
much -- not clear. our faculty needs to know that. free cannot be good. it is something on the internet. it is open textbook 2.0 that david is talking about. peer reviews and all that we have had no adoptions. i can't blame our faculty. they are busy and being asked to do so many things. what we knew was we needed strategy. they are constantly busy and outreach and research. we asked them to review an open textbook
. we said it was a small amount of money but just enough to get their attention. 1 to 200 dollars to write a short review that we could use to put in the catalog that with be useful to somebody else. you think about the savings. 100 to 200 investment is nothing. that is one textbook. they adopted an open textbook because they took the time to review it. savings are instant. we had nine faculty review text books. 7 of them ended up adopting.
did professional development and explained issues and all these things. what we needed was this engaging strategy. we had nine faculty review. 7 adopted of those nine. they took them back to their departments and convinced three others. ten faculty adopted. i don't have final numbers now. it is about 300 thousand dollars since the fall. people working in the open textbook world know it adds up very fast. what is next? we are trying to -- we learned within one context of our institution and we are reaching
out to other institutions to help them. we got a grant within the last couple of months to go to other institutions and help them create open textbook initiatives. we are looking for institutions where the leadership is ready and don't know what to do and they can benefit from us. we already know as we reach out, there will be other barriers. for instance we hear -- i know david has heard this that what is going to happen in the book store? what is going to happen to that revenue? those questions we need to be able to answer. we need to have some sort of a path forward for the institution. the answer to that
one i gave -- if you have a better one feel free to give it. i stated after you have an internal conversation about their priority it selling books a priority and making a profit? we will continue to learn and hopefully /efrp everyone will benefit from what we learn as we try and reach out and help other institutions. again the u r l for our catalog -- feel free to use it or send to to anyone that wants to use it. we crossed 1 thousand 00 thousand user mark this week. it is being used over 188 countries around the world. you are welcome to it. that is why it is there. thank
you. speaker: thank you very much david for sharing all those different strategies for, encouraging adoption of open text books by faculty. having workeded in the field, they sound excellent. i can see a lot of chat about engagement faculty engagement. thank you for that. we are going to move to questions. because we have such wonderful presenters and we are almost up on the hour. our next set of webinars will occur in march. we will do those with open education week
which is march 10 through 15. open education week is about promoting open education globely. sounds familiar. on tuesday march 11 we will have an o e r and accessibility day that the consortium is participating in. wednesday march 12 is o e r day. if you would like to participate, contact me. we would love to have your participation. at this time we are just on the hour. i think we are going to try and keep the phone and the conference going for another five minutes for questions. we had some excellent questions over the last hour that have come up that i
think we might want to just recap a few things and go ahead and type in as people have additional new questions. there is contact information and myself and please do contact us over e-mail. once again i want to thank our wonderful presenters today. they were amazing. one topic that came up is what is the difference between free and open. i know that david addressed this. i know we have cable green online. cable would you like to address that? are you on mic? speaker: sure. as
most basic level free means no cost meaning you can get access to something without paying money to get access to it. that is great. certainly o e r is free and so is on m o o t. open has an additional requirement. something must be free and you must have the legal rights to exercise what we call the four rs. you must have the legal rights to re use the resource, revise, re distribute. take open s t a x textbook for example. is it free to users? yes. can i revise re mix and distribute
that book? yes i can. it meets both criteria so it is o e r. another example , looking at one. is it free? yes. do you have the legal rights to revise it? no you don't. it is copyright. if you do those things you will be violating u s copyright law and you can be sued. we call that not open although it is free. speaker: thank you for that. really good distinction there. we had a question about open test banks. this is a critical piece of textbook content today. i wonder
david h a r r i s can you talk about test banks and what you are doing about that. speaker: couple of things. we have an open test bank of questions that spans beyond the /kwaud base. we have test items for most of our titles not all. we are working on them. we know it is important. comprehensive test bank developed at university of minnesota. when it comes to test items we are concerned about that they don't get into the wrong hands and they don't fall into students hands.
how can you prevent that if they are openly licensed? speaker: excellent question in and of itself. perhaps we'll leave that one for another time. i think that is a longer one. barbara has a great explanation. in chat. she doesn't worry about it. if a student wants to practice on 2000 plus questions, then fine. speaker: good point. speaker: it is one great answer. there are a lot of different points on that one. before we run out of time, there were questions about licensing. particularly
c y r i l these were directed at you. you shared in the chat window that your faculty decide on license of the textbook they produce. can you elaborate on that a little? speaker: sure. it is more of a -- we have a license that we use to re distribute our open textbook. that is what the authors do. the author retains the copyright so they can put it on print on demand and they make all royalties off of it. that is the model we decided to pilot one and two. it makes the most sense in many ways for the faculty to have an incentive in addition to what we are offering to
produce their work in print as well. it is open. it has a share alike license and a non commercial license because that is a concern of many faculty who author work. they don't want other people to -- their work. we put that in as agreement. it is a good license. others can make derivatives as long as they get attribution to the work. others can't commercial it. thank you. speaker: that is interesting approach. faculty author retains the copyright so they can release it in any manner they would like in addition to.
speaker: exactly. speaker: i think at this point we are going to close out the session. david i didn't give you a chance to recap. would you like a final statement before we close off here? speaker: no, i don't think so. i they we are in good shape. i would offer as part of our grant if there are institutions looking for some help in that where you think the leadership may be ready to do something, be happy to have a conversation. speaker: wonderful. davids e-mail is there in our main window here. i want to thank once again all of you who joined us today for this informative webinar. i want to thank our sent presenters. thank you and see you in march.